Two Worlds II Preview

Here's a preview of Two Worlds II which really makes the game sound intriguing. I played the original game, for awhile, and it was fun enough. It's a "real-time" single-character role-playing game (much like Oblivion), and I'm really bad at "real-time" combat. But like Oblivion, I could still have fun with it.

I could play as an archer, which I always like, and you could set traps, which is kind of neat. It was a lot of fun exploring the world. With care, you could take on enemies one at a time (running away for awhile, then stopping to shoot). If you were killed, you'd just resurrect at a nearby shrine. And the world was beautiful. I never did follow the main quest - I guess I didn't play that long - so I can't say anything about that.

Corpses that still held loot would never disappear, so you could teleport back and forth to shops until you'd sold everything. That seemed great at first (certainly, the easy teleportation was nice), but it really destroys your immersion in the gameworld. And Two Worlds had a weird system by which armor could be stacked to improve it, which would supposedly keep even low-level armor valuable later on.

It was a nice idea, but again, it ruined my immersion in the game. There were a lot of different kinds of armor and other equipment, and I kept a bunch of horses (which would stay indefinitely wherever you left them) as living chests to store everything, teleporting back to them with loot whenever I killed an enemy. Of course, you didn't have to do this, but it's hard to resist this sort of thing when the game design encourages it.

And horses were awkward to use, otherwise. (If you want a game that does horse-riding right, try Mount&Blade. Note that I haven't tried the new Warband standalone expansion that's just been released, but you can try the game before you buy it. And the original game is still available at their website, too, under the same shareware arrangement.)

Anyway, according to this review of Two Worlds II, the item-crafting features of the first game seem to have been tweaked a bit:

The player, through an enhanced version of the interesting item crafting system of the first game, can break down old, weaker equipment into their base elements (steel, leather, wool, etc.), which allows him to upgrade his current equipment in a much faster and efficient way than traditional RPGs’ method of selling armor to buy new armor. If there’s a certain piece of equipment the player likes, the item crafting system allows the player to continuously upgrade the item so that it can stay useful to the player for a long time.

Depending on how that's implemented, it could work a lot better than the original method (although I'd prefer the traditional method of just selling my old armor when I found something better). And it sounds like the game in general features even more customization options for the player than the first game. It's hard to say how this will work out - and whether or not the game will be playable by someone as inept as I am at this kind of combat - but it does sound interesting.