2419: Happy Anniversary, Titan Quest

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is currently just £5 on Steam, and it’s completely free if you own any other Titan Quest products already. You should go buy it and play it, because I have spent most of the evening doing so and I like it a whole lot.

Titan Quest Anniversary Edition combines the original Titan Quest and its expansion Immortal Throne into one package, cleans the whole shebang up for modern computers — the original came out in 2006, hence the “anniversary” thing — and unleashes it on the world for existing fans and newcomers alike to enjoy.

Having never played Titan Quest, I fell into the latter category. It had just never quite appealed to me for some reason, despite it being the sort of hack and slash loot-whoring game I enjoy coupled with Greek mythology, which I was in love with as a child — and despite the game often being discussed in hushed, reverential whispers any time anyone brought it up.

£5 for a remastered version of the game and its expansion in one complete edition was too good an offer to turn down, though, so I took the plunge and gave it a go, partly to sate my own curiosity and partly to have something to play online with my friend Chris, who had also been going back and forth about whether or not he wanted it.

If you, like me, have never played Titan Quest, here’s the deal. You play a male or female Greek person who initially has no character class. You save a farmer’s horse from being eaten by satyrs, then you embark on a journey to cleanse the land of evil seemingly for no other reason than “because why not”. Your character is given precisely no backstory and no real motivation to do their thing, but in this sort of game that’s probably a good thing. While the lore in the Diablo games is substantial and interesting, its execution in-game leaves a lot to be desired, and in latest installment Diablo III in particular, by far the most enjoyable way to play the game is in “Adventure Mode”, which dispenses with the narrative and linear structure altogether in favour of giving you freedom to go anywhere at any time to chase down various objectives.

Titan Quest doesn’t quite go that far in abandoning the traditional narrative structure — you still progress from “unknown Greek person” to “hero of legend” over the course of the game — but the plot is very much de-emphasised in favour of the excellent mechanics.

At level 2, you unlock a “specialism” — essentially a character class with its own skill tree plus a mastery meter you need to pump skill points into in order to unlock the next “tiers” of skills. (Said meter isn’t entirely useless; each point you put into it gives you a substantial increase to your base stats.) Then at level 8, you unlock another specialism and can start pumping skill points into that as well, allowing you to effectively mix and match skills from two entirely different classes to create your own custom build.

And these classes aren’t your usual warrior-thief-mage trinity, either — they’re all interesting, and all present interesting combinations when combined together. All together, there is a caster type that specialises in cold and electricity; another caster that specialises in fire and earth; a close-range physical attacking type person; a highly defensive physical attacker (who can apparently do some tremendous things with shields later in the game); a tree-hugging hippy that can summon wolves, heal things and infect enemies with plague; a hunter type that is good with bows and spears; and a backstabby thiefy rogue type deal that is good at inflicting pain but not so good at taking it.

The great thing about this system is that you can make a variety of different character types — all together, there are 36 different combinations, each of which has its own unique name. You can combine the Defense and Warfare masteries to create Conqueror, for example, which is a tank that also hits incredibly hard. Or you could combine the Earth and Nature masteries to create Summoner, a character that is able to summon a variety of different minions to do their bidding, including an earth golem, some wolves and a nymph, and be able to sit back, pelt the enemies from a distance and heal their minions as needed.

The combat itself is fundamentally satisfying. Humanoid enemies are thrown around with satisfying ragdoll animation; birds explode in a shower of feathers; skeletons shatter into pieces. The variety of skills mean that there are a lot of different ways you can protect yourself or go on the offensive, too, and so far I haven’t felt like there’s a “bad” combination; with two different masteries, you can either cover the weaknesses of the first with the second, or enhance the first’s strong points with the second.

Then, of course, there’s just something wonderfully enjoyable about hacking and slashing through recognisable creatures from mythology. The game appears to act as pretty much an Ancient Greece’s Greatest Hits, promising confrontations with Medusa, the Hydra and numerous others over the course of the adventure — and I believe you also take a trip to ancient Egypt and China later, too, which opens up possibilities for all manner of interesting confrontations.

I hadn’t expected to like the game quite as much as I did when I booted it up for the first time. But, well, the 5 hours of playtime Steam has already recorded for me — I bought it earlier this evening — probably speaks for itself.