Interviews// Risen 2

SPOnG: You guys are still making PC games, and as you said the PC version of Risen 2 is ahead of consoles at this stage of development. With a lot of large developers seemingly dropping the PC in favour of consoles, what do you think is the status of the industry there at the moment?

Daniel Oberlerchner: I think it’s very hard to say it’s dying, because it’s more like it suffers ups and downs. I think it’s definitely changing rapidly. What you’re seeing right now is people are focusing on micro-entertainment, I would say. And that’s definitely one influence that comes from the console generation - people playing on consoles tend to just come home from work, pop in a game and play for ten to fifteen minutes.

Risen 2 is really a hardcore game, which means that it’s not designed to be consumed in chunks. When you’re deciding to make a game in chunks, you have to make sure that the quests and dialogue are designed that way. That’s what we didn’t want to do, because when you do that it will just hamper and hurt the gameplay. You can’t do complex stories because people will be annoyed when they switch off the console for two weeks and then switch it on again, forgetting where they left off.

We made sure to have different features in the game so that players are always tracked in where they are and what they’re doing. We really didn’t want to adapt the micro-entertainment stuff. We really think there are enough people out there who are dedicated and want to explore a hardcore game.


SPOnG: You don’t think you guys are going to be left behind on PC, because you’re not interested in jumping on board with all the micro-entertainment games and Facebook stuff?

Daniel Oberlerchner: What we will be doing in the future is cater to that audience as well. Instead of making Risen 2 hook into Facebook, I think it would be more interesting to develop a dedicated Risen 2 Facebook app, for example. Or maybe a dedicated iOS app. You could come up with an app which revolves around the Gnome creatures specifically, perhaps. That could hook into the Risen universe, but make it a dedicated experience for the iPad.

But you don’t necessarily need to break up the 60 hours worth of gameplay of Risen 2 and share it on an iPad or any other mobile device, because then you’re going to fail. You really have to focus on what the device can do.


SPOnG: It’s funny because a few PC developers have broken out and done exactly what you said. Telltale Games have made an episodic Monkey Island series, and there’s a RAGE iOS app. Do you think that is the way to go if you wanted to reach that audience?

Daniel Oberlerchner: For smaller games, yes. Telltale Games’ episodic titles in Monkey Island and Back to the Future have been very successful but they don’t exactly have huge gameplay times. I think when you sum all those episodes up, each game may equate to around 15-20 hours. Most of them are below 10 hours.

The whole episodic approach, for example, was also planned for Half-Life 2 wasn’t it? However in that case, we all know... [laughs] When you have a complex game like Half-Life 2, you’re suddenly running into problems that the development time increases, and I can fully understand that Valve is not able to throw one episode quickly after each other. It will hamper the game’s quality, and they clearly don’t want to water down that quality.

They want to deliver cool stuff, and there is a fight between being quick enough for episodic content and having the quality you need for a AAA game.


SPOnG: There are companies like BioWare who have attempted to redefine the role-playing game with Mass Effect - and there is an argument that those games take certain things away from the genre and instead pushes more action and third-person shooter style elements. What defines an RPG to you, and do you think Risen 2 falls under that?

Daniel Oberlerchner: Risen 2 is much more a traditional role-playing game than the current ones produced by other companies. Mass Effect... is just designed differently, with other target groups in mind.

They also put so much into the cool storyline, full character presentation, full cutscenes, which is... the trouble with that is simply that you have so much that you really want to show it off as well. And to make sure that the player is seeing those cool cutscenes, you sometimes yank the controller out of their hands.

That’s not what we want to do. What we want to do right now for Risen 2 is to really put the controller in the player’s hands. You decide the pace in which you consume the entertainment in this game.

If you are a collector, you can spend 60-80, maybe 100 hours into this game, crafting, searching for legendary items, looting, doing more quests in different styles, making save games, loading them again. If you are someone who wants to just go through the main storyline, you can finish this game in around 35-40 hours.

What we really want to do is unleash the player again. It’s not like we built a cutscene viewer, even though Risen 2 has much cooler cutscenes compared to the first game. But we didn’t want to impose on the player a certain pace. We don’t tell people when to watch cutscenes or to do tutorials because that’s how we scripted the game. You really have to decide for yourself.


SPOnG: Thank you very much for your time.

Daniel Oberlerchner: Thank you.