Two Worlds (yes, again...)

I wasn't going to do yet another post about this game since interest in it is so limited (not a reference to my readership, but rather a reference to the fact that even the Two Worlds Forums don't show much activity where the first game is concerned), but there's still a thing or two I feel compelled to share.

Two Worlds has been compared to Oblivion by many more gamers other than myself, thus when I reached a particular location in the game I knew I needed to share at least one screenshot. Does this Two Worlds locale remind anyone of any other game in particular?

I was also reminded of a certain more popular RPG when I encountered my first invisible wall and was greeted by the message: "YOU CAN'T GO ANY FURTHER. TURN BACK."

But as you might guess from the stark appearance of the bit of rock I'm standing on in that screenshot, I encountered said invisible barrier while pushing my hero's dexterity to the limit against the physics of the game world by rabbit-hopping my way up the side of a steep mountain that I apparently wasn't meant to reach the top of to begin with.

This discovery reminded me yet again of my disappointment that the modding craze that other games have enjoyed never really took off for Two Worlds. There are plenty of only partially-developed areas around the borders of the map that would be perfect locations for cities, castles, enemy camps to invade et cetera, and it's really a bit of a shame that the potential of those areas will likely never be utilized.

The world is big enough that, even in the middle of the map, there are still plenty of areas with enough space to accommodate the entrances to underground dungeons or even above-ground enemy enclaves.

I've been playing for nearly 40 hours now (not consecutively, of course) and have only explored a fraction of the accessible game world.

The darker sections of the map are the unexplored areas while the brighter bits indicate where I've traveled thus far.

Here I "zoomed in" on the map with the mouse wheel to get a closer shot of one of the cities to give a reference point regarding the overall size of the map...

I've passed the level 50 benchmark (there's no level cap, I'm told) and I'm still encountering areas filled with enemies that can "one-shot" me. Obviously there's still plenty of gaming to do here, just in case anyone was wondering and again comparing the game to that certain other RPG. I'm a particularly stubborn gamer, though, and I press on into these areas and find as many cheesy ways as possible to deal with the tough enemies. My favorite thus far is planting myself next to a healing shrine or magic source and juggling the enemies with spells that briefly stun them while doing damage.

So that's what I've been doing lately. So far this is the longest in quite some time that I've played a single vanilla game without getting bored and switching to another game for a while before returning to it (classic Doom notwithstanding). I guess Two Worlds is simply satisfying my love for basic hack-and-slash dungeon crawls (as it has plenty of those).

Can my readers look forward to yet another post about Two Worlds? Ah, only time will tell...

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.

Two Worlds

I've actually owned this game for a number of years, but only recently have been able to play it. You might ask why that is. Three letters: DRM. A few years ago I purchased Reality Pump's Two Worlds at a local Wal-Mart, perfectly legally with my own hard-earned cash. But as my luck would have it, it was one of those games that contains a nasty little bit of DRM that makes it impossible to re-install and re-activate it more than once or twice. After an OS replacement on my old computer and later switching to a new computer, apparently I inadvertently had used up all the permitted installs. Thus the game ended up sitting in a DVD rack collecting dust...

This is where websites like GOG.com (Good Old Games) come in handy. Offering DRM-free versions of many popular games at reasonable prices, GOG.com is really the sort of place a reminiscent gamer like myself should hang around more often. Special thanks to unofficial GOG.com spokesperson Kirtai for mentioning that Two Worlds could be found there for just $10 USD. So, now that I've owned the game for a few years and have purchased it twice, I can finally play it...

THE PLOT:

You're Hooded Dude. Your sister, Scantily-Clad Chick, has fallen off the horse you both share. While you go off to fetch a pail of water, Armored Hooded Dude drops by and kidnaps her. Several years pass and still you're looking for her.

Okay, there's a bit more to it than that, but the game doesn't really give us much of a prologue before we jump right into it.

Two Worlds is the game that I've always felt really wanted to be Oblivion but just didn't quite make it. Much like the famous Bethesda cash-cow, it offers players a large green world to explore and plenty of quests and stuff to hack at with a sword or throw fireballs at. However, unlike Oblivion, you can only play the game as the one guy and you have a pre-determined list of possible skills that you can activate with your experience points (think Witcher, but with an interface and skills that don't look or feel quite as cool or complex).

To be honest, the only things that really went wrong with this game in my opinion are the characters and the dialog. The NPCs all look quite shoddy by today's standards, and everybody likes to say things like "forsooth", "mayhaps" and "pray tell ye" a lot, to the point that it just sounds really corny.

But I can overlook such things if the gameplay keeps me entertained, and so far Two Worlds is doing just that. It took me a few tries to grow accustomed to the GUI and find a control configuration that I'm comfortable with, but now that I'm getting into it I could see myself actually playing this one through to the end. It has plenty of side-quests, a large world to explore, plenty of stuff to buy and sell, lots of spells to learn from various elemental schools of magic and of course hordes of enemies to hack your way through. The combat system does not seem at all complex, but I'm a fan of hack-'n-slash adventures so I really don't mind.

If you've heard bad things about this game and have avoided it because you found the Bethesda games first, the best way I could describe Two Worlds to you would be this: imagine a game that tries to emulate Oblivion but with lesser graphics and gameplay similar to Morrowind, though the quests and factions system aren't quite so complex.

I'm not going to preach that everyone should buy Two Worlds because admittedly there are better RPGs out there, but I also have to say that you could do a lot worse. At only $10 USD for a full game with two expansion packs and no DRM, you really can't go too wrong. If you get bored of playing those other games that you've already been through more than twice and want to mess around with something different, Two Worlds might be just the thing you could check out without emptying your whole wallet.

(What this game really needs is a Construction Set. Don't know why more game devs and publishers haven't caught on to that yet...)

I've also managed to get a copy of Two Worlds II... but that, my friends, will be another story for another time...