The second game we finished during Extra Life this year, this was another one that was a long time coming. In fact I’ve had this in my steam backlog so long, I was given this version as a free upgrade when it released and it reminded me it was there. But during the 100 Days of gaming, the dice chose this, so I started it up for the first time. Almost 70 hours later, I am glad I did.
Story: Long before the dawn of man, the world was in primordial darkness… during this time, super-powerful beings known as titans ruled everything. Then came the gods of Olympus bringing with them light. In the war that followed, the Olympian gods won, exiling most of the titans, imprisoning the others. But a few escaped their eye, hiding in the shadows as the eons passed and forgotten. During this time, mankind prospered under the gods’ watchful eyes.
But this was not meant to last forever, as those titans that had escaped, the Telkines have returned leading armies of monsters across the human world. Why now and what kind of hell are they planning on unleashing? No one really knows, but when your local village is attacked, you can’t just stand by, so you grab your sword and head out there!
From this point the game will take you on a journey across Greece, Egypt, and Asia as you follow the Telkine and his two siblings on their path to the destruction of the human world in their quest for revenge against it and those that made it. The tail is both direct and only part of the story you will witness, however, since this edition of Titan Quest includes the Immortal Throne expansion and with it an entire second story to take your hero through. This too will be pretty direct, but since it plays directly on the ending of the original I can say little without spoiling what is to come.
What I can say is that while these plots are very direct and pretty predictable, they are still well written out as the story will be driven by both the events you play and the conversations of those you do quests for.
This also goes for the much smaller side-quests which both color the world and form nice neat little mini-stories to go with the main plotline. This can include anything from finding a strange artifact for a rich man willing to pay to looking for ruined ships with a cache of war-gear for you to take, to hunting down beasts terrorizing the city you are currently in and more. There is a LOT of material here and most of it is incredibly solid, if simple.
7/10
Graphics: This is yet another game that is old enough you would expect the look to age badly, but surprises you. The game is displayed from a bird’s-eye-view, and looks pretty good. Everything is fully modeled, including the items dropped, giving the whole thing a very solid appearance. But the game also takes advantage of this create shadows for the world and even an effective day/night cycle adding some nice extra touches to it all.
In addition, while your camera’s direction is fixed, your zoom is not, allowing you to zero in for cinematic effect or out just a little bit further for a tactical edge. This is how I tended to play but especially considering how little you would be expected to use such zoom capability to get close, it’s actually amazing how much detail is there. Don’t get me wrong, when at the minimum distance, things look a lot more simple then one would accept even potentially back then as a standard, but it’s still amazing how much work when into these things in case you wanted to look closer at them.
And with this technical prowess comes a vast variety of lands, people, and monsters to feast your eyes on. Each of the four acts carries it’s own theme accompanying the area of the world it generally takes place in. The landscapes all feel exactly as they should as do the inevitable dungeons you will find within, be it caves, temples, tombs, or anything else you have to explore.
Each act is also populated by it’s own theme in monsters, so for example while in Greece, you will face off with minotaurs, skeletons equipped like an ancient Greek warrior, and even more familiar specific faces as bosses (starting with the ones shown off in the opening video, the gorgons). Meanwhile Egypt will offer you up scorpions, entombed guardians, scarabs, and even the souls of those buried with their pharaoh to fight off. And Asia will have yet a whole other selection of enemies completely it’s own to take on.
The end result to all this is that despite the length of the game, you will never find yourself board with the world, as each part varies more then enough to stand out until you get through to the next.
7/10
Sound: The music of this game is not going to impress you, unfortunately. It is far from bad and it fits it’s role, but there is little here that you will remember even a few minutes later or even really changes the tone of the game. It’s just there to fill in space since you would notice the silence.
Nor are sound effects going to wow you. Your swords, axes, spears, staffs, or any other spell you use will sound pretty good, but it’s pretty much the standard at this point. No, like so many games it seems, it’s the voice acting that stands out… and there is a LOT of it.
Just about every city you come across as you journey across the world contains several citizens and many of them are either salesmen, supply/cause quests to proceed, or even just give background story of the events in the town, and every single one of them was voice acted. Some are short, some are long, but all are clean, crisp, and sound great! Some even have multiple speeches they will cycle through when you click on them more then once. Simply put the sheer volume of work here speaks for itself.. especially as this game comes from a time before such things were expected.
