Risen 3 gets free visual upgrade

I'll skip my usual preamble, where I argue that Piranha Bytes' Risen games are really interesting (despite being kinda terrible), and get straight on with it: Risen 3 has just received a pretty substantial graphical upgrade patch on Steam. It embiggens the textures, improves the draw distance, and adds new post-processing effects like HDR bloom and bokeh depth of field. It also, apparently, pretties up the skies, via "a new physically based, more visually realistic cloud rendering technique".

The comments under the update notes seem happy with the patch, although a few reckon the game's performance has taken a hit thanks to all the new graphical gubbins. We thought Risen 3 was pretty good, and I'm interested to see how Piranha Bytes' open-world sci-fi RPG Elex turns out.

Ta, RPS.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.