Why is it that LOL2 is so hated, while for example on mobygames you can read it garnered mostly very positive reviews at the time? And the graphics on the screenshots does not seem as ugly as some say they do. Sure it's totally different than the first one, but what does it matter? Nostalgia factor?

I don't know. I played LOL2 when it came out and loved it. Still love to play this game.

Ugly graphics. The 3D engine's resolution is so low that after a while your eyes start to hurt trying to focus. Then cheesy FMV sequences and dialogues with actors dressed in high school drama club reject costumes. There are other things, but these are my major gripes about the game.

However, the story is intriguing and the main character's morphing compelling. It's a shame they didn't use a simple 2D engine with hand-drawn sequences like in the first game. 3D was new at that time, but it took a few years until it got refined.

Seems some reviewers of the time didn't think so:

"As you can tell, Lands of Lore: Guardians of Destiny blew me away. It surpassed all my expectations. The graphics, level design and audio make this a truly engrossing game. "

maybe the whole 3dfx acceleration thingy?

frankly, as i look through the screens, i don't see justification for such an opinion, except for 2d characters, who are indded blobs of pixels, the textures and backgrounds look very detailed and look like there was a lot of work put into them. Comparing this to all those FPSes that were running on 320x200 resolution... maybe seeing it in action would change my mind, but the screens themselves look nice.

Searching through the net i even found that some people had positive experience with the actors...

If the game was in development for 4 years, with all the hardware changes in that time... for me that's impressive.

Just beat LOL1, moved to LOL2 and I was like OMG why is it so ugly. Not sure if I'm gonna try and beat it.... we'll see, LOL1 is a masterpiece though.

>> The graphics, level design and audio make this a truly engrossing game. "

What was a good 3D at that time is now a messy bunch of pixels, 2D on the other hand ages better.
Lands of Lore 1 was surely worse than LOL2 graphically at that time. Now LOL1 is considered somewhat acceptable, LOL2 is terrible. The same can apply, for example, to a comparison between Eye of the Beholder (acceptable 2D) vs. Ultima Underworld (3D mess).

We are now much less marveled by the free movement, the perspective, the non-tiled based world and we are much more sensitive to jagged edges, lack of antialias, lack of texture filtering, lack of texture resolution etc.

I was wondering about whether the graphics were objectively bad, or just by today's standards. If it's the second, then some people's rants "why did they choose 3d over 2d" are pointless, 'couse at the time everybody was happy with the decision and it was a logical move. Also it would prove that the nostalgic factor is significantly lower on this installment and i wonder why. It may say something about average GOG user age. Are the people who were growing up on late '90s games not yet old enough to feel nostalgic about their childhood activities? Also Might and Magic VI-VIII doesn't seem to get as much hate and if i compare screenshots, then MMs look worse than LOL2!

My questions may seem a bit academic, but i'm really curious about such things.

Hello everyone I am wondering if LOL1 and LOL2 are compatible on 64 bit systems? I have
LOL2 and LOL3 on the hard disk. When I try to install LOL2 I get an error mssg saying it's not compatable with 64 bit and when I try to install LOL3 I get a message telling me to insert the disk into the CDROM..... What a bummer..... Any one played LOL3?

LOL2: yes and no. No in the sense that you can't run it natively. Yes, in that you can run it with DOSBOX with success (the Gog version runs with dosbox in fact).

LOL3: I don't know. If you are the technical type you can try Virtualbox with a 3D accelerated windows installation.

Another point to be taken into account is the curse of sequels which depart a bit too much from the originals...

For example, I personally believe EOB3, Ultima VIII and Ultima IX to be average games.. not great but not the crap many want them to be. They were simply different enough and below the mark set up by their predecessors.

Would they be judged as standalone games, they would get much better reviews (again, not great, but not paradigm of the bad games either). Take Diablo and call it "Ultima X" and it would have got bad votes too (though not as bad as U9 :)).

That's understandable. Yeah, it's all a complex psychological knot of wanting to try something new and also recieve the "good old". It may be difficult to find a proper balance, not to bore and not to disappoint, it's always a problem with a title bearing a number.

Nevertheless my argument still stands, that there's lack of people here who played the second part as their first.

frankly, i find that part at the beggining where you meet this cat, and your like "hello kitty" and he tries to kill you, well that is a difficult segment to say the least. kinda turned me off becuase that cat can kill you FAST!

you know what game lol 2 reminds me of? ravenloft and menzoberanzen. couple of classics.

indeed.

LoL2 was my first game of the series, after that part 3. i loved them both. neverever heard of or saw the first game. well i was 9 and didnt have internet, lol :D i just played the games my father bought. when LoL1 was released on GoG.com last year, i gave it a try and bought it, installed it, started it and thought WHAT THE HELL IS THIS UGLY CRAP ( please don't be mad :D ) well after a while i thought nah ok whatever, ill try again.

i had some difficulties with the game controls as i never played a dungeon crawler in my life and was used to lol2 and lol3. still thinking it was kinda crap i played it. and played. and played. dammit i played for hours ignoring everything else. like a real addict :D when i finished the game i was really happy that i did, because its a real great game. it doesnt have much in common with lol2 and lol3 though.

in the end, all 3 games are really great in their own gameplays and graphics, though the music in lol1 is the best imo.

If you can get the 3dfx acceleration working as I was fortunate enough to do the game looks very nice, indeed--especially compared to the pixellated mess it looks like without 3d acceleration. LoL1 was a straight-up 2d game--LoL2 really requires 3d acceleration to look as its developers intended (I bought the game when it was new and I owned a 3dfx 3d card.) I use nGlide currently and the game looks very good, maybe even better than it originally did. Still, I'm having a few configuration problems of my own at the moment with this game...

Don't forget that it's not enough when you see the "hardware acceleration" option no longer grayed out. You need to select the option and turn ON acceleration before you'll see the massive difference it makes in the game's display.

I see people mentioning Ultima 9 and comparing the two. As someone who was online and in game forums and community sites when both LoL2 and Ultima 9 came out I can tell you that while LoL2 was mostly well liked, U9 was *not*.

LoL2 was the beggining of a great divide in the CRPG hobby at the time. A lot of DOS era folks like me, who grew up with C64s and Amigas and 386's didn't much care for the fancy looking, watered down, single PC party style LoL2 gave...so you might see a lot of left over hate from those folks. As time went on, however, I learned to appreciate LoL2 for what it was...a nice first person action RPG that is flawed but enjoyable.

Other series around that time made equally harsh movements into the burgeoning 3D world...like Might & Magic 6, which also had a small but vocal minority of DOS folks like me crying about it. Like LoL2 though, I quickly adapted.

Same can be said for Baldur's Gate 1, since some disliked the fact it wasn't turn based. I know many friends of mine at the time on Interplay's site that were rioting over comments that "Auto pause is the same as turn based". Yet, it didn't take long for most of them to enjoy the bigger mroe fleshed out world BG gave us compared to the goldbox games.

But Ultima 9....to compare U9 to LoL2...that's a travesty. Those who hated it then still hate it now, and most of its fans are those too young to remember the Xmas of 99.