[Dez]

I'm currently playing through risen 3 first time and i'm now in chapter 3, but I'm afraid that I've broken my game.

First of all let me just say that piranha bytes have indeed built us a wondefull gameworld to explore and its packed with detail. The world is certainly a lot more detailled this time around. There are even some lore books available that offer me some much needed backround information about the locations and cultures.

Npcs are also voiced quite nicely and the dialog flows quite naturally. Its not outstanding work, but alteast npcs show some personality every now and then. Gnomes in particular are hilarious.

Gameplay stands on solid ground too. Risen 3 may have the most enjoyable magic system piranha bytes have ever designed. Gun gameplay is quite fun too. Melee combat feels quite one dimensional, but its not the biggest issue.

I'm going to write a proper review later on, but at this point i have to mention whats really bothering me.

The thing which really BOTHERS me is this: The game is stupidly easy and unchallenging. I'm a completionist by heart and thus I explore every inch of gameworld. This has ruined my game though. The game is rewarding gold, glory, stat boosters (spell scrolls, treasure, plants, potions, jewelry) at such pace that character building has become a trivial task. I could max almost every atribute if I wanted. Heck i'm forced to max, because its the only thing besides story and exploration that keeps me going!

No matter what you do, you become over powered after joining the faction. I've died only few times since I joined guardians.

Enemies aren't that difficult really. Maybe shadowlords, soul eaters, and shadow guardians still offer me a relative challenge, but thats it. Otherwise i'm just cruising around like a tourist and it is so boring.

What this game needs is a balance patch. Few ideas:

-Cut glory rewards in half
-Halve the potion bonuses (both permanent and normal potions)
-Lower armor values by 2/3
-Halve the atributes bonuses so that buying skills would actually become a more atractive investment.
-increase enemy damage and give them more health
-Tune enemy a.i to be more agressive.
-Make enemies more magic resistant
-Implement melee, ranged and magic stat requirements for melee weapons, guns, magic scrolls and magical items.
-Make magic scrolls faction exclusive. My opinion is that only a guardian should be allowed to cast a firerain scroll for example. Ofcourse the parrot scroll must an expection since every faction needs it in main story, but when you're allowing each faction to cast all the different kind of magic scrolls, it just cheapens the faction choise. How could a guardian for example have a knowledge about voodoo dolls?

[Morgannin09]

Don't expect a patch, it's pretty clear by now that Risen 3 was intended to be a short-lived affair.

I don't necessarily agree with a lot of your ideas, but I do agree that Risen 3 was much too easy and, in a game like this, you should not be able to max out your character - it should be all about making the most effective build, selecting a few skills out of the large variety that you max out, like the old Gothic games had - you could not possibly get enough experience in Gothic 2 to make a powerful mage who was also a master swordsman and archery sharpshooter, for example, so you focused on making the best damn mage possible.

Enemy aggression should have been increased, but increasing health and damage by a patch seems redundant - just turn the difficulty on the highest, and your character can go down in two or three hits. With more aggressive enemies, you'll have a lot more of a challenge. But one reason I think Risen 3 fails to maintain any challenge is that you fight the same enemies throughout the entire game. In Gothic 2, when you reached Irdorath, you had to fight large groups of strong orcs, powerful undead, hordes of lizardmen, and dragon bosses. In Risen 3, the final location is full of minions, hellhounds, golems, skeletons - the same enemies you've been fighting since the beginning of the game. You are far too powerful to be fighting the same fodder enemies at the endgame. The enemy variety needs to get tougher at the endgame levels - but they absolutely should NOT resort to level scaled enemies the way The Elder Scrolls does it. That's such a lazy cop out that ruins the experience and makes the locations a lot less interesting.

Another way to increase combat challenge is to reduce the length of the invincibility during dodging. It's too easy. Your character cannot take damage from the moment he moves to the moment he's standing tall again, and there's such a minimal period where you can be hit before you're able to roll again. The way it works in Dark Souls, for example, is that you have a period of invincibility, and a period of "recovery," a period where you can take damage but are still in the rolling animation, so you cannot perform any action until the animation completes. This means you have to time your dodges much, much more carefully, as timing it wrong means you can still take a hit while your character is locked into the dodge motion.

