: One thing I wanted to go back and do quickly was clear out the gnome cave. They’re gnomes, not gnolls - I don’t know why I said gnolls earlier. Gnomes are annoying bastards for two reasons. First, they use the same AI that human enemies do - they use weapons and can block your attacks. Second, they’re low to the ground, meaning that if there’s a height difference between the terrain you’re on versus the terrain they’re on, it can cause your attacks to miss.
: There’s really nothing worthwhile in here - this is from an earlier save where I didn’t have the sword yet, so that’s why we don’t have it in this shot. We do want all the gold we can pick up though, and you’ll see why once we hit the swamp. The main reason we came back here is for EXP, which is a precious commodity in Risen. Unlike Oblivion (which this game was clearly modelled after in a lot of ways) there are no randomly-generated enemies, meaning there’s a set amount of EXP we can actually obtain.
: One thing you’ll also want to watch out for is this fun bug, which occurred when I tried to go back to Jan’s house after going back into the gnome cave. If the game ever goes above 60 FPS, it can randomly softlock when going up slopes. This is because vertical momentum is tied to the framerate of DANK WEED MAGIC. If you’re playing this game on any kind of modern PC, you’ll want to manually limit it to 60 FPS.
: This is the map of the island we have, which covers about half of it. It’s a bit hard to see, but there’s three major zones here: the Don’s swamp in the top-left, Harbor Town in the bottom-center, and the Monastery in the top-right.
: I didn’t find out this out until this recording run, but there’s a weird plateau thing outside of Jan’s house that you can climb.
: This gets us a short bow and some arrows. Bows in this game are basically worthless, except for one specific use we might see at some point: that being hitting switches that are on the other side of death traps.
: At the bottom of the plateau is a Wanderlust. Wanderlusts are one of four special plant types. They give you 10 EXP if you eat them, and while you can technically turn them into a potion that gives you 100 EXP, you need a bunch of them and won’t pick up that recipe until the end of the game.
: To the east of Jan’s house is a sign for Harbor Town. We’re going to head this way, but we’re not actually going to Harbor Town just yet.
: You see, there’s a farm on the way to Harbor Town that has a few sidequests. This area is relatively safe, except for a small swamp which is located to the left off where this pic is.
: The swamp is full of upgraded grave moths that have.. I want to say something like five times the HP the ones we fought near that ruin did. We don’t want to fuck with these until we’ve properly levelled up. However..
: Where there’s swamp, there’s dank swamp weed. Even if we’re not going the Weedlord route, we definitely want to pick up all the weed that we can. There’s two weed plants here, and I think one or two more behind the death moths but I’m not going in there to grab them.
: Near the small swamp is a hill that would actually take us to the Don’s area.. but it’s covered in enemies that are way too tough for us to take. From up here, we can see another new enemy type: boars. As in NieR, boars will fuck you up. They can break through your shield, something almost no human enemies in this game can do. That’s how bullshit they are. They also hit real hard (for how we are now, anyway) and have a ton of HP.
: The farm itself is really small. There’s two guys in robes working out in the fields..
: And then two more near the buildings. We’re going to want to talk to the guy with the broom first. One thing Risen does not do very well is having a solid game sequence. In fact, there was one design decision that had me real confused the first time I played this game.
: “The tide. I’m a shipwreck survivor.”
: “Well, it’s a strange kind of luck that you washed up onto these shores! But I must warn you.. you cannot wander freely around here. I don’t mind, but the Warriors of the Order are less forgiving.”
: One other thing I’m going to put to a vote is what we’ll do with Sara. We could send Jan to pick her up, or we could send her here. Alternatively, we could do nothing and maybe go back for Sara ourselves? I’ll let you guys decide. That vote will also have until we reach Harbor Town.
: “Who are you?”
: “My name is Tristan, a novice of magic. I’m looking after this place on the orders of the Convocation of Mages.”
: “What is this place?”
: “Just a simple farm. It’s under the control of the Inquisition now. We cultivate the land and take care of the animals. Our work ensures the wellbeing of the order and Inquisitor Mendoza’s men.”
: “The Convocation of Mages has long had their seat here in the Monastery at the foot of the great volcano. It was a place of study and faith before the dark wave covered the land and those temple ruins had risen from the ground.”
: “And now the Inquisitor is looking to push back that darkness. We’re very lucky he found us in our hour of need. Now the Monastery not only serves as the mage’s home, but also as a training camp for recruits of the Inquisition.”
: Tristan doesn’t explain it very well, but basically, the Inquisition has a law against being outside of Harbor Town. This means that if we run into any White Cloaks, they’ll be hostile. The punishment for breaking the law is being conscripted into the Inquisition. If you don’t know this, it is real easy to accidentally wander into an Inquisition-held area and get forced onto the wizard route.
: Henson here wants us to go kill some wolves that have been eating his pigs, so we’ll go ahead and do that. But first, a lesson in how NPCs work in this game - because I figured now would be as good a time as any to show it.