8/10
Gameplay: Titan Quest is a point & click Action Roleplaying Game game much like many others of the genre built around a 2-button mouse. If you want to go somewhere, click there and your character will go there. Want to interact with an NPC (shop or otherwise)? Click them and you will either hear their story or open up their shop to buy, sell, or swap things with your item storage. Want to attack a monster, clicking them will be the way to do it. (And holding shift will keep you stationary so you don't risk going somewhere you didn’t want to if you were firing a ranged weapon.) And you will be doing a lot of this since, as traditional to this kind of game, you will have a ton of monsters thrown at you.
If you feel like I’m ignoring a mouse button, don’t worry about it. You can equip a second function to the right mouse button as well for right-click access, as well as each of your number buttons. These abilities are anything from a secondary attack you choose to equip as well as potions and powers from your classes. In essence, if you’ve played Diablo 2 or any game of the type since then, you are going to be very familiar with the controls of this game very quickly.
But there have been a few updates to improve this, such as defined hot-keys for your health and energy potions, so you will never need to take up a spot you could use for your abilities as well as the ability to swap between two pallets of them at will, giving you some extra flexibility. But the real stand-out from most of these ARPGs is just how flexible the character building is.
When you start playing, you will choose only three things: your name, your gender, and the color of your initial tunic. From this point you begin as your village is attacked by the monsters the Telkine has lead by, but it won’t be long before you gain your first level and begin to actually build your character. At this time in addition to a couple points for your character’s stats, you will also get the option to pick your first class. You can do so right away if you choose, or you can hold out and think about it. You might well be tempted to do that as there are 10 different classes to pick from, all of which have a completely different set of abilities.
When you do pick one, you will now have access to their screen. On the far left is a “Mastery meter” which has lines going across the board from it at various levels. Any ability on the screen will require at the very least for you to level this up to a level above it’s icon, but boosting it will also boost some base stats of yours (class depending). In addition some skills require other lower skills to have points as well, as marked by the lines between them. But between these you will have your outline for what you can do to build your first class.
And yes, I meant first. After a certain point in the game, you will have the option to take a second mastery, but there is a trade-off here, because you will not boost the skill points you get at each level for by taking it. You will always get 3 per level. So what will you do? Will you stick with one and make yourself as powerful as you can with it? Or will you blend a few classes together to make your own mix of powers? The choice is yours as it is in few games of this type. (If you must know, I went straight Seer myself.)
Combine all this and you have a very entertaining, if familiar to many, experience waiting for you, and one you will have plenty of time to sink your teeth into. This game took me almost 80 hours to complete, and outside of exactly two bosses (one optional) I enjoyed one hell of a lot.
8/10
Bugs: While I did enjoy this game, I can not say it ran bug free. In fact, there were two bugs that happened fairly often while I played. One I could learn to the ignore… the other can potentially cost you a life (good thing the death penalty is only a counter in your stats and a small bit of experience you can regain if you can reach your grave).
- SHADOWS GO CRAZY! This is the most common bug I found in the game. It was most obvious during the day, but could happen at night as well. Basically, the shadows of the environment itself would not always work right. At night, you might have an issue every now and again like shadows around shrines would not match the shrine, being a simple shape instead, but during the day, the game sometimes would lose track of if it should display them at all. This would usually happen based on your position, but could even be something like what action you are doing. When I first saw this, I thought my graphic card was giving way, but when I could reproduce it reliably, I knew better and knew the game was having an issue as an old game running on settings that were probably only added half-hazardly since no one would want to leave them on for the PCs of the day.
- LAG: This issue, however is a lot more serious. And while it’s not that common, I saw it roughly once a session. Every once in a while, the game will pause for a few seconds before running stupid-fast to catch up. In essence we have a single player game which can have lag. I honestly have no idea how this works, but enough people hit for the Steam community to try to fix it (with mixed results)
Overall: This game has a reputation for being one of the best of it’s kind. And it does live up to being a great game in it’s own right. If you like mouse driven ARPG games, you will certainly enjoy this old-school one. However, it is still very nested in the genre, so don’t expect it to wow anyone over who has no interest in the game type.
Score:
8/10
System Requirements:
- 2.0 Ghz processor
- 1 GB RAM
- Geforce 6800 or ATi Radeon X800 with 128 MB VRAM
- Windows XP or later
- 5GB of hand drive space
System Specs:
- AMD FX8350 (4.0 Ghz)
- 16 GB RAM
- Geforce GTX 960 with 4GB VRAM
- Windows 10
Source: Steam
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