On that note, parries are far too easy to pull off. It shouldn't be like Risen 2, where you had to mash three different buttons in quick succession to pull it off, but rather my idea is that you have to time your parry to catch the enemy's weapon - like Risen and Risen 3 have already done it - and then, in a very quick window, have a variety of keys to indicate a different form of riposte. (All riposte abilities should be a learned skill, however, so you still need experience and a teacher to be able to use each one of them.) For example, a successful parry followed by a left-click results in a quick, unblockable attack that deals a bit higher damage. A successful parry followed by pressing the jump key makes your character attempt to kick at the enemy's legs, possibly knocking him to the ground and making him vulnerable. A parry followed by the secondary weapon key allows your character to score an instant critical hit with his offhand weapon (pistol, for example).

They should also make it so that characters with heavier equipment cannot dodge as well. A character in full platemail should not be able to roll like a gymnast. (In fact, I think the whole "rolling" thing should disappear entirely. It should be a quick step/crouch the way the first Risen and Gothic 2 did it.) A character in heavy armor should focus either on taking hits for less damage and less stunlocking, or rather blocking with a weapon or shield. Again, Dark souls really does this well. If you have really heavy armor, you can hardly move, but you take so little damage, and the "poise" stat that increases with heavy armor also means your character won't flinch or fall over from lighter hits. You can also choose to block with a weapon if you need to, but you lose more stamina and it won't reduce the damage entirely. (I'm not saying that Piranha Bytes should imitate Dark Souls, but could learn a couple lessons and maybe adapt it if they think they have a better way to use the mechanics.)

I absolutely agree with stat requirements for equipment. It's a huge incentive to grow your character for a specific build - the same way we've done it in Gothic, and the same way people do it with games like Dark Souls. We want to build our character around certain powerful equipment, and we know we can't have it all. This is another factor that kills my enjoyment of games like The Elder Scrolls - if you know where a really powerful weapon is, you just go get it, and you can use it at Level 1, and just wreck everything.

As far as faction-locking scrolls, though... that almost utterly defeats the point of them. In the old Gothic games, melee characters could use a single-use scroll intelligently and strategically, to help them in a situation that's a little too tough for them. In Jharkendar, for example, I always save a Fire Rain spell to help me take out the troll in front of Quarhodron's tomb. I wouldn't be able to defeat the beast otherwise. But the drawback is that, of course, I don't get to use the spell again. What I think they should do, instead of giving you tons of scrolls you can't use, is just not give you tons of scrolls. They should be very limited to people who are not a part of the relevant faction, but still available to use creatively. And if you are a part of the faction but cannot use the permanent version of the spell (stat requirements, again), you can invest in the single-use scrolls, instead, because you now have greater access to them due to your relationship with the faction that creates them.

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, that's just my opinion.

[Dez]

Don't expect a patch, it's pretty clear by now that Risen 3 was intended to be a short-lived affair.

Somehow I'm not surprised that piranha bytes' post launch support has once again been underwhelming.

I don't get them. This game has potential to be a very enjoyable light action rpg, but they left it unfinished. Risen 3 isn't going to win Game of the year awards, but the foundation is solid and with few tweaks here and there, it would be a much more enjoyable experience. That kind of commitment from developer builds fanbase. Nowdays it feels like piranha bytes are just doing contract work or something.

It feels like pbs have given up. They must have known how unbalanced the game was and yet did nothing to fix it?

I don't necessarily agree with a lot of your ideas, but I do agree that Risen 3 was much too easy and, in a game like this, you should not be able to max out your character - it should be all about making the most effective build, selecting a few skills out of the large variety that you max out, like the old Gothic games had - you could not possibly get enough experience in Gothic 2 to make a powerful mage who was also a master swordsman and archery sharpshooter, for example, so you focused on making the best damn mage possible.

Enemy aggression should have been increased, but increasing health and damage by a patch seems redundant - just turn the difficulty on the highest, and your character can go down in two or three hits. With more aggressive enemies, you'll have a lot more of a challenge.

I was quite frustrated yesterday when i wrote that post, so not every one of my suggestions was measured all the way I just think they should do something rather than leave the game as it is now.

I'm already playing on hardest difficult setting and it does not make much difference. I'm still killing enemies with 2 or 3 attacks and my character is pretty much unkillable at this point because i've maxed toughness with permanent potions. I even went and bought the regeneration skill. So I'm regenerating health faster than enemies can attack! i'm thinking of loading an earlier save, because playing like this feels like cheating.

And because of the dodge mechanic, avoiding damage is a cake walk. Heck I was able to clear Antiqua shadow realm with laughable stats already in chapter 1. I just had bones with me all times.

Can these companions be even killed? I've seen Bones going down only once during my game and that happened because he was stuck on a tree.

