Shades of Twilight

I have been reading up some on Titan Quest before I actually went and got it. Some writeups say that it’s a homage to the old games like Diablo. They weren’t kidding. The very FIRST thing I noticed, and irritated me, was that we can’t pan the camera around. It’s a fixed Isometric-kind of view, altho you can zoom in and out with the camera. Yeah yeah I was hoping for a NWN-like experience I guess.

Objects fade if it’s hiding your character, like how Diablo did it. It’s kinda like an overkill since the game uses 3D objects, hence you don’t need to do “tricks” like what Diablo did because Diablo wasn’t a 3D game. Diablo was a fully sprite-driven game, in 2D. In this respect I was disappointed. I am sure that if the camera angle could be rotated and panned etc, it would have made the game that much more enjoyable. This kinda reminds me of Baldurs Gate too, and those were sprite-driven games too.

Icewind Dale was perhaps the first game that I know, that “tested” the current Neverwinter Nights interface. The only downside to Icewind Dale’s gameplay was that you need to create all 6 party members before you set out on your quests. You can’t just “pick them up” like how Baldurs Gate does it, and for a single-player game I’d prefer we don’t need to “LFG” before we set out for the quests.

I made a quick character in Titan Quest and set off into the world. Character creation was fast – choose gender, name, and tunic colour, and you’re done. What, no classes? Well you don’t really worry about that till you hit level 2. For now, you just hack and slash. Here lies the 2nd shortcoming, in my opinion – the lack of a tutorial. They DO have a “tutorial box” that pops up once in a while, but if you don’t do actions that trigger those popups, you wouldn’t know about them. Once you hit level 2, you are told (via one of those “tutorial boxes”) that you now have skills points to allocate. So once you hit the key to bring up the skill window, you are presented with a number of choices. At first I had no idea what these are, till I read the descriptions and realised that THIS was where you get to pick your class.

For some reason I picked a Pyrocaster, which I’d classify as a mage, instead of my usual Fighter/Warrior class. Perhaps tonight I will make a new character that is melee-based, as per normal when I play these kind of games.

I didn’t get too far into the game before the first major problem stopped me – it crashed out and I couldn’t reload my character again. I hunted around Google and realised I need a patch to fix it, and promptly did. Once I patched it, off I went again. Eventually I stopped playing around 1am at night.

Titan Quest looks reasonably OK for a Diablo clone. Quests are a little bit too trivial – if you’re a die-hard questor in Everquest, these quests are very simple by comparison. Almost like a milk-run in fact.

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