Risen 2: Dark Waters Message Board

Hark! There, off on that obscure isle surrounded by countless biting piranhas, a new Risen has arisen! The Gothic spiritual successor series has previously dazzled with its ambition just as much as it’s disappointed with technical troubles, tedious conversations, and bland helpings of fillery gruel. If you want to understand the series’ charm, I highly recommend Alec’s diaries of the first game, as they’re captivating reads and also there are kittens. Risen 3: Titan Lords, meanwhile, will once again spirit players away to a new setting full of opposing factions and infinitely explorable nooks and crannies. Details below.

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Furthering the gaming industry's ongoing fascination with the word "titan" comes Risen 3: Titan Lords, a newly-revealed entry in developer Piranha Bytes' cult-favorite dark fantasy roleplaying franchise.

German magazine PC Games has revealed the existence of Risen 3: Titan Lords via a preview image of the magazine's next cover. Scant information on the game was offered alongside this teaser, though we do know that Risen 3: Titan Lords will return to the medieval fantasy setting seen in the original Risen, in lieu of reviving the high seas, piratical adventures of Risen 2: Dark Waters.

There is currently no word on when Risen 3: Titan Lords might debut. It seems certain that the roleplaying game will come to the PC, though any platforms beyond that remain a mystery. [Image: Piranha Bytes]

Piranha Bytes’ spiritual, Pirates of the Caribbeany Gothic sequel Risen 2: Dark Waters made its somewhat deflating presence known last month, but if one man’s one thousand words on wot he thought about it aren’t enough to cement your buying decision one way or another you can sample a demo now.(more…)

Gargoyles soar into the fray with the Air Temple DLC for Risen 2.

Inquisitions and Krakens are cool and all, but GORILLA FIGHT!!!

Inquisitions and Krakens are cool and all, but GORILLA FIGHT!!!

Risen 2: Dark Waters is Now Available on Steam!

Set several years after the end of Risen, raging titans have devastated the world and pushed humanity to the brink of existence. Subsequently, monstrous creatures have risen from the watery depths of the sea and their attacks have brought all seafaring to a grinding halt. The hero, now a member of the Inquisition, is sent out to find out how to stop the chaos caused by these creatures from the deep. His quest begins with rumors that the pirates who frequent the southern islands are the only ones who know a way to get rid of the creatures once and for all and end their reign of terror.

Known for crafting vast, detailed virtual worlds, developer Piranha Bytes has been making single-player open-world role-playing games for over a decade. Its Gothic series presented colossal explorable spaces and offered hardly any direction, challenging you to define your own journey through the wor...

Relax, PC gamers: Risen 2: Dark Waters is still launching on April 27. The Xbox 360 and PS3 ports have been bumped back to late summer, Deep Silver has announced today. Risen 2: Dark Waters will launch on Xbox 360 and PS3 on July 31 in North America; Europe gets Risen 2 on August 3.

To make up for the console port delay, Deep Silver is tossing in the episode "The Air Temple" for PS3 and Xbox 360 players. Deep Silver says it's "several hours" long and tasks heroes with finding a lost temple and the source of all air magic. May we suggest checking Russia first? That's where Linka is from!

That is not, of course, to say that Risen 2: Dark Waters snatches away your hard-won victories or pits you against a giant, 20-story-tall physical manifestation of the public’s waning interest in pirates. Rather, the patch-eyed, peg-legged sea scoundrels have been known to use any means necessary to win a fight. Kicking below the belt, bringing guns to a swordfight, being Orlando Bloom, etc. But can such a varied arsenal stand up against seemingly unprovoked jaguar attacks? Risen 2′s latest dev diary aims to answer that burning question and many more. Also, it strongly hints at attack parrots, which is something I didn’t know I wanted until it turned out that I wanted it more than anything in this sad mortal world.

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I’d love to be a pirate. Not a real one because I don’t think I’d enjoy murdering strangers to make ends meet, but I can certainly see myself drinking rum on a tropical island. Essentially I want to go on holiday somewhere warm and tranquil, and despite the mythical sea beasties, slavery and violence, Risen 2 is set in the kind of island paradise where a man could spend an eternity watching clouds lazily drifting across the sky, galleons sharply cutting through the calmness of the waters and lead shot efficiently puncturing the rear of a rear admiral. Judging by the video below, people are going to expect me to do more than bask in the sun though. Shame.

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Risen 2: Dark Waters, the coming RPG from Deep Silver, features the swashbuckling staples of any pirate tale, including the Kraken, a feisty female lead, eye patches, curved swords and alcohol, as the above cinematic trailer demonstrates. Deep Silver announced a modified release date for Risen 2 with the trailer: It's coming to North American PCs on April 27, and Xbox 360 and PS3 on May 22.

Putting aside everything else that Risen 2‘s RPG heritage might suggest, I have to say I appreciate the efforts made with that fantasy pirate theme. It’s occasionally silly, but certainly harder-edged than your Pirates Of The Caribbean fare. There’s something reassuring about this continued focus on jungle islands and salty sea-dogs, particularly after the shipwreck promises of the original Risen. The world the Pirhana Bytes team have crafted is both vivid and atmospheric.

