Rock, Paper, Shotgun

30/05/2012 at 11:23 Chaz says:

I tried the demo when it was Ego Draconis and found the combat like hitting a brick wall, and then tried the second demo with the DKS release, found it much improved and bought it after that. I too was very pleasantly surprised at how good the game was, it far exceeded my expectations and has become possibly one of my most favourite recent RPGs. Yes even more so than the Witcher 1 and 2.

I think what sets it apart for me is it’s whimsical approach to the story telling. It’s just so refreshing when compared to the ridiculous po-faced seriousness of other RPGs. To back that up though is some genuinely good and very witty writting and superb voice acting, with some real laugh out loud moments. Another thing that really impressed me were the quests. They’d really gone to great lengths to include a really diverse variety of quests that by and large kept away from the usual RPG tropes. You never felt as if you were just going through the motions doing the same thing over and over again, or just performing a load of filler quests. For starters I can’t remember doing a single stock go kill me 10 of these quest. Some of the quests even featured quizzes to see how much you had been paying attention to your surroundings or whether you’d bothered to read any of the lore books left lying around. Another one had me changing my sex to take part in a play, before which I was given the script to read and memorize the lines. The game was just full of great little moments like that.

After playing DKS I played Two Worlds 2, and my god that was duller than a dry cream cracker by comparison. Dreadful painfully dull dialogue with the blandest voice acting, that just seemed to drag everytime there was a cut scene for dialogue, which basically was every time you spoke to someone. The most boring quests, more or less it was just an endless round of fetch and kill quests. I remember one quest on the second island had me running back and forth some distance between 2 NPC’s just delivering straight messages between one an another. No input or way to sway an outcome, no fighting or anything like that, just a dull trudge back and forth to sit through a load of tedious dialogue for some thing really trivial that had no bearing on the story at all. Then to top it all off and really add insult to injury, the game was finished with a boss fight that didn’t really require the talents of your carefully crafted character that you’d just spent the past 40 hours or more building up. Nope, just a frustratingly hard, cheap shooting gallery game. What were they thinking? Frustratingly you could see the game had lots of potential. The islands themselves were big and lush and beautifully done but on the whole the big wide open spaces were just used for grinding mobs. The game featured a sail boat, one of the things that got me really interested in the game, but it was used for nothing. No quests made use of it to send you off discovering far flung lands. You could sail off to a nearby island and bash yet a few more mobs but that was it. It felt as if there was a lot of unfinished potential there, like the game had been shoved out the door prematurely, and quite likely had. However unlike DKS it would have taken a serious major overhaul to fix everything that was wrong about TW2.

Divinity 2: DKS = Brilliant

Two Worlds 2 = Fecking awful.