Two Worlds

 

Two Worlds is a game developed around mid 2000s when Oblivion was all the craze. The devs have not seemingly released a game before it, hoping to pickup on the open world RPG craze of the time. They even are quoted as saying Two Worlds is the "Oblivion killer". Well, upon release the game was panned by everyone. People really had a hate boner for this game and had nothing nice to say about it. Its been sitting in my Steam library for years as I picked it up dirt cheap one time and my backlog is getting thin so I finally chose it to see why its reception is so bad.

The game starts off with some story about your sister being lost or kidnapped and you have to save her. The voice acting is the first standout thing, all the characters talk in this Ye olde english like Shakespere or something, and while its admittedly pretty awful, it also has this unforgettable charm to it. Like, what other game does this kind of stuff? Atleast it dares to be different. They constantly say things like "Forsooth" "Verily"  "Nay" and so on, its just kinda entertaining listening to all the different words theyre using and trying to talk to eachother in the same deadpan voices. You can visually change how the character looks, but its really minimal just a few faces and hair. You dont create a character with different starting stats and gear or anything.

You start off in this cellar, kill a few goblins, and pickup some items and get greeted to the inventory and looting screen and interface. It's a nice interface, the icons are very well designed and appealing, everything is well laid out and has personalized decorations, its a big deal to me the way the interface is laid out on RPG games. A bad interface could totally kill my motivation and desire to find new items for example. But in Two Worlds, the attractiveness of the icons and the way it uses Diablo style inventory tetris, already off the start made me want to collect all sorts of items, armors and equipment.

After this initial start, youre just plopped into this giant open world with little directon. The graphics are about average for a 2007 game, though the world is very huge with impressive draw distance and particularly satisfying reflections on the water and depth of field effects. The landscape is this typical European forested hillsides and villages, at times the game world looks identical to Oblivion which they were trying to compete with and it shows.

You start off on the very top of the North of the map, and I soon figured out that the further south you go, the game exponentially gets harder. In a way, this game design kind of reminds me of how in Diablo 1 you start off at the top floor of a dungeon, but the further down you go in the dungeon, the more and more it gets harder. This game world is like that too, except its just the direction South on the open world map. I like it a lot, it makes it so its linear feeling despite it being this huge open world, youre never really too confused about if youre in an area thats too hard, if its too hard then just walk more North and fight enemies more akin to your abilities! Admittedly, this took a few hours to all figure out, and the struggling until then was a bit confusing.

A lot of the games mechanics are sort of obfuscated and take a few hours to really understand how it works. The main questline, for example, is hard to even follow and figure out which quests are even the main ones. On the map screen and quest log, it sorts the quests by area that youve picked them up. But it turns out, the main quest is called "Tainted blood". It doesnt have a different color than any other quest, it doesnt look particularly different, so its very easy to accidentally do tons of sidequests  even though all you want to do is the main quest. Thats something I wished was better laid out. After I realized the main quest is under "Tainted blood", things started to progress a bit easier, though.

So to do the main quest, you read these entries under "Tainted blood" and theyre all vauge without much direction. This game isnt as much like modern RPGS like Oblivion or Skyrim where it just has a big arrow pointing to exactly where you have to go, its instead more like Morrowind where you actually have to carefully read every word in the quest log and actually read the location or even general compass direction of where it expects you to search. Although it does have quest icons on the minimap and game map, theyre extremely confusing and it took me a dozen or so hours of gameplay to even figure out what they all mean. The quest icons are these tiny little colored dots, Green dot, blue dot, red dot, etc. Honestly, I still dont really know what all the different colored dots mean. But they generally point you to some direction of a quest, or even just a place where you first obtained a quest.

