Date: 2007/09/13 (updated 2007/09/26 with final conclusions)
Platform: 360 (also available for PC)
My Specs: 360 Premium, 32" 1080i LCD TV, Surround Sound. Game actually froze a few times, showed graphics glitches a few times as well as a few framerate drops.
Genre: Role Playing Game (RPG)
Official Site: http://www.2-worlds.com/
Played So Far: About 25 Hours...completed on medium.
Two worlds is a free-roaming 3D RPG in the vein of Morrowind, Oblivion, or the Gothic series. It features a traditional swords & sorcery setting and miles and miles of landscape to explore and quest in. You'll be able to take on a pile of side-quests in addition to the main story. There are powerful weapons to find, levels to earn, skills to learn
The presentation? Well that's a bit of a problem for this game. The graphics are "okay" and can be quite nice at times, but really some of the graphics are more reminiscent of Morrowind. Again not bad, but compared to other 360 games, the graphics are quite dated. The scenery can impress at times though, I remember in particular working my way up a mountain path on horseback with a river stretching out in the valley below with reflections on the water way off into the distance. It was a very scene vista! And you get lots of vegetation, and even various weather effects. So it's not bad but not great either.
The ambient sound effects are nice whether it is frogs calling, insects buzzing, or dogs barking in the background. The combat sound effects are passable, with some weird ones here and there (I'd swear the wolves' whimpering is someone imitating a wolf with their own voice). The voice acting though, is absolutely awful, to the point where it actually becomes entertaining in a campy sort of way. The dialog is made worse by using medieval phrases like "forsooth" or "mayhap" in every other sentence. Sometimes the dialog even runs of the rails all together and you'll be hearing something different than what is shown on the screen. It's also annoying that many NPCs don't really acknowlege previous encounters. That being said there are whole crowds of NPCs, it's almost like Daggerfall sometimes.
The story and setting seem a bit fantasy generic throughout, instead of rescuing a princess it's your sister. There are lots of find and deliver quests. There are faction oriented quests but there doesn't seem to be a full faction system implemented. I once killed a village guard (I wasn't trusted enough to enter and apparently rightly so), entered the village and they all assumed I was a welcome member of the faction. My first character is already "legendary" in all the factions which only score out of 10.
The core game play with its RPG levelling and item collecting is what really makes the game worth playing. It's can be as addictive as a game like Titan Quest (or reportedly, Diablo II). In addition to finding items you can also power up equipment you already have by combing them. So two swords that have 100 damage each can be combined to maybe give you 125 damage, then if you find another one you can stack it on too. It doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it does mean you can keep a given weapon or armour piece for longer than in most RPGs and does encourage you to look around for more pieces. Also weapons can be enchanted with various gems repeatedly so you can add 10 fire damage, then add another fire gem, and another sneaking up the bonus damage as well (the weapon is locked to that type of bonus after the first enchantment). The whole free roaming thing is enjoyable as well, and there are so many quests that I often found it hard to complete one quest without ending up with 5 more.
The basic movement and combat controls are about what you'd expect, hack and slash combos (single button combos), with spells thrown in etc. The rest of the interface is a mess though. I found that I never became completely comfortable switching through things whether it was going through my inventory or reading the map. For example you can't manually shift a piece of inventory around you can only attempt to auto-sort the entire inventory with a single button. With the potential size of your inventory, plus your horse's inventory it'd be nice to be able to sort things a bit, actually Oblivion style inventory filters would have made all the difference. Problems and oversights like this are present throughout the game and make it a frustrating experience at times.
Magic also has some poor design choices. You can actually only have three active spells at once. These spells can have power up cards that you slot in, three per spell. But if you leave an older spell in your hotkey by mistake the game will happily activate that spell, it just dumps all the power up cards back into your card inventory. I understand games that try to force you to choose between powers at some point, but only three active spells is just far to restrictive, especially when you have spells that serve to power up other spells. So if you use the overpower spell to power up your fireball, that's two out of three slots gone already and there are quite a few situational spells. One nice touch is that you can stack multiple copies of the same spell to get more powerful effects. I also do like the power-up system, the spell slot limitation holds this back.
