Risen 2 - "Why Risen 2 will be better" @ Eurogamer

Piranha Bytes' Michael Hoge together with Deep Silver's Daniel Oberlerchner discuss Risen 2 with Eurogamer. Let's start at the beginning with our quote:

Eurogamer: Was Risen 1 your best work?

Michael Hoge: No, absolutely not. Risen, especially the console version, was done quite poorly. It was our first console project. The PC version was all right, though. With Risen our main goal was to produce a role-playing game in time and in budget.

Daniel Oberlerchner: [Piranha Bytes] wanted to recover from the feedback they got for Gothic 3. Gothic 3 was their previous project before Risen 1. The feedback from the community and also the press was abysmal for Gothic 3 because the project lacked a lot of time and polish. It was a huge world but it wasn't really filled properly and there were many bugs.

We wanted to get rid of the bugs and polish it down for Risen 1. And I think we succeeded with that.

...and a quote on Risen 2:

Eurogamer: What is the budget for Risen 2?

Michael Hoge: 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.