Actually, my main complant and critique of the game is the whole Map quest icon system and minimap is just bad and hard to follow. The icons should of been made better and easier to decipher whats going on. For instance, the main quest is all about picking up these different magical stones to give to a guy called Gandohar to help you get your sister back. You need Earth,Wind,Fire,Water. After you get all these stones, the games basically over. At the beginning of the game, it gives you a vauge hint where one or two of these stones are. One of the stones is held by the leader of this military clan in some outpost. But, when you get to him, its locked behind a gate. The seemingly only way to actually get the main quest objective is to do a bunch of side quests. Thats another thing I dont like. A lot of the times, in order to progress the main quest, you are forced to do random side quests and youre not even sure if what youre doing is making progress towards the main goal or not. Its always some tangentically related thing like you need X object but in order to get it you have to do side quests for this person so you can build reputation for their clan so they will help you, stuff like that. So once I got to the Leader who has access to the quest item, I had unlocked like 5 different side quests for these guys. This part of the game was pretty confusing, it was all sorts of head scratching stuff like I have to go to so and so location, but I had no idea where it was, or I could just kill a certain person, but it doesnt tell me where he is, theres a real lack of direction and the map system's different colored dots dont even point you in the right direction, more often than not they just point to where you've obtained the quest and thats it. Eventually I found out where to go somehow, and reading the quest log one path I could take was to simply walk inside some guys house and pick up some Forged document on the floor, return it to the leader, and then I had access to the main objective stone. Ok, cool, one down.

At this point I'm just starting to understand all the systems and what the game expects of you. As for the combat, I was commonly scratching my head and wondering if I'm understanding it right. The combat is very simplistic and minimal. You just press mouse1 to attack, tap a few times to do a few different followup animations, and you can press Q to do a backstep almost like Dark Souls invincibillity frames. So you just wait for the enemy to swing, backstep, click once or twice for a few swings ,repeat. I sort of like how the core of the combat is really minimal, again, it reminds me of something like Diablo 1 or 2. Of course you can supplement this basic combat with 'Active skills', these are skills that add abilities with new animations such as swinging your sword in a circle to hit more enemies, but I found a lot of these active skills are just not as good as the basic attack (More on the skills later).

So with the basic combat, I just started roaming around the start of the map killing any enemies I found, looting their stuff to sell later, and get myself some equipment. Well pretty soon I kept finding sudden, massive difficulty spikes. Like I would go from easily dealing with a group of enemies, to suddenly a Silver wolf would instantly annihilate my health bar in one hit, killing me. Its very jarring when this first happens, it makes you feel like youve missed something or you dont understand the game. Whats happening is that I simply encountered enemies too high for my characters level. In retrospect, the color of the name of the enemy gives a hint. Green means theyre below youre level, yellowish means around your level, Red means danger and they will kill you fast. So what youre intended to do is keep sticking to the North part of the map where the enemies are easier, level up, and slowly make your way to the southest part of the map where the hardest enemies are. Once I grasped that combat the sudden huge difficulty spikes were mostly gone, leaving me to happily explore, kill bandit squads, goblins, attacking wildlife, to level up and get more loot to collect.

On my way to completing the main quest, I knew I would probably have to level up a ton to get the upper hand on the increasing enemy difficulty as I progressed south, so I'd frequently kind of just wander around, discovering new areas of the map (uncovering the black fog), Following the main Red roads, killing lots of bandit camps I come across. While the combat is really minimal, it also surprisingly frequently throws a ton of enemies at you at one time. Its not uncommon to see a group of 10-20 enemies trying to attack you all at once, its weird because the combat system doesnt really seemed designed around accounting for that many targets. So what you end up doing is kind of just kiting them around, getting some swings in here and there, running in circles, etc. Luckily lots of weapons have different ranges and swings can hit multiple enemies, so the combat is still overall enjoyable even in these huge awkward battles, despite how clunky it can all seem and look.

So I began exploring the map and leveling up, finding all sorts of dozens upon dozens of different armor pieces, Chest, boots, gloves, helm, 4 Ring slots, 1 Hand weapon + shield or 2 Hand weapons, etc. The loot is really enjoyable! There is even a feature where you can hover over items, and if two highlight Green, it means you can instantly combine them by simply dragging ontop of eachother and it just adds them together and upgrades the stats, with no downside. Once I realized this it was really fun to try to find the same items over and over again, unlike other RPGS where it gets annoying to find similar items, in this game it encourages it and is a resource. 

It almost feels Arcade in its gameplay and design, I think thats one of the reasons I found it so addictive. There is horseback riding, too, but its one of the most janky and clumsy parts of the game so I mostly ignored it. For starters, you can only find horses randomly in the world which you basically just steal, then the controls and animations seem to have a mind of their own. Its only marginally faster than running on foot, its not even that big of a difference. You can do combat from horse, but I never even cared to do it because I just didnt like the horseback mechanics. I guess a complaint I have is that travelling across the world can be tedious and boring sometimes, like you can teleport from various different teleport shrines once you unlock them, but sometimes theyre few and far between, or you have to spend 10 mins just walking on foot back to the nearest teleporter because you cant simply just open your map and teleport, you have to do it from one of these stations. The horseback riding could of been better, but at the same time, Im kind of glad it isnt and youre moreso compelled to just be on foot the whole time, I never much like horseback mechanics in games anyway, except maybe Mount & Blade.

