I bought this game years ago and liked it alot. Decided to load it up on my new laptop today and was surprised to find that it still really kicks alot of ass.
The graphics are still very good and because they are polygonal (unlike D2) they hold up really well over time.
The sound is great.
Most of the NPCs are voice acted and it’s pretty decent quality.
The loot tables are pretty awesome, second only to D2. Tons of unique armor seats and weapons. Enchantments, runes, everything that makes a dungeon hacker a dungeon hacker.
Tight controls.
Great inventory management, though I think this was greatly enhanced in the expansion pack.
Incredibly long game. Takes WAY longer to get through the single player game than D2.
Most robust skill tree/character building of any hacker, D2 included. You pick a primary skill tree at lvl 2 and then, if you want to, you can choose a 2nd tree for dual masteries. If you don’t want to you can become a turbo charged single mastery character.
The settings are very nice and pretty varied.
All in all this is still a great game and I’m kind of getting re-addicted now while waiting for D3 to show up.
Did anyone else every give this a shot and enjoy it as much as I do? You can get the full game plus the expansion for like 20 or so on steam. Definitely worth it and you will get hours and hours of enjoyment from it.
I haven’t played it for a while, but I played it like crazy for some time. I never actually finished it though; the fact that you can make so many different viable powerset combinations sucked me into making lots of alts (I tend to do that a lot).
It was the Titan Quest: Immortal Throne version I played btw.
Titan Quest has a lot of polish, balance, and pacing issues that the more refined Diablo 2 doesn’t suffer from. Like Act 1 is way too long and repetitive. Act IV is ten-times harder than the previous acts. Pretty much all character viability comes down to the same skills trees or using the same OP mechanic (-CD%). Titan Quest is a good game, but the Diablo series is worlds better. Just too much of the game was broken.
I don’t know that I’d brand Titan Quest “underated”. It’s fairly well known and pops up in every “games similar to Diablo…?” thread i’ve ever seen. Of course it’s not going to replace the multiplayer Diablo 2, which has had 10 years of patches and polish. But the single player version was worlds better than D2 imo.
I can’t find the link but I remember reading an interview from one of the devs, who claimed TQ was pirated and hacked to death, which was the reason for the lack of sequels/multiplayer development.
I have to disagree. TQ ( w/expansion ) was the more refined and particularly more balanced game IMHO. Unless you knew what you were doing or had a huge inventory of gear, it was much harder to build a class that was viable in the highest difficulty level in D2. Well, at least in single-player which is exclusively how I played. TQ was much more flexible.
I’m not saying your wrong but what does impact does the level layout have on enjoying the game? Even if the level is laid out the same the second time you go through it it really doesn’t change anything of substance. The same enemies are there to fight and the loot is still random. Diablo did have randomized levels but I always felt that was a little overhyped. The levels may have been random but they all looked and felt exactly the same so it didn’t really increase my enjoyment.
ETA: Now that I think about it you are probably talking about online multiplayer aren’t you? I’m talking about the single player campaign. Doing loot runs online ala D2 is probably pretty severely impacted by static levels.
No, in single player after beating it once in the first difficulty i really had no desire to do it again on the harder ones or play a different character. I enjoyed the game but it didn’t make me want to keep playing it like Diablo did, and i think a large part of that was the static levels. Also it didn’t do as good a job at making you feel powerful by throwing hordes of mobs at you.
I wasn’t impressed by TitanQuest. Long sections of repetition that just drag on and on. The enemies are all generic and don’t really have any special abilities or flavor that make you treat one type of badguy differently from every other. For that matter, the -players- don’t have many special abilities either. Since about most of the talent trees have about half of their space wasted on poorly tuned garbage, you wind up with only 3 to 5 useful active abilities, and it takes quite a slog to even get that many.
It’s a very pretty game in dire need of some game design to go with its graphics.
