Risen 2: Dark Waters Focuses on Exoticism, Pirate Culture

The first Risen game, seen as the spiritual success to the Gothic, has been less of a hit than its developers hoped but the team is ready to evolve the concept for the Dark Waters sequel, which will focus on pirates and on naval action.

Bjorn Pankratz, who is a leading developer at Piranha Bytes, has stated, “We wanted to go out to sea to create an exotic and tropical pirate game.”

The designer says that the game will start out small, with the player completing a tutorial on a little island before moving on to a larger one which features two settlements and opening up to offer a larger number of quests.

Risen 2: Dark Waters will allow players to get their own ship, which can be used to explore the map and travel to other island, and different pirate clans will be the main forces in the game.

Speaking of the development challenges the team faced,Michael Hogesaid, who is also a developer on the second Risen game added, “It was the usual struggle of making it neither too big nor too small. On the one hand, you’ve got to create a world big enough to make it plausible that you require a ship. On the other hand if it’s too big it gets boring.”

The team at Piranha Bytes has used a terrain creation engine for the first time in order to create the game world, because the size made it impossible to create it by hand.

The focus on pirates also means that Risen 2 will be very open and will give players the freedom to decide which quests they plan to tackle after leaving the starting area.

Risen 2: Dark Waters is set to be released on the PC, the PlayStation 3 from Sony and the Xbox 360 from Microsoft at some point during 2012.