The level up mechanics aren't very complex either, its quite easy to grasp and work with for the most part. You have your standard 4 attributes, Strength, Vitality, Wisdom, Dexterity.  These are almost self-explainatory, though Dexterity is the one I was most confused with. I was never quite sure exactly what it does. Does it make me have more attack speed? Does it make me miss less often? Well I dont even really miss already. Does it do something else entirely? I still dont really know. I ended up mostly ignoring the Dex stat the whole game, except for raising it to the bare minimum required for some items. The game could have added some tooltips explaining exactly what this stuff does. I mostly focused on pumping Strength as high as possible for the most damage, and Vitality for when I felt like I needed more health. Every level you get 5 attribute points and I think 2 skill points. You also can seemingly randomly get skill points for doing quests or progressing certain quest areas.

The skills are the other category. It's just a small page with a few different sections. Theres a section dedicated to archery related skills, Mage related skills, Non-combat skills like Lockpicking, Stealth, pickpocket etc,  and then you just have your core combat melee skills. Beyond these categories, there are also two different 'modes' of upgrade. There are Passive skills, which as it sound just give you a permanent buff. Then there are 'active' skills which you have to add to your hotbar quick key and use like skills from an MMO or something. I mostly ignored all the 'active' skills in favor for getting as many permanent buffs as possible, which is a very viable route it seems. There arent that many, either. Maybe 5-10 really go-to skills per 'build'  (archer, mage, warrior I guess are the possible builds, really).  So I just went for the Passive abilities like, permanent damage increase, Critical strike, Knock down enemies, and so on. Each skill can only level 10 times, too. I like the skill and stat system ,its very down to earth and easy to grasp, but it also has enough to play with where it felt exciting and rewarding to constantly get levels, I found myself caring and wanting to plan ahead of exactly what I was gonna do with my character, and it all worked out in the end and I made a pretty satisfying and powerful character just by using my intuitions about the system.

The weird thing about skills, though, is that at the start of the game most of them are Locked. It doesnt really explain, but the way to actually unlock the skills you want and actually spend your skill points in useful ways, is you have to first find a Skill Trainer that for a fee, will unlock the skill for you. Well for the first like 6 hours I could not for the life of me find one of these guys, and just walked around the whole time with 10+ unspent skills. Its weird that there isnt skill trainers sooner in the  game, but the first time I found them was when I went to one of the major cities and there was a place with like 10 of them.

The game also has a rather unique and complex Alchemy system where you have a whole section in the interface dedicated to potion crafting. I dont know a whole lot about this, but theres also a passive skill dedicated to it, which I maxed,  then you can combine random ingreidents from your inventory to the 5 different alchemy slots, for a total of 10 ingredients per potion. These ingredients seem to come in two varieties: "Temporary" and "Permanent" So you can find items that say like "Temporarily raises Strength by 20 for 5 minutes"   OR you can find items like "Raises strength by 5. Effect is permanent"  -- So the thing is you can actually create potions which permanently increase your stats! The way to do this is weird, though, and took some headscratching to figure out. I really only did this at the end of the game also, Its totally fine to ignore Alchemy for the whole game, I only checked it out around the end of the game because I was curious to see all the mechanics the game had to offer. But yeah, to create permanent potions you strangely have to add up to any 9 Permanent ingreidents, then any Magic potion. If you do anything other than this, it will turn the end result into some random thing, or turn it into a temporary potion. Weird, but once I figured that out, the knowledge it brings is insane. Constantly able to craft potions which permanent increase your health and armor is pretty nutty.

