2821

Didn’t know there was a fanpatch - and this reminds me I reinstalled this over the christmas holiday and haven’t begun a new game yet!

2822

Also with the fanpatch, be sure to read the documentation. There is a means of unlocking new skins for the characters. I didn’t realise this until I had one character through legendary and a number of others in epic. It is purely cosmetic, but being able to change the skin of the character to fit with their skills and their equipment is quite pleasing. The mod itself is called the All-Skins mod. I’m sure it comes bundled with the fan patch.

2823

Yea that’s the one.

2824

I found the game was so long that it didn’t matter that the maps were exactly the same. My main character has 140 hours of play on him – IIRC that’s two full play throughs without the expansion and one with, so about 45 hours of play per run through.

After 45 hours, I really don’t remember whether a cave branches out to the right or to the left. Sure I may remember that after I leave Helos, I go to Spartan camp, and that at Spartan camp I’ll have to take on the centaur Nessus. But so what, that’s exactly the same as Diablo.

In Diablo 2, I know that I have to go out to the Cold Plains and then to the Burial Ground, and I know that I’ll find Blood Raven at the Burial Ground. I know that I need to go to the Sony Field and find the Cairn Stones. I know I need to take the Underground Passage to get to the Dark Woods. The only thing the randomizer does is determine whether the Burial Ground is to the left or right of the Cold plains. Or which section of the Dark Woods the Underground Passage goes to. The ordering of the sections and the boss monsters on the sections are pretty much exactly the same.

The big benefit of the Titan Quest approach is that the world is much more attractive and they can set up some really nice visuals such as seeing ship wrecks from the bluffs and then following up by wandering down to those same ship wrecks down at the beach. The TQ world was just much more beautiful than Diablo’s was. Part of that was art-direction no doubt, but I suspect a good part of it was Diablo’s need to randomize stuff lead to a cookie-cutter look.

2825

Before Titan’s Quest hearing about the lack of random maps almost made me never play it.

Post-Titan’s Quest (today) that system working so well is why things like XCOM and Diablo III not using random maps doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, those game’s system of using pre-built tiles that themselves contain random content seems like the next evolutionary step over the brilliantly done TQ.

2826

Unfortunately we couldn’t get the demo to run on her laptop. This is probably due to the integrated graphics card. I know they’re not made for gaming, but I thought it might be ok since her laptop is from 2009 and the game came out in 2006. Oh well.

I am currently looking at Din’s Curse. It runs fine and seems OK, but it’s lacking a lot that made TQ seem cool. The world and dungeons are randomized, the item system doesn’t seem as interesting, it has less classes, etc.

2827

Ah, the integrated graphics thing will put a block on most 3D games.

Take a look at Sacred.

2828

Yea it’s not that it can’t run it per-say, just that it won’t. The game recognizes the intergrated graphics card and then just refuses to start, a lot of the games around that time were like that.

I remember being able to play SC2 just fine on an old laptop and still couldn’t fire up Shadowgrounds or TQ or anything like that.

2829

TQ plays just fine on my laptop w/integrated graphics (I thought it wouldn’t) but it’s from 2011 (AMD Phenom dual core 3Ghz).

I originally played it in 2010 on my ancient PC and surprised then that it ran well (this was on a 2.4 GHZ P4 with an AGP card). It was on 1024x768 but still, smooth experience and the graphics looked fantastic. Nice engine, wonder if they used it on anything else?

2830

New game by some of the ex-Iron Lore developers called Grim Dawn will use the same engine.

2831

Looking at the gold edition on Steam now …

Could someone enlighten me if an archer character is possible/viable in Titan’s Quest (I have kind of a thing for ranged combat in these types of games)?

If yes, what would such a character entail? That is, would what the build be like, roughly?

If no, how about a Necromancer-like class? Does such a thing exist in the game?

Any info would be appreciated.

2832

The hunter tree gets ridiculously awesome. Like fire some shots and a giant group of enemies gets blown up.

2833

Sold!

Thanks.

2834

Yea the Marksmen power set is generally considered one of the most powerful sets in the game, so no need to fear that :)

And the best part is that you could probably play 3 different Marksmen based characters and have them all play completely different thanks to the multi-spec system. You can also make pet classes (since you asked about that) and gear exists in the game specifically tailored for them. You’d almost certainly want to invest in Spirit if you wanted something necromancer-ish.

2835

I bought Titan Quest when on sale recently on Gamer’s Gate. I’m not a big Diablo / clickfest fan but at the price I figured I’d give it a try. My first question - I just met the Oracle and up until now the game is incredibly easy. There have been a handful of battles that weren’t easy, but for the most part I am running around clicking on the enemies and winning. You essentially have unlimited healing potions since you get so much loot to sell. The game forces you to play on normal on your first play though. I’m not sure why in these games they always force you to an easy difficulty level on the first play through since it has been completely brainless. I doubt I’ll have the motivation to continue to play a second time at a harder difficulty level.

Sorry for the rant…
Does the game actually make the player think eventually or is it a cakewalk the entire way through by just stocking up on healing potions and bashing them with my melee weapon?

Thanks

2836

IIRC the experience varies quite a bit depending on the difficulty level and the character build. In general, the game will be quite easy on the initial run through until you head into China. Some of the Chinese enemy heroes can be quite vicious.

At the higher difficulty levels things get much tougher. For example the Centaur champions have horns which when they blow them can freeze you, which ends up being instant death depending on your gear and build. In general at the initial difficulty level most of the bad guys really don’t use any powers, and the ones they use aren’t particularly dangerous or long lasting.

Also the game is easier with non-melee builds or at least it was originally. I played through 3 times (once per difficulty level) with a offense/defense melee build and enjoyed it quite a bit, but there was a lot of whining from other melee players about how hard that build was.

2837

My memory is fuzzy, but a quick scan of a walkthrough says you’re less than 25% of the way through vanilla normal. For better or for worse, you’re still in the breaking in phase of the game.

The game will certainly get harder. IIRC, the bosses in TQ can be challenging, even for the first playthrough. I don’t know if you would call it making you think, but it may cause you to farm a bit, adjust your skills, and/or improve your arcade reflexes.

As for your rant, the Diablo-game model is constructed in such a way that starting you directly at the beginning of the next difficulty tier would gurantee instant death, even if you were a Starcraft champion. The next difficulty level isn’t about the monsters being a little tougher or a little stronger, they’re an order of magnitude (or more) tougher. This allows the designers to have your character progress to where they’ll be an order of magnitude tougher than where they started. Unlike an FPS, difficulty isn’t all about player skill: it’s mostly about your equipment and character abilities.

2838

Thanks for the responses guys. I guess Diablo-like games just won’t be for me. I have a hard time playing the same content over. If they eventually get more interesting they just take too long to do so. It seems like designers should be able to shorten the extremely easy phase and make the game more interesting a bit quicker. Maybe it is a game I could use to fill in 30 minutes here or there and not try to play it for several hours at a time.

2839

I’m not sure that it ever gets very tactical - that’s just not what these games are about. However, you might try modding. The Underlord mod, for example, in addition to completely retuning the talent trees and miscellaneous other enhancements, roughly triples the number of enemies. I think it might also give them more HP. The result is really really hairy battles, especially early on when you don’t have any active skills or useful gear. As you level up it becomes more manageable but I’m not sure it ever gets to be a cakewalk.

2840

Even simpler would be to install the xMax mod for vanilla TQ. What that does is increase the number of enemies that come up at the spawn points by a factor.