Two Worlds (360)

Two Worlds – for most of you, its name will be something to avoid. So will its sequel, and for those who have not heard of the disappointment that is Two Worlds then you may learn something from this review. For those who aren’t in the know, I will briefly outline the idea of the game.
Two Worlds, its name is endemic to the overall design, the game is split into to different game play options. You can play the game in single player, on your own in what can be best described as a clone of Oblivion or you can take the game online and play a game that has a similar style to Gauntlet or free-to-play online MMORPG Runescape.

I’ll move onto multiplayer later. Single player is a mess, its aims high but shoots low. The main problem with Two Worlds is the phrase “next-gen”. That single phrase destroys what would have been a perfectly good game four years ago. Much of the content within Two Worlds is like ying yang, with good and bad parts.

To analyse the graphics and animation is a difficult task for this game. On one hand, we have the beautifully designed world. An almost seamless zone that does its best to match Oblivion for size. The over world, in comparison, has far less interactive features. It has less caverns, towers and forts than the beast from Bethesda Game Studios. In its place however, is a vast quantity of magical zones. These zones are generated by huge, ornately crafted rocks, covered all over in magical lettering (runes). There are two forms of magical rune, one will recharge health and the other will recharge mana (the essence of spirit required to perform magic).

Whilst this is a huge help in terms of game play you do find your self camping at these zones, luring nearby enemies to them so you have no fear of losing health, or depleting your mana levels. It greatly ruins the difficulty level, especially when the magical runes appear inside caves near the exit, begging you to use this easy method rather than that of combatant skill.

Spending twenty minutes, climbing a mountain and looking over the entire world is, breathtaking. It seems to have a larger draw distance that Oblivion did, with the shadows of towers and cities looming far away. The vegetation spreads far and the distance between loading halts is bigger in Two Worlds as well. On the other hand, the sheer quantity and quality of life like vegetation is awe inspiring, and far outweighs that of Oblivion, something most of you would think impossible. Occasional loading happens, but this is for no less than ten seconds and is fairly dismissed. Its not just that, it’s also level of detail in terms of wild life. The audio is filled with the noises of animals and the landscape too; it’s all very realistic, such as howls of wolves at night. There is also wild life wandering around the landscape, and not just the feral aggressive one such as the aforementioned wolves or bears (which again can be related to Oblivion) but rabbits, deer and even everybody’s favourite flightless bird the Dodo. Upon slaughter, this wildlife can be harvested to give you items for alchemy (potion making) which can be combined with items gathered from plants and picked up from the corpses of enemies.

The character models for enemies are fairly well designed, but looking at your character or other NPC’s. They are a real problem; games on the Game Cube could produce better character models. Upon character creation, I made my hero with a strong accented chin that was powerfully combined with cheek bones. I made him tall and ever so slightly skinny, when my choices where applied to the final model it looked like my hero was a walking skeleton. His face was bony, short and stocky. The character models are the second worst aspect of the game.

The worst aspect of the game though is the animation quality. Not one single animation is fluidly designed. Animations are stiff and thoughtless, they are wooden to the point of frustration, characters move horribly. They can’t produce emotions in the awful dialogue. The animation quality can only be compared to action RPG’s available on the PSOne or N64. No joke, they really are that bad.

Coupled with the fact that the game contains no pre rendered cut scenes to give you at least some eye candy and you are missing out what could have been something to look at occasionally. Instead the designers chose to use the in game mechanics to produce artificial, shoddy and lifeless cut scenes with poor direction and terrible lip syncing.

It’s the same story when it comes to battle animation, to the static animation like that of fire or with doors opening and closing. The quality of animation is so poor it will distract you from the overall shoddy presentation in other areas of the game.

It’s the same ying yang effect with the story line. The story line itself is a fairly self sufficient ordeal, a mercenary, who loses his wounded sister, is contacted four years later with information. The quest leads him to contact with his sister and a plot, to save her and to thwart evil forces bent on resurrecting a banished God.

The usual RPG affair, only replace the lost love interest with said sister. The negative side of this point is the voice acting. There would be less wooden voice acting in a film about dangers of costal erosion presented by an Oak tree. It really is the worst voice acting I have ever experienced in a game before.

Characters have no emotion, although that doesn’t mask the emotionless words, the dialogue is so poorly constructed it has to be heard to be believed. None of the conviction of Oblivion or any other game for that matter. When you consider that a major point of this generation is the use of story telling techniques.

Once again, this is a real disappointment because there was so much potential with the storyline that they had chosen to go with. These sorts of games usually pick the son of a disgraced war hero, but to go with a mercenary with a growing reputation is a nice change. It’s a shame the game is plagued with sloppy dialogue and lifeless voice acting, otherwise it would have been perfectly acceptable.

