What is going on here, if I type in my GOG-provided CD key I'm told that I have to "activate" this game via internet or phone, or else the game will only run in "Demo Mode", whatever that means.

When I click "activate by Internet" I'm then told that I must register my game, and in order to do that I have to fill in fields requesting personal information. Perhaps the game developers aren't aware of this but product activation and registration are generally two separate things. Product registration is historically voluntary, but here it is mandatory.

Can't I just play the darn game in LAN coop without all this hassle?

Forgive my coarseness but WTF is going on here?
Problem partially resolved: initially unchecking the "register this product" checkbox on the registration page did nothing. After a reinstall of the game, it allows me to activate the game without registering when unchecked. A mystery for the ages lol.

Thanks for posting this and letting us know. I was going to get Two Worlds, but I definitely won't be buying it now. I don't want any DRM and activation is the complete opposite of that.

I thought GOG was all about no DRM.

There is no DRM. The poster has probably installed a patch or update that has reverted his copy to one with DRM. The GOG installed game does not have any DRM. Could you describe exactly how you installed the game, and what patches etc. you installed? The game should not require activation.

Thanks. I'll take another look at it and put it back on my wish list.

To clarify the situation, the online multiplayer portions of Two Worlds and some other GOG.com releases require using a CD key (available by contacting support) in some way or other. This is an unavoidable limitation due to using the same multiplayer servers as other releases of these games.

The single player portions of GOG.com games never ever require a CD key or any form of activation.

In the case of Two Worlds specifically, registration is a one-time step; the game remembers the registration details, and for future installs you can simply choose "activate by phone" and enter the key sent to your email.

While the single player can be played without entering a key, if you do not enter a key the game maintains that it is running in "demo mode", which might not hurt its functionality for single player but it certainly doesn't sound good that a paid purchase is a "demo" in name.

I simply installed this via the GOG installer. No patches or any modifications were made.

As far as I can see, there is no local multiplayer whatsoever in this game. The GOG page reports that this has "coop", which is why I bought it, but the "coop" seems to simply be normal multiplayer mode. When I jumped through all the hoops to gain access to the multiplayer mode, there was no coop distinction, and I was simply dumped into some generic medieval-looking town with no prompts from the game on how to proceed, which is not how the SP campaign starts off. To me, coop mode is playing through the single player campaign with other people (eg:Borderlands) or playing through a coop-focused alternate campaign with others (eg:Portal 2). From what little I've seen, and please chime in if I'm missing something here, Two Worlds really has no more "coop" than do games like WOW or any game with team deathmatch.

Lastly, this game leaves much to be desired in terms of performance & appearance on the PC.

Two Worlds has a separate set of multiplayer quests (available by pressing F12 while in the waiting town) which other players can join in on. You can read more details here. I haven't really tried it myself but apparently each quest set uses a semi-persistent world map for the players to explore, with character equipment and stats being fully persistent.

As for performance I can't comment on that as it has always run beautifully on my now-ageing system (Core 2 Duo, HD3850 256MB video card, 2GB DDR2-800 RAM). Installing the latest PhysX Legacy Driver could perhaps help improve performance a bit (I don't use the bundled PhysX version, which is much older).

There have been a few people complain of performance issues, with a variety of solutions:

http://www.gog.com/forum/two_worlds/horrible_performance_unplayable

http://www.gog.com/forum/two_worlds/very_very_low_fps_in_dungeons