Iron Lore cranks out a Titan Quest expansion that's good, godly fun for both newbies and veterans.
A lot of action-RPGs that try to capitalize on successful Blizzard titles tend to trot out claims like "made by three guys who worked on the goatmen's running animation from Diablo II!" as a selling point. So it was a pleasant surprise that Titan Quest, a game that made no claim whatsoever in using anyone previously employed by Blizzard, turned out to be one of the better Diablo II clones in recent years. After a solid nine months of crafting, Iron Lore and THQ have just released the new expansion, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne. It might feel like a short bit of time to crank another product out, but it's actually one of those worthy expansions that doles out good content for newbies and veterans alike.
Tonight, We Dine In Hell!
TQ: IT adds an Act IV to the original game, so if you finished off the Titan Typhon, then your finished game is now at the city of Rhodes, where you're told by the ghost of Tiresias to seek out Medea (of Jason and the Argonauts fame). Thus begins your quest to take on Hades, who decided that the Underworld wasn't enough and he wants to run everything up top as well. Act IV consists of about eight areas, which took me around thirty to forty-five minutes apiece, depending on how many sidequests I did. All told, you should get a good ten-hour chunk of gameplay out of it.
Since it is Act IV, if you bought this together with the previous game, it'll be a while before you see the new content. TQ: IT is one of those expansions that has made numerous changes to the overall game, so while it may take you a while to finally go cross the river Styx and take on weird melinoes and spiders down below, Iron Lore has added a significant amount of stuff that affects the core game. This includes stuff like the new Dream Mastery (which, when paired with the eight Masteries in vanilla TQ, effectively makes for eight new character classes).
Iron Lore did a pretty darn good job in making Dream Mastery fun to use. While most of the original Masteries are pretty focused (i.e. Defense is for tanking, Earth is for nuking), Dream Mastery goes for the "does a little bit of everything, and kicks ass" line of thought. Notable Dream skills are the psionic burn, which adds a significant damage boost to your normal attack; Trances (Titan Quest speak for the Auras from Diablo II's Paladin) that can either boost healing, inflict damage, or even convert damage into health; a slick area-effect attack called Phantom Strike, and a pretty awesome pet (the Nightmare, a floating eye that can confuse monsters and give bonuses to all of your other pets).
Another boost to the Dream Mastery is its really, really pretty; the Distortion Wave has a great ripple effect in its wake and the waves of psionic energy that flow from your body during the Trance of Wrath are sublime. In short, Dream is a great companion Mastery to any of the original eight; the "problem" is that it's often too good. Some of the most powerful player characters are essentially "Dream Master with some points in another Mastery tree." I won't be surprised if Iron Lore ends up releasing a patch that tones down Dream's awesomeness.
Midas' Fat Wallet
One of the more noticeable "flaws" of TQ is the abundance of money. Going through the original game, it wouldn't be unusual to have millions of gold in your robe and nothing to spend it on. Well, now you've got two major classes of items to save for: Artifacts and Scrolls. Artifacts are new items that confer a whole lot of buffs and effects when equipped; an example of a "Greater Artifact" is the Eye of the Heavens, which grants cold and lightning resistances, adds cold and lightning damage, and a devastating tidal wave attack to go along with your normal one. Yea, that sounds awesome, but now you need to gather the appropriate reagents (usually three complete charms or relics) and then pay about 300,000 gold to craft it. Lesser Artifacts hurt the wallet less at around 75,000 each, and I haven't even seen a Divine Artifact, as those only show up on Epic or Legendary difficulty.
Scrolls are your tactical nukes: immensely powerful one-shot spells that also sell for a hefty price (80,000 is considered low-end). These range from fields of vampiric energy that sap any baddies for your benefit to a massive lightning storm that tears baddies apart to a giant Cyclops who plays Cash to your Tango for thirty seconds. On the flipside, it seems that Iron Lore optimized the boss battles for scroll usage, as many times I'd be fighting one of the new bosses (like Cerberus, the huge three-headed dog in Hades) and I'd need to use a scroll to put a dent in him. It felt like Iron Lore made boss difficulty a bit higher than it should've in order to justify the need for such powerful scrolls.
