Titan Quest
The best Diablo "clone" ever made?
The best Diablo "clone" ever made?
Since it is practically a written law that all games of this variety be compared with Diablo, let?s get down to business. While retaining many of the aspects that made Diablo II so addicting, Titan Quest polishes and refines the formula that Blizzard created in such a way as to breath new life into the genre. Titan Quest also improves upon many of the problems that plagued its inspiration. However, despite its many positive features, the game is not without its own faults. Fortunately none of them are game breaking. They are but small blemishes on an otherwise exceptionally conceived experience.
If you did not like Diablo II, then Titan Quest will likely not change your mind because the basic gameplay remains the same. The most notable difference between the two is the visuals. If you have a computer capable of handling the maximum settings, the game is breathtaking. And while these are not graphics comparable to the ridiculously beautiful Crysis, they are without doubt the absolute best that this genre presently has to offer.
Instead of the gothic world of Sanctuary, you will journey throughout ancient Greece, Egypt, and China while trying to solve a mystery grounded in classical mythology. The environments are simply gorgeous. Not only are they beautiful to look at, but they are quite large and give the game an especially epic feel. I don?t want to divulge any details or spoilers of the story, but along the way you will interact with the likes of General Leonidas, the Oracle of Delphi, and Zeus. During your travels you will battle creatures taken straight from myth and legend, such as minotaurs, myrmidons, gorgons, and the undead.
One of the most exciting features of Titan Quest is the class system. All characters are initially the same, with the exception of gender. Once you reach level 2, you will choose a mastery. You have eight masteries to choose from: Warfare, Defense, Rogue, Hunting, Nature, Spirit, Earth, or Storm. Each mastery contains branching skill trees that players can invest points in with each levelup. Upon achieving level 8, you can select a second mastery to further increase character customization. This option of selecting two masteries effectively gives players the choice of 28 different character classes, ensuring that no matter what your playstyle, you will find a combination with skills that suit your interests.
Speaking of skills, Diablo II allowed only one skill to be assigned to each mouse button at a time. This made it clunky and difficult to use multiple skills. In Titan Quest, as in most massively multiplayer online games, skills are placed in a toolbar along the bottom of the screen. They can then be activated by clicking on them or by pressing the corresponding hotkey, allowing for a faster paced and more fluid experience.
One of the most important aspects of a game like this, aside from combat, is the loot. And make no mistake, loot is plentiful here. So plentiful, in fact, that it becomes a minor inconvenience. If you are like me and habitually pick up everything that you see, you will be portaling back to the nearest town every 5-10 minutes. An obvious way to avoid this is to only pick up items of considerable value. However, even by using this technique you will acquire so much loot so quickly that you will literally be swimming in wealth by the time you finish Act I.
One of my biggest complaints about the game is that there is no way to store items that you want for future use. The expansion pack solves this, but in the original you have no storage options. If you acquire a piece of armor that you can?t use for 3 more levels, you will either have to keep it in your inventory or sell it to a vender. It?s rather perplexing why something as simple as a bank was not included in the game. However, since quality equipment drops quite frequently, it is not a major problem.
There are special npc?s scattered throughout the game that will allow you to reallocate your skill points for a fee. This simple addition to the game offers much relief compared to Diablo II, where you could never reallocate a skill point once it had been spent. The one drawback to the feature is that you can only buy back one skill point at a time, and the price increases with each point. Therefore, if you want to reallocate 30 points, be prepared to spend a small fortune in order to do so. But as I?ve already covered, a small fortune is easy enough to acquire.
A major selling point of Diablo II was the focus on co-operative online play. Titan Quest includes co-op play, but it falls short of the excellent experience that Blizzard?s Battle.net provides. Unlike Battle.net, which stores character information on Blizzard?s internal servers, all Titan Quest characters are stored client-side. This means that your single-player character will also be used for online games. In theory, this works great because there?s no need to create multiple characters depending on whether you want to play by yourself or with others. However, because character information is stored client-side, it also means that characters are easily hacked and modified. And as you can guess, cheaters abound.
Titan Quest also provides users with a powerful world-building toolset. This is good news for modders who wish to create their own adventures and share their custom maps with friends. The world builder is actually the same toolset that Iron Lore Entertainment used to create the vast gameworld of Titan Quest, so there is tremendous power under its hood. However, with that power comes a steep learning curve. Don?t expect to jump straight into the toolset and automatically create a masterpiece of art and level design without some learning involved.
Despite its few flaws, Titan Quest has tremendous replay value. The main quest, combined with numerous side quests, can easily last for more than 40 hours. Take into consideration that there are two unlockable modes that ramp up both the difficulty and the quality of loot, and this game could last you for months. If the recent announcement of Diablo III has your saliva glands pumping overtime in anticipation of some classic top down action-RPG adventuring, look no further than Titan Quest to fulfill your needs. Titan Quest can be purchased, bundled along with its expansion pack, on Steam [http://www.steampowered.com/v/index.php?area=sub&SubId=402&cc=US].