But one reason I think Risen 3 fails to maintain any challenge is that you fight the same enemies throughout the entire game. In Gothic 2, when you reached Irdorath, you had to fight large groups of strong orcs, powerful undead, hordes of lizardmen, and dragon bosses. In Risen 3, the final location is full of minions, hellhounds, golems, skeletons - the same enemies you've been fighting since the beginning of the game. You are far too powerful to be fighting the same fodder enemies at the endgame. The enemy variety needs to get tougher at the endgame levels - but they absolutely should NOT resort to level scaled enemies the way The Elder Scrolls does it. That's such a lazy cop out that ruins the experience and makes the locations a lot less interesting.

Well more different kind of enemies would be nice, but enemy variety as it is now aint' that bad. There are plenty of different kind of monsters, the problem is that nearly every one of them is cannon fodder type. For example spiders and jaquars in risen 2 were much more dangerous than they are in risen 3. I don't understand this at all. Jaquars and huge cave spiders are supposed to be the ultimate predators, yet in game they go down just as easily. Only difference is that it requires extra 1 or 2 attacks.

Undeads such as minions and skeletons should offer a hard or medium level challenge depending on player level, yet i've been killing them quite easily since day 1. In gothic series undead were something to be afraid of. Even one tiny goblin skeleton was a dangerous adversary to low level character.

And those hellhounds..oh boy i had wrong expectations about them. Remember risen 3 trailer? The nameless one was barely able to defeat one hellhound 1 on 1 combat. In game they are pure cannon fodder. I was expecting something similar to wargs in gothic 2.

I think one explanation for this unbalance is how most enemies are scattered around in groups of 2 or 3. Player can never be overwhelmed by their sheer numbers. I vividly remember in gothic 1 when I opened the doors leading to minecrawler nest, those things kept just coming and I was glad to have those templars as a backup Or remember the orc camp near valley of mines entrance. You could easily have 5 to 10 orcs chasing you!

Another way to increase combat challenge is to reduce the length of the invincibility during dodging. It's too easy. Your character cannot take damage from the moment he moves to the moment he's standing tall again, and there's such a minimal period where you can be hit before you're able to roll again. The way it works in Dark Souls, for example, is that you have a period of invincibility, and a period of "recovery," a period where you can take damage but are still in the rolling animation, so you cannot perform any action until the animation completes. This means you have to time your dodges much, much more carefully, as timing it wrong means you can still take a hit while your character is locked into the dodge motion.

On that note, parries are far too easy to pull off. It shouldn't be like Risen 2, where you had to mash three different buttons in quick succession to pull it off, but rather my idea is that you have to time your parry to catch the enemy's weapon - like Risen and Risen 3 have already done it - and then, in a very quick window, have a variety of keys to indicate a different form of riposte. (All riposte abilities should be a learned skill, however, so you still need experience and a teacher to be able to use each one of them.) For example, a successful parry followed by a left-click results in a quick, unblockable attack that deals a bit higher damage. A successful parry followed by pressing the jump key makes your character attempt to kick at the enemy's legs, possibly knocking him to the ground and making him vulnerable. A parry followed by the secondary weapon key allows your character to score an instant critical hit with his offhand weapon (pistol, for example).

They should also make it so that characters with heavier equipment cannot dodge as well. A character in full platemail should not be able to roll like a gymnast. (In fact, I think the whole "rolling" thing should disappear entirely. It should be a quick step/crouch the way the first Risen and Gothic 2 did it.) A character in heavy armor should focus either on taking hits for less damage and less stunlocking, or rather blocking with a weapon or shield. Again, Dark souls really does this well. If you have really heavy armor, you can hardly move, but you take so little damage, and the "poise" stat that increases with heavy armor also means your character won't flinch or fall over from lighter hits. You can also choose to block with a weapon if you need to, but you lose more stamina and it won't reduce the damage entirely. (I'm not saying that Piranha Bytes should imitate Dark Souls, but could learn a couple lessons and maybe adapt it if they think they have a better way to use the mechanics.)

These are all great ideas how to balance combat. Dodging is a cheat move and parrying happens way to easily. Counter attack shouldn't be that easy to pull off. And there should be a difference between light and heavy armor, but at this point i'm not holding my breath to see those kind of fixes. Tweaking some enemy stats is best I can hope for.

Still they should consider this kind of stuff when designing their next game. For some reason piranha bytes seems to think risen 3 has no issues. Its worrying me.

I absolutely agree with stat requirements for equipment. It's a huge incentive to grow your character for a specific build - the same way we've done it in Gothic, and the same way people do it with games like Dark Souls. We want to build our character around certain powerful equipment, and we know we can't have it all. This is another factor that kills my enjoyment of games like The Elder Scrolls - if you know where a really powerful weapon is, you just go get it, and you can use it at Level 1, and just wreck everything.

