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Wherein we discuss the wonder that is TITAN QUEST (NSF56k)
s3rial one
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Latest Update: 12 July 2010
IRONLORE HAS REFORMED AS CRATE ENTERTAINMENT AND IS MAKING THE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR TO TITAN QUEST: Grim Dawn.
IRONLORE HAS REFORMED AS CRATE ENTERTAINMENT AND IS MAKING THE SPIRITUAL SUCCESSOR TO TITAN QUEST: Grim Dawn.
Grim Dawn information is spotty right now, but they're doing a funding program similar to Natural Selection 2 and Mount and Blade. It seems that they've learned from being raked over the coals by THQ, and are trying to privately fund the development of Grim Dawn. Right now, they're taking donations. When the game's completed (although there is no promise of that), you will get a digital download of the game. They plan to distribute on Steam.
If you want to take part in Grim Dawn's donation program . . .
There are three levels you can buy in at:
Normal
Normal
- $19.85
- Direct download of the game upon release
- $32.00
- Direct download of the game upon release
- Beta access
- Your name in the credits
- In-game item (TBA)
- $48.00
- Direct download of the game upon release
- Alpha access
- Beta access
- Your name in the credits
- In-game item (TBA)
Based on the little available information, Grim Dawn is going to be in a steampunk setting; think League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I'll update as more info comes out, and make a thread for it once there's enough info to justify one. Here are a few screenshots, though:
You can find more at Grim Dawn's media page. Just keep in mind, the game's pre-alpha right now.
SEE BELOW FOR PATCH & MULTIPLAYER INFORMATION
WHAT IS TITAN QUEST?
Titan Quest is - although I loathe using the term - a Diablo clone. But I say that in the most appreciative manner possible. Titan Quest is a masterful Diablo clone. It has incredible environments, fantastic art design that has held up remarkably well, and some extremely engaging character design and gameplay. More on that below.
IF IT'S SO GOOD, WHY HAVEN'T I HEARD OF IT?
Well, there are several reasons. First, simply, is that THQ - the publisher - did the most half-assed job promoting the game that they possibly could.
Second was TQ's reputation. The first demo of TQ that was released performed pretty poorly. This didn't get the game started off on the right foot. Additionally, there was some sort of anti-piracy system in the game that would simply cause a CTD. No error message, no warning. If you had a pirated copy of the game, you could start up and play, but sooner or later, you'd get a CTD. Well, this wasn't known at the time, and so forums ran over with people bitching up a storm about how "buggy" TQ was. It wasn't buggy. They were using pirated copies and TQ had oddball piracy protection.
Third, and I think most damaging to the game, is that it didn't have any online support to speak of. What is there basically works like Open Battlenet; anyone can connect, and it's full of cheaters and douchebags. Adding insult to injury, the game made use of Microsoft's godawful DirectPlay system, which is notoriously quirky and has issues with many NAT routers.
So what we wind up with is a game made by a newbie development team (Ironlore), with a bad publisher, saddled out of the gate with a reputation it didn't deserve, and then sunk by bad online play.
Fortunately, the game is awesome despite all that.
HOW AWESOME?
SO awesome.
This game is... better than Diablo II. :shock:
I prefer the whole gothic medieval thing but fuck... this game is so well made in pretty much every regard that I am afraid Diablo III won't satisfy me when it comes out.
Whee!
maek pictur plz
HOW DOES CHARACTER ADVANCEMENT WORK?
TQ doesn't have classes per se. It has 8 skill trees (9 with the expansion): Hunting, Warfare, Defense, Rogue, Storm, Earth, Spirit, and Nature (and Dream). When you level up, you get 3 skill points. You pick up to two of these skill trees to use (the first opens up at level 2, and the second at level 8), and can invest points in either a tree's mastery, which increases your stats and unlocks abilities, or individual skills, making them more powerful.
You can see the individual skills and get an idea for how it all works by using the most excellent Titan Calc tool.
STORY?
This gist of the story is that you're in ancient, mythological Greece, and everything's going to hell. Monsters are being organized into an army that's ransacking human towns, courtesy of these demons called Telkines. Typically, mankind would plea to the gods for mercy and intervention, but after that whole ordeal with the titans, Zeus & Co. have basically told humanity to go die in a fire and deal with the Telkines themselves. That's where you - predictably - come in.
The original campaign takes you from ancient Greece to Egypt to Mongolia. The expansion takes place predominantly in ancient Greece and the underworld.
HOW DOES THE GAME ACTUALLY PLAY?
TQ uses an isometric camera, just like Diablo. You can zoom in and out, and everything is rendered in 3D, but the camera is more or less fixed. The game's mouse-driven, but uses an action bar (like any MMO you've played recently) for powers, plus allowing the character to put powers on the mouse keys, as well. As you'd expect, you stomp around all manner of settings, exploding monsters to see what sort of goodies pop out.
Loot-wise, TQ's system isn't anything new. It has magic items (yellow), rares (green), sets (blue/purple), uniques (blue/purple), potions, life and mana leech, runs and charms, etc. Thankfully, though, your inventory is larger than Diablo's, and it has an auto-sort button, which dramatically cuts down on the inventory tetris.
SO IT'S BASICALLY DIABLO 2 WITH BETTER GRAPHICS, BETTER MUSIC, A BETTER CLASS SYSTEM, SET IN ANCIENT GREECE, BUT WITHOUT BATTLENET?
Yep.
WANT!
Sadly, Ironlore has shut down, a victim of bad publishers like so many before them. But TQ can still be found for purchase on Steam.
