Titan Quest

"Pretty action RPG let down by fatal flaws"

Original review: rated (7/10) on 17th August, 2006
This update: rated (5/10) on 29th September, 2006

- [ Introduction ] -

Titan Quest is the new action RPG on the block, this time set in the Ancient World. From Greece to Egypt to the mysterious Orient, your hero will be involved not only in saving the world but also tangled up in the affairs of the gods.

I will be looking at Titan Quest from a Diablo 2* veteran's point of view. There's a reason THAT game is still going strong well past half a decade since its release while still being used as the yardstick for similarly played action RPGs. Note that I say play; there are many games which may also technically be considered action RPGs - like say, the AD&D games (e.g. NWN). However, those don't fall into the same niche since they place much less emphasis on the repeated playthrough concept.

*When I mention Diablo 2, I refer to the whole D2+LoD package. The LoD expansion is pretty much expected; no gamer worth his salt plays without it.

- [ Story ] - fair (5/10)

Narrated to you in the form of quests, the background of the game is fairly well done. If you're into mythology you'll find a lot of interesting reading. I am no authority on the ancients even though I like to read about that period, but it all fits in pretty well with what I recall. From what the developers mention on the titanquest.net forums though, they did a whole lot of research into everything, so you can rest assured that most depictions are fairly consistent with the myths.

However, having to consult your Quest page or the various NPCs makes for a somewhat lackluster presentation - the opening video is just about the only one you'll see, everything else done in-game via dialogue, there isn't even a narrational overhead or subtitling.

Someone here purported to claim that Titan Quest is "Diablo 2, without insane boredom!". That is a blatant lie. Did he even PLAY the game? Fact: it plays virtually similarly to D2. From character stats, skill point allocation, item variety, difficulty settings, to the interface, you do the same exact things in this game, in a genre that the reviewer claims to hate. The only obvious superficial difference is the graphics - such a "review" smells exactly like the meretricious dreck spewed by a typical shallow narrow-minded graphics-blinded FPS-loving gamer.

Titan Quest is NO BETTER than Diablo 2 when it comes to spinning an interesting yarn - and in fact, Diablo 2 does a better job of telling it, to boot, with multiple cinematics. Someone else here was impressed by the opening video - you're going to rate it "GREAT!" because of ONE single lousy video?! Sorry, that's the ONLY ONE you'll get, and even that is merely implied to be part of the story, not an actual game event. You do not see the alleged vault the creatures broke out of, unlike the videos of Diablo 2 which depict actual in-game locations or happenings.

Other than fairly accurate and interesting historical facts, TQ has a weaker, less engaging story compared to D2. Not only presentation-wise, but from the depth of characters and quests you are involved in. This is yet another huge failing of Titan Quest: the NPCs. They represent the ONLY source of story and quests driving the game, but they themselves are little more than 1-dimensional cardboard cutouts, with hardly any personality (despite decent and sometimes amusing voice actors), and not memorable AT ALL. Even I, despite playing and finishing multiple characters all the way three times through the game (three difficulties, again like Diablo 2) with each of them, only remember them mostly in terms of "talk to the guy in the lower-left corner of X town to get Y quest".

Once you reach the next town anywhere, you will forget about the inhabitants of the previous town - not to mention the ones before that, let alone those in previous acts. Why should you remember them? They don't factor in the game at all once they've dispensed with their quests or flavour text. They could very well just be mouthpieces to feed quests to you: and that's exactly what they are. You get this impression of chasing the villain-du-jour of each act, and the NPCs are just like waystations where you pick up the next paragraph in the script. Totally forgettable, and while not critical to the action, it detracts from experiencing the story. You don't feel like a hero saving the world and earning the gratitude of the populace - you feel more like a faceless soldier headed into disaster while getting a pat on the head from passers-by or the random "well done!".

The NPCs in Diablo, to contrast, comment during and after each quest you do, and while it's not realistic to expect that all of them are memorable, you DO at least identify with the important ones, like good ol' Deckard Cain, the arch-angel Tyrael, or the proud barbarians of Harrogath. Even the prime evils linger malignantly in the background, overshadowing everything you do while you progress through the game. In Titan Quest on the other hand you spend most of the time running down a nameless evil, then kill him, only to find out another one is causing havoc somewhere else, then chase that one down, etc. It's like a series of fetch-quests and go-to-quests; there's not too much sense of the epic that's SUPPOSED to be the main theme of the game.

- [ Graphics / Sound (i.e. Presentation) ] - good (7/10)

Beats Diablo 2 flat in terms of technical graphical complexity, but what did you expect? It's been half a decade and more than 3 video card generations later - gaming rigs go obsolete much faster than that. The blurred shadow effect was somewhat interesting for a while but quite a few players complained about it. Lighting effects are excellent however, although combined with shadows produce unacceptable lag even on hefty computers, noticeable during night scenes or indoors or in caverns. The patches address this a little, and now officially you can remove the day/night cycle if you wish - although the terrible transparency-inducing lag you get when venturing into the forests of the final act will still plague you.