As far as faction-locking scrolls, though... that almost utterly defeats the point of them. In the old Gothic games, melee characters could use a single-use scroll intelligently and strategically, to help them in a situation that's a little too tough for them. In Jharkendar, for example, I always save a Fire Rain spell to help me take out the troll in front of Quarhodron's tomb. I wouldn't be able to defeat the beast otherwise. But the drawback is that, of course, I don't get to use the spell again. What I think they should do, instead of giving you tons of scrolls you can't use, is just not give you tons of scrolls. They should be very limited to people who are not a part of the relevant faction, but still available to use creatively. And if you are a part of the faction but cannot use the permanent version of the spell (stat requirements, again), you can invest in the single-use scrolls, instead, because you now have greater access to them due to your relationship with the faction that creates them.

Aaaaaaaaaaanyway, that's just my opinion.

Yeah that would be the alternative way of balancing them. Maybe restricting them to faction was too harsh. It just feels cheap that I can buy and find tons of voodoo dolls even if i'm not part of faction that knows voodoo. In gothic 2 atleast scrolls like rain of fire or summon demon were a true rarity.

And there should be definitely stats requirements for spell scrolls.

[Morgannin09]

I didn't say higher difficulty made the game a decent challenge, especially not later in the game. Your character just always gets too powerful, especially thanks to the lack of stat requirements.

Followers cannot die. That would be story-breaking in a lot of cases. I avoided having companions with me throughout most of the game. It means you miss a bit of dialog, but it's not really anything important.

There are plenty of different kind of monsters, the problem is that nearly every one of them is cannon fodder type.

Well, that's exactly what I meant. None of the enemies stand out as far as gameplay goes, and very few of them are significantly more difficult than another.

Player can never be overwhelmed by their sheer numbers.

Problem is, I really don't like that idea, or at least not universally. It could work to make certain areas less accessible early on, as even if you can take on one or two of an enemy type, you need to wait until you can survive an onslaught from a bunch of them. Besides, consider that in Risen 3, you only get attacked by one enemy at a time - having tons of enemies wouldn't make it more difficult, just longer. This is another reason why it should not be possible to use healing items instantly, without an animation forcing you to stop fighting.
I prefer the idea that you encounter tougher and tougher enemies as you go on, one or a couple at a time, as it makes it more skill-based to take on a tough enemy, rather than just trying to turn your character into a tank so you can plow through dozens of enemies scraping away at your health meter. Then, more carefully and contextually, have large groups of enemies that you need to be clever about avoiding or defeating.

For some reason piranha bytes seems to think risen 3 has no issues.

I think they know it has issues, just nothing game-breaking. The game is complete and a player can get from beginning to end without technical issues. If the gameplay is not what people want, they can't easily just go back and fix that - that's a load of extra programming that they can't be expected (in most cases, at least) to plug that back into the game they already spent their budget on. If they're sensible, they'll make these changes to the next game as they develop it instead of repeating the undesirable mechanics in the previous games.
As far as their support, I don't think PB can really afford to keep supporting the game after they've finished it, either pressure from the publisher to start new development, or the fact that the game didn't sell well enough that they can afford to pay their programmers to fix a game that isn't really going to sell much more as a result of their work. Devil's advocate, here - I could be wrong, but I prefer to avoid undue criticism until it's proven to be warranted.

[Dez]

Followers cannot die. That would be story-breaking in a lot of cases. I avoided having companions with me throughout most of the game. It means you miss a bit of dialog, but it's not really anything important.

I really enjoy travelling with companions. I get so lonely without a good company Companions have few intresting comments about locations and npcs every now and then. I just wish there was more banter! Piranha bytes are pretty good at writing dialog and characters. They should let it shine more.

PBs just need to balance the game better. Companions shouldn't have so much health for example and enemy encounters should be challenging even if you're travelling with companions. This was already a problem in risen 2 and sadly I was forced to leave companions behind to increase challenge, but its a dull and uneffective solution to a much bigger problem.

Besides, consider that in Risen 3, you only get attacked by one enemy at a time - having tons of enemies wouldn't make it more difficult, just longer. This is another reason why it should not be possible to use healing items instantly, without an animation forcing you to stop fighting.

I prefer the idea that you encounter tougher and tougher enemies as you go on, one or a couple at a time, as it makes it more skill-based to take on a tough enemy, rather than just trying to turn your character into a tank so you can plow through dozens of enemies scraping away at your health meter. Then, more carefully and contextually, have large groups of enemies that you need to be clever about avoiding or defeating.

