Did you hear about the game that was released last week? No … not *that* game. Indeed, there were several games that came out last week. Some managed to get a LITTLE bit of mind share – Brain Age 2 was notable because of the cool looking new DS color that launched along with it, but pretty much everything else that launched last week might not have existed at all. They launched, as I said, under a Cloak of (Bioshock) Invisibility.

There are a few games that I am thinking of when I talk about this – well more than a few, but a few from last week. The PSP saw the release of Jeanne D’Arc, a wonderfully polished strategy-RPG that is being overlooked because of Bioshock and the fact that it got pretty mediocre reviews in its’ international releases. Also slipping below the radar were the PSP and PS3 versions of Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2, because of Bioshock and the fact that enough other versions already shipped to tell everyone that the game was pretty mediocre and they should stop caring – so they did. But while both of those games fell beneath the general radar they have some significant hardcore interest and I have been talking about them in various fan areas for a while (especially Jeanne D’Arc).

But the one I am thinking about is Two Worlds. This is a game that came out at the beginning of May in Germany and has been getting patched furiously ever since. It has also been delayed several times, including a delay early last week for the UK and Australia. The game was a mess back when it was originally released, and at that time the XBOX360 version was ‘delayed indefinitely’ in order to clean up the technical issues. Since then the game has seen five massive patches – the latest one was more than 1GB!! Heck, it wasn’t that long ago that entire installed games weren’t that big!

So Two Worlds launched last week to … well, pretty much nuthin’. There is a fair amount of activity at the (unofficial) Zuzzex forums, but that was already full of folks before the launch, and new activity is pretty much limited to the release of the XBOX version. For the rest of the world it seems that the game might not even exist. Even in the usual hardcore spots there are threads wondering if the game was delayed again because no one was talking about it!

That is unfortunate. Bioshock is getting loads of attention, and it deserves to have praise heaped on it because it is an excellent game. But there are other games out, and having such a single-minded focus on only Bioshock does a disservice to gamers as well as those games.

This is not the first time that a game has been eclipsed by the release of a more popular game. The original SiN was a pretty darn good game that ceased to exist the moment that Half-Life was released. The anticipation of Half-Life 2 clouded releases for over a year, and decimated games such as Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines. Of course, similar to Two Worlds that game had more than its share of technical issues, but in that case it didn’t have the benefit of four months of ‘post release beta testing’ in Europe. Despite being regarded as one of the better RPG’s of this decade, Bloodlines had only managed to sell ~75,000 copies before Troika shut its’ doors several months later.

Is this the fate that awaits Two Worlds? A history of mediocre reviews and technical issues dooms the game to struggle for mind-share and the simultaneous release of a likely ‘Game of the Year’ seals its’ fate of obscurity? If so that is unfortunate. There are many articles about games like Psychonauts or No One Lives Forever that were critical hits but never sold – yet the writing of those articles never turned one into a million seller. Imagine the fate of a game that is only ‘good’! No one will be writing to sing the praises of this game – it will get average reviews and fade into obscurity. Sure there are plenty of ‘merely good’ games that have relatively small fanbases – things like Star Trek Elite Force 2 come to mind – but many of them weren’t stomped on by the ascent of a massive juggernaut such as Bioshock or one of the Halo games … or even Metroid Prime 3 …

As I said, no one will be singing the praises of Two Worlds – and that includes me. I find it a fairly decent game but with many minor and somewhat major issues that prevent it from being mentioned in the same company as the Gothic or Elder Scrolls games. Fortunately the patching work done at the expense of buyers in Europe has also kept it from being mentioned in the same company as Dungeon Lords or Mistmare or Pool of Radiance 2: Ruins of Myth Drannor.

As the shine wears off the Bioshock hype-train and the gaming media starts to look for their next fix, you can be sure they won’t be looking back to see if they missed anything while they were on brain vacation. They will be looking forward – they have seen Metroid Prime 3 and are done with that already, but now there is a new focal point – Halo 3. For the next month we will hear about little else – and anything that comes out during the week of the 25th will be every bit as invisible as last week’s games. So this isn’t an ode to Two Worlds, but rather to games that start their life doomed to live in the shadows of other great games; these games might as well have been put on shelves under an invisibility cloak.

Tags: Misc