Two Worlds II - Thoughts / First Impressions


And I still get far too many crashes.

I have no crashes so far. Some clipping problems,when I'm close to walls, but that's all.


The more I play this, the more I like it.

30+ hours into a very good RPG. Combat, magic and crafting make some nice improvements over most recent offerings. The story is good, but does not really engage as much as I would hope. There are some implementation issues, typos, and odd oversights, but the concept the designers seem to have delivered to the programmers is excellent. Very few, and relatively minor, problems. Biggest issue for me is too much hand-holding for my personal taste, but many RPGers like that. Large world — wide open empty spaces in parts (scattered animals) but also many hidden towns, camps, etc. Chapter two opened up a new island, but I still have a few areas and quests to finish on the starting one. It is very easy to underestimate the number of quests hidden out there. And there is a learning curve on magic and crafting — would be easy for someone to miss all the possibilities and potential there.

Huge world, non-linear, and a bazillion (often creative) quests. In chapter two your choices start to make a difference — I had a girl commit suicide because of a bad decision. Someone posted they finished this in 20 or so hours — I simply can't buy that. After 30+ hours I am just into chapter II because of all the side quests. (No clue yet how many chapters.) No way someone in 20 hours without taking the time to level on sidequest experience could face chapter II baddies, let alone what I expect is coming for the finale. They must mean 20 hours as shown in the savegame date stamp — it seems to run about 1/2 to 1/3 of elapsed playtime.

+1

Only the combat is a bit too easy, for my taste, so I recommend to play on the hardest difficulty setting. The game time could easily be doubled, if you could diasable the handholding quest markers (maybe in a patch ?). I try to ignore the quest map most of the time or use it only as a broad, vague direction ;)
 
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Thanks for the lead in this forum!!

I spent ab hour researching the console options and stole a bunch of good ideas from various places in the TW2 forums. The result is a huge improvement in graphics.

Do the following if you would like to try it:

in your TW2 folder create a new folder called Parameters

use notepad to create a new file called autoexecgame2.con — this will go into the parameters folder

type otr paste the following into autoexecgame2.con:

Engine.MBlurIntensity 0
Engine.ParalaxOnTerrain 0
Engine.FOV 70
Engine.BloomMultiplier 0
Engine.EdgeAABlend 0
Engine.Farplane 1500

Save it and run TW2 — you should see a large improvement.

I also went to my NVidia control panel and overrided game AA options. 8x worked fine, 16x blacked out everything.

Hope this helps, and thanks RPGwatch for the leads!
 
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Thanks for the lead in this forum!!

I spent ab hour researching the console options and stole a bunch of good ideas from various places in the TW2 forums. The result is a huge improvement in graphics.

Do the following if you would like to try it:

in your TW2 folder create a new folder called Parameters

use notepad to create a new file called autoexecgame2.con — this will go into the parameters folder

type otr paste the following into autoexecgame2.con:

Engine.MBlurIntensity 0
Engine.ParalaxOnTerrain 0
Engine.FOV 70
Engine.BloomMultiplier 0
Engine.EdgeAABlend 0
Engine.Farplane 1500

Save it and run TW2 — you should see a large improvement.

I also went to my NVidia control panel and overrided game AA options. 8x worked fine, 16x blacked out everything.

Hope this helps, and thanks RPGwatch for the leads!

Thanks for the tip Voxclamant.
 
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Follow-up …

No clue why, yet, but in 2 hours since making the graphics change I have had no crashes. I was having 3-4 an hour at zone transitions.

Thank you for the graphic tweak.

I noticed after using the tweak, that my cooling-fan of the gfx-card is more quiet.
So it could be that your crashes were the result of gfx-card overheating.
 
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ATI cards crash when forcing AA with 10.10 driver FYI. Retired till a few patches happen, but I was also beginning to think the game was at least 40 hours if you were doing most of what you run across. Exploration could be better, and they avoided scripting issues by making locations spawn only after you take a quest for that specific spot. This renders the game linear w/ a huge world offering. Little strange, but I can understand cutting down on the bugs by not having reverse flagging of items etc (you pick up the quest item before you get the quest, auto starting the quest in your log and allowing you to finish without having started the quest "the designed way"). How many games have we played that had that complexity only to suffer from quest breaking bugs/script errors? Oh well, can't have it all :)
 
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I agree with a lot of the points already noted. I purchased the game this past Tuesday from Gamersgate and have been having a great time. The quests are good and varied between each other. I have not had any crashes so far and I'm about 13 hours in and just hit the second "mid size" island, the whole with the Japan type setting. The story is decent, like what was previously said, not the most engaging, but there are a ton of quests to find, both in towns and out in the country The graphics are great I think. I'm really excited to see the inclusion of the DX10 and 11 components. Mainly DX 10, because that's what my car can do, but even without that, the game looks pretty damn amazing. Animations are serviceable.

There are choices in dialogue, but I haven't reloaded to see if there's any difference. I'm been reading the Zurrex forums for quite a while and saw all the posts about the length, but like what was previously stated, I believe those guys were mainly doing main quests and skipping a lot of side quests. I am curious about the large main island to see how much content is there because of what's been said. I haven't tried any multiplayer yet, but am eager to get into that as well. Overall, I'm really enjoying my time with the game. About the difficulty, Two Worlds 1 was the same way. For anyone wanting a challenge, go at least medium, if not hard and I will agree, in the beginning of the game, stay away from the giant ants. Those things are crazy:)
 
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Thank you for the graphic tweak.

