Gaming Trend

Gaming Trend Review

by Ron Burke

Diablo and Diablo II held my attention in a way that few games other than Massive Multiplayer games do.  In fact, I can’t readily estimate how many times I’ve beaten both games in the pursuit of better loot. Many games have tried to replicate this addiction and there really hasn’t been any that have done it properly…until now. 

THQ and Iron Lore have teamed up to bring us an adventure set in Ancient Greece, Egypt, Japan, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, and even Mount Olympus – areas normally overlooked in most action titles.   Essentially, a Titan has been released from the Underworld and you are charged with the daunting task of putting it back.  Before you can get to that though, you have a metric ton of bad guys to kill. 

Titan Quest is impressive to look at.  Waist-tall weeds and flour fields part under your feet, their tops swaying in the wind.  Rocks and other debris litter the landscape which is often heavily populated with foliage ranging from grass to dense jungle.  The insides of areas are detailed according to the land in which they are located. Grecian structures feature a columned look, with long-worn carvings adorning the walls. Egyptian structures are decorated with ancient hieroglyphs with sarcophaguses, burial chambers, and statues littered about.  The Japanese cities have Fu Dogs and multi-tiered Pagoda buildings.  All in all it is a great landscape in which to slaughter and loot. 

On my XPS M170 laptop, I was able to run at maximum widescreen resolution of 1900x1200 with every bell and whistle turned on, including Anti-Aliasing.  Though this did provide the richest experience, with fantastic lighting, particle effects, and shadows, I found that turning off V-Sync and Anti-Aliasing improved the overall frame rate greatly.  The fact is that the game can and will chug and lag out quite a bit with these options turned on.  Turned off, there is a slight bit of jaggedness to some of the graphics, but this is being addressed by the developer shortly with a second patch.

Essentially, Titan Quest delivers a great visual experience, albeit with some high requirements and the occasional framerate hiccup.

The sound and music in Titan Quest pretty standard fare.  Typically you only really notice the music when you are in town, as the volume seems to inexplicably double.  It is dynamic and will amp up a bit when there are bosses nearby.  The voiceovers, on the other hand, are a bit of comedy.  The early Greek voices are decent, but the Asian voices just made me laugh.  They are bad comedy at best, sounding like a stereotype that a comic might perform in a skit.  Thankfully, you can simply walk away from anyone you are talking to and read the quest descriptions later.  In fact, you can walk away from any of the overly-chatty people in the towns and it really won’t affect much.  If you clear out the entirety of an area, you are guaranteed to complete whatever quest you might be on without having to hear a voiceover from anyone.

One bug I did encounter was sound glitches and repetition.  During one run I was walking in the forest with my level 12 character and began to hear the initial opening quest dialog out of nowhere.  Being about 5 towns removed from the area in which this speech occurs, this was unusual to say the least.  Another issue is that my caster has a pet, and that pet can interrupt speeches by crossing in front of the speaker.  It is a known bug and should be fixed soon, but a bug nonetheless.

If navigating Windows isn’t a daunting task for you, you’ll have an easy time of controlling Titan Quest.  Essentially, you point and click on items, people, monsters, or objects that you want to interact with, and that generally happens.  You can set a skill or item to the left or right mouse button as you see fit (although some skills only work on the right mouse button), and you can map the same onto your number keys, 1 – 8.  The 9 and 0 key are automatically set to health and mana potions, so you won’t have to map the obvious.  You can use summon portals using the L key, bring up your quest list with the Q key, and talk with the T key.  

If you don’t like the way your keys are mapped, you can do a complete keyboard remap.  Simply go into the options and look at your current key bindings.  This tab lists the full set of options and should give you the customization you need.

In a similar fashion, the editor included in Titan Quest is very easy to use.  It is menu driven, relying on clicking and dragging for the bulk of your landscaping work.  Selecting various tools will allow you to shape the land, put water in place, adjust the depth of both, and determine the area in which players can interact.  You’ll also want to define the edges of your movement zones as players could fall into oblivion if you don’t.  Nobody wants that.  In a similar way you can place items from the Object Pallette, enemies, allies, respawn points, sounds, and much more.  Again, if you can click and drag, this will be a snap.

As a magic user I did encounter a bit of difficulty with spell casting.  Sometimes I would hit my number key only to have my spell fail to cast.  Hitting it again lobbed my volcanic death spell, but it was often too late.  It didn’t happen often, but often enough to make the players I was with comment “It’s the thought that counts!” or “Better late than never!”

Let’s call this game what it is – a hack and slash adventure title.  Essentially, you’ll wade through waves of enemies until they drop something interesting.  You’ll scoop up the loot and cart it back to town to sort it out.  You can use the much-improved town portal system which allows you to simply port to whatever town you’ve been to, or to a friend’s town portal if you are so inclined.  Selling your gear and buying new gear will make your character more powerful, move faster, stack poison damage, resist fire, or a great many other attributes that can be attached to individual armor pieces.  We’ve heard all of this before – grey gear, white gear, yellow gear, blue gear, purple gear, socketed items…it sounds like Diablo II or World of Warcraft.  This isn’t a bad thing as it is immediately recognizable for a great many players, but you can’t help but feel like you may have done this all before.