So I was getting so much enjoyment from just exploring, leveling up, looting items killing enemies and pushing my character further and further South to the more difficult content, trying to complete the main questline, One day I found myself just waking up and playing Two Worlds for like 8-12 hours straight! Shocking, I know. I thought this game was supposed to be awful? I was finding it strangely addicting, charming, and enjoyable. The soundtrack, atmosphere, the all around personality of the game is unforgettable. A lot of moments of the soundtrack sound like something from Runescape, but then other times it has these oddball piano/techno songs too, it seems obviously out of place, but in a way its also enderaing and nostalgic sounding so I rather enjoyed it and made the experience feel cozy. It's just a world I found myself experiencing for the most part.

The game is obviously rather rough around the edges, the animations are especially janky looking. While the game runs at 60fps, it looks like the animations are barely at 20 they look super choppy and weird. For some enemies, especially later on in the game like the Dragons, its possible to sort of stunlock them over and over and it makes their animation look horrid and instantly repeat its self, making the game look like some sloppy Alpha game. But maybe all these things come together in some strange way which gives the game its own personality and aura. The ridiculous Olde english voice acting, the main character being so in love and gushy with his sister that it seems insestious at times, the random out of place techno music, the hand decorated interface and colorful detailed item icons, the way the character will randomly announce stuff to himself in the enviornment  like "It's raining, its snowing"  or when you attack enemies sometimes the main character with laugh with glee like an evil maniac. It just oozes with a soul of its own and is hard for me not to appreciate. Some games feel like they were put together by robotic inhuman corporate drones, but games like this, while rough around the edges, feel like they were made by actual people that put their own personal touches on what they were working on, creating this interesting world that I found myself not wanting to put down.

The game can be fairly buggy, I think picking up one of the main quest objectives failed to trigger some script when I picked up the Air main quest item. Apparently its supposed to trigger some goblin invasion that kills the whole city, but it just never happened and the quest remained incomplete on my log. Not that big of a deal, I could still progress, but it sucked that the log was incomplete. A few other times it seems like it was giving me quest icons on my map despite the log contradicting it. Like for the Fire objective, the log would say "No one has any clue where this is yet" -- But on the map, it would show me an icon of where to go all the way south of the map, past my characters level and ability! Not sure what was going on there. The game is very open ended and doesnt hold your hand much at all, its possible to entirely miss areas, main cities, locations if you arent paying attention. I almost missed the entire Desert section because either my game sort of bugged and didnt point me there, or I just went an alternate route. The different areas of the map have all sorts of different enemies, the desert has these stone dragons and weird animal warriors, theres a burnt forest area down south that has Hell warriors in full plate mail among other things, theres another area with a lot of these huge scorpian things, the game has tons of enemy variety so that also made it really fun to keep exploring and pushing my character to the next level. There are ghouls, zombies, even at night time there is this mechanic where enemies you kill can come back as Ghosts, and you cant even hurt them unless you enchant your weapon with some Element! The first time you encounter this its a mindfuck.

 Luckily enchanting your weapon with some ability is really easy, you just need a element gem which are really easy to come by. However once you imprint an element on your weapon you have to stick with it and cant undo it, so I had to make sure which one to use (Fire, cold, Spirit, poison etc). The game has a lot of mechanics that are simple, yet satisfying to try to wrap your head around and figure out exactly how they work. Another one of these mechanics is the whole 1 hand VS 2 hand issue. You can use a shield, but theres no actual way to block yourself. Shields say "Parry" on them, but Im not really sure what it means? Does it just mean I have some automatic chance to block hits? I'm not sure. I opted to instead go for 2 handed weapons and go full out on damage. There is so much weapon variety, Polearms, Axes, Swords, Two hand swords, Blunt weapons. Each weapon has different categories of damage. Slashing, Piercing, Blunt. Each enemy can have strengths and weaknesses to any of these damage types. Like a skeleton would be almost immune to Slashing damage, so using a blunt weapon would suffice better. Its cool and clever having to think about that stuff. I like that it makes you make all these decisions. For the first half of the game, I went with this two handed mace that I sometimes upgraded using the combination feature. Later on, I started using two hand swords like Katanas and Flamberg that I bought from city merchants. The actual aesthetics of the armors and weapons for the most part are appealing too. Some of the later armors look a bit too fantasy, but for the most part I was getting into gearing up my guy with all sorts of different Chainmails, platemails etc, and everything you put on is reflected by how you look.  

