Tired of having to skip the opening logo videos for Deep Silver and Piranha Bytes? These can be removed. First, navigate to the game directory (suggested example below):


If you don't have a Program Files (x86) directory, you might have a 32 bit version of Windows, in which case the directory is just called "Program Files" without the "(x86)" on the end of it.

In that folder you'll see two introductory videos. They both are clearly identifiably by name. You can either cut and paste them into some other directory or delete them. Next time you run the game, it'll start up immediately at the Main Menu. If the videos return, this may be because you have checked the integrity of the game cache or experienced a patch of the game through Steam.

Want to backup your saved game files? Maybe you just don't trust Steam's ability to backup the files for you. Maybe you're afraid you'll accidentally delete one by mistake. In any case, they can be found here:

For some reason, Risen 3 doesn't have an in-game option to run in a windowed mode. It can be done though. To do this, navigate to the following directory:


If you have trouble finding the "AppData" folder, that's because it's a hidden folder in Windows (don't unhide it). You can either turn the viewing of hidden folders and files on in Windows or you can just type the folder path in your address bar and force Windows into the folder. In the config directory, you'll find a file called ConfigUser.xml. Open that file up in Windows Notepad. About 6 or 7 lines down from the top of the file, you should see and entry that looks like this:


Change that to "false" instead of true and save the file. When you run the game it will now load the game in a windowed mode. That said, this doesn't work as amazingly as other games that run in a windowed mode. Once the mouse is used in game, it won't leave the confines of that window. That can be problematic when you want to move your mouse over to another window on your desktop. To get around this, just open another window (like a blank text file or a browser) and minimize that. When you want to get your mouse back from Risen 3, just ALT+TAB in Windows. When the other app pops up, you'll have mouse control within Windows again.

Okay, before you do this, please keep in mind that this is unsupported. To do this, navigate to the following directory:


If you have trouble finding the "AppData" folder, that's because it's a hidden folder in Windows (don't unhide it). You can either turn the viewing of hidden folders and files on in Windows or you can just type the folder path in your address bar and force Windows into the folder. In the config directory, you'll find a file called ConfigUser.xml. Open that file up in Windows Notepad. Near the top of the file, you should see and entry that looks like this:


The entries for Right and Bottom represent the horizontal and vertical resolution you're currently set to. Here you can change the resolution to something else that isn't normally supported in the options presented by the game. Save the file when you're done and exit from Notepad. When you run the game it will now load in the new resolution. If the game doesn't look right, chances are it doesn't want to work with the resolution you've given it. This is unsupported, so you're basically hacking around with the insides of the game engine. Simply shut the game down and put the old resolutions back into the file, save, then check the game loads back up again before trying a new resolution.

This is how a lot of people have been configuring Risen 3 to use ultrawide monitors that operate in the 21:9 aspect ratio that pushes things a lot wider than the 16:9 that most people use. For example, in a typical ultrawide resolution, you would change the Right entry to "2560" and the Bottom entry to "1080". Another example of an even larger resolution would be 3360x1920. That said, this hasn't worked for everyone. Some people have been unable to get the game to run on ultrawide monitors in fullscreen mode. To get around this, people have been switching to windowed mode and maximizing it. This isn't fantastic either though, as the Windows cursor often shows up over top of the game cursor when this is done and that can be pretty annoying.

Some people who have installed the game have found that it isn't running with English speech packs or subtitles. This is a fairly easy thing to fix. Right-click on the game in your Steam inventory and select Properties. Switch to the Language tab and select your language from the pull down menu you're given. If the game was using a different language setting, this will mean it's going to want to update and patch the game files. Each time you switch languages in Risen 3, Steam downloads the appropriate language pack but it doesn't download all of the languages by default as these are fairly large files (roughly 2 GB each) and Steam is trying to save you bandwidth and hard drive space.

You can also try manually forcing the game to support English but this will only work for the subtitle aspect of the game, as you still need Steam to download the voice files in order for the voices to work.

