Today, publisher SouthPeak Games announced that it has acquired Austin-based Gamecock Media Group. SouthPeak, the company behind Two Worlds and Dream Pinball 3D, certainly seems to be adding some good games to its repertoire with the addition of Gamecock’s Velvet Assassin and Legendary.

From the press release:

Melanie Mroz, CEO of SouthPeak, stated, “Gamecock brings us a solid slate of upcoming titles, including Legendary, Mushroom Men and Velvet Assassin and supports our strategy of working with independent developers. We are excited to give the Gamecock titles a bigger platform to succeed.”

“We are thrilled to be joining forces with SouthPeak to continue to bring great original titles from independent developers to market with a stronger sales and distribution reach,” said Mike Wilson, CEO of Gamecock. “We have followed each other’s progress closely over the last two years, and combining our team with theirs results in a very strong and well-rounded force in the market.”

SouthPeak Games, already one of the fastest growing videogame publishers, should be on the rise even more after the Gamecock acquisition, and the publisher said it expects to ship both Legendary and Mushroom Men in the current quarter.

We have a dilemma here. On the one hand, we love beating down ogres and dragons and would happily do it year after year. On the other hand, we hate buggy gameplay and crippling slowdown. Fortunately it seems SouthPeak might have has found a way to minimize the glitches and maximize the ogres in their standalone expansion pack for Two Worlds, Epic Edition, due out in August.

The first game received wildly mixed reviews, ranging from a respectable score of 7.0 (ok, that was me) to a not-so-respectable “fecal doughnut” comparison. It was a fair game, marred by terrible glitches that were somewhat addressed in a patch several months after launch.

Still, even with the patch, multiplayer in Two Worlds was not the “MMO lite” that was promised ahead of time. Trying to play the game over XBL was nearly impossible, as slowdown and crashes made even the simplest fetch quests seem like an epic mess.

In the Epic Edition expansion, expect to find more multiplayer quests, a new town where players can fight online in an arena, and magical PvP competitions. And for a budget $20, it’s likely to snag a few budget-conscious adventurers who don’t mind if their horse gets stuck in an occasional rock.

My personal favorite moment from the original Two Worlds? Snagging a town’s sacred stone, which destroys the town’s defenses and lets the ogres take over, so you have to fight your way out. See, Two Worlds wasn’t all bad– there were some good ideas in there, you just had to look past the game’s technical flaws. If all these issues have been addressed, there’s no reason why Two Worlds can’t work the second time around.

Update: There’s been some confusion about whether this is a sequel or merely a stand-alone expansion. The answer is that a real sequel, called Temptation, is due out in November, but a few months ago it was incorrectly reported that Temptation would be an expansion pack for the original Two Worlds. The Epic Edition contains the original game, plus two new modes, for a budget price. From the press release:

Two Worlds: Epic Edition will contain the original game and the add-ons “Tainted Blood” and “Curse of Souls”, putting the massive world of Antaloor and countless hours of adventuring into one tremendous package. The original Two Worlds gave players a huge world and hundreds of adventures to undertake. The expanded content of Epic Edition adds over 70 online quests, eight new multiplayer maps, an innovative player-versus-player challenge where opponents battle to control magical orbs within a variety of arenas, and introduces the town of Tharnburg where players can train their warriors in various skills and challenge other players to combat in the Gladiator District’s huge arena.

Gamers spoke, and SouthPeak Games listened to every word they had to say. In addition to a playable demo that will be hitting XBL tomorrow, the crew at SouthPeak has been hard at work on an update to address the feedback they received from players. We have been told that the update will be available soon, and when it comes down to it, you really can’t ask for much more than that.

Below is a list of some of the improvements that players can expect to see in the update.

Both platforms (PC and Xbox 360)
- Horse steering has been improved
- Character development curve not as steep over level 25
- HP regeneration slower for max values above 2000
- Death strike skill – executable by strike button while in sneak mode
- Critical hit skill fixed
- Damage is now allowed over 32000
- There is a cap on damage and armor at 99999
- Necromancer spells have been balanced
- Magical boosters – effect restricted to 5 boosters
- Stacking potions with different statistics – fixed
- Objects stacking – objects can’t be stacked up if result has higher level requirements than current player level
- Equipment Class cap on 50
- When killing in towns – after you leave the town and go back guards will ask you to pay instead of immediately attacking you
- NPC’s in towns don’t resurrect
- Tweaked hi- level monster balance
- Wing Membrane ingredient added to Helllord
- Dragons strike not breakable by player hit
- Bomb traps attached to some chests and wardrobes
- Balanced number of lock picks in chests and wardrobes
- Walking under water and not dying has been fixed
- Inaccessible Cave north of Ashos has been fixed
- Multiplayer Lag issues have been improved
- Multiplayer too many skill points generated due to combat stats has been fixed
- Friendly fire disabled in RPG mode (players cannot damage each other)
- Resurrect spell on players has been disabled
- Experience points for killing players has been removed
- Disarming skill disabled against other players
- Freezing/stopping spells disabled against other players
- Multiplayer RPG quests given to all, reward splitter between players
- Team assault – main monuments 50 times stronger
- Barbarian – berserk skill in PvP reduced to 5
- Chest and wardrobe lock levels improved in multiplayer
PC specific:
- Issue of moving money between servers has been fixed
- Maps D2,E4,F4, Multiplayer Tharbakin – missing triangles or flying objects have been fixed
- Enter opens console in single player
- Horse steering – stopping horse by back key changed
- Cloning character when logging on new WarNet server is fixed
- Boosters disappearing in Arena modes
- Atmosoheric fog for multiplayer towns added
- Chat over open dialogs possible (by F11 chat dialog)
- All PVP arenas unlocked from beginning

Xbox 360 specific:
- Improved single player framerate
- Interface – repeat changes selection left stick hold added
- Game HDD cache cleaning possibility – RB + A + B during game launch
- Achievements for 5 elements is fixed
- Map interface improvements – only one open quest at the time, quests selection box better visibility, hero location on map better visibility, quest name on tooltip
- Hit info fonts larger
- “BACK – Show Instruction” text disappears
- Double saving multiplayer characters to protect character lost from power-off or hard-locks
- Interface – no controls after “server refused connection” is fixed
- Doubling gold in multiplayer is fixed
- Doubling objects in multiplayer is fixed

“Which of the Two Worlds has a decent framerate?”

