Two Worlds II Preview

The editors over at Critical Gamer has gotten around to posting their preview of Two Worlds II based on the demonstration they were given during this year’s PAX East. Quite a bit of commentary from TopWare Interactive’s James Seaman is included:

Two Worlds II wouldn’t be much of an RPG without the storytelling to back up all the combat and customisation. This was a major issue in the original game it languished in stiff, awkward dialogue and cutscenes. But both Seaman and Kobylinski assured me that this was one of the major things they are addressing. (We just finished our first round of voice-over in Toronto last week and we’re in the process of implementing that, lip-synching and everything like that.)

TopWare has also completely reworked how conversations are presented. (In a lot of classic, open-world RPGs you enter a conversation and it becomes the camera flip thing,) Kobylinski explains. (It’s this exercise where he says this, he says that, he says this. And while it reads very well in a lot of these games, we wanted to do something a little more unique in this game, a little more flavourful. So what we did was actually allow the player to move around within the conversation environment, pan the camera, pull the camera forward and back to make the characters themselves pop.) The closest comparison would be the original Assassin’s Creed, where players could wander around the room throughout the conversation. (It makes it feel more like the conversation is a natural part of the game world as opposed to being this separate mechanic,) he adds.