Two Worlds

DimGrav said:

I was about to buy the collector's edition the other day,but a friend of mine told me that TW is the definition of a "buggy" game and therefore should leave it for about a year or so,because it needs a looooooot of patches in order to be playable.Is this true or the 1.5 version is playable enough?

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I first cancelled the collectors edition. But then after seeing 20 x 80-90% reviews, lots of positive comments from users and finally playing the 1.5 demo I reordered it. I think the demo was the decisive thing. You should try the demo and see yourself.

Its certainly playable if a little too easy. Play on hard only. You cant change the difficult level after starting.

Theres also lots of mods coming for this game. So its going to get improved in future by both patches and mods.

DimGrav said:

I was about to buy the collector's edition the other day,but a friend of mine told me that TW is the definition of a "buggy" game and therefore should leave it for about a year or so,because it needs a looooooot of patches in order to be playable.Is this true or the 1.5 version is playable enough?

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Hmmm ... it is more stable, complete, and internally consistent than Gothic 3 as of the last patch, IMO.

There are numerous 'little things' that I encounter, mostly that seem to be related to sequencing - it makes no sense to talk to a dozen people about someone who is unexpectedly a female and then suddenly in a dialogue watch the hero say "She?!?!"

MudsAnimalFriend said:

A real horse will not stop when confronted by a tree or a boulder any more than a human will stop upon encountering a lamppost of fire hydrant, both will simply alter course slightly before continuing on their previous headings. Real horses do not require micromanagement to follow a given direction at a required speed.

In contrast Two World's equine locomotion appears to be based on the principle of Brownian motion. They veer wildly all over the place in reaction to non-existent barriers never mind the real obstacles. As I'm playing version 1.5 - where horses cannot even follow open roads without issues - I can only shudder when I speculate what version 1.0 was like.

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Wow. I don't know what to say to that. I have absolutely no problem walking my horse about, especially on roads. No "veer wildly". Are you holding down the forward arrow? That might be your problem. That's one of the ways the horse works differently. Once you set the horse in motion, it will continue to go, you don't need to hold down the forward button like you do with the avatar on foot. However, the forward button does control speed. So, the longer you hold it down, the faster the horse goes. I'll agree that it gets very hard to control the horse at high speed but, again, that seems realistic to me. If you whip your horse into a full gallop in terrain that his very hilly with lots of trees, you can expect all sorts of trouble. Try just tapping the forward button once or twice. The horse sets off at a nice, manageable trot. Then all you have to worry about is tapping the left and right to steer it. If it gets going too fast, just tap the back button to slow it down. In emergencies, just use the stop horse button to pull back on the reigns and bring the horse to a full stop (side note: I love the way that the stop horse animation changes based on how fast the horse was going. very nicely done!)

I only set the horse to a gallop when I've lined up some baddies and am ready to charge through them bashing skulls left and right as I ride past.

chamr said:

Once you set the horse in motion, it will continue to go, you don't need to hold down the forward button like you do with the avatar on foot. However, the forward button does control speed. So, the longer you hold it down, the faster the horse goes.
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Try just tapping the forward button once or twice. The horse sets off at a nice, manageable trot. Then all you have to worry about is tapping the left and right to steer it. If it gets going too fast, just tap the back button to slow it down.

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Thanks for the tips. I did try various combinations of the above my first time around but the nag still spun around like a leaf in the wind :shrug:

My idea of a useful horse is one that gets me from A to B faster than I can on foot, so my focus and game play experience was based on attempting to travel at speed. The experience wasn’t good. On the strength of the good things people had to say about it here I gave the horse another chance in case I'd judged it too harshly. The answer was both yes and no.

My first test was combat on a relatively open stretch of road against some bandits and I didn't encounter too many problems there. The experience was comparable to controlling a horse in Mount and Blade; my mount did get hung up a few times but nothing that really detracted from the game play. It was also pretty easy to connect my blows with their intended targets while travelling at speed. Sadly, while mounted combat works, it's probably only of use to very low-level character due to the feeble damage bonus to hit ratio.