Grinding out the 65 possible levels and collecting fantastic blue and purple set items will take you a while.  Beating the game will unlock the Epic difficulty, and by beating it again on Epic you free up Legendary. While you probably will not see a Legendary item, or even a lot of Blues until you are playing on Epic, and more so on the third and final difficulty level, the pursuit of these set items keeps the game moving. 

The game starts off with you picking a few attributes.  You’ll determine your sex, your name, and what color skirt..er…tunic you’d like to wear.  You don’t chose what your profession will be until you level up for the first time.  At that point you can chose from the eight “Masteries”.   These include Warfare, Rogue, Defense, Hunting, Nature, Earth, Spirit, and Storm.  Warfare is your warrior type, Rogues can set traps, Defense helps you use armor more effectively, hunting puts a bow or spear in your hand, Nature gives you the power of healing and wolf summoning, Earth makes you a fire-throwing nightmare and gives you the ability to summon a fire golem.  Spirit allows you to use your powers to leech health and the like, and Storm allows you to throw lightning from your fingertips.   While this first decision is fairly crucial to how your character turns out, it is when you turn level 8 and get to augment that Mastery with a second Mastery that the game really changes.  By combining a Hunter and Defense, you get a Warden – a character capable of dealing damage up close as well as from far away.  Combining Earth and Nature will make you a summoner, and you will be capable of summoning a wolf and a golem at the same time.  Using Warfare and Defense will yield a Conqueror, making you a melee juggernaut.  Obviously there are quite a few combinations, and they all feel very balanced from my two runs and various reports.

Eventually your skills will fail you – you will suffer a cruel and painful death at some point.  The penalty is a short loading screen and a pop back to the last respawn point you touched.  There is a small experience hit, but it is almost inconsequential unless you repeatedly run yourself into the spears of your enemies.  Should you decide to quit the game, you will restart at your last respawn point, but all of the creatures you killed will be alive again.  Keep in mind that the save option in the game does not save you in the exact area in which you stand, but makes more of a snapshot of your items, level, and skills.

The Masteries have a skill tree system associated with it.  As you level, you are given two points to allocate towards Health, Mana, Strength, Intellect, or Dexterity as you see fit.  As equipment almost always has a level requirement, as well as one of the three primary attribute requirements, placing these points will require some foresight.  Similarly, you get three points to place in your Masteries of choice.  You’ll have to carefully plan your character by focusing or blending your points in the various skill trees to survive.  For instance, I chose to put a few points into healing and then dropped almost all of my points into my Golem and my Volcanic Orb skill.  I have almost completely ignored all else.  The choices, and their consequences, are yours – balance as you see fit.

All of these skills and traits are combined to enhance your ability to kill monsters.  By killing monsters I mean killing metric TONS of monsters.  Beating the game, I had personally killed over 3000 monsters, and I played through the entire game with a partner.  From that statistic alone you can see what the bulk of my complaint with this title is – it doesn’t bring anything new to the gameplay that Diablo II brought to the table.  Kill, collect, repeat.  This will be your mantra through the very linear game.  While there are side quests, they are often ‘kill the foozle and collect my Maguffin’ variety.  This is not where Titan Quest shines.  Titan Quest excels in an area we’ve been before – customization.  In your limited bag space, you’ll have to make the tough choices.   Will I get another Heracles’ Might to stack into three on my leg armor so I get the bonus?  Do I keep this chest piece in hopes for a second, third, or fourth part of the set?  How long can you resist the temptation to sell it off to free up the bag space?  Do I get rid of this un-enchantable blue item and use this somewhat inferior green item so I can enchant it and make it better?  These questions are the ones that will propel you into the Epic and Legendary difficulties, and it is these same questions that will keep you playing this game for weeks to come. Everyone wants to keep up with the Joneses – check our forum for pictures of reader characters for simple proof of that.

I have to state that when I first got Titan Quest I couldn’t get it to run in any sort of stable fashion.  Apparently I wasn’t the only one, and Iron Lore quickly patched the game.  This first patch solved the vast majority of the issues with stability, but has left the overall performance lacking.  Iron Lore again is coming to the rescue with a patch, this one aimed squarely at performance improvements.  This demonstrates to me the commitment that THQ and Iron Lore are dedicating to this game.  After beating the game, I immediately thought to myself “I wonder what cool stuff I’ll get in Epic?”  When a game hooks you like that, and you find yourself installing it on your desktop as well so you can play a second character, you know that you have a winner.  For anyone who puts countless hours into Diablo II, and Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, this could be the game that will pry you away.  The enhanced resolution, new locations, and up to 6 player multiplayer support should be enough to make any fan of the genre interested.  After playing this game for more than 30 hours, I can easily recommend it. Titan Quest may be a Diablo clone, but it is a Diablo clone done right! With excellent balance, cooperative multiplayer, addictive loot gathering, and a great graphical presentation, it is easy to overlook the few flaws within the game.

Gaming Trend Score

85

1. Graphics: 90
2. Audio: 80
3. Controls: 90
4. Gameplay: 83
5. Value/Replay: 85
6. OVERALL:85