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Bust out your toga. It’s time for…
It’s always a little sad when a good multiplayer game’s servers get shut down. It’s always always a little like a surprise Christmas when that same game gets re-released with optimizations for modern day gaming, a fixed multiplayer system and Steam workshop out of the blue. Oh, and you get a free copy because you owned the original. Uhh….. OK! Enter Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, a re-release of Titan Quest and its expansion pack, Titan Quest Immortal Throne. We’ve seen medieval, we’ve seen futuristic but have we seen… Greco… Roman?
So I’ll come clean, I’ve already played this game a lot. Maybe not as much as some, but if Steam is to be believed, I have over 120 hours on the the Immortal Throne expansion, so I chose not to play the Anniversary Edition that long. That being said, what wisdom has my 120 hours of gameplay given me? Well, it’s that Titan Quest isn’t really that bad of a game. For starters, it’s a Diabloesque; you know, the genre of gaming for people who want to grind for hours on end but not have to play online. Diabloesques are a dangerous line to walk though as a player. They sort of suck you in and demand a ridiculous amount of your time… and often we give it to them because initially they are kind of addicting.
We only realize our folly when we’ve been grinding for hours on the same enemy models we’ve been fighting since the beginning of the game, rotating the same exact skill set with the same exact gear that we’ve had for the past 3 dungeons, trying desperately just to achieve that next level. Some Diabloesques achieve their greatness by avoiding this entirely. Torchlight II (and its progenitor) never hit the player with that ever-so-familiar EXP wall that so many Diabloesques deliver as an artificial extender of the game. That’s what makes Torchlight II one of the best if not the best Diabloesque out there–all of the filler trimmed out. Levels technically take longer later on, but never slow to a crawl. You don’t need to travel through loading screens to go back and sell your gear to the shop and buy potions–you can just send your pet out to do it and so on.
Then there’s Diabloesques like Path of Exile, that do suffer from the slow-down and filler problems, but derive their joy from a ridiculously large skill tree to walk down. As of 08/03/2017, it has 1325. Titan Quest is somewhere in the middle of those two. You don’t meet a brick wall quite as badly as you do in some Diabloesques and you get to mix and match your skills between whatever two classes you choose. With the addition of the “Dreamer” class in Immortal Throne, this essentially gives you 72 different playstyles to choose from.
It’s still a grinder though, so you have to be in a power-fantasy grind kind of mood. That being said, Titan Quest is probably the second-best Diabloesque I’ve ever played, landing it in Tier 1 territory. It’s not quite as good as Torchlight II, but it’s fast-paced and the classes make it a lot of fun. It’s not hard (push R and E, the health and energy potions respectively to win) but it doesn’t have to be. Just talking about it and looking at the picture above makes me want to waste another 20 hours grinding out another kind of character that I haven’t tried before.