My second trial was to navigate the horse from the western Grom camp, where the earth wizard's staff was located, to Komorin village (western edge of D2 to northern edge of E2 on the map available at http://www.2-worlds.com/). The route was about 50/50 road/open country. At any speed faster than a walk my mount just wouldn't play ball. The horse ended up in some really bizarre situations. In one instance it managed to gallop up the top of a boulder and refused to climb down, much like a cat up stuck up tree. It did eventually abandon its perch when I dismounted and whistled for it. Ultimately I could have completed the same journey three of four times over on foot in the time it took my four-legged burden.

MudsAnimalFriend said:

My second trial was to navigate the horse from the western Grom camp, where the earth wizard's staff was located, to Komorin village (western edge of D2 to northern edge of E2 on the map available at http://www.2-worlds.com/). The route was about 50/50 road/open country. At any speed faster than a walk my mount just wouldn't play ball. The horse ended up in some really bizarre situations. In one instance it managed to gallop up the top of a boulder and refused to climb down, much like a cat up stuck up tree. It did eventually abandon its perch when I dismounted and whistled for it. Ultimately I could have completed the same journey three of four times over on foot in the time it took my four-legged burden.

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My demo experience was complete opposite. I could go fast both onroad and offroad with the horse without getting stuck almost anywhere in the demo area. I saved a lot of time vs doing the same journey on foot. I enjoyed it much and actually rode all around the map because it was so fast and easy to ride with the horse.

It still feels theres somthing weird here.

It doesn't work at all well for me and the feedback in the official forums confirms I'm far from alone in this. Perhaps there's some hardware factor, such a duel core processing, which effects horse control for some and not for others (there is/was some issue with day/night cycles and duel core).

MudsAnimalFriend said:

It doesn't work at all well for me and the feedback in the official forums confirms I'm far from alone in this. Perhaps there's some hardware factor, such a duel core processing, which effects horse control for some and not for others (there is/was some issue with day/night cycles and duel core).

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I think you may be right... it may be a problem based on hardware. After reading this thread I tried horse riding (I'm not playing the game yet, but my son is) and it works great for me... as long as I follow the steps that have been outlined here and in the manual.

By tapping the 'forward' button once my horse starts a slow walk... and it is very easy to control him. Tap the 'forward' button again and he speeds up to a slow trot, and is still very easy to control. Continue in this way and he will eventually speed up to a gallop at which point he becomes more difficult to turn... and like stated elsewhere in this thread, that is realistic (which I personally like).

Tapping the 'back' button then slows the horse incrementally... or you can push the 'stop horse' button for a hard, complete stop.

For me horse riding is implemented better than I have seen it in any game. All other games treat it basically as a faster form of the character running... which is nice if that's all you want, but it's nothing like actually riding a horse.

So I can see why the general populace doesn't like horse riding... it simply doesn't respond the way they want... which is "even though my horse is galloping I want him to turn on a dime".

But for those who understand the mechanics of horse riding who are still having troubles, I believe you could be right that it may be due to different types of hardware that the game is being played on... for reference here are my system specs:

Intel 3.73Ghz Extreme Edition processor (single core, multithread)
3Gig Memory
GeForce 8800GTX
2 x 180Gig RAID1 hd where my pagefile exists
200Gig external USB hd where the game is installed
Sound Blaster Audigy 2ZS
Sony DVD drive
22inch Samsung widescreen monitor

Game runs like a dream in 1600x1050 resolution with all details at max

I'm single core too. Mud, you dual? Zak, you single?

Maybe it is another very wierd bug, like the dialogue clipping that can be solved, temporarily, by opening Windows Media Player in the background.

Alright already.. looks like I'm going to have to try the demo tonight. Everywhre I turn it seems, there's TW! It's readily available here, I'm seeing it in all the chain stores.

One thing is really moving me towards it too. The mounted combat thing is sounding cool. One of my best pnp characters recently was a Paladin in a very mount-heavy game, it was really fun. Ive been dying to get some mounted combat in since!

xSamhainx said:

Alright already.. looks like I'm going to have to try the demo tonight. Everywhre I turn it seems, there's TW! It's readily available here, I'm seeing it in all the chain stores.