The fact that you could FINALLY see every item of equipment you equipped on your character was good - after all, this game is in 3D, all you needed was to slap on a 3D-model and texture of said item. 2D games like Diablo needed prerendered sprites of your character, in all possible combinations and character poses, very much more effort needed. However, you only get 1 (a single one!) male or female model to pick from - no tweaking for height, face, skintone, hair - which would really have been trivial to do in 3D.

I mean, if not height (since that would maybe stretch some equipment out of proportion), at least face, eye / hair colour and hair style. Nope, everybody looks the same as everybody else. Big minus points here. Even Diablo 2 with its 2D sprites had very different looking characters to contrast each class.

The world environment is good and quite well done - you do feel as if you were running through forests, beaches, grassland, cities, caves, etc. Grass rippled as you ran, as well as water - very nice effects. You could scale the zoom from up-close to almost overhead, but for the most part it was more practical to stay at mid-zoom (press keypad '2'). However, one annoying effect of the fixed camera position was that enemies were easier to spot at a distance if you were approaching them from below. Approaching them from above meant going against the camera tilt, so you had to be close to actually see them, at which point they could see you too.

Monster design was quite decent, although the cannon fodder were repeated a bit too much for my liking, and were mostly not as impressive as Diablo 2's later foes (like the awesome Knights) even though they were beautiful to look at. Minus the satyrs, the blue maenads, the reptilian fish-men, the crocodile-men, and the tiger-men, what do you have left? If you look at the monster 3D models appearing on the credits scene when you finish the game, you can see that there seem to be many of them, but in reality many are just variations on a theme. This isn't an imaginary world fantasy game, so the actual variety of enemies is not large.

Sound effects were sufficiently ok to remind you of what they were for, decent but not great. The music was better, but still nothing to write home about. In fact I had some issues with the music since it was often very soft, only to spring out loud at dramatic moments - I'm the type who actually pays attention to the music, and it was annoying not to be able to enjoy it.

And regarding the sound and music, you can't even turn them off, a complaint others had too. Why do developers insist on a low-max setting, when it should be off-max. Many gamers are used to customising their sessions with winamp or something else playing in the background.

- [ Gameplay ] - fatally flawed (5/10)

Okay, this is where my Diablo 2 comparison kicks into full gear. After all, combat is the heart of this genre - if you don't like it, you're playing the wrong game. Basically Titan Quest plays like Diablo 2, with several improvements and a few WTFs. I will not be addressing stability problems - those are not play mechanic issues.

They got rid of portal / id scrolls, ammo, and durability. Honestly, these were mostly just inconveniences, forcing you to return to town but expend no other effort to deal with them. Titan Quest also does not sport vendor "caps", meaning they will always sell you equipment useful to your level, so you will always find something of interest on them - a very good welcome from Diablo 2, where vendor items were largely useless. On the other hand, they did not implement gambling, forcing players to reload their game continually in order to get the vendors to sell items they wanted.

NPCs called Mystics allow you to "buy back" skillpoints to reallocate, which is a very welcome move, avoiding regretting putting points in a skill you later did not like. They did it for too cheaply though, although I suppose this is necessary to please casual players who presumeably outnumber the hardcore players in terms of sales this game generates.

Titan Quest also allows you to socket items, however you can socket virtually anything except for certain higher tier items. On the down side, you can only socket the SAME type of socketable. Meaning if you socket a relic (or charm) of type A into an item, you can only ever add more A-type relics until you reach the A-relic completion limit (3 or 5, depending) and get a relic-set bonus. This means no more mix-and-matching socketables like in Diablo 2, preventing interesting combinations from being made, or creating runeword-style results. This also means game veterans will know which relics are crap and which to keep, rendering the low/medium end ones worthless - at least in Diablo 2 there was always the hope that you could find a combination to make a cool runeword, even with a low-end rune.

The maps are fixed, but they are huge. In fact, I actually thought that Greece (the first act) was the entire game (I did not prejudice myself by reading reviews before taking the first plunge). Random maps aren't too big of an issue - but it does get tiresome after playing multiple different characters. It gives you that "been there, done that" feeling far too quickly.

The fatal flaw in Titan Quest however is the skillsets. Sure, you get 8 masteries to choose from, and pick a combination of 2, making for a wide range of possibilities yes? Well, most of the skills are single-target based; aside from a few skills in the spellcasting masteries and the overpowered summons (an overreaction to the underpowered Diablo 2 summons perhaps), most of the time you will be attacking one target at a time. And this is where the game breaks down.

