Titan Quest

Right it's that time again, nagging!
On today's menu we have THQ's Titan Quest. Another fine example of a piss poor game polish. YAY!
Certainly some of you are now wondering why it is that I'm bashing yet another game. The answer is twofold. On the one hand we have the fact that it's a buggy unstable picky monster. It might just win a prize for the worst case of release date rushing since the original unreal. Even Ascaron's Sacred that quite a few other gamers have compared this with wasn't THIS bugged. It uses a new and improved version of securerom.

Now I have never been a big fan of this kind of intrusive and quite often aggressive type of protection system but it was the lesser evil compared to the system wrecking Starforce. However it looks like the securerom devs are playing catch up. This game will crash over just about any other process running in the back. IM clients, antivirus, firewalls, mail clients. Hell it even had a fit about my launchy. It is therefore quite ironic and funny that the game is bundled with Xfire. At present trying to use xfire and gods forbid teamspeak or any other voice chat system for multiplayer is the quickest way to make the game crash. And if you're very unlucky take your entire system along for a BSOD/Reboot. Nice job guys!

Out of the 4 test pc's I tried this on I could only get it installed on 2. For some reason the game had a fit on one system either because it was SATA or because it had .NET 2.0 installed. The exact same thing happened when I tried to install this on my laptop. Judging from the status of the installer it either was trying to apply the 1.1 update to the 2.0 .NET framework. Or it hates SATA systems with an USB optical drive.

On the clean windows build it worked. Though it still crashed several times. On my main test system I could only get it to work by removing VMWare and shadow user.

The second gripe is slightly more obscure. I happen to like mythology. As a kid I read every single story i could get my hands on. As a result there is a good amount of Greek mythology trivia still in my mind. This game has that particular mythology as a them. But deviates from it quite a lot and in an annoying way. For example the game has a lot of gorgans. Now apart from this being in contradiction with the myths that only name 3 the models used for them are also very wrong. Instead of the original females with snakes as hair the game developers decided to go with full snake bodies with large breasts and a semi female head. Their stone turning gazes don't work on the main character. Something that makes no sense at all. Every kid knows how Medusa was defeated

Also just about every non human creature you come across during the entire game is stupid and fair game for slaughter. Greek myths had many good and extremely bright creatures in them. To turn what could have been a very interesting and long RPG into nothing more than a 3rd person view hack and slash game with even less depth and variation than Diablo is very sad indeed. Whatever happened to crawling through a trap filled dungeon to get a special weapon or bit of armor. To bartering with a dragon for information? Kill, crush, slash, bash and kill some more. BORING!

The sound is uninteresting and tedious, the music doesn't match the theme of the game. The monsters lack personality. There is no noticeable EAX advanced HD or real 3D sound implementation . You won’t be looking behind you to figure out where the noises are coming from or have a real feel of any weather system. You cross stone bridges between mountains and you won’t even hear a scary breeze.

Multiplayer is fun, but not very well worked out. If both players start a new character it’s only a matter of time before you need to reset the hosted world so both players can finish up quests. Especially if one dies while fighting a boss.

On a whole it could be a fun slasher, but not in it's current state. So avoid for now until it gets fixed. If you're dying to play something like this right now, you could probably get into this game for a few hours. Although if you haven't done so already playing Sacred with the Underworld expansion and Dungeon Siege would be better value for money. Not to mention probably more fun especially in coop.

EDIT: With the latest patch and the Immortal Throne expansion installed a lot of the early problems are fixed. However the multiplayer is still far from perfect and it is still somewhat unstable even on high end systems.

EDIT 2: A community patch resolves most of the remaining problems. The game still has quirks, but is now enjoyable.