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.

It’s time to start a new PC game, but I’m a bit sick of shooters for now, so it’s time to get to one of the handful of RPGs I still haven’t started yet. The candidates are: Oblivion, Two Worlds, The Witcher, NWN2, and Gothic 2 or 3. The Witcher is supposed to be the best of the bunch, but yesterday I started with Two Worlds first instead. The word-of-mouth is that it’s a rather average game, so it’ll probably be less disappointing than if I were to play it after a really good one.

The first impressions are that the graphics are fairly decent. The terrain is perhaps slightly less pretty than Oblivion, but the people’s faces are much better (though they were supposedly much worse before the patch I applied). The map looks decently large given how little I’ve uncovered so far, and there are teleporters for getting around quickly.

Combat is a bit simplistic in that you just click the left mouse button to swing your weapon and the right mouse button to fire your active spell. You’re usually attacked by a group of enemies though, so the real trick to combat is in positioning yourself so that your swings hit multiple targets, avoiding putting yourself in a spot where multiple enemies can hit you, and withdrawing effectively in order to heal or regain mana.

You get a horse early on from a side quest in the starting village, but the horse controls are notoriously awkward in this game. It’s not so bad when you’re just riding from place to place, but it becomes really difficult if you try to take advantage of the horse to do some mounted combat, since you waste most of your time just trying to get the horse turned around and going the right speed so you can take a swing. You’re best off just dismounting whenever you want to fight, which is fairly often.

I did a couple side quests for the starting village, running off some bandits and activating a teleporter a ways away, but most of the starting quests require you to travel to a village fairly far away for some reason (and you can’t teleport until you reach the teleporters on foot and activate them first), so I haven’t done those yet. I also did the first few quests in the main story, putting me back in ‘telepathic’ contact with my kidnapped sister. The plot isn’t all that exciting so far, though. An ancient evil, someone trying to awaken it, an important artifact in my family, blah blah blah…

The first handful of levels came fairly quickly, giving me a lot of stat and skill points to spend. I wasn’t sure what the magic system was like though, so I’ve been going mostly for warrior-oriented passive skills, so that I’m stronger in straight-up combat without having to use any special skills. I’m using a bit of magic as support (healing, really), but I probably won’t dabble in the other skills until I get a bit more experience.

There’s also an alchemy system and I’ve been finding components for it all over the place, but I don’t have the skill yet so I can’t do anything with them. It’s not a starting skill, so I have to find someone who will train me in it before I can even put any points in it, so it’ll have to wait for now.

Overall, it’s not really that bad a game so far, or at least not nearly as bad as some of the forums might have you believe. It’s no Oblivion and it has its flaws (the aforementioned horse controls, some horrible voice acting and silly Elizabethan dialogue, mainly), but it’s still kinda fun. I’m playing the PC version though, and the 360 version has a different control scheme that a lot of people dislike, and some performance problems that I don’t see on my fairly-new system.