Two Worlds

"Say 'Hello' to DEATH!"

"Press X To Arm Yourselve."

—The Tutorial

Verily, thou has cometh into this page to read about the video game Two Worlds.

Two Worlds doest be a Role-Playing Game released for PC and Xbox 360 in 2006. It hast been widely noted, and widely reviled for being an obvious rip-off of The Elder Scrolls genuinely bad.

Forsooth, thou doest playeth as a mercenary in the fantasy world of Antaloor. At the beginning of the game, thy sister is kidnapped by a Cult that doest wisheth to summon Aziraal, the evil god of the the Orcs. The cult doest blackmail you in hopes that mayhap thou shalt help them achieve this foul deed.

....

Okay, enough of that.

Like its obvious inspiration, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Two Worlds drops the player into a huge landscape full of villages, dungeons, side-quests, and enemies with a set objective that is ultimately optional. Emphasis is on exploring the world of Antaloor and developing your character.

Contrary to popular opinion the game was not developed by Southpeak but by the polish studio Reality Pump. The PC version was very well received in Germany, possibly to the success of the Gothic franchise.

The sequel, Two Worlds... Two, was released in 2010. Unlike the first game, which ranged from below average to good, the sequel is generally accepted as being above average at worst and very good at best. Cue the inevitable cries of I Liked It Better When It Sucked.

Tropes used in Two Worlds include:

