I hopped back into Two Worlds tonight, where I talked to one of the main quest NPCs and got the next main plot goals: finding the five parts of some family relic, with directions to first two. Which I then promptly ignored in order to go wander around for my own jollies.

I figured I may as well continue working on those initial side quests, so I headed off to Brumhill village on the east side of the map. It was mostly wolves and bandits along the way and the occasional bear, which are really easy to kill since their attack animation is so slow. At one point I found a cyclops by a tower, but upon approaching him he killed me in one hit, and that’s how I learned that a target’s name being red is a Bad Thing. So instead I just stole the stuff from his camp and ran off.

I also ran across a scout, who gave me a quest to retrieve some totems from grom war camps nearby, and the first camp was just down the road a ways. My first attack upon the camp resulted in my almost immediate death, since a whole mob of them came running at me at the same time and I wasn’t quite prepared. The second time went a lot better since I was able to split them up into smaller groups and use a nearby healing shrine to keep from dying mid-battle. A nice spear I’d picked up that does a ton of damage and attacks in a sweeping arc helped a lot, too. I also took their horse, since I’d left my original one back near the starting town.

Along the way I also discovered that ‘ghost animals’ come out at night, and they’re really annoying since they do a ton of damage and are invulnerable to regular weapons, so I had to wear it down with my weak starting fireball spell. The weather also changes occasionally, with rain and foggy spots, and the player’s character apparently likes to say dumb things like “oh, it’s raining.” OH REALLY?

I found an ‘old boar cave’ along the way, but it had an ogre beyond my level and some spiders with annoying poison, so I’ll come back to it later. And a bit later on I ran across a bandit camp. Some wolves had been chasing me for a while, and when I reached the camp, they started attacking some of the bandits, too. It was rather amusing having the bandit leader demand 1000 gold from me in tribute while a full-scale battle between bandits and wolves was breaking out in the background.

I eventually got to Brumhill only to find it had been destroyed by some nearby snow orcs. I tried to fight a few of them but they were fairly tough and I only managed to kill a couple before being chased off by the archers (single hits from their bows could knock off over half my health). I reported back to the starting village to complete the quests, cleared another war camp that was nearby, and found the magnesite deposits needed for the teleport stone quest.

After that I figured I may as well take care of the last war camp in the west and headed towards it, stopping in a large town along the way and picking up a whole bunch of other side quests, and that’s where I retired for the night. And by “retired for the night” I mean “had Two Worlds crash on me,” though I didn’t lose anything important (there’s an autosave every five minutes).

Again, not the greatest game, but it’s still kinda fun to just screw around in the world.