Titan Quest + Immortal Throne ~ Diablo 2 + Lord of Destruction
From the onset, Titan Quest unabashedly rips off its inspiration. Again you find yourself in control of a nameless hero on the trail of an ancient, powerful evil attempting to free a more ancient, more powerful evil. The Titans, rather upset at that whole Greek Gods banishing them from the world they once ruled thing, have freed themselves from their Olympian bonds and sworn vengeance against their former captors. Three lesser Titans, called Telkines, have unleashed an army of Greek monsters upon the world – minotaurs, gorgons, satyrs – and are now trying to free Typhon, a powerful Titan that wants nothing more than to see Zues’ head on a pike.
Caught up in the Gods’ affairs, and with the mortal world in danger, you’ll travel between ancient Greece, Egypt, and China in a quest to prevent these Telkine from loosing their Titan master. Like Diablo 2, the game is divided into large acts, three in this case, each of which takes place in a different section of the globe. Each locale is vibrantly brought to life through the game’s powerful 3D engine, which retains Diablo’s 3/4 overhead perspective. Character models and environments are surprisingly detailed, perhaps too much so, in fact, as even at its lowest settings the game’s lush visuals are demanding and the framerate frequently drops in larger, populated areas. Each location is clearly defined by historic and mythological landmarks; before the game is through you’ll visit an Athens in peril, fight mummies beneath the pyramids of Giza, and travel along the Great Wall of China.
Throughout it all, of course, you’ll be confronting the Titans’ armies. Combat is fast and unrelenting; you’ll continually battle small groups of interesting enemy types that interact and play off one another’s strengths and weaknesses to form generally engaging encounters. The game’s robust physics system sends defeated enemies satisfyingly ragdolling off cliffs and tumbling over level geometry. It’s not all about flinging fallen corpses, however, as Titan Quests’ enemies excel at killing your character if you’re not careful. Thankfully, the game frequently saves your progress with Portals and Rebirth Fountains, ensuring you’re never too far from your corpse and serving as stand-ins for Diablo 2’s Waypoints. Guzzling potions is the only way to ensure you’ll be alive long enough to sell any valuable items you come across in your travels and earn the riches you so obviously deserve.
Titan Quest features the sort of tiered, prefix/suffix-modified item system you’d expect from an action RPG. The game’s itemization is really its greatest strength, surpassing even Diablo 2’s. Enemies will only drop items they’re carrying, meaning wild boars won’t yield suits of armor and a single skeleton won’t drop five polearms. Additionally, every item that hits the ground is potentially useful for someone, even if it’s just vendor-fodder for you. Every item and item modifier is powerful enough to find a home in some wanting character’s inventory. There is no garbage loot here; truly, this is loot porn at its most beautiful. On top of the standalone weapons, armor, and accessories, Titan Quest’s baddies also drop relics and charms you can combine to form powerful items used to augment the strength of other items. Plus, the game features an auto-sorting feature that automatically rearranges items in your inventory, allowing you to keep your full focus on more pressing matters – like slaughtering an army of harpies.
Besides individualizing your character through your item loadout, the game’s skill system grants a wealth of customization options. As you play the game, you can choose from up to two of nine different masteries, one at level two and one at level eight. Masteries function similarly to Diablo 2’s skill trees, with skills positioned in one of six tiers. Each time your character gains a level, he or she also gains three skill points. These points are used to purchase new skills, as long as you have purchased all subsequently required skills, or to improve upon skills you’ve already acquired. In order to unlock each new tier, however, you must invest in a general mastery pool that doesn’t benefit the skills you’ve learned in any way, but instead boosts your character’s attributes. This system allows you to spend your points in a rush for the top tier skills without too much of a penalty, as your character still becomes stronger with each level even if his or her skills don’t actually improve. You can progress through the masteries at your own pace, slowly maxing out lower tier abilities before accessing newer skills or heavily investing in the mastery itself in order to obtain top tier skills as quickly as possible. The game encourages and rewards specialization. Additionally, you can visit a mystic at any time to untrain spent skill points, for a price, ensuring mistakes made early in the game don’t have ramifications later on.
Titan Quest also features a multiplayer mode, but it’s archaic even by Diablo 2’s eight-year-old standards. Characters are all stored client-side, meaning there’s nothing stopping enterprising players from hacking their character files to make themselves impossibly powerful. This effectively ruins any legitimate character interaction or item trading from the onset. To make matters worse, games only support up to seven players and suffer from massive lag spikes whenever a player joins or leaves. Helpful tools like the ability to kick or ban players from your games or to force all players to join the same party automatically are welcome, but the multiplayer component is so lazily implemented you won’t spend much time online anyway. Aside from playing with your friends, playing online is rendered moot by rampant cheating and the game’s overall poor replayability.
There are many reasons to replay Titan Quest, even if multiplayer fun isn’t one of them. The mastery system allows for a wide range of possible character types and the itemization is so excellent, from the types of items dropped to the rate at which amazing items appear, that it’s hard to resist the siren call of character building. Unfortunately, two large problems cut Titan Quest’s time in your DVD-rom drive short and keep the title from becoming anything more than a very good single player, single playthrough game.
First, and most shockingly, Titan Quest’s levels aren’t randomly generated. They’re certainly very well designed, offering multiple paths to a single destination and rewarding exploration, but they’re also set in stone. While this has no ramifications on your first playthrough, in the long run, this lack of randomness makes a very repetitive experience. Quest objectives are always in the same locations and areas’ entry and exit points never change. Replaying the game to test out new character builds or to farm loot, staples of the genre, becomes very boring very quickly. There’s little incentive to play through the exact same level layout a second time on a harder difficulty setting, let alone with a new character.
To make matters worse, Titan Quest is unusually long. With Immortal Throne, the game clocks in at 25-30 hours per difficulty level. With Epic and Legendary difficulties waiting beyond the first, you’ll be playing each of your characters for 100 hours before hitting the level cap and exhausting the game’s content. Action RPGs are generally shorter games that encourage replaying their content, and Titan Quests’ decision to fly in the face of convention by building a lengthy, unrandomized world unfortunately cripples the game’s longevity. The game is a great deal of fun, and does a lot of things right, but you’ll be hard pressed to find the motivation to replay the game, online or off.
Still, as a single player action RPG Titan Quest is an excellent offering, even if you only play through it once. Immortal Throne, its expansion, adds a fourth act set in Hades to the game in addition to a ninth mastery that focuses on buffing and crowd control. Most importantly, it adds a new vendor called a caravan, which provides additional storage space as well as a universal storage area that any of your characters can access. This greatly alleviates any of the inventory pains of vanilla Titan Quest and alone makes the original unplayable when compared against the expansion. Immortal Throne also introduces a robust crafting system, allowing you to combine the relics and charms used to augment items into powerful artifacts. At this point, there’s no reason to play Titan Quest without Immortal Throne, and anyone doing so will be sorely missing out on some of the game’s best features.
Sadly, THQ hasn’t released a single patch for Titan Quest since Immortal Throne’s release in March 2007. Many balancing issues as well as superficial graphic and quest bugs remain. Though honestly, the balance issues aren’t much of a problem given the game’s poor multiplayer component. It may lean heavily on Diablo 2’s shoulders, but in many ways, Titan Quest surpasses its inspiration. In the eight years since Diablo 2’s release, it has faced many imitators but Titan Quest is its first competitor. Its gorgeous graphics, subtle physics, and brilliant itemization balance out graphical problems and the absence of random levels. While it may not be your next life-consuming addiction, Titan Quest is still an excellent entry in the genre and a welcome appetizer in the wait for Diablo 3.