: Right behind Henson’s pig shack is a boar. Animals in this game typically give you a warning before attacking you, provided you don’t run right up into their faces. Wolves are an exception to this. We MIGHT be able to kill the boar with a bit of finagling, but there’s a better way. This is something you’ll see me doing a lot if we choose to go the wizard route.
: Just like in most older MMOs, enemies will follow you once they’re aggroed on. Unlike most MMOs, Piranha Bytes kind of forgot to design a “leashing” mechanic - or at least, the one they put in the game doesn’t work very well. It is ENTIRELY possible to have a wolf follow you the entire way across the world. Most NPCs that have weapons will come to your aid if they see that there’s an enemy attacking you. In this case, Henson is already here and ready to whack the boar with his staff.
: Once Henson attacks it, the boar pretty much immediately switches aggro onto him. At this point in the game, pretty much every NPC is stronger than us. Henson did this much damage with two hits of his staff, and then leaves the boar open for an attack from the back.
: There’s two dangerous parts to doing this. The first part is that if we hadn’t gotten the killing blow (which is common if more than one NPC decides to join the fight) we’d get zero experience from this. The second is that animal-type enemies can permanently kill NPCs.
: The reason I wanted to kill this particular boar is because it’s blocking a Pixie Hat, which is the third of four special plants. Pixie Hats raise dexterity by 1, and can be put into a potion to raise it by 5.. but the number of these potions you can actually make is far less than the number of Pixie Hats you’re going to find. Dexterity is kind of a useless stat anyway.
: The wolves that Henson sent us after are behind the main house where Tristan is.
: They’re significantly stronger than the ones in the tutorial area. If I had to estimate, I’d say they have around three times the HP. This first one kinda fucked me up so I had to go back to Jan’s to heal.
: You’ll also notice that there’s a quest progress indicator in the bottom-left. This is important because in some cases, it’s possible to get items or kill enemies for a quest without even being aware of the quest. This lets you know that yes, these are quest mobs, and so there’s somewhere you can turn them in once you’ve killed them all.
: The wolf happens to be guarding the final type of special plant: Ogreroot. Ogreroots raise strength by 1, or by 5 if put into a potion.
: The wolf was also guarding a chest, which.. is that a blunt? Yes, it’s absolutely a blunt. There’s also a beer in here, which we’ll want for when we reach the swamp. We’ll save the blunt for if Weedlord wins the vote. One thing I should make clear though is that I went through some speedruns, and Wizard is actually just as broken as Weedlord is, just in a different way.
: Another thing I should mention is that the gold value displayed for items is completely wrong. Merchants will pay you.. I want to say about 20% of the listed price.
: The rest of the quest is fairly straightforward - it leads us into this little mine shaft where the rest of the wolves are. This mineshaft actually leads right to the monastery. The farm here is basically a shortcut between the swamp and the monastery.
: We also find a chest with some gold in it, and a vein of gold ore. Unfortunately, we don’t have the skill we’d need to extract gold from the vein. That would require prospecting, which unless you’re using the fan-made patch (i’m not) you can only learn from one specific NPC in Chapter 1, after which you’re forever locked out of it. I’m personally not a fan of prospecting, because to do anything with the ore you need three levels of smithing and it doesn’t do a whole lot for you.
: Once we go back to report the quest to Henson, he’ll alert us to the fact that there’s currently someone from the Inquisition on the farm. If they spot us, they’ll attack.
: We don’t need to follow him. As long as we stick to the area behind the buildings, he won’t see us. In fact, that’s a pretty good rule for stealth in this game: as long as their back is turned to you, they probably won’t notice you.
: The storehouse has a chest in it that we’re free to take, which contains a pearl necklace we might need for a quest later on, depending on if we’re a Weedlord or not.
: We can then use the bed to sleep until the inquisitor leaves. Beds are better than water barrels in that they’re much faster to use and also restore your MP.
: Doing the quest this way gets us an extra bit of EXP.
: While we’re at it, there’s also this guy, who wants us to harvest grain for him. This quest is boring as shit so I just did it offscreen. I then decided to use Thomas here as an experiment to show what happens when you train too many enemies onto an NPC.
: I went up the hill and grabbed four wolves. See how the health bar is at half? That was two hits.
: The wolves promptly murder Thomas, who dies without even hitting them. If we wanted to, we could in fact kill everyone on the farm except Tristan (who cannot take damage) with these.
: With that done, let’s talk about the areas west of Jan’s house, where I’m going to end this update. There’s kind of a weird fork in the road - one leads to the swamp, while another leads here, to an inquisition camp.
: A third leads to a little ruin with two skeletons in it. Skeletons are extremely powerful enemies - these ones do enough damage to oneshot us. And yes, it is ENTIRELY possible to put two and two together. In fact, the inquisition camp has two incredibly high-level wolves behind it that can be used to wipe out most of the lower-level NPCs.
Next time, we’ll investigate the swamp and get some dank swamp weed. We’ll also maybe become a weedlord. Who knows?