The rest of the changes include a bunch of little tweaks that make the original game significantly more playable. Trying to juggle potions, charms, and weapons around to fit some new loot was a total pain in the original TQ, so the new inventory auto-sort button is a godsend. Another big help in loot management is the new Caravan NPC, which is TQ-speak for Diablo II's item stash. What makes the Caravan superior to his DII ancestor is that not only does he carry your loot from town to town, but he has a separate compartment that all of your characters can access. So if you're playing a Conqueror and you find a totally sweet but flimsy robe, you can chuck it into the shared part of the Caravan and have your Evoker snap it up. While there are other tweaks such as an Attribute Undo and more Quick Slots for spells/skills/items, the final big change is the ability to just right-click on something to equip it. Yay!
Clashing Online
On its base level, online is an enjoyable romp, but the choice of an open (use characters from your hard drive), rather than closed (server-stored characters) system translates into scores of people using hacked characters and items (which isn't too bad in co-op play, but tends to make PvP an exercise in frustration). The community is pretty active, as there were a lot of servers with 4-player parties; the games I played tended to descend into contests of "who can spot the green (rare) item first and click it." The hacked characters plus the general negativity translated into me playing online only with buddies or to power-level (jumping into Act I with a level two character with other party members being levels 11, 14, and 48 got me up to level 12 in less than an hour).
While Titan Quest is still a pretty shameless clone of the Diablo II formula, it's a pretty good one, and this new expansion is one of those smart ones that add new content both for high-level and newer players. It might not feel wholly original, but it's a fine pastiche of comfortable formula fare (Greek mythology plus Diablo II), and hey, we're just happy to have a great Diablo-style clickfest that runs at a higher resolution than 800x600.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved
This expansion to Titan Quest will take you through hell and back.
It takes a game like Titan Quest to make you not care very much that Blizzard still hasn't gotten around to making a new Diablo. C'est la vie. Take your time, Blizzard. We're having a great time with Titan Quest. And now we've got the Immortal Throne expansion, which doesn't just add new content after what used to be the final boss. It also gives us an incentive to start over from the beginning.
One of the first things you'll want to try after you install Immortal Throne is the new Dream mastery. This new "class", if you will, is a powerful jack-of-all-trades, with skills for all occasions. There's crowd control, a healing aura, melee attacks, and even mage-style long-range nuking powers. Most of them are accompanied with some nifty visuals that make use of transparency effects. Nothing says sleep and reality-bending powers like clear rippling shockwaves and bright blue sparks.
You can even make use of a rather unassuming little pet. The Nightmare may look like nothing more than a winged eyeball with a tail, but he's got considerable kick once you put a few skill points into him. There's a whole set of improvements for the Nightmare and even a buff for your other pets if you're a dual class with a wolf, lich, or earth elemental. Thematically, the dream mastery doesn't make much sense. But it's got enough power and flexibility to make anyone want to roll up a new character.
The problem with rolling up a new character is that you're going to have to play through all three acts of Titan Quest before you get to any of Immortal Throne's new areas. The new areas pick up right where Titan Quest left off. Once you've reached the end of Olympus, you step through a portal and you're back in...Greece. You're still only in Greece.
You'll begin in Rhodes. Say 'hi' if you see Kratos, who also starts God of War 2 in Rhodes. But this is the Rhodes to hell, at least eventually. It takes a while to get to the underworld, and there's a fair bit of mundane Greek filler before you get to the cool new stuff. Apparently, the road to Hades is paved with a lot of artwork that doesn't look that different from what you played in the original game. But about a third of the way in, you'll come to a shade-infested ruined town with a stairway behind it that leads conveniently to the underworld. Here, you'll find some of the expected trappings: the ferryman, Cerberus, and Orpheus, for instance.
But down here there are also some new demons, some impressive effects, and lots of harmless dead people aimlessly wandering around. You'll eventually get to some really funky locations and special effects. Immortal Throne starts out pretty mundane, but it eventually turns out to be quite a trip.
The core game has a few important changes. There are new money sinks, so you won't have that an extra million gold pieces weighing down your pockets any more. New artifacts are made from recipes, but for a steep cost in gold. These recipes also require some pretty esoteric ingredients, such as completed relics or charms. Some artifacts are even made from lesser artifacts. The result is an even more robust collecting game, partly maddening for how hard it is to complete anything worthwhile, but partly addicting for how easy it is to just keep playing in the hopes that you'll come across what you need. There are also expensive one-shot scrolls that are particularly useful during some of Titan Quest's boss battles at the harder levels. As far as money sinks go, these feel a bit tacked on, but they do the job. Overall, it's nice that money is useful again.