Needless to say, I’ve been sacrificing precious hours of my life to a preview version of it, so I urge you to read on your find out more about its buried treasures.(more…)

Butch, the pirate foreman of the tropical island that we find ourselves on, is a bit of a drunk. But then, as Deep Silver brand manager Peter Brolly points out, most pirates are drunks. Most pirates are also slippery, devious liars of low moral fibre, which is perhaps why Butch and his lazy rabble o...

Despite some performance issues, crashes and wonky combat, the first Risen was well received. The real issue for developer Piranha Bytes, then, is to prove that it can address the problems of the original and make the franchise even better. And at this point there's no definitive answer if it has. With just over two months until its scheduled release, Risen 2 needs a lot of polish to get it up to expectations...

Risen 2: Dark Waters, the pirate RPG coming in April from Piranha Bytes and Deep Silver, is getting a collector's edition in the UK only. We find that part a little strange, considering pirates are supposed to be pretty good at traveling overseas. Sorry; we had to.

The UK collector's edition will include a "making of" DVD, a soundtrack CD, double-sided poster, pirate flag, amulet, art cards and three Risen 2 stickers, all for £69.99. The UK version of Risen 2: Dark Waters drops anchor on April 27, while the US version drops April 24.

Deep Silver has announced that Risen 2: Dark Waters will be released for PC, Xbox 360 and PS3 on 27th April 2012 in Europe and 24th April in North America...

This six-minute “making of” trailer for Risen 2 (below) is definitely worth a look. It shows off some of the environments in detail, but more importantly the developers take their chance to talk about some of the decisions that went into to making the archipelago world. A bunch of factors are at play in making Risen 2 the game it is going to be, not least of which is the implementation of a terrain engine, which was opposed to the usual handcrafted worlds that Pirhana Bytes had worked on. It’s looking impressive, though.

The video does make the peculiar decision of mixing translated voice-overs with subtitles, which is a little awkward, but then perhaps that’s just me. Anyway, it has added 43.7% to be anticipation of the game, which was already fairly high after the moderately excellent Risen.(more…)

Speaking with Strategy Informer, Deep Silver (publisher of Risen 2) Daniel Oberlerchner said: “I can tell you that we are going to have the optimum experience across all platforms, and they are going to be different experiences. There IS a technology gap. Some studios say they are going to have the same quality across all platforms, which is to say you take the weakest platform – the Xbox 360 – and you have the same crappy textures for the Playstation 3 and the PC.” He went on: “It was just a couple of weeks ago there was a PC game that was… *laugh* well, I don’t really want to go into details, but our decision is that we want to have a really hi-res experience on the PC. There is no reason why we should create hi-res textures, then just make them blurry for a console version, then put everything back on the PC again – it doesn’t make any sense.”

Risen 2: Dark Waters is some time in 2012.

Risen's transformation into a swashbuckling pirate adventure hints at a more accessible approach to role-playing than Gothic developer Piranha Bytes usually takes. Risen 2: Dark Waters is still very much a traditionalist PC-style RPG, but it's one designed to guide players in more effectively withou...

Gamers lament at how simplistic a lot of Western RPGs are these days, and developer Pirahna Bytes has heard you. Their new game, Risen 2: Dark Waters is set to give players what they want -- no lengthy tutorials, a giant world to explore, and an epic adventure that will take a massive amount of time...

Pirates, from what we understand, were a pretty uninviting crew. Can you imagine what might have transpired had these rotten swashbucklers also possessed the ability to be wizards? You don't have to imagine: This trailer for Risen 2: Dark Waters does all the imagining for you.

There's an interesting trend lately of hardcore PC RPGs coming out of Europe, of which The Witcher 2 is only the latest and greatest so far. One of the earliest entries in this sort of splinter genre was 2001's Gothic, a game that was extremely popular among its European audience despite being the first title put together by German developers Pirahna Bytes.

After a few Gothic sequels, the company introduced a new Pirate-themed RPG a few years ago called Risen and, this past week at E3, introduced that game's sequel to all of us. Just like the rest of this crop of European RPGs, Risen 2 seems a quality RPG wrapped in a not-so-great game.

The graphics are definitely better, and the controls are a little more usable than they were (Deep Silver, who's publishing the game, went so far as to show off bugs in the last version to the press just to make clear how much better the sequel was). But in the end, Risen 2 seems like it will have all of the pluses and minuses that this type of RPG always seems to have.

Learn to fight like a pirate with this interview from E3 2011.

Those who've been playing video games for a while likely remember developer Piranha Bytes from its days working on the Gothic games. It was a hardcore action role-playing series set in a traditional fantasy world, as was the first game in its follow-up franchise, Risen. For Risen 2, Piranha Bytes is trying on a much different theme: pirates. That means a brighter world, a reworked combat system, and even your own ship...

Risen 2: Dark Waters! Will it be shit? We just don’t know. We do know that the first Risen was a pleasantly free-form RPG that had potential and that this one is looking piratical. Now there are some new screenshots, showcasing the game’s new firearms and also the fact that giant enemy crabs can be kicked onto their backs so you can get at their weakspots. That’s innovation, right there. Poor crabs.(more…)

Story details and more as we probe the murky depths of Risen 2 in this GDC 2011 interview!

Ladies and gentlemen, we'd like to present to you the latest trailer for Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. What? Oh, sorry! In actuality, it's the teaser for Risen 2: Dark Waters -- a pirate-y action-RPG that looks to have a fair bit of flair, if this CG footage is anything to go by.

Tempers flare in the cinematic Debut Trailer for Risen 2!