To manually set the game to English subtitles, we'll need to change a config file. Navigate to the game directory (suggested example below):


If you don't have a Program Files (x86) directory, you might have a 32 bit version of Windows, in which case the directory is just called "Program Files" without the "(x86)" on the end of it.

Inside that ini directory is a file called ConfigDefault.xml. Open it up in Windows Notepad. Search for "language" and you should find an entry that looks like this:


Here you can replace the SubtitleLanguage options with "English". Save that file and restart the game. If you change the VoiceLanguage to another language, the game will run but the voices won't work. The game will essentially do nothing when you speak to characters. It won't even bring up the subtitles when speaking to them. It will basically skip the process of talking to them. This is because the voice packs haven't been downloaded in Steam yet. In terms of subtitle options for the languages, you're probably able to change to whatever languages you see available in Steam.

You can save yourself some download time if you know you're going to be swapping language packs by backing them up before switching languages in Steam. To do this, find the language PAK file in the following directory:


The English language pack is called 0_en_dlg.pak. I have no idea what the other language packs are called but my guess is that the German one, for example, would be called 0_ge_dlg.pak.

Risen 3 runs on something called the Genome engine. This is a custom game engine written by Piranha Bytes that they have revised and revamped since their Gothic series. It has notoriously had issues in past with newer CPUs. Gothic 3, for example, doesn't seem to run well on systems with too many cores and actually ends up running slower as a result. As a result, it's no surprise that Risen 3 is experiencing CPU related issues. Specifically, people are experience a loading screen when first starting the game that seems to be endless. This seems related to the number of cores you're running in your processor. Any systems in the range of 8 cores or more seem to have this problem but some folks with 7 cores have had this problem as well. Until this problem goes away in a future patch, there is a quick solution to get you by in the mean time.

First, you'll need to run the Windows System Configuration application (aka. MSCONFIG). To do this, hold down the Windows key and press R. When the Run window comes up, type "MSCONFIG" and hit Enter, which should load up MSCONFIG. Switch to the Boot tab, then click on the Advanced Options button. Here you'll see an option to set the number of processors. Check that checkbox, then use the drop down menu to set the number of processor cores in your system to 6. Click Ok, then Apply, then Ok again. Click Exit without Restart. You'll need to restart Windows in order for this change to go into effect, so close down all the applications in Windows and reboot your computer. Make sure you're rebooting and not just logging out of the current user.

Try running the game again. If you get the same problem, try doing the same with with MSCONFIG but try setting the number of processors to 4 instead.

Keep in mind that this change affects everything else in Windows so you might see some things run slower or differently as a result.

Keep an eye on the patch notes for Risen 3. Hopefully this will be resolved in the future and you can revert the changes back in MSCONFIG to UNcheck that checkbox for forcing the number of cores to a lower amount.

Some people have had issues with Risen 3 not wanting to save games. One user posted a solution that apparently cleared things up for him.

Specificially, navigate to the ini folder in the game directory:


If you don't have a Program Files (x86) directory, you might have a 32 bit version of Windows, in which case the directory is just called "Program Files" without the "(x86)" on the end of it.

Look for a file called "mount_packed.xml". Open that file up in Windows Notepad and look for an entry like this:


The next line after that should say "PhysicalPath=x" where x is something like "$(savedgames)/Risen3/SaveGames".

Change it to:


Save and exit from the file and restart Risen 3. I haven't personally tested this as I haven't been able to duplicate the error but apparently it's a solution that works. You should be able to save games now.

That said, my guess is that saved games will no longer appear in the folder listed above in this guide. Rather, they're probably going to end up appearing somewhere in the Risen 3 game directory in a sub-folder called "save". This change might also mean that Steam doesn't want to backup your saved games to the cloud as it might not expect saved games to appear in a different directory - I have no real idea. Taking this into account, you might want to take backups of your saved games into your own hands just in case something bad happens.