I hope the demo is representative of the rest of the game. I'm gonna buy this the second I find a copy.
Very interesting to hear. I am tempted to try it on my old rig (AMDFX55, X1900XT,
2GB) before the new parts arrive.
A note though. When I first tried the G2 demo back in the day performance was from
ok to great. I distinctly remember the lowest fps was something like 23 when coming
down from the pass from Xardas's tower in front of the little shrine and looking toward
the sheep herder guy. Very playable I thought (for 1280x960 all maxed). The game
itself was a different story (14 fps at that exact same spot and even lower inside the
city). What I am driving at is that performance at the game might be lower generally
(and especially inside the port city)…
I guess it may have to do with the demo being a slice of the actual map (ofcourse
their streaming design could be much more different now and offload/stream
resources more efficiently so the size of the "map" is irrelevant, who knows).
It may just have been my PC, but I found Gothic 3 a little rough around the edges. The little things, like the ocean bump mapping, clipping, colour pallette. I think Risen looks a lot more interesting. Gothic 3's world was big, but it seemed less detailed than Risen's.
I get the same impression even from the vids. Also it is more important imho for a
game to be graphically consistent and glitch free rather than provide an insane amount
of polys and highres textures. That is where G3 was a bit problematic (due to its LOD
mechanism). You could heavily tweak it from the ini though at the point that it would
look very very good. Oblivion for instance with its much praised graphics was far more
problematic in that area and the difference between indoors or even near outdoor and
distant graphics was jarring and an immersion breaker (It too could be tweaked of
course, it just entailed downloading GBs of Textures and Normal maps to replace the
crappy originals)…
Ooops I guess my graphics whore aspect wanted a peek out of the closet
But seriously Art direction and consistency > Latest tech at any case for me.