While Playstation 4 owners will have to buy an entirely new copy of Piranha Bytes’ Risen 3 to enjoy the new enhanced visuals its receiving, PC gamers are considerably more lucky. According to a Steam community post, a patch is now online that will allow current PC owners of the game to enjoy the new enhanced edition content for free.

…now that we have your attention with our terrible pun, today we’d like to announce that, courtesy of a free automatic update for those who already have the game in their library, we’re bringing a slew of visual enhancements to Risen 3: Titan Lords for players running the game on a 64-bit Operating System –

• – Improved texture resolution for items, objects, foliage, terrain, particle effects, characters, monsters and other in-game models.

• – Improved draw distance & viewing ranges

• – Larger caches leading to smoother frame-rates & less LOD streaming

• – The introduction of new state of the art post-process effects such as bokeh depth of field and HDR bloom

– Addition of a new physically based, more visually realistic cloud rendering technique that adds even more spectacular skies and sunsets to the dynamic day-night cycles.

For those of you yet to own Risen 3: Titan Lords, fear not: if you’re running on a 64-bit OS then you’ll automatically receive the 64-bit version of the game upon purchase. Due to the fact that the above improvements are only possible through the extra bandwidth switching to 64-bit affords us, those of you running on a 32-bit OS & purchasing the game will receive the original 32-bit version, which will of course update automatically should you ever move to a 64-bit OS at a future point.

In addition any DLCs that you have previously purchased (or may purchase in future) will obviously also function in the 64-bit version and all save games & previously obtained Steam achievements will also transfer from the 32-bit version to 64-bit version.

This is great timing, since it wasn’t too long ago that the entire Risen series was 80% off on Steam; a move that brought quite a few new fans into the fold.

As for what’s next for Piranha Bytes, it’s doubtful we’ll see another Risen game, at least for a very long time. With a new IP being worked on, as well as comments from PB hinting that they only did a third Risen to fulfill contractual obligations to their publisher (Deep Silver), it’s unlikely a 4th game is in their plans.

Regardless, supporting owners of the game by freely giving them the upgrade the consoles are getting is a great show of respect.