Just finished the review copy, which is the full game...uh...except for Treasure Isle DLC (lulz).
It's a PB games through and through. I had to restore to a different path 25 hours in coz one quest-vital NPC didn't spawn. Piranhas gonna Byte.
(also lockpicking does require talent minimums, sorry if my preview wasn't clear on that)
Solid improvement? Really?
I attributed it to him perhaps feeling it's better than the sum of its parts. That or world design has improved or something. Dunno. Perhaps
Brother None could explain?
Sorry, didn't see this before.
Quest design in Risen was fairly awful. Beating up guys to get them to hand over parts. Barely any use of dialog skills.
Risen 2:
- Very frequently uses dialog skills (silver tongue and intimidate talents as well as the nuff said skill) as alternative mission paths, or to bypass tough fights/situations.
- High thievery talent for lockpicking and pickpocketing is not required but is definitely a boon. Not just for frequent looting/pick-pocketing, but it pops up with some regularity in quests as an alternate solution.
- Alternatives are a big thing. You take the voodoo skills or gun path about 8-9 hours in (the beta cuts off well before this, I think? Preview copy cut off shortly after it). Voodoo has a lot of quest-related stuff, where you mind-control people to bypass certain segments. It's not huge, and the game determines when it's possible (obviously, there's no realistic way to do it otherwise), but it provides nice alternatives. At one point you have to get into the Inquisition's council building. If you don't have the voodoo skill, your only option is to work with a merchant and disguise yourself as a messenger, and once inside you'll have to either use sneak skills, combat skills, dialog skills or a combo to get what you want. The other option is voodoo mind-controlling one of the councilmen, for which you need to pickpocket or buy a wig (for his hair, oddly enough), and then it's fairly easy to both get the information you need and even coerce the Council into a positive decision for you regarding the main quest (though I didn't get to see if this has any consequences long-term).
Gothic 2 did it better. So did Gothic. But the main conclusion here is "it's a typical PB game", and I adore PB games, and I enjoyed this one. It's not a straight-line improvement on Risen but it's at least as good as Risen (which in my view failed in a lot of quest design and in the last half of the game being a mindless combat romp). One thing it's awful at? Consequences for actions. At one point you steal an inquisition ship, and not even the inquisition camp you stole it from turns aggro. I don't even know.
Review in a few days when the embargo closes. Won't reveal anything more until then, sorry :p