I'm having more fun with Two Worlds than I'd care to admit. I'm about 6-7 hours into it and it was pretty obvious right from the start that it is a shit-to-mediocre game. Clunky combat, ridiculously bad writing and voice acting, a basic and not very well thought out character system. But somehow it has kept me interested so far. Going melee on hard it sometimes even manages to kick me in the balls, at least in the earlier stages of the game. I'm guessing that once I get alchemy maxed and start brewing permanent bonus shit all kicking of my ass will be gone. The item stacking feels really barebones, but still manages to be pretty addicting. Could work really nicely in a Diablo clone if expanded on.
If you focus on the positive aspects rather than the negative, you may realise there aren't that many games of this type that can compete with Two Worlds.
1) You have complete freedom from the beginning. No hour long tutorial or closed off areas or continents. You can easily go anywhere right after the first short battle. People don't seem to appreciate this sort of thing enough. You can be pretty sure if a game has this design, it's at least not a total money-grab made by a committee of suits. It takes balls to just throw the player into the game and let them figure things out on their own these days.
2) The world feels geographically well designed. Contrast this with games like Sacred 2 that have a lot of area design reminiscent of corridors and don't really feel particularly "open world" as a result (even though strictly speaking they are).
3) Whatever you say about the skill system, it's fun in a way that other systems usually aren't, because they've been so expertly "balanced" and "perfected" that you never have the chance to discover some great way to make your character unusually powerful - you're stuck doing the same thing everybody else is doing, which is "becoming gradually better in a predictable lame fashion". Balance doesn't belong to open world games anyway.
4) I still haven't figured out how the level-scaling works in this game, but it seems to be a lot better handled than in Oblivion. The only time it may bother you is with the bandits, who do seem to get better equipment pretty regularly just so they can keep up with you. At some point you realise killing a group of bandits is like robbing a bank - it's fun and lucrative but you can't really claim it's the most intellectual of ways to gather money. Other than that though, the game is pretty good at giving you variety and challenge and pain if you venture too deep into the wrong kinds of place as a low level character. And some truly badass monsters are always going to be higher level than you. You're not going to squash dragons like flies in this game nor even be able to fight them in a fair battle no matter what your character level or equipment. I'm not saying that's necessarily better or worse than other systems, but it works and is different than usual.
5) You can speed up the gameplay with a console command, making the game harder as well as less time-consuming. After typing "twoworldscheats 1" just type gamerate XX where x is the speed you are fine with. 50 seems to about double the speed. I've used even higher speeds than that. You may also want to decrease the amount of night time via console. Write the following in a text file, call the text file day, and put the text file in the game directory: EC.SetDayLength 360 43 213 (then write @day.txt in the console). Those numbers should be OK, but you can vary them to get a different day-night cycle. I seem to be using this currently: 540 6 249 (looks like almost no night with this one). You only have to set these parameters once per play through. I'm also pretty sure you want to make the grass disappear further away from the player. Again, make a text file:
// Grass fading near the player
Engine.GFadeNear 3000
// Grass fading far from the player
Engine.GFadeFar 3000
Then call that file via console.
6) The equipment system had the usual flaw of level and stat restrictions being used. The loot system is still one of the better ones in action RPGs and Diablo-clones. I liked the same feature some others have commented on (stacking), and since it was a feature unique to this game, you gotta give it some points for that. If someone knows of a mod (or can make one), to get rid of level and stat restrictions, lemme know.
7) If you force yourself to play iron man games, it's actually an exciting game when using a higher game-speed. That's of course a sum of many parts, one which I haven't mentioned being the game's non-linear main quest and a good number of optional quests and dungeons providing variety for different playthroughs and different approaches.
8) Combat system is laughably simple but it does work just well enough so that the elements of the game that are strong get to shine. The focus on player skill in addition to character strength means there's more freedom re where you can go and what you can do without obscene amounts of level scaling.
9) Lots of monsters in the PC version. So many games (Dark Souls, Gothic, Oblivion) focus on having individual monsters or small groups. In Two Worlds you can find actual hordes of necromancers, zombies, and other monsters, not just a few here and there.
10) You almost never have to fight, you can just avoid monsters instead, though not always without some danger involved. You realise it's a strategy in the serpent temple if not before, because the serpents there are truly dangerous motherfuckers. It's probably the highpoint of the game with its atmosphere and perfectly designed hide-and-seek layout.
11) And the game did have a truly varied world map, with a variety of truly different monsters found in different places and environmental variety (contrast with Morrowind again).
12) Main quest doesn't really get in your way, even if it's all you're solving. It's nothing to write home about, but it's also nothing to write consumer protection organisations about.
At the end of the day, the game got a lot of things right that mattered, where many other games of its type did something retarded or annoying or spoiled an important aspect of their game. Many complain about the dialogue, but they only compain about it because they couldn't think of anything of importance to complain about. And I like over-the-top seriousness more anyway than spoiling a game like this by making it light-hearted and humorous.
- (it's rough, but I liked the conversations. And once you get the hang of it, the gameplay is not so bad afterall, except for the hacking mini-game, that was terrible.)
