Risen 3 announced for PC, PS3, Xbox 360, due August
Near Dragon Age: Inquisition and The Witcher 3.
Not everyone's jumping on the next-gen bandwagon: just announced RPG threequel Risen 3, due August, will be a PC, PS3 and Xbox 360 game.
Developer Piranha Bytes is promising freedom in exploration and a hand-crafted world.
The game's full name is Risen 3: Titan Lords, and it spins the story of a world abandoned by the gods, where a young warrior is attacked from the shadows and loses his soul. His quest to retrieve it will also be yours.
Piranha Bytes created the generally well-regarded Gothic series of role-playing games, but walked away from the IP, and IP-leasing-publisher JoWooD (now defunct), because "there were a couple of differences in opinion between the publisher and us", Piranha Bytes told me in spring 2011.
Everything after Gothic 3, therefore, was made not by Piranha Bytes, but by Spellbound, a developer that folded but then rose from the dead as Black Forest Games - a studio that hasn't amounted to much yet.
Not being able to use its own IP, Piranha Bytes invented Risen, and plugged away - without any stand-out success - through two games, now three.
Curiously, in 2011, Piranha Bytes told me JoWood's lease of the Gothic licence had expired, or would do so very soon. Piranha Bytes would be the owner again. But would it revert to making Gothic games again? Judging by Risen 3, apparently not, although what exactly happened is unclear.
Nevertheless, it's knocking on for two years since Risen 2 was released on PC, which is an encouraging amount of development time. Risen 3 will have tough RPG competition from The Witcher 3 and Dragon Age: Inquisition this autumn, mind you, although it could still be the crowning achievement of the series so far.