Two Worlds (addendum)

I felt the overwhelming need to do a second post regarding this game because it's actually a bit discouraging how overlooked Two Worlds apparently has become in relation to how much I've enjoyed playing it thus far.

First, I need to redact a statement that I made in my previous post, where I commented that I think what this game really needs is a Construction Set. As it turns out, there actually is a SDK for Two Worlds, which one can download (along with some other modding tools) from the Inside Two Worlds Forums once one has secured a free membership.

This discovery should have encouraged me. Being restricted to a single male character always lessens any role-playing experience for me, so I immediately looked for a mod that would allow me to play the single-player game as my own gender (that's right, there's a multi-player aspect to the game). I found just such a mod, but in the end decided not to use it because none of the male-voiced dialog was replaced so it ended up just being a bit unnerving.

But here's where I began to get truly discouraged: a quick look there at the downloads page for Two Worlds mods (for this first game, not its sequel) reveals only 77 entries, which is a staggeringly low number when compared to the quantity of community-produced mods available for other games. I find this a bit of a paradox since there are plenty of remarks to be found on the web opining what's wrong with the game and should have been done differently by the devs. If you don't like it and you have a SDK, why don't you fix it?

But the community isn't entirely to blame here. The latest version of Two Worlds to be released is v1.7 (a.k.a. the Epic Edition), yet the SDK has only ever been updated to work with v1.6. Thus the community was forced to make a choice: play the most recent version of the game or play a moddable version of the game. Somebody somewhere really "dropped the ball" on this one.

Despite the fact that Two Worlds apparently is a "dead" game now, I just wanted to do another post to attempt to counteract all the negative criticism surrounding it. The game really isn't bad at all, it was just never able to escape from the shadow of Bethesda's Oblivion  -- the game that it's constantly compared to and thus could never be as good as in the eyes of most gamers.

The most frequent complaint I've read about Two Worlds is that it's poorly balanced. This is in a way true; I initially played it for about four hours on the default "medium" difficulty and found that I leveled up relatively quickly and soon was able to cut my way through most enemies virtually unscathed. Now I'm about ten hours into my current game on the "hard" difficulty setting and am finding the game more challenging and perhaps even too challenging in some areas. But I also think that the majority of the complaints about balance result from the fact that the game is being compared to Oblivion. In the popular Bethesda game the entire world around the player (for the most part) is constantly adjusting to the level of the player, whereas many of the encounters in Two Worlds appear to be static and should not be attempted until the player has reached a certain level. The Cyclops and the Ogre I stumbled across are good examples: each was able to smash me with a single blow while I was able to do virtually no damage to them.

Oh yeah, and then there's the graveyard full of undead that hit me with fatal levels of poison:

But Oblivion and Two Worlds obviously have two very different leveling and balancing systems, so in the end I have to say that comparing the two is really just illogical and unjust. Sure, in Two Worlds you'll feel really outmatched by some of the enemy mobs, but the game also provides the player with ways to deal with such mobs without taking any damage at all. Prime example: my fiery assault on this Dwarf-invaded mine; the little buggers never really had a chance...

It's also possible to get different factions (monsters versus humans, for example) to lose interest in you and start attacking each other. I came across this mob of bandits that were really giving me a hard way to go...

...until I realized that I could lure the aforementioned Ogre to their camp to wipe them out for me... but only after they had done enough damage to the big guy that I was then able to finish him off myself.

So the game is not without its own tactical nuances and challenges and can be enjoyable if one can stop comparing it to other games and simply accept it for what it is. In my opinion (and trust me, I'm not easily impressed), Two Worlds has everything a good single-player RPG should have: a huge world to explore, lots of quests to complete, a somewhat unique magic system, plenty of stuff to kill when it tries to hurt you and a main story-line that (though perhaps a bit of it was lost in translation) is interesting and entertaining. I feel that it's well worth the $10 USD that GOG.com is asking for it and, while I won't be so boldly delusional as to declare it the best game ever created, I do recommend that any fans of sandbox-style RPGs at least give it an impartial chance. It might never be your favorite RPG, but I don't think you'll regret having played it.

EDIT: (a few hours later...)

Oh, and another thing I forgot to mention while we're comparing Two Worlds to Oblivion:

I've lost track of how many times I've read complaints from Oblivion players regarding frequent CTDs. Sure, some of those crashes can be attributed to improper mod usage, but many of them can be blamed on the buggy game itself and the engine that runs it. But I've now logged in over thirteen hours of gameplay with Two Worlds and its Earth Engine and I can honestly say that it has not crashed, frozen, flickered or faltered a single time. Nope, not even once. My kudos to the devs of Two Worlds for their craftsmanship on the technical side of the game.