• Aborted Arc: TW2 seems to suffer heavily from this. The story goes on nicely until you finally make it out of the Goddamn Swamp, then you have to head out for the Big Bad's fortress only to end up being handed a Twist Ending the size of the castle you're infiltrating. It seems the game was originally planned to be significantly larger but the developers had to shorten it due to time and money constraints, so you get the feeling of having "skipped" a certain portion of the story when getting an ending which doesn't make much sense and feels extremely rushed and even lame.
  • The first chapter is about recruiting a rebellion and building a massive army using the same mysterious Verita that Gandohar uses. This army is never heard from again.
  • Of course, What Could Have Been ensues.
• Action Girl: Dar Pha and Reesa in Part Two.
• Exclusively Evil: Orcs (subverted by the second game), Groms and other humanoid mooks.
• Artifact Title: Before the game was even released, in fact. The website for the original games has an outdated synopsis that challenges you to choose which of the Two Worlds you will save. This has nothing to do with the released game or its sequel.
• Automaton Horses: averted within the limits of the game mechanics in both parts.
• Black and Gray Morality: Aziraal and its minions are simply evil, but the "good" human nation has its fair share of corruption and internal conflict.
• Bond One-Liner: The Hero says them at random after killing enemies.
• Blow You Away: Air magic is used in the game and is combined with lightning magic, i.e. Shock and Awe
• Boss Corridor: In TW2, with lots and lots of potions along the walls.
• Call a Rabbit a Smeerp: The Groms are just your staple goblins. In the Part One their totem poles are even called Goblin Totems. Likewise, the Necris, that is nothing but a skeleton.
• Card-Carrying Villain: Gandohar in the second game has been taking multiples levels in this, as opposed to how he was almost Affably Evil in the first game.
• Cliché Storm: The sequel tries to shake this up by making the orcs Noble Demons, but even the characters you meet are just standard fantasy archetypes with green skin.
  • Another, somewhat more successful try to do something about that is the New Ashos University in TW 2.
• Commonplace Rare: In the second game you can slaughter all sorts of animals by the hundreds and loot some body parts for alchemy, but only a few domesticated animals drop "meat" items.
• Constructed World
• Continuity Lock Out: There is little to no in-game information about who's who and who stands for what in the Part Two.
• Darker and Edgier: The plot of the second is somewhat darker than the first, which was fairly lighthearted by contrast.
• Deadpan Snarker: In the sequel, the main character, very much so, albeit it's a cynical snarky.
• Dem Bones
• Dishing Out Dirt: One of the schools of magic.
• Dismantled MacGuffin: The key to Aziraal's tomb, which is split into five pieces scattered across the kingdom.
• Dual-Wielding
• Dummied Out In the instruction book there are pictures which suggest there were going to be more equipment, also with using creat codes, you can find things in the game engine not in the final game
• Dragon with an Agenda: Gandohar in the first game.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: Instead of the asian-themed monsters you might expect, the second game's Wutai island inexplicably has velociraptors roaming the forests.
• Everything's Worse with Bears
• Evil Is Hammy: Aziraal, Sordahon, and Gandohar just can't resist Chewing the Scenery.
• Fire and Brimstone Hell: Not shown, but implied by the fact that fire-magic can literally summon creatures from Hell—fire-themed creatures.
• Flunky Boss: The second game's boss summons increasing numbers of minions several times during the fight.
• Follow the Leader: "What you say? The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion made lots of money? Well we'd better get to work making something just like it! Except it will definitely be much better!"
• For Massive Damage: The Humbling Blow skill from the second game knocks opponents down; if you then follow up with a standard attack while they're lying on the ground, you instakill them automatically, potentially dealing tens of thousands of hitpoints worth of damage in a single blow.
• Four Point Scale: Played straight with the usual big-name sites and publications, who gave it a 7 out of 10, but averted with pretty much everyone else, who gave it a 2.
• Gotterdammerung: The ancient war between Aziraal and the other gods left the world in a rather sorry state.
• Hatedom: One has arisen due mostly to the overblown self-image of the folks at Southpeak Studios. On the other hand, most people just find think the first game is too funny to actually hate.
• Heroic Fantasy
• Invisible Wall: in spite of being a Wide Open Sandbox, TW 2 has its fair share of them. Sometimes it's justified by the plot, but most of the times you'll be just teleported back if you manage to set foot in a location you weren't meant to.
• It Got Worse: Regardless of the ending you picked in the first game, it only got worse by the second.
• Left-Justified Fantasy Map
  • Averted in TW 2.
• Kick Them While They Are Down: The second game allows you to learn a skill that enables you to kick your opponents in the face, then stab them in the gut them while they're splayed helpleslly on their back.
• Lost Technology: The elven Portal Network
• Making a Splash: Water magic exists as a school, but it's actually just ice magic.
• Medieval European Fantasy
• Minus World: The interior of Eikronas, the largest of the islands, is supposed to be inaccessible. It's blocked off by steep cliffs and, should you manage to make your ways onto those, a layer of invisible walls that teleport you back to the shoreline. There is, nevertheless, a gap in those that allows the player to slip through and explore the mostly barren landscape beyond and even make their way to the swampy area in the middle before being transported there in the proper course of the story.
• Ms. Fanservice: Kyra, which is really weird because she is your character's sister. The second game adds Dar Fa, and the very Stripperiffic Cassara.
• Necromancy
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: The main quest line in both parts. It leads basically to unleashing the real Big Bad into the world. Not that the hero had much choice in Part One. In Part Two he just doesn't know the hidden agenda of the Prophet.
• Non Indicative Title: Two Worlds? There's Antaloor and... that's it. It might refer to the divide between the human and orc civilizations in the first game, but that doesn't end up being that important to the plot in the long run.
