Risen - Various Interviews @ World of Risen

The World of Risen has posted some English translations of various interviews with Piranha Bytes staff members over the holiday period, some of which cover older material. For those who haven't seen them yet, here's a link and snip of a group Christmas interview:

21. Can you tell us something about the amount of NPCs in the game or the number of dialogue lines? How immersive is the world compared to your previous games and how dialogue-focussed will RISEN be? Will we get primarly short and - let's call it result-oriented - chats or do individual NPCs have own opinions which they share with us beside the basic information?

Björn: With amount and complexity of quests, dialogues and characters in RISEN we orientated ourselves stronger towards our predecessors Gothic 1 and 2. The size of the settlements of the individual guilds is similar, too. We set ourselves to make any character in the world unique and with an own personality. The player will meet important characters on several occasions throughout the chapters of our story and develop a personal relationship to them. The goals and intentions of the characters in RISEN are strongly reflected by the quests and dialogues of the respective guild that the player joined. He has to master those guild-quests to advance into the next chapter of the story.

There's also a series of informational interviews that ask the developers the usual questions on their personal backgrounds and experience here.