Titan Quest

[Maxymiuk]

Eh, I have mixed feelings about TQ.

On one hand, it has great atmosphere and robust visuals that look good even today. On the other, it suffers from poorly balanced mechanics.

Rant warning.

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People compare TQ to Diablo, so I'll do it as well, since I think it'll explain my gripes with the game better.

Diablo 2 tended to use two types of opponents - swarms of low health, low damage monsters that could be taken down quickly, and the occasional medium health, high damage bastard that was slow enough that you'd have the time to run up, hit him a couple times, and run away before he could retaliate. Even more importantly, your character could outrun 90% of the enemies you'd encounter, allowing the use of skirmish tactics - a necessity when you're outnumbered several thousand to one. Playing smart, you could take very little damage, saving health potions for emergencies or boss fights.

Titan Quest regularly throws you at large groups of enemies that can individually dish out a fair bit of damage, take several hits to put down, and have attack and movement speeds only slightly slower than yours. This makes it very difficult to disengage once you realize you're in way over your head, necessitates either taking Nature as one of your masteries in order to gain access to healing abilities, or filling your inventory with health potions.

This brings me to the boss fights. Diablo 2 bosses, for the most part anyway (I'm looking at you, Duriel), had a selection of high damage, slow, and heavily telegraphed attacks that could be easily dodged by anyone paying attention. Additionally, there was enough of a gap between every attack for the player to rush in and score a few good hits.

TQ bosses have a selection of high damage, moderately fast, and poorly telegraphed attacks with barely any time between each one. They're just about manageable for a caster character, who can keep his distance and rely on ranged combat and DoT abilities, but trying to fight them as a melee specialization is painful, frustrating, and unrewarding.

And speaking of masteries, TQ melee characters are utterly, and completely hosed. For the reasons listed earlier, they're too slow, they don't do enough damage, they take too much damage, and, worst of all, THEIR CORE ABILITIES ARE RANDOMLY ACTIVATED. Who's idea was it to make dual-wielding, one of the main skill trees of the Warfare mastery, have, after maxing out, all of a 20% chance to trigger? Same goes for the Defense mastery, and the Rogue mastery is just a little better, with its core attack skill granting an automatic critical every fourth hit, forcing you to split your attention between what's happening on the screen, and counting how many times you've swung your sword.

This poor class design is the reason why, despite trying every mastery as a primary, to date I've only managed to actually finish the game as a Nature primary - having three wolves and a Dryad to up my DPS and split incoming damage between several targets, as well as having easy access to healing, allowed me to breeze through encounters that were an excruciating slog for any other character (for comparison, my Hunting mastery primary took three times as long just to get through Greece), but even that proved barely enough as I've approached the endgame. In all honestly, I can't imagine myself standing a chance against the final boss as a melee character.

Short version: I do like the game, but can't recommend it without mentioning the deep flaws in its mechanics, which potentially limit the number of playable class combinations.