The fun of this genre lies in tearing up crowds, and smashing them with flair. In Diablo 2, even with the "meagre" fixed skillsets of the 7 classes, all of them had multiple ways of dealing with multiple enemies. Sorceress? Nearly ALL of her skills hit multiple enemies. Barbarian? The famous whirlwind aside, a lot of the other skills (stun etc) affect crowds. Necromancer? Curses were area-effect. Amazon? Homing arrow, multishot, strafe, valkyrie. Paladin? The hammer ;) Their "auras" by definition were area-effect, but most of the other skills weren't - and true enough, most Diablo 2 players did not play the Paladin if they wanted mass-killing fun. The additional classes? The Druid had his summons and spells much like a mix of the necromancer and sorceress, while the Assassin, while seeming to be a melee class by definition, rocked the world with a strategic use of (spammable) traps and flashy kick counters that culminated in the Phoenix attack which blasted frost or even rained meteors around you.

So what does Titan Quest's masteries have to offer? The hunting mastery alone (bow/spear) which I used is very spartan - I used one skillset (Marksmanship) which had two modifiers that tacked on piercing and a (very small) blast radius. That was on leftclick, replacing default attack. And what else? There are two aura-likes, a so-so decoy, and ensnare which casts a net on only ONE target! That's it! No homing, no multi, no strafing. My Titan Quest huntress felt positively naked even at level 30 compared to my Diablo 2 bow amazon at the same level.

Coupled with enemies stopping from chasing you if you run past their "area of influence", the game seems practically designed for snipe-luring or summon / lure / trap baiting. You could not agro very large numbers of creatures, round them all up, and then rain destruction on them like in Diablo 2 - this IMO kills a lot of the fun. I found my huntress pretty tough work, and my melee-only characters fared worse. As expected, only spellcasters had a bit more options, especially with their summons. One more thing, staves actually fired at range, which meant you could actually NOT invest in any offensive spells at all since the staff damage grew in power with better staffs, and you could just put a few points in a couple of auras to help you, and then dump all your points in your summons when they became available. My summoner actually did this - she had NO attack spells whatsoever, relying entirely on her staff attack, and then eventually on a summon to tank.

In fact she could even ignore the later-available mass spells like chain lightning and eruption, since the summon was strong enough and her staff attack boostable with auras and items that improved attack speed. Unthinkable in Diablo where quick skill-to-situation adaption was paramount! How the hotkey system worked also conspired to reduce you to spamming two skills on your left and right mousebuttons repeatedly over and over.

Another glaring difference is monster density. Titan Quest has small monster mobs, which come at you in packs between 2 to 5. This fits into the predominantly single-target skill paradigm, but all this means is that it degenerates into a clickfest real fast. This genre's fun lies in killing with flair, not just click-killing. Despite all the skills, most of the time fights are mano-a-mano slugfests (broken up by the occasional monster camp) precisely because of the nature of the skills. Only spellcasters have area effect spells, and guess what? The most spammed broken spells are EXACTLY those spells. Forcing us to target on each and every monster gets old real fast, this genre should've progressed beyond single-target clickfests.

Lastly is balance and survivability. Monsters die very fast in Titan Quest, which is why most skills appear "ok" - their worthlessness only appears in the later difficulties when you begin developing them. Note that if the Mystic NPCs did not exist, I bet that there would've been tons of complaints about useless skills. As it is, if you make a mistake, no big deal - just visit a Mystic and reallocate skill points. This is not an "advantage". This is a cheap cop-out that sweeps balance problems under the rug. After all, why should you NEED to change your skill points when you don't WANT to?

Surprisingly, dying easily goes for players as well - despite attention to armor, defense, and resistances, even a 10,000-hp Nature hybrid can die in several hits. Extremely annoying for melee characters especially since they typically pay more attention to their equipment, compared to the fact that spellcasters can get away easily by hiding behind summons and just lobbing a few spells. How fair is that? Not at all.

- [ Replayability ] - fair (6/10)

Regarding item farming, about as good as Diablo 2, if not better, considering that all items, even uniques, have variable stats. Item-wise, Titan Quest does better than Diablo 2 although not by too much, especially considering the socket combination limitation. However, it's so tedious to run through the game for more stuff because there aren't many mob-plowing options. And besides, it's so easy anyway, why should you? Getting loot is hardly a challenge, which removes the need for better equip anyway. There's not much in it except maybe for completing set items and bragging rights.

- [ Recommendation ] - overall (5/10)

Buy when you can get it cheap - it's a good game, but hardly worthy of the title of "King" of Action RPGs as some have implied. It's a shame, since Titan Quest looks very nice - imagine, all that polish, only to be let down by the heart that drives the gameplay.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 08/17/06, Updated 09/29/06