• Obviously Evil: The Orcs are obviously evil due to being, well, Orcs. Their human allies are obviously evil due to their eerie voices and face-concealing masks. The Orc part is subverted in the second game.
• One-Winged Angel: The final boss of TW2 transforms into a dragon before the final fight begins.
• Only a Flesh Wound: In those almost exact words. Quoth Unskippable: "This is no time to quote Monty Python!"
• Our Demons Are Different
• Our Dragons Are Different: These are Western Dragons, played very straight.
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same
• Our Elves Are Better: They are the Precursors.
• Our Orcs Are Different: Tolkien Orcs
• Portal Network: The elves left one behind when they fled Antaloor, but the humans who then settled there did not know how to use it. A series of side-quests involves you helping a researcher reactivate the Portal Network. Completing said side-quest is its own reward, since you can then use it yourself.
• Porting Disaster: Two Worlds was obviously meant to be a PC game. The Xbox 360 version has inferior graphics, an almost-unusable user interface, and more bugs than you can shake a can of RAID at.
• Playing with Fire: One of the schools of magic.
• Pre-Ass-Kicking One-Liner: The Hero will sometimes let one loose when enemies appear.
  • "Reminds me of my in-laws."
  • "Interesting guests!"
• Precursors: The elves.
• Rated "M" for Manly
• Save Game Limits: You can save at any time in TW2... except during the final boss battle.
• Sealed Evil in a Tomb: Aziraal
• Scaled Up
• Scenery Porn
• Self-Deprecation: Sordahan's Journey
• Sequence Breaking
• Shoulders of Doom: Even on lowly leather armor.
• Shout-Out: In the sequel, there's tons.
  • "Are you a God?" "No." "Then DIE." "I'd like to change my answer."
  • There's an entire questline that is a shoutout/homage to Indiana Jones And The Last Crusade, complete with the holy grail being your reward.
    • And during the quest, you also meet the Black Knight, who speaks, word for word, the same lines that he did to King Arthur. This ends with the protagonist saying "Dear God, I hope this doesn't mean a lawsuit."
  • There's another sidequest that involves getting rid of the ghosts of some annoying imperial toll collectors...who happen to be medieval Expies of the Marx Bros. It also contains mild Ghostbuster references - the Groucho Expy says "If you don't pay the toll, you can't cross the stream" (to which your character replies "What stream?" - the area you're in is almost bone dry), and when you talk to them before enacting your plan to exorcise them (trick them into following you into a nearby room with a mirror so that they look into it, realize they're dead and pass on), they refer to themselves as the Scoleri brothers, after the ghostly gangster brothers from Ghostbusters 2.
  • When confronted by the ghost of a formerly defeated foe, you make a comment to the effect of "I thought I'd try cutting off your head, see if that works."
  • Valarin, the captain of the guard in Hatmandor, has Narsil mounted on his office wall.
  • All work and no play makes Gorlag a dull boy.
  • The final quest is called whatever it takes
  • One of the quests you can do is called Drakonai park, it requires you to kill a group of raptors on an island
  • One quest is called Magic The Gardening
  • You can find a ship's log in a wrecked pirate ship. According to the log the captain's name was Jack and the first words recorded in the log are "the rum's gone".
• Standard Fantasy Setting
• Swamps Are Evil: the entirety of Chapter III in the second game.
• The Undead
• Turns Red: The final battle of TW2 starts with easy to dodge fireballs and proceeds to attacks that instakill you if you don't know how to dodge them. Which you don't on your first attempt.
• Unwinnable By Mistake: Many spawn points are located just outside towns. It's very easy for the soldiers - at the start of the game, strong enough to pretty much One Hit KO you - to chase you until they're standing over the spawn point, and simply kill you over and over and over again.
• Values Dissonance: In TW 2, the hero may play a big game hunter, happily shooting cheetahs and rhinos in the savannah. Keeping the rare species rare, aren't we?
• Vancian Magic
• Warp Whistle
• Well-Intentioned Extremist / Anti-Villain: Gandohar turns out to be one in the Part Two.
• What Could Have Been: Almost everything that was said prior to the release of the game. You can go online—sort of. You can customize your character—but it won't matter, because he looks the same anyway. You can play a female character—online. And there's only one world.
  • This game SERIOUSLY had a lot of potential. The first part takes place in Northern Antaloor, which was just recently shaken by a bunch of sleezy jerkasses who took control of the region via political intrigue and imposed a bunch of laws the populace hates. The main quest of that area involves a lot of political intrigue and the like that could have been fleshed out and given more overall depth. In the South, there's a lot of tension and concern over the invading Orc armies, and in fact when you get to the capital city of Cathalon, you can see siege machines being set up across the river by Orcs. Once again, the epic potential of this stock Fantasy trope is epically wasted because, all in all, you don't really even do too much to help end the war. Seriously, had Southpeak actually had people smarter than retarded orangutans for writers, Two Worlds could've been quite a game.
• Where It All Began: The final chapter of the second game.
• Wide Open Sandbox: Especially in game two. There are freakin' oceans you can cross by boat. The sequel really makes you feel that you're in a vast world, rather than just a small part of it.
• Wutai: Which has European architecture and is inhabited by black people.
  • And then there is that tavern in New Ashos, with the drunkards called Macek, Jarek and so on. Might be an Easter Egg from the Polish team of developers, though.
• Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe: And butchered modern English. None of the peasants can decide how to pronounce the names of their towns, no one told them how, and some of them don't even know how to pronounce real words.

Peasant: "They said they wanted to buy my corral (pronounced "coral") for one piece of gold. I told them to stick it where the sun never shines."

• • Parodied in the sequel where there is one person who speaks Olde Timey, and the hero basically walks away saying he has better things to do than figure out what he's saying.