Why Risen 2 will be better

Yeah.

It's hard to give a final judgment as we're currently still developing it, but from what I'm seeing right now on our screens, it looks quite close. Our aim is to build an Xbox 360 version that you can't tell the difference to the PC version on first look.

No, no.

Yeah, but we don't live here; some guys live here, mainly the ones who are new, before they get their own apartment. But we chose to have a house instead of a grey bureau complex because we thought it was more fun being here.

The project Risen 2 is by far the most expensive project that we've done. I can't elaborate on that, sorry.

We've put much more effort into the animation by using motion capture. Also, the structure of the game: in Risen 1 we had quite an imbalance in the game chapters; as the game went on there was less and less to do, and at the end you had to run through a couple of dungeons. This gave you the feeling that the game became more boring.

What we're doing in Risen 2 is mix it all up: the dungeons will not be at the end of the game but at several points in the game.

We have a completely different travelling system. We've split the world into several islands and coastal regions, so you still have an open world, which you can explore freely, but we can force the player to solve some missions before we allow him to travel to another island. Thus we can ensure the player knows certain things when he arrives.

Yes, but we can't really tell you the details. All we can tell you now is that you're going to travel by ship from island to island. But how the ship is going to work and what it entails - we're going to reserve that.

The whole story revolves around pirates. Our main goal when we started the project was to develop a pirate RPG with fantasy elements. We combined what we'd done before with a pirate setting. Yes, obviously you can become a pirate when you play the game.

I can't comment on that.

The game world of Risen 2 has several islands the size of the island in Risen 1. And no, bigger is not always better, but the way we've done it, by having the player explore certain locations before he can move on to others - and then at a certain point allowing him full access to the whole world - gives us the opportunity to tell the story and have an open world.

Dragon Age is far more into epic battles and war. We always try to have the player solve a certain problem in the world, but it's not like he's the saviour of the world - he is the saviour, maybe, of the village.

He is not killing a god of evil but he is killing one of his minions who is particularly dangerous. We go one step more towards the reality approach: what one person really could do, not the superhero stuff.

Yeah, those are in our game. We enhanced the party system a bit...

We can't really go too much into the details! In Risen 1 you had quests where you accompany people, and that's the minimum level of companionship you'll have in the game. We're not going to have a Dragon Age II or Dungeon Siege party with four or five men - that's not our aim.

We have this party mechanic where you can only have one party member at a certain time. It's for balancing reasons. We have no round-based combat system; it's real-time, and it's no good to have five people around you hacking and slashing through the game when you can't control them.

It's very hard to do the balancing bit without auto-magic strength-levelling of creatures - we didn't want to do that.