One thing is really moving me towards it too. The mounted combat thing is sounding cool. One of my best pnp characters recently was a Paladin in a very mount-heavy game, it was really fun. Ive been dying to get some mounted combat in since!

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Great! Looking forward to hearing what you think of it...

Played through the demo of TW again last night to see if I could get a better grasp on whether or not I want to buy the game. I'm still not sold on it yet, it doesn't help that there's so many good games coming out over the next month.

One thing I feel is that magic is still a little overpowered even in version 1.5. I found that I could kill just about anything in the demo, as long as I had enough mana potions, by simply using the fireball spell over and over again.

JDR13 said:

Played through the demo of TW again last night to see if I could get a better grasp on whether or not I want to buy the game. I'm still not sold on it yet, it doesn't help that there's so many good games coming out over the next month.

One thing I feel is that magic is still a little overpowered even in version 1.5. I found that I could kill just about anything in the demo, as long as I had enough mana potions, by simply using the fireball spell over and over again.

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Are you playing the game in HARD mode... my son is not, so I created a new profile and played around to see the difference... and I was getting my butt handed to me regularly. It seems that the HARD mode is the way to go if you want a good challenge...

Yes, Hard is definitely the way to go in this game. My character is approaching level 50 and just now is getting pretty powerful. We all know how boring it is to be god-like at level 20.

I like the reasoning that horse riding is hardware related... just couldn't understand how some people found it so difficult. I ride an Orc horse (much more durable) everywhere. You know that your horse can die from repeated animal attacks, even though there is no way to gauge their health. In the early going loaded him up with loot and rode into towns right up to the traders. You can only gallop in straightish open areas. I almost never use transporters as a result.

Still waiting for the playable female character mod to get fixed to a decent state.

narpet said:

Are you playing the game in HARD mode... my son is not, so I created a new profile and played around to see the difference... and I was getting my butt handed to me regularly. It seems that the HARD mode is the way to go if you want a good challenge...

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Actually I am playing on hard mode. I couldn't stand the thought of being magically reincarnated at a shrine evry time I died. I'm not sure if the enemies are any tougher on hard mode though.

I think some of the spells have been nerfed. I have one, Fire Spray, that is supposed to do over 1000HP damage. It barely does any!! So far, I've found a little magic softens up the enemies, but rarely kills them. It takes my trusty sword to do that!!

Corwin said:

I think some of the spells have been nerfed. I have one, Fire Spray, that is supposed to do over 1000HP damage. It barely does any!! So far, I've found a little magic softens up the enemies, but rarely kills them. It takes my trusty sword to do that!!

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You're too early on ... I barely pause running at this point - low level enemies I hit with a spell, high levels I use concentrate then hit with a spell. Sword for fun in a crowd.

I have one spell which is supposed to increase damage?? Do you have to cast it first, then switch to a different one? Seems weird to me.

Corwin said:

I have one spell which is supposed to increase damage?? Do you have to cast it first, then switch to a different one? Seems weird to me.

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Yes - there is the fire school one and then 'Concentration' which is a wonderful general purpose maximizer. Cast prior to battles, and it lasts a while. Find the strongest enemy and blast them then hit everyone else with regular spells.

It is very much like a 'maximized spell' from D&D

I do believe that there are more enemies on hard and that the mix of archers to melee fighters gives more archers. I could be wrong though. Thank god for Freeze Wave on those bowmen!

Looks like the Female Character mod is up, the one by Rilune, not the buggy inclusive mod by ReynenStarfyre, over on Inside Two Worlds. Hooray!

chamr said:

I'm single core too. Mud, you dual? Zak, you single?

Maybe it is another very wierd bug, like the dialogue clipping that can be solved, temporarily, by opening Windows Media Player in the background.

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I’m running an AMD dual core. I’ve strong suspicions that there are multiple CPU threads executing simultaneous and conflicting commands for horse movement. It just feels like there is an invisible Gremlin armed with a giant horse magnet running along side my mount. Yesterday I tried to ride one of the skeletal horses out of a black tower courtyard and it kept flickering from left to right as if trying to turn in both directions at once. I had to loop around the tower twice holding down the *right* movement key until the exit came around again, when I relased the key the horse turned *left* and out the exit.