Alright, so the first Two Worlds wasn't the Oblivion killer that everyone claimed it would be. With a number of glitches, bugs, painful voice acting and somewhat sloppy gameplay it was hard to defend the game against its many naysayers. However underneath the issues that the game had was an interesting story and some cool mechanics to its name.
The first thing that grabs you when you take a gander at this title is how much better it looks than the first. These graphics are pretty damn impressive. Textures look much improved and, thanks to some motion capture, so do the combat animations. But this is only a small example of what seems to be the main mantra of developing a sequel to Two Worlds improve, improve, improve.
Everything that was great about the first game sounds like it's been improved considerably. While the weapon and armor customization in the first game allowed you to power up your equipment customization will be much deeper in the sequel. In addition powering up spells and crafting potions will be made much more in-depth and useful. You can even go so far as to combine spells for a wide variety of effects.
Combat has been touched up but it still works in a fundamentally similar way. It's still somewhat loose, enabling you to run around like a madman while hacking away at enemies. However many new combat options have been added such as defensive skills, parrying, more offensive skills and blocking enemy attacks much more reliably. The aim of all of this is to make the combat much more interesting while also reducing the amount of pausing and menu fiddling that you have to do.
One place that the original didn't really need much improvement was the story. The first game had a very simple plot in the manner of Final Fantasy I for the NES but the twists that it took made it one of the best aspects of the first title. However the story for the sequel starts off in a really interesting manner Seven years after the events from the first game your hero is rescued from captivity by his Orc foes, and it sounds like it will only go to more interesting places from there.
Two Worlds II will hit store shelves October 2010 for every next-gen system under the sun - Windows, Mac OSX, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360.