For the most part, this is one of those kind of games that start off really hard since you dont know what to expect. Like if you dont realize enemies with RED names will fuck you up, you can easily get one shot by random seemingly weak enemies like Wolves, bears,etc. Thats what happened to me. I thought the game would be trash and annoying because I would randomly encounter enemies that would one shot me. But once I realized I just had to back off and level up some more, then return, the game was really enjoyable and easy! I went from a total chump getting shit on, to becoming a God making the whole world mine. Thats what a good RPG does for me. Unlike Oblivion, this game DOES NOT have level scaling. In oblivion, as you level up, so does the world around you. Almost paradoxically making leveling up being a bad thing and making your character worse (In modern days, Diablo 4 is now guilty of this..). In many ways, Two Worlds actually IS the Oblivion killer, atleast they dont have this shitty level scaling! It feels great to better yourself and come back to a challenging area and now dominating it with your new gear and stats.

Though, there are still a few places in the game where these weird difficulty spikes show up. Like later in the game, there are these Giant variations of enemies. Like Giant scorpians, or Golems. I can easily kill all the surrounding enemies without losing any health, but get touched once by these Golem or Giant variations and its instant death. Its almost like theyre programmed to be One hit monsters to keep the player on their feet. Weird design decision I guess, but understandable. Death in this game isnt even a big deal. Theres not much penalty for dying. You just spawn at a respawn location nearby and can run right back to the enemy you were just fighting and their health is even the same. I guess its kind of disappointing that you can cheese the game so easy and have no penalty, but its also not that big of a deal in a massive RPG such as this where its not so much about player skill, but about stats, gear, and knowing how to properly plan your character. For me, its a matter of pride of being able to actually 'fairly' beat the enemy, so if I die multiple times I dont just corpse rush the AI, I try to back off and go level up some more first.

Once I finally got all the main objective Element stuff, it was obvious to me I was near the end of the game. Sometimes the quests are really obtuse like at this part it was telling me to "Find someone who supports the pentagram" I have no idea how to do that, ended up having to Google it. Turns out I had to go to one of the random necromancer towers and kill the guy ontop, ok, easy enough. After that it gives you a quest to "Free kira" and tells you to go fight Gandohar, the villian guy youve been dealing with all game. Well, since I didnt even want the game to end yet, I held off and just walked around doing side quests, exploring the map, messing with Alchemy and items because I was having so much fun with it. Thats the sign of a good game, not wanting it to end!

The game has multiple main cities which are absolutely brimming with dozens upon dozens of citizens. At first its overwhelming because I had no idea how to differenciate generic copy paste NPC with 'special' onces, but luckily there is a way. The icon that shows up when you hover on NPC tells you what they do. Green means Quest, Bag icon with coins is merchant, Red means skill trainer, Blue means respec.  Once I realized this it was a breeze and excitement to run through the big sprawling major cities often stocked with dozens of traders, looking at their wares, etc.

Well after I decided to finally continue the main quest, it came to a halt really quickly. I went up to the big bad boss stronghold, killed all the enemies around him like the cool Hell demons and dragons, zombies etc. Then a big red monster spawned which could one hit me (and did once) But because I had been leveling my gear and character, using alchemy for permanent potions etc, using the Magic system (which I havnt touched on because I usually ignore magic on RPGs first time around, I just used the most basic minimum level spells 'Blessing' to give myself temp strength buff, and Heal spell)  I was able to kill that boss very quickly. Then, the main villian Gandohar talks to you and basically asks to join the dark side, or to kill him. I choose to kill him. The shocking part is he was REALLY easy. He acts like any other regular NPC enemy, he barely could do any damage to me, and I kill him in 2 hits. Then, you get a really short cutscene of you and your sister riding off on a horse, and the game kicks you back to main menu. Not even any end credits! Doesnt seem like you can even play after the game ends, you can reload previous save thats it.

I think Two Worlds is a very underrated RPG. It may be janky, have sloppy programming, rough around the edges, confusing quests and worst of all a bad minimap and hard to navigate quest system, but everything else about the game was engrossing for me especially the looting and sense of character progression. I think people back in the day were too enamoured with Oblivion to ever entertain any alternatives, its a shame because this game needs a lot more love, I could see myself replaying this in the future, sure. Theres even a sequel, Two Worlds 2,  which I am pretty excited to play now.  I beat the game in about 25 hours, by the way. Could have beaten it in 15 if I didnt wanna stick around so much longer just enjoying it, so that says something.

7/10