I liked Titan Quest up to a point, the original was fun up to the end, Immortal Throne less so. However, it’s a very “play onceish” game, after Immortal Throne came out my friend and I decided to start new characters and co-op once again. We got to about Egypt and got really, really bored. We slogged until we just decided to hack characters to max level with optimal equipment (all within game rules bounds).
One thing the game does well is ability balance, it’s very hard to make a non-viable character. Unfortunately, this also causes its biggest weakness. Everything is so finely tuned that it’s easy to feel like a bit of a whimp.
Titan Quest has lots of potential. I used to play the hell out of it, with the Unofficial Mod. The game gets better after Egypt.
What makes me stop playing the game is how little active abilities there. Playing as a Defender as your first class pick is, well, boring. The Warrior class has most of its beginning skills triggering on a random basis.
While there are many strong class builds, there are equally weak ones. It’s very hard to play a fighting/mage class because those two masteries add to two different stats, unless you use Dream, because it adds to Strength per mastery increment. I tried a Earth/Warrior and got my ass kicked in Egypt. Nature is also shafted if you are using pets; your minions does not scale very well.
I find that in the harder difficulties you really have to grind for better equipment, or have your ass handed to you.
Other than that, I like the games for a lot of other reasons.
BTW, the developers from the former studio are still working on a new game based on the engine: Grim Dawn, which is based on their own Victorian-eque setting. It’s only available through digital distribution.
Oh, and with apologies to the OP, I think the most underrated Diablo clone is Divine Divinity. It’s like Diablo, and have a half-way decent storyline, character interaction, alchemy and interesting varied quests.
It has one of the silliest name for a RPG ever, though.
They scale very poorly in Normal difficulty ( particularly after Act 2 ), but do fine thereafter with enough + skills. Well, the nymph needs the unofficial patch to ever be even marginally useful, regardless. But maxed, properly supported wolves are pretty effective in Epic and Legendary since they get sizeable boosts to health and damage. Not quite D2 skelemancer territory, but pretty viable.
The PIA part is you simply can’t use them for most of Normal difficulty unless you have the patience of Job. But since TQ allows for re-speccing, it’s not such a huge issue.
While this thread is active… I used to play and love NetHack and other roguelike games, and I’ve always heard Diablo described as similar to them, but I’ve actually (heretically?) never played Diablo or any of its sequels.
And I haven’t really played many computer games at all for quite some time… so one thing that is important to me is a game which really does a good job of easing you into its complexity, not something which assumes “well, here are your 28 inv slots with exp auto activate macros… but since you’ve played Diablo, we don’t have to bother explaining them to you…” or anything of that sort. Oh, and I’m not going to play multiplayer at all, almost certainly.
So… any thoughts on games in this general category that I might enjoy?
Most Diablo and Diablo-clone games generally ease you into its mechanics. If anything, those games are actually way simpler than your usual Roguelike as the emphasis is more on combat and action, not exploration or interacting with NPCs (with the exception of Divine Divinity, mentioned above).
While I think there’s a comparison to be made between Roguelikes and Diabo-clones, it’s not a big one. Roguelikes are more like stochastic puzzle games, at heart. Most of the challenge comes with making do with what the game gives you and learning to roll with the punches. Diablo-clones are much more about prioritizing enemies and being well equipped/specced. The difference, here, is that while drops are random in Diablo-clones, you have much more control over your character and his loadout than in a roguelike. In a Diablo-clone it’s also very hard to be ill equipped in the initial playthrough, it’s only in New-game plus that lack of gear really hurts, during your initial playthrough much more of your success is determined by which talents and skills your character picks, and unlike most Roguelikes, the skills and skill progression is static for a given class.
I suggest a cheap indie game called Dungeons of Dredmore. It’s got a classic roguelike flavour and a strong heaping of humour and geek pop culture references.
Pretty much how I felt. I’m not sure why, but it lacks a certain something D2 had. Maybe because the character classes don’t feel different enough? Or maybe because it had the same problem as Torchlight in that there were too many passive abilities, or 1 point abilities, etc. I dunno.