After having just released the third Risen title, you’d think Piranha Bytes would sit back and take a well-deserved rest. After all, the time between 2012’s Risen 2 and the 2014 sequel was just a few months over two years, which is fairly quick for such a small studio.

Seems like that isn’t the case though, as translated news from the Gothic community seems to point to a new game in development that has nothing to do with either Gothic or Risen.

For some, this isn’t much of a surprise, since Björn Pankratz (The Risen 3 director) had been quoted as saying that not only did they have concrete plans for their next game but that Risen 3 was the final sequel for its series. Still, very little was known about the company’s direction post Risen 3. Strong rumors indicated that the only reason there was even a Risen 3 was due to Deep Silver demanding a trilogy and not letting Piranha Bytes out of contract until all three games were shipped.

All of this speculation came to a head recently when one of Piranha Byte’s founders, Michael Hoge, posted to the community forum.

Mattias Filler made me aware of this thread. It seems that there are more than this one so here is a short statement for everyone who is curious:

1. I was not involved in the making of Risen 3.

2. I did indeed lock myself up for two years in order to work on a new concept, albeit not related to Gothic. A prototype based on this concept is being developed by a small core team since the beginning of this month.

3. Before you ask: I can not give you any more information at this point. First, we deliberately want to take our time with everything and secondly this is not the right place to divulge further details.

Thank you for your understanding that I do not yet want to reveal anything about this new project. Those of you who are interested won’t have to wait too much longer though.

Hoge mysteriously left Piranha Bytes sometime during Risen 2’s development and it was assumed he had parted ways with the company. This may or may not be the case, but for whatever reason, he seems now to be working with Piranha Bytes on a new series of his own creation. With Hoge being so open about his plans, it’s obvious he isn’t under an NDA, since if he was beholden to a publisher, he would have been unable to reveal this news to a public forum.

There’s speculation that this new project will be crowd-funded, which would be interesting to see.