Game Length

[Renevent]

Originally Posted by Calvin

The problems I had with Titan Quest's lengthy acts & areas were:

1. You take 12 steps, you fight a group. A tidy little group with 1 bone pile, a few normal mobs, and 1 or 2 supporting mobs. Then you take another 12 steps and do it again. Forever. And ever. And ever.

2. You don't hit the monsters, you attack at them. And not in a threatening fashion. And they don't bleed, they just instantly ragdoll. Instead of killing monsters, it just feels like you're poking stuffed animals.

3. Everything is aggressive.

4. The towns were so boring (voice acting, quest dialogue etc) that you didn't have a better option. It's like I kept praying for the next town to get away from the boring areas, only to pray to get away from the boring town.

5. The bosses. They were infinitely childish and drab. The Telkines are probably the lamest bosses I've ever seen in a video game. When the boss fights are the only thing to look forward to, and they're pathetically cartoonish and bland, it ruins the whole game. The game would have been so much more epic if you fought gods instead of telkines. Or anything instead of telkines.

6. The skills. What made the long areas of Diablo 2 tolerable is your skill set. If you can cast hurricane or frozen orb, teleport around, blowing up herds of naked demons by the second, then you could play it over and over. You don't get skills like that in TQ. Often times it's just countless 1v1 battles, instead of 1v25.

The whole game felt like the secret area. I took it about as seriously. It was just disheartening that a game with such a cool setup & idea, coupled with great historical weapons like the falcata was made for people that play Candyland all day.

I could play a 500 hour long ARPG if it didn't suffer from these things.

Edit: Or a 15 hour ARPG over and over and over.

1. This is true...but how is this different than any other ARPG including Diablo 2 (and now Diablo 3)? These games are about smiting hordes of monsters...

2. I can see where you are coming from here, I think this is greatly improved in Grim Dawn with blood/gibs and better monster hit reaction. This is definitely something they know was lacking in the original.

3. Should there be monsters that are not aggressive?

4. I thought they were visually interesting, although could be an area of improvement. I think Grim Dawn will be better in this aspect as there will be factions, and we will be doing quests that actually have visual effects on towns.

5. How far did you get into the game? There were many other bosses that were not Telkins. You had Typhon, Hades, Cereberus, and a bunch of others. There were also quite a few mini-bosses that were really impressive like the Hydra and Manticore.

6. Gotta ask again, how for did you get into the game? Honestly there were quite a few skills that allowed you to lay waste to multiple enemies at once.

[Capn Tucker]

There was no blood in Titan Quest because of the THQ marketing suits. They decreed no blood, and lo there was none. I'm sure the devs would have put it in if they could have.
I thought the voice acting was decent enough too. The greeks sounded suitably "greek", the egyptians, babylonians and chinese were ok too I thought.
I will agree with you that the telkines were pretty cheesy. I would have liked to have seen some of the other Titans as bosses instead of them. Most of the other bosses were pretty cool though, like the hydra, manticore, chimera, cerberus, the Erymanthean Boar etc..

[mamba]

Originally Posted by Calvin

The problems I had with Titan Quest's lengthy acts & areas were:

1. You take 12 steps, you fight a group. A tidy little group with 1 bone pile, a few normal mobs, and 1 or 2 supporting mobs. Then you take another 12 steps and do it again. Forever. And ever. And ever.

just like in any other ARPG (I tend to agree with you here, but still, this pretty much happens in every ARPG). I too would like more mobs, like in D3 act 3 and 4 where you are constantly being rushed (well, frequently)

2. You don't hit the monsters, you attack at them. And not in a threatening fashion. And they don't bleed, they just instantly ragdoll. Instead of killing monsters, it just feels like you're poking stuffed animals.

no issue for me, might be different in GD though

3. Everything is aggressive.

what did you expect ?

4. The towns were so boring (voice acting, quest dialogue etc) that you didn't have a better option. It's like I kept praying for the next town to get away from the boring areas, only to pray to get away from the boring town.

don't care, do not even listen to the text

5. The bosses. They were infinitely childish and drab. The Telkines are probably the lamest bosses I've ever seen in a video game. When the boss fights are the only thing to look forward to, and they're pathetically cartoonish and bland, it ruins the whole game. The game would have been so much more epic if you fought gods instead of telkines. Or anything instead of telkines.

there were a lot more bosses than just the Telkines, granted they were the ones at the end of an act

6. The skills. What made the long areas of Diablo 2 tolerable is your skill set. If you can cast hurricane or frozen orb, teleport around, blowing up herds of naked demons by the second, then you could play it over and over. You don't get skills like that in TQ. Often times it's just countless 1v1 battles, instead of 1v25.

I like TQ skills a lot better than those of any other ARPG. What you seem to be getting at is just a repetition of 1 though.

[LocalProfit]

Originally Posted by Betrayer

I just wanted to discuss what I thought was TQ's fatal flaw (not that it wasn't awesome).
The game was way, way, WAY too long for this type of game.
It really discouraged trying new builds and even simply finishing the game was an epic quest that I think a very small percentage actually achieved.

I also think the whole game suffered for it's ambition and length.
What would be ideal for TQ in retrospect would be to condense all the huge amount of content into a 10 hour game. There would be so much variety in the environments and monsters and replayability.
What ended up happening was all the environments lasted literally about 5x longer than it felt they should, which gave the player more than enough time to get bored.
What could have been a dense and jam-packed experience, was spread as thin as possible to pad the game length unnecessarily.

It's just my opinion but I feel a short game is not only not a detriment, but is in fact ideal in a genre where randomness and replayability are paramount.

I agree completely and hope not to see this repeat.

[Zasso]

I didn't mind the length of Titan Quest that much.
Yes it was long and took a while, but as said I found it to be epic.
I could choose to rush through the main quest storyline or explore every inch and always find nice stuff.

I was actually quite surprised when I finished the alpha and remembered the statement about it being 1/3 of the game.
It makes me wonder how long the game will be and how much the modding community will pick up on it and add more acts opposed to just adding other stuff.

[Snazzblaster]

I agree that TQ was too long. In fact, the furthest I ever got was to act 2, so maybe I don't even have to right to say anything :P

Act 1 just felt like an endless rush of satyrs in semi-forested terrain... it was all the same to me. Grim Dawn seems to have more environmental variation, though, and I already have better framerate in GD than I did in TQ. I'd much prefer a shorter game with faster levelling, at least compared to TQ.