Two Worlds 2

I used some of my birthday money to buy the game, but due to a busy week I only got around to installing and playing for a couple of hours last night.

People have somewhat criticised this game as something of an Elder Scrolls 'wannabe' - but that's part of the attraction to me, frankly! Clearly it is very heavily influenced by Elder Scrolls in terms of world building, guilds, story and so on. Certainly, story wise it's as generic a medieval RPG as you'll find!

I'm liking what I'm seeing of the spell creation, which seems very flexible and interesting, based on finding cards and creating your own spells from them. And I look forward to exploring crafting which seem quite involving. I'm only in the Prologue so far, which is a bit of a tutorial and does a fair bit of hand holding. I expect it will 'open up' once I get through this part.

The downside is that you can only play in third person perspective, although you can zoom in and out with the mouse wheel. That makes playing as an archer looking to be bit unviable.

Graphics are decent, without being awesome, and the character animations look a little clunky at times. For some reason the player character (who has to be male BTW) appears to arms that are out of proportion with the rest of his body...odd!

So far, I'm reasonably impressed. I bought it to help pass the time until Skyrim, and I think it will do the job admirably.

Anyone played this yet?

Forced third-person is also present in TW1, although if you do not have an equipped weapon, you can go info a first-person mode. I tried tracking down a copy of the cape, but the folks at EBGames told me physical copies had been discontinued, and that I could only get it through Steam and that kind of stuff. I WANT to play this, as TW1 was great as well.

Something by way of update

Once you get past the prologue (which is a tutorial, basically), the world opens up and you find yourself in a desert-like savannah area. It's sandy and dry, with arabic-style villages, which is a nice change of mood from the usual forests and lakes.

It's 'open world' from that point onwards. There's a map screen with markers, but its a bit confusing as it always revolves so that whichever direction your moving is 'up', even if you are travelling south. This is very confusing, and I find myself opening my map (which I have hot-keyed to a numeric key) just to check that I'm actually moving in the right direction since the onscreen map is no help at all

I've got a horse via a quest - but riding the horse is like trying to control a ...uhm...wild horse! The horse is somewhat unresponsive, and keep throwing me off at inopportune moments! Unfortunately, I had a quest which involved a timed horse ride, very frustrating and needed many re-loads to do it in the time limit...

I'm getting to a point now where I think I'm going to do a re-start. I've made a few daft choices in the leveling and character development, which I would like to correct. So I think I'll start over and build my character in the way I really want, now that I've found out how the game 'works'

I still don't see TW2 as an Elder Scrolls-killer, but its a good romp and entertaining whilst we wait for Skyrim.

It would be interesting if someone could compare the first game and its sequel. I'm currently playing the first game and it's quite fun.

I guess we keep comparing Two Worlds and Oblivion because of the freedom to explore the world but when I play Two Worlds it reminds me of old games like Diablo (for the importance of the loot) and the Might and Magic series (for the atmosphere) more than Oblivion (which IMO was marred by level scaling and the infamous dialogue wheel).

IMO Oblivion didn't innovate that much. In fact I would go as far as saying that compared to Morrowind it was definitely a step backwards. Morrowind felt inspired and original whereas Oblivion went back to a classic setting. The typical medieval fantasy has been used so much that it becomes formulaic and that is something that we probably won't mind that much when playing a game like Two Worlds but that many will find irksome with a title from the Elder Scrolls series -personally Shivering Isles was my favourite for this very reason, it was different and it departed from the basic standard fare of CRPGs to introduce a fantastic world and that's what RPGs and CRPGs should be about.