To help you with the collecting you'll inevitably be doing, there's a new caravan shopkeeper. He gives you considerably more storage space, which makes it feasible to play packrat in hopes of collecting the ingredients for artifact recipes. It also means you can keep collecting charms and relics without eating up precious backpack space, and therefore making trips back to town more frequent. The caravan shopkeeper also has the ability to store items and transfer them to your other characters. You no longer have to jump through hoops to get that sweet staff from your character who can't use it to your character who can.
Inventory management is also made easier with a new sort button that instantly repacks your inventory a few different ways. You won't have to tax your Tetris skills while you're playing Titan Quest. Remember trying to squeeze that 1x4 bow next to that 2x2 helmet and the 2x4 chest piece with a smattering of tiny potions and relics crammed into the gap? No more. The new loot sorting options lock out any inadvertent pick-ups when you're gathering treasure, so you won't accidentally trawl junk that you don't want. These two relatively minor features go a long way to making Titan Quest less tedious.
A new multiplayer lobby makes it easier to know what you're getting into when you join a multiplayer game. Unfortunately, there's still no provision for secure character storage, so Titan Quest is rife with cheating and maxed out characters. THQ has given us a great game, but it's too bad they haven't taken steps to protect it for those of us who want to play fair.
But at least they've given us enough new stuff to warrant another playthrough, plus the ten or so hours it'll take to go through hell. Not to mention the extra time you'll spend collecting ingredients for your artifacts. And then there's the time it'll take to level up a new character with Dream mastery. Plus the new characters you'll want to make to use the great loot you found that you can't use. Diablo 3? Never heard of it. We're too busy playing Titan Quest.
Iron Lore offers a number of cool new improvements and an exciting new act to their action RPG.
Last year's Titan Quest received many favorable comparisons to Diablo II and rightly so. With the title's emphasis on loads of enemies, loads of loot and loads of click-happy combat, Titan Quest was an excellent modern take on the format popularized by Blizzard's action RPG. Now the team at Iron Lore has graced us with an enjoyable expansion pack that adds tons of content and smoothes out some of the original. It still won't win over anyone who isn't a fan of the basic design but it's a great expansion for fans of the original.
Though we can hardly claim that Titan Quest was too short, Immortal Throne adds a rather sizeable chapter to the game. After the end of the original game, players will find the doorways to Hades open to them. There are several new large areas here, each of which is full of interesting quests and terrifying monsters. While many of the areas are basically dark caves, there are some bright spots here and there, particularly in Elysium, and some truly memorable vistas.
The Dream master also gains access to a flying eye pet called the Nightmare that can be used in combat and can also boost the effectiveness of your other pets. (Some new pet targeting commands and stances for your pets give you additional control over large groups of pets.) Even better, the new skills come with plenty of great visuals: loads of smoky purple energy effects and flying crystals.
To balance out the increased challenge of the monsters and bosses you'll meet, there are a handful of new items that you can use. There's a new equipment slot on your character sheet that you can use to equip artifacts. These artifacts are immensely powerful items that you'll have to build yourself. You'll find recipes to make these items throughout the game. Each requires a number of completed charms to fabricate. Fortunately, there are now enchanters in many of the towns that allow you to pay to reclaim charms that you've installed on your items.
The original game suffered quite a bit from poor inventory management. Characters frequently became burdened by the vast number of items picked up on the battlefield. This time around, you can turn off automatic item pick up. Pressing different keys allow you to see items filtered based on whether they're broken or magical. It adds an extra step to looting, but it sure cuts down on the trips back to the merchant to sell a sword for 3 gold.
Additionally, there are some cool inventory management options. The basic character inventory has an auto sort option so you can make more room for your loot as you make your way through the levels. There are now also caravans in most of the towns that act as safe deposit boxes for items you want to keep but aren't ready to use yet. Any item you place in a caravan will be available at any caravan throughout the game. What's even cooler is that you can transfer items from one of your characters to another through these caravans so, if you find an item that doesn't suit one of your characters but works for another you can switch them freely.
There are some minor multiplayer improvements in the game, mostly designed to make it easier to join games. There's still no fix unfortunately for the client side hacking that plagues many of the matches.
©2007, IGN Entertainment, Inc. All Rights Reserved