Horses with basic mounted combat are present as well. Horses are frustrating sometimes, but more because they seem to have their own personalities at times; shying from objects and seeming to refuse commands sometimes. Horses can also be used to carry a lot more inventory, but they can't follow you through teleports so you may need to TP back and forth to the store to sell. Actually even if you bring your horse to town you can't sell straight from the horses inventory leading to an annoying shell game where you are constantly transferring to your limited inventory, selling, then repeating. And your horse can be killed and you'll have to loot it, and probably make several more merchant trips. I don't have a problem with this, it just encourages you to take care of that horse!
The map is huge, but very difficult to read at times. Teleports are not usually named and there are a lot of them. The map is fixed to a few different zoom levels. So often I had a great deal of difficulty figuring out where I was compared with where I was trying to go. Eventually I got the hang of it, but it was fairly unintuitive and the game could really use a way point system or something that would show up on the mini-map. Also the close zoom level doesn't mark merchants or trainers.
Two Worlds sports a classless, skill based system. So you basically just choose the skills you want to work on without any arbitrary limitations on skill choices. Levels come very quickly, and I found sometimes I actually didn't have anywhere I really wanted to spend my skill points. The game slowly encourages you to make choices along traditional fantasy class lines, but never forces the issue. For example eventually you'll find very heavy suits of armor that don't allow the use of bows or swimming or you'll realize that you're missing out on some major magic bonuses due to using plate armour instead of robes. Some skills are not available at all until you find a trainer to get you to give you the basics for a fee, similar to Gothic. It's a lot easier to get the trainers to train you though, you just have to actually find them and then fork over some cash. Overall the character system worked very well and went a long way into getting me into the game.
I know that this review sounds horridly negative and Two Worlds definitely has its share of problems. But between the levelling system, exploration elements, and item collection I found I was quickly taken in by this game and so far I've put in many enjoyable hours worth more to come. If they can iron out some of the interface and other issues I think a sequel to Two Worlds could be a true classic. In the meantime if you need an open-ended RPG experience Two Worlds will probably get you your fix as long as you can get through the initial learning curve and get past the design issues.
This game just sort of loses something towards the end. The end game felt like they ran out of time for polishing. There was even a bug in the last part of the main quest - I finally complete the driving objective and it looks like it's going to finish but I warp and just end up talking to some guy. The final quest worked though, but let's just say it was the easiest 230 gamer points I ever earned. I'd definitely try out a sequel though (Three Worlds? Or Two Worlds Two?). Hopefully the developers got some good experience and will be able to deliver a more refined game next time around. Probably worth trying, unfortunately at this point there's the usual holiday season run up of game releases but next summer when you're looking for something to play you might want to check it out.
Quentin
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Gothic Series: Has the same sort of feel, but I would have to say Gothic I and II are better games. Two Worlds beats out Gothic III though. Gothic also had a bit of learning curve and difficulty, but its story and world seemed more coherent than Two World's and the characters were a lot better overall in Gothic. I think that fans of Gothic will probably end up enjoying Two Worlds as well.
Oblivion: Two Worlds is comparable to Oblivion basically in terms of the amount of exploration and in terms of the open ended experience. Two Worlds doesn't featured leveled encounters, so you can get yourself into trouble which can some people find more enjoyable than Oblivion's system of sending level appropriate monsters your way. But really there is just no comparison in terms of presentation, writing, and UI. Oblivion is easily the better of the two titles. But if you've played Oblivion and Shivering Isles, and Morrowind, and need some more free-roaming RPG action then definitely check out Two Worlds.
World of Warcraft, Other MMO's: I haven't tried the multiplayer mode yet, but in single player there is somewhat of an MMO feel, though monsters don't respawn at regular intervals and level progression is much quicker. Not really the same kind of game obviously, but there's items to collects and skills to learn and lots of terrain to explore.
Mount and Blade: This indy game I'm mentioning just because it has such awesome mounted combat. How come no one has managed something similar? It has the same open gameplay, but Two Worlds is a lot more fleshed out (M&B isn't technically complete). Seems like someone needs to get their butts to Turkey and get the M&B authors to help them out!