Most of you who read this will never see the ending credits; I pushed forward to the end to make sure that there are no end game treats. There are none. The basic structure of the game is much like any game you have ever played that involves factions. Throughout the game you can choose which faction to aid to reach you goal, and the structure from here basically involves questing.

In order to perform the top tier missions for any given faction, you must perform many remedial quests (go to location and kill X number of wolves etc….) to gain reputation. Once a sufficient reputation has been gathered you will be given the option to perform the special missions, which will progress you through the storyline.

Another factor that has made the rounds with Two Worlds is the high difficulty. On the easiest difficulty, the standard enemies can, and will kill you until you raise a level. This is extremely frustrating in the earlier stages of the game when you have a limited load out of standard equipment. This sheer level of difficulty is most annoying when the game just throws you in, no tutorial at all. An opening cut scene and an NPC telling you to go kill a couple of thugs. Once you perform this menial task you are plonked down in the whole world to explore and with very little direction. While many would find this level of difficulty refreshing, in plain honesty it’s a bad move by developer Reality Pump.

I can only wonder what this game must have been before the half dozen or so patches had been released. In all honesty, this game should have never been released. The developers could easily spend anther six to eight months refining gameplay mechanics, improving the graphics of character models and re-casting the entire game.

However, take the game into multi player and you will have a far improved experience. There are some of the old niggles in the online question from single player, graphics and animation are still a problem for example. But on the whole, playing in a party of eight and blasting at skeletons is still just as fun as it was in Gauntlet II with four players on the NES.
Multi player in Two Worlds far exceeds the experience discovered in single player. Yes, the game still plays in a similar fashion, but having team members with which to laugh about it, is a great experience.

In the multi-player mode, you begin by making a character, you choose a sex (the single player campaign has to be played with a male hero for story purposes), customize the body size and shape and pick a class. Picking a class determines what skills you initially specialize in, and determines what starting weaponry and armour you’ll be sent out with.

Once you have done this its time to get questing. You can either join a quick game, search for a custom game or host your own. Searching for a custom game lets you search for games depending on the level the host has chosen. The multi-player word is divided into sections, (for faster loading) and to designate which areas are suitable for beginners etc…
There is just one area for beginners, a nice green area. Although don’t get me wrong, the area to explore is still huge. Multi-player game play revolves around players finding quests from NPC’s, and carrying them out until an area is cleared. You can attempt missions alone or work as a team. However, working as a team is very important until you reach around level ten. The difficulty in multi-player is much higher than that of single player. On my first attempt of multi player It took six re-spawns for me to kill one measly wolf. Six.

Talking to team mates makes the experience better, knowing that some one can cover your back, or playing chicken with a troll that can kill you with one strike, or having a swimming contest across a lake are all examples of emergent game play, something other developers are trying too hard to achieve. Whatever you can say about the game negatively, you can’t put a word to its community. A selective group of die hard fans, other players are consistently generous and fun to play with. Most players are reasonable, deciding who gets the share of the booty, who will lead and who gets the lucrative job of archer for cover fire etc…

In fact, this may be the first multi-player RPG of this generation not to carry the tag MMO. Whilst many of the principles of games like Jagex’s Runescape can be identified within the multi-player aspect of Two Worlds, its not an MMO. Two Worlds doesn’t have an immersive, ever shifting dynamic world, where players drop in and out and where new quests are made readily available. And it actually benefits from that, you can’t become obsessed by Two Worlds online, there I no temptation to go “grinding”. With the quests themselves it doesn’t even matter what their purpose is, often you’ll forget. You do the quest just to have fun, watching your lower levelled buddy run from a zombie, bow in hand.

Developers Reality Pump have been lucky to find such a good audience for the game, because despite the good multi-player, many people would find the content within this game simply unacceptable. Two Worlds isn’t one word in the sense at all next gen, it’s stuck five years in the past, which is a disappointment.

Hopefully the developers can take the interesting ideas they coined for this game and re-approach them for the recently announced sequel. They really should consider making this game multi-player only, they can focus on DLC and build a strong, vibrant community. If they approach this game attempting to do a half decent single player alongside the online, expect a mess.
- Large open world, full of life and character
- Ability to combine two of the same weapon to make a stronger one is nice
- Upgrading skills and character is fairly simple
- Easy to navigate menus and item select screen
- Hunting your first Dodo
- The experience of the online world
- A hugely miscalculated difficulty
- Terrible character models
- Even worse animation
- And even worse voice acting
- Lack of tuition at the beginning
- Little character customisation online
- Over generosity of health and mana shrines detracts from atmosphere
- Easy achievements
If you absolutely must play an RPG similar to Oblivion, then maybe you’ll get some satisfaction from Two Worlds’ single player. It’s the same again with multi-player, you’ll have a good time, and it’s just a shame that some core elements show terrible design. Ok, but for a budget price.
In a word - Disappointing