I noticed after using the tweak, that my cooling-fan of the gfx-card is more quiet.
So it could be that your crashes were the result of gfx-card overheating.

That tweak really worked for me. After applying this it decreased the annoying brightness level of the graphics. And with forcing the AF from the Nvidia Control Panel, textures were sharpened considerably.
 
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I have a 5850. I found that paralax/AF tweak doesn't work from an autoexec file, only from the console… and likewise found AA could not be forced from drivers. Motion blur intensity of 0 didn't change anything for me - does it work for other people?

... and now it's crashing on me, leaving a cave for the main quest. Joy.
 
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Bought it on GamersGate on Saturday, played it most of the weekend. Like others I had a lot of crashes on my dual 5870. Ended up disabling crossfire and AA, and manually turning down the speed of the GPU. After that it's been smooth.

Anyway, once I got past the technical problems, it's been pretty fun. The beginning is somewhat slow and combat feels a bit sluggish at this point, but after I reached the first real city (Hatmandor and the city next to it) it's been a real pleasure. I really like the look and feel of the cities.

The voices and overall characters are miles ahead of TW1 - in fact, they're actually among the better I've seen, especially the main character. I like how he's funny, yet tough, without being a complete schmuck. Such a thing is pretty hard to balance.

As for combat difficulty - I actually find it quite challenging, especially certain fights (like the spider, werebeast and cyclops in the arena). Then again, I might have been a bit too low level/poorly geared at the time.

A quick question: What's the deal with horses? I haven't found any use for them yet. The default speed of a horse is slower than regular running, and while the sprint is certainly faster than the sprinting of the main character, it hardly lasts long enough to make it useful. I find it much easier to simply use teleports a lot.
 
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I think horses are quite a bit faster than running, if you get them up to full running speed which takes a while. But i never use horses in these sort of games, i prefer running since the games are quite combat oriented anyways + it's just much easier to navigate your character.
 
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I haven't played this, beyond the first hour of the tutorial. Was looking forward to it, and I've just completed Fallout 3 - for the first time, so I'm ready for a change.

But, it seems waiting for a patch and perhaps some more content would be wiser. Not that I think it's a bad deal for ~30 hours of gameplay - but I was hoping for a more epic thing.

I guess I should take the opportunity to do some serious work instead, as I've been putting that off for far too long.
 
Not only can riding horses fast be fun, but there are a couple of quests associated with them also.
 
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But, it seems waiting for a patch and perhaps some more content would be wiser. Not that I think it's a bad deal for ~30 hours of gameplay - but I was hoping for a more epic thing.

Exactly my thoughts. It's not a bad game at all, but i've been waiting for this game since 2 years back, the devs have been saying its going to be larger than TW1 etc. Very disapointed that a huge portion of the map is only for MP and its not not really bigger than TW1, but even smaller. Risen was quite small too, would've been nice with a really big landmass to explore. The sailing which seemed like such a nice idea is also quite useless. I really want to go back, but i think i'll wait for a patch and maybe even for a DLC.
 
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Exactly my thoughts. It's not a bad game at all, but i've been waiting for this game since 2 years back, the devs have been saying its going to be larger than TW1 etc. Very disapointed that a huge portion of the map is only for MP and its not not really bigger than TW1, but even smaller. Risen was quite small too, would've been nice with a really big landmass to explore. The sailing which seemed like such a nice idea is also quite useless. I really want to go back, but i think i'll wait for a patch and maybe even for a DLC.

TW1 was too empty, no matter how big it was.

I haven't played TW2 (much), but if it turns out that it's equally empty - THEN I'll be very disappointed.

The land-mass thing is an odd choice, and I agree the PR has been misleading - but I'll be ok if it's ~30 hours of good content. Not really what I wanted, but for 268 kr. (~40$) - I think it's a good price.

I thought Risen was fantastic until it became a samey dungeon-crawl - but I would also have preferred it to be stretched out a little. Something like 50% bigger land-mass would have been perfect.
 
Not only can riding horses fast be fun, but there are a couple of quests associated with them also.

I assume in Two Worlds I there isn't ?
 
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Don't recall any. But in TW2 they're much faster than running, although I agree they're 'just another game system' rather than something integral. Do they even have horseback combat in this one? I think TW1 did, but I haven't noticed it here.

I have just realised how context-sensitive the special moves are. In melee, the available specials change if your off hand contains another weapon, a shield, a torch, whether you're blocking… and in archery they vary depending on whether you're zoomed in or not, which actually seems to make less sense. As far as I can tell I have to be zoomed in for, say, poison arrows, but zoomed out for fire arrows? So sniper mode isn't available for fire & ice but is obligatory for poison and distraction? I don't think that's ideal. Not least because the cooldown for something like fire arrows means sniper mode becomes available/stops being available at times that feel semi-random when you're in combat. Add to that that the mouse inversion setting changes as you move in and out of aiming, and those elements really don't come together well for archers. (On the PC at least).
 
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