Well its true that enemies seem to be politely waiting their own turn to be killed, so increasing enemy numbers may not be that significant from challenge's point of view. Still if they prefer these cannon fodder type enemies, there better be a good number of them. Force me to use those rain of fire spells more often

I also prefer more intelligent opponents, but like you said very few risen 3 enemies seem to falling in that category. Shadowlords and the oracle boss fight have been the most enjoyable fights so far, but everything else is just same old.

I think they know it has issues, just nothing game-breaking. The game is complete and a player can get from beginning to end without technical issues. If the gameplay is not what people want, they can't easily just go back and fix that - that's a load of extra programming that they can't be expected (in most cases, at least) to plug that back into the game they already spent their budget on. If they're sensible, they'll make these changes to the next game as they develop it instead of repeating the undesirable mechanics in the previous games.

As far as their support, I don't think PB can really afford to keep supporting the game after they've finished it, either pressure from the publisher to start new development, or the fact that the game didn't sell well enough that they can afford to pay their programmers to fix a game that isn't really going to sell much more as a result of their work. Devil's advocate, here - I could be wrong, but I prefer to avoid undue criticism until it's proven to be warranted.

I don't think its utterly unfair to ask for a small balance patch. Atleast offer us an optional harder difficulty setting. I'm not asking them to redesign the combat mechanics or add new features. As cheap as the rolling mechanic is, it can't be changed that easily because it would require too many changes.

I get that Deepsilver is not willing to pay for a new patch, but. still its piranha bytes name in the credits. I think they do themselves disservice by not doing anything, but maybe its too late at this point and maybe their contract does not allow any kind of action to be taken.

That being said I'm about to enter the last chapter in risen 3 and i'm quite enjoying the game despite the lack of challenge. Thats a testament to how great gameworld builders and writers piranha bytes are. This gameworld is a joy to explore. Then again these kind of open world games are my favourite thing to play and i've been their fan since gothic 1. So I'm not probably their most critical customer.

By the way the main theme is quite fantastic. Kudos to who wrote the score

[foobar]

I don't get them [Piranha Bytes].

Well, at the end of the day, they're running a business. And in their mind, if Deep Silver does not pay for a patch, then they're not going to make one. If they were going to make a patch out of their own pocket, that would take resources away from the current project on which they are already working (probably for the very same publisher). Which that publisher has no interest in. From PB's point of view, their customer is not us, their customer is Deep Silver. And Deep Silver does not want patches. It took a long struggle to get them to even cough up the Unprotect Patch for Risen 1, even though that required no real work on the developer's side.

Of course, you can always make the argument that well supported games benefit both developer and publisher in the long run (customer loyalty and stuff). But let's face it: There are only a few people who actually remember that they got assf^W treated badly by some developer/publisher 3 years ago. EA is rumored to have made a solid business model out of "cheating" people out of their money and have them come back begging for more shortly after. And we all know that if it works for big players, then it must work for the small ones as well. There's no way that customer loyalty could give them the edge they need to compete or anything. Therefore, customer loyalty does not appear to be a big issue for PB/DS, as similar instances show (e.g. the "modkit affair" or the lack of presence of publisher officials outside the hot marketing phase in the forum).


That being said, I don't have that much of a problem with the balancing. It is actually a bit confusing to me that people complain about it. You wrote yourself that you are a completionist. You want to explore everything, do every quest, complete every task. Me, I'm a role-player. I don't do quests just because they're there. I do quests if and when I think my character would do them (e.g. a mage wouldn't steal, a rogue wouldn't help the city guard etc. etc.) I don't try to kill every animal just to get more XP (or fame). I might hunt them if my character is a hunter. But not for the XP or the sense of "having done everything".

And then it is good that there is enough XP (or fame, in this specific case) that you can still build a character that can hold his own against the opponents that the story throws at him (or her). All the people who do not play out their roles and then complain about being too powerful and/or too rich make life harder for me when developers actually listen to them. Which PB did, for instance, when they added money costs to training (G1 and G2 didn't have that). CrazyIvan once said about power gamers (in PnP games): "The best thing to do is have the game master drop a cow from the sky and kill them with it right at the start." Unfortunately, there is no game master in CRPGs.

Granted, you could reserve the highest difficulty for such people. So they can have fun without bothering the roleplayers. Why not? I just wanted to say: Balancing is always a matter of taste and playing habits. There is no such thing as the one right way to do it and not everyone has problems with it.

There are more important bugs to fix. The Zacharias bug, for instance. Or the ships that sometimes disappear from the game. These can be real game breakers and are much more important than balancing.