Titan Quest: Titanesque or Titanic?

Just played the demo of a new lil hack-n-slasher, Titan Quest. I enjoyed the demo; actually played through it three times. I will certainly pick up the game when it comes out in a couple of weeks. A few thoughts on the demo:

The success of Diablo and Diablo II spawned a whole new genre of games, conventionally called "action-RPGs". They resemble action games in that the primary player activity is combat rather than exploration, quests, or puzzle-solving, and RPGs because they take place in fantasy worlds and involve some kind of character development, through skills, attributes and equipment. They're also common called "Diablo clones" or "Diablo-killers", since emulating Diablo's success has always been a goal of these games' developers; games in this genre can't be discussed without reference to Diablo.

I've played quite a few of these games through the years, from obscure titles like Darkstone and Nox and Harbinger to the more successful Sacred and Dungeon Siege I and II. Dungeon Siege II was just released last Fall, and it has an expansion coming out fairly soon, so I will be making quite a lot of reference to it in discussing Titan Quest, which in fact resembles Dungeon Siege as much as Diablo.

Titan Quest is set in the ancient world, encompassing locales in Greece, Egypt and China. This distinguishes it early from standard fantasy RPGs which must create their own universe, lore, and bestiary from scratch; TQ can rely on myth and history to provide exotic yet familiar creatures and conflicts. Graphically, it is a full-3D game but it has a fixed-angle (though zoomable) overhead camera. (In this respect TQ plays a little more like Diablo than like Dungeon Siege; the Dungeon Siege camera could be rotated around your party.) TQ is a single-player game with a coop multiplayer mode; unlike Dungeon Siege, where you play a full party, you control only one character.

The graphics in the demo are clean and pretty, and there is limited physics in the game. It's clear that a lot of thought went into small details. Notable is the way grass and bushes move as you pass through them, the way enemies fly through the air after a strong blow, the way the light changes and shadows move through the day/night cycle. I was impressed with the character animations of the villagers; rather than standing motionless they feed chickens and engage in animated arguments with each other. As in virtually every fantasy game you will fight skeletons in TQ, but these skeletons are quite delightful ones that burst from the ground when you approach and rattle satisfyingly when struck.

Having only played the demo I can't say much about story, but it appears to develop through quests almost exactly as in Diablo and DS. The world is dotted with NPCs who give you quests or simply chat, providing color and background and gameplay information. The dialogue is fully voiced, with the villagers in the Greek starting setting speaking with funky accents; and some of them have a good deal to say. One villager narrated most of the myth of Herakles; and even the "talking signpost" characters, who are there to tell you where to go and what to do, would not say the same thing every time you click on them. You can't expect to find NPC AI or schedules or dialogue trees in a game like this, but they fill their function of moving the story forward with grace.

Leveling is experience-based, like Diablo; you gain experience points by killing and completing quests, and after a certain number of points you move to the next level. (This contrasts with use-based systems like Dungeon Siege or the Elder Scrolls games, where you gain points by excercising particular skills.) At level up you get 2 points for attributes and 3 for skills. Attributes are the usual culprits — strength, dexterity, and intelligence — but you can also add points directly to your health and mana pool.

The class/skill system is probably the most unusual feature of TQ; and, with itemization, it will make or break the game. As in DS character creation is a simple affair; choose a gender and tunic color and you're off. Your first choice comes at Level 2, when you choose your first Mastery, or class; you add a second Mastery at level 8. The developers are promoting this as a 24-class system, but in fact it's an 8-class system with dual-classing… which is fine, as it certainly leaves plenty of room to experiment with different builds. This resembles the Dungeon Siege II system, which also lets you take more than one class. The class choices are not too original, but with 8 to choose from, the standard archetypes have been broken down a bit. There are defensive and offensive warriors, a frost/lightning mage, a fire/earth mage, a rogue, a hunter/ranger, a druid/healer, and a necromancer.

The skills themselves are arranged in a prerequisite structure, like both Diablo II and Dungeon Siege; but the abilities that have prerequisites seem to be improvements of the base ability rather than separate, related abilities. The most original feature of the system is mastery level. To gain access to higher level skills, rather than needing to be at a certain experience level, you have to put skill points into the mastery itself. Adding points to the mastery gives you stat bonuses as well as providing access to more powerful skills; so there are always decisions to make about whether to max out lower level skills or devote skill points to the mastery instead for later access to the top tier of skills. Although the game gives you a lot of skill points to spend, it seems pretty clear that a good deal of specialization is going to be optimal within each mastery; it looks as though perhaps the best strategy will be to pick just one of the prerequisite paths within each mastery.

As with both Diablo and Dungeon Siege, there are lots of both randomly-generated and unique items in the game, which fall like rain when you kill a swarm of critters or pop a chest. There is also an item enhancement system: you can pick up small charms that add stats to an item, and if you find multiple pieces of the same type of charm you can multiply the charm's effects. The item system looks promising, but still quite a lot more limited than either Diablo or Dungeon Siege's. Items are not restricted by class, and there seemed to be basically two sets of weapons and armors, caster and fighter, with variations based on material and random stats. It's probably unfair to judge the itemization based only on the demo though. Time will tell how much real variation there is.

Titan Quest is good-looking and highly playable, with an intriguing character development system. I look forward to finding out whether it lives up to its potential.

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