Two Worlds, a massive RPG that plays like a cross between Diablo and Oblivion, owes a debt of gratitude to the persistence of hardcore gaming geeks. The potential fun to be had exploring Two Worlds’ massive environments is considerably hampered by a plague of technical issues– framerate drops, glitches, and crashes.

The moments of satisfaction, such as gaining a new level, combining found items to improve your gear, and learning new combat skills, are matched by moments of frustration, absurdity, and befuddlement. When I was first awarded my trusty steed after helping his owner take care of a pesky bandit problem, I knew that horseback travel was absolutely the way to see Two Worlds. However, my horse soon became stuck on every jagged rock or slightly steep incline. The numerous glitches made just moving around the landscape more awkward than it should have been.

The menus also take some getting used to. After Oblivion showed that an Xbox controller could easily navigate an overworld map, Two Worlds completely threw the concept out the window and made planning an adventure quite cumbersome. It’s a chore to find out not only where the next mission objective is, but also to figure out where you are and how to get to it. There are only two levels of zoom for the map– too close, and too far.

The artificial intelligence is also pretty dumb in this game, to the point where you will feel like you are cheating by taking advantage of it. Is that orc too tough for you to take on at a low level? Just jump onto a rock and keep shooting him full of arrows while he swings his axe in futile frustration. Too many bandits on your tail? Just lead them to the nearest health-restoring monument, where you will constantly recharge your life bar even in the middle of combat. You need every bit of XP to get through the beginning areas of the game, and taking advantage of lazy AI is one of the most efficient ways to advance.

Finally, the biggest technical complaint about Two Worlds has to do with the framerate. As a port of a PC game that came out a few months ago in Germany, there’s no sign that this game was completely optimized for the Xbox 360. The framerate is consistently low, causing a choppy slideshow every time I rode my horse through the forest. The game also constantly loads in new areas, causing stuttering and freezing, sometimes causing the game to crash. While you can save at any point, it becomes a necessity to avoid losing valuable progress and experience.

Now that the litany of complaints is out of the way, it’s time to focus on the good. Like Oblivion, Two Worlds is a truly open-world experience, where you can customize your character’s prime attributes and choose the next chapter of your quest. If you want to focus all of your skill points on using a bow and arrow, you can do so at the expense of magic or melee attacks. If you want to ignore the main quest to save your telepathic twin sister Kira, you can just hone your fighting skills on bears, wolves, and wyverns instead. Decisions you make in Two Worlds often have far-reaching effects, and your reputation with a half dozen major organizations from necromancers to merchants is dependent on your choice of alliances.

There’s a lot to do in Two Worlds, and potentially dozens of hours of adventure to be had exploring the massive environments. While the quests aren’t all fascinating, there are still several good opportunities to gain XP, and they’ll ease you into new areas while suggesting more side missions. It’s a classic RPG formula, and it still works so well that it almost makes your forget about the technical glitches.

The graphics, while clearly taxing the capabilities of the Xbox 360, are generally quite good. The environments are the real star here, with lush foliage and gorgeous weather effects. Weapons and gear take second place in the Two Worlds beauty contest, with well-rendered leather jerkins and some intimidating swords, spears, bows, and axes that appear on your character when you equip them. The character models don’t look quite as nice, and they are a step down from those characters seen in Oblivion, which many people didn’t care for. Still, there’s a good amount of character variety within the towns and castles you’ll discover.

The sound effects are mostly unimpressive, with lackluster voice acting. The exception, however, is the music that plays throughout the game. It’s appropriately moody, almost-but-not-quite like Howard Shore’s Lord of the Rings score. Your main character will also make plenty of comments in response to changes in the weather or the approach of bad guys, but they don’t have much of an impact on the game.

There are versus multiplayer options over Xbox Live, and a co-op mode that can be found on the character select screen by hitting the Y button. Most of the versus modes perform so poorly over Live that they are practically unplayable, but the developers say they’re working on a way to improve their servers. Perhaps with a local area connection you could have some fun, but if you’ve got friends who want to play Two Worlds with you at your house, you’d be better off trying the tabletop RPG that comes with the collector’s edition instead.

It’s easy to see the similarities to Diablo and Oblivion, and like those games, Two Worlds can become addictive if you allow it to. There’s enough interesting stuff to find in the environments, skills, and loot to encourage players to keep exploring and completing quests, even if their horses do get caught on rocks. Stackable items, branching storylines, and special fighting moves like multi-arrow shots make this game unique among action RPGs. Technical glitches aside, it’s a good game for RPG fans to spend many valuable hours playing. Just be prepared to conquer a clunky user interface and a choppy framerate before you’re able to conquer these worlds.

Update: A PR rep has let us know that the server issues that are affecting performance over Xbox Live are being dealt with. Also, to correct our previous error, the co-op mode isn’t scrapped, it just wasn’t mentioned in the instruction manual. To start a co-op game, hit Y at the online character select screen to create an RPG character.