Titan Quest: Immortal Throne

Game: Titan Quest: Immortal Throne
Developer: Iron Lore Entertainment
Platform: PC
Release Year: 2007
Stephen's Rating: 6/10

I never played the original Titan Quest without the expansion so I will only mention the two together.

Basic Plot

The player takes on the role of an adventurer in mythical times who ends up assisting the Order of Prometheus in restoring balance to the world. The scene is set around the time human beings lost contact with the gods.

The player battles through four "acts" including ancient Greece, Egypt, the Orient, and finally the Underworld in the expansion.

Ultimately the player must defeat the titan Typhon and then Hades to complete the story.

Gameplay

Titan Quest is an action role playing game similar to Diablo. The player has a top down isometric view of the game world and their character and the interaction is primarily pointing and clicking on enemies to engage them, and also using keys to select different abilities.

Titan Quest utilises a fully featured 3D physics and graphics engine in contrast to Diablo II which used isometric pseudo-3D graphics.

A lot of the game mechanics are similar to Diablo II but the differences are worth mentioning.

The skill system is quite different. Every character starts the same - without a character class, and at level 0. From memory when you reach level 1 you get to choose your first character class. The options are:

• Defense: A melee warrior build for "tank" characters which focuses on a shield and weapon.
• Dream: A multi-purpose build with auras which can be used for melee or casting. Only available in the Immortal Throne expansion.
• Earth: A caster dps and summoner build.
• Hunting: A ranged or melee weapon build.
• Nature: a summoner/healer build with some magic dps and enhancement capability.
• Rogue: A melee weapon build with utility skills.
• Spirit: A caster dps and summoner build.
• Storm: A caster dps and summoner build.
• Warfare: A melee warrior build focusing on wielding two weapons at once.

Each of these skill classes had a tree of skills that you could advance as you levelled up. Some skills synergised with others. The unique thing about Titan Quest was that at level 9 (from memory) you got to choose (optionally) a second skill class for your character. This meant you could pick skills from two trees and combine them in a way which was complimentary. Each combination of skill trees was a character class and had a unique name. For example, if you choose Warfare and Dream your character class was Harbinger. Using Harbinger as an example of complimentary skills; I had a harbinger who raised Warfare skills to increase his dual-weapon fighting abilities, and then mixed that with the health regeneration aura of dream + some of the flashy finishing moves to become a vanishing/Wolverine-like/spinning ball of death.

Dream skill tree.

Weapons were very similar to Diablo 2 in that there were different colours for different grades. Yellow and green for normal magic items, blue for rare, and purple for epic items. Any colour could be part of a set, and set items gained bonuses if you wore multiple items from the same set.

There were also runes and sockets for enhancing your equipment. Multiplayer was accessible over LAN or the internet.

Positives

Great engine - fun to play in. I like the the skill selection quite a bit although I think they could have thought more about how skills from different skill classes could compliment each other better. Good multiplayer support.

Negatives

As with pretty much every action-RPG that has ever come since Diablo 2 there were some major issues which stopped this game becoming legendary.

1. As with Diablo 2 you could play the game through 3 times on normal, epic, and legendary difficulty. Unfortunately the XP gain drops exponentially once you finish normal difficulty until you get to the point where you can play for hours and not level up once. I felt like it was a much better balance in Diablo 2... it dropped off too much to make me want to keep playing beyond normal difficulty.
2. The item pool was a bit limited and boring. There were only so many epic and legendary items in the game and after a while you start finding the same gear over and over. There were almost never any unique effects, it was always just about raising a stat on your character. In comparison, Diablo 2 had (for instance) a bow that had a "Fires explosive bolts or arrows" effect. This was interesting in that you could compliment it with a Paladin's holy aura for extra fire damage.
3. The enemies were very limited in type and very repetitive to battle.
4. The map wasn't auto-generated which meant replaying the game was even more tedious.

All and all it was a good game but it didn't have enough attention to detail and secrets to keep me playing beyond the normal campaign.

Memorable Moments

One day myself and three friends all sat down and started the campaign together multiplayer. It was very exciting appearing together at the start of the game, wearing nothing but some basic clothes. Mutliplayer was pretty fun, especially sharing items and building up sets and recipes.

There was a glitch in the game and sometimes enemies who died would "stretch" out due to the ragdoll like physics of the game.