PORT FORWARDING
UDP 42800
UDP 49152 - 49172
UDP 49272 - 49292
THE FAN PATCH
As mentioned above, Ironlore is no more. They closed down in 2008. As such, TQ never quite got all the patching it deserved. Some abilities were broken, some bugs still hounded players. And so a group of fans got together and made an unofficial patch. As of this posting, the current version is 1.17a.
You can find the patch here.
NOTE TO STEAM USERS
You can apply the fan patch as well, but there's an extra step.
1. Download both the manual and automatic patches.
2. Place the automatic patch in your Immortal Throne folder and run it.
3. Take the engine.dll file from the manual patch, and replace the existing engine.dll file with it.
When the Steam version is correctly patched, it should display the version as 1.17a, instead of 1.1sd on the title screen.
JOIN THE STEAM GROUP!
http://steamcommunity.com/groups/immortalwang
I'M NEW, WHAT SHOULD I PLAY?
Pick any two masteries, and you'll be able to find a build that's soloable through the end of the game on the hardest setting. Obviously, some may take more work than others. Here's the gist of it, though:
Characters will broadly divide into one of five roles: (1) pet-focused caster, (2) offensive caster, (3) melee, (4) archer, and (5) hybrid.
Casters generally offer the easiest start, combining high offense with relatively low equipment dependency (N.B. Flame Surge in the Earth tree is a million kinds of awful; you cannot make a character focused on it any good).
Melee and archer characters can be extremely powerful, but are more equipment-dependent.
Hybrids are tough to play, and extremely equipment-dependent. They can be very powerful, with the right stat allocation and gear, but they aren't very newbie-friendly unless you can twink them.
USEFUL LINKS & TIPS
- Titan Calc is as close to a character planner as TQ has.
- Game Banshee has an awesome TQ section for walkthroughs and items.
When you have pets, you can right click on their portrait and set them to aggressive, defensive, etc. - All skills have an effective hard cap of 4 levels over the skill's max. So if a skill takes 16 points to max, its cap is 20. If it takes 12 to max, its cap is 16. Many skills receive some sort of upgrade at this cap (e.g. you can summon your 3rd wolf pet at 20/16). You can get to this cap by getting +skills items or finding a mastery shrine.
- Note that the fan patch messes with skill caps a bit, in order to fix some skills that wouldn't scale with +skills properly. For example, the Wisp skill in the Storm Mastery tree.
- If you get a mastery shrine, re-summon all your pets. They will stay at that level with the improved abilities after the mastery effect wears off.
- You can re-spec your character at major cities (e.g. Delphi, Athens). Look at your map for a blue dot. It costs money and starts cheap and the cost goes up per-point. You can't re-spec masteries, though; you're stuck with those.
- Always, always, always carry potions. The default hotkeys are R for health and E for energy.
- Charms and essences can be combined. They're used to enhance your equipment (including greens/rares) and to craft artifacts. They cannot be used on uniques, though.
- Press M to bring up the big map. You can zoom in and out and drag it around.
- A thread with explanation of many of the game's mechanics. More here.
QUEST CHECKLIST
TQ has a lot of quests, but these are the ones that add permanant enhancements to your character. If you're doing a speed run (or going back after one to pick up what you missed), make sure you get these.
Act 1
- Sparta: kill Nessus, 1 skill point
- Tegea: Poisoned Spring, health bonus
- Ambrossos Farmland: Chiron's Bow, 2 attribute points
- Delphi: Bring Olive Branch to Oracle, resistance bonus
Act 2
- Desert Wastes: Kill scorpion monster, 2 skill points
- Memphis/Giza: Bring Eye of Chaos & Hand of Kufu to priest, 2 attribute points
- Thebes: Turn in Telkine's tablet, 2 skill points
Act 3
- Chang'an: Kill Bandari, 2 attribute points
Act 4
- Rhodes: Gather the three plants for the cure, health bonus, +STR
- Stygian Marsh: Kill Feaser, +STR/DEX/INT
- Plains of Judgement/City of Lost Souls: Dust of a Titan, 2 skill points
- Underworld: Kill Hades' generals, +5% damage
s3rial one on
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Let me tell you about Demon's Souls....
Problem is my laptop is a piece of guano but its only maybe 1.5 years old. It's just burdened with many lifetimes of porn. (kidding) Will this run decently even with oodles of enemies on-screen? Spore runs pretty well if that says anything.
I've got a 19 Assassin (rogue/warrior) which I'm sure I built wrong but I don't care. I just got to Act 2. I also have a Storm character I just started, who seems way more powerful than my Assassin.
Also, installing the expansion makes them game much better. It adds in town storage like Diablo, but also built in muling between characters, which is nice. No need to run D2 on my crap laptop just to transfer an item (and no need to buy 2 copies of the game to do that).
I wish they had more character appearance variety than male or female, but once you get enough gear I guess it doesn't make too much of a difference.
I'd be up for playing multiplayer sometime, but I don't want to commit to a schedule that I might not be able to keep.
Assholes.
I'm playing right now on my level 11 character that's still in Greece. If anyone has a character in that level range (or wants to make a new one or something), let me know, and I'd be happy to team up.
EDIT: I should point out that I run the 1.16 fan patch (it's just a bunch of bug fixes that Ironlore never got around to), so I can't play with anyone unless they install that, too. You can find it here if you're interested.
Yeah. That thread has an uninstaller for it as well, if you don't like it for whatever reason.
I played through it when it first came out with a Conquerer (warfare/defense) - he was amazing. I've since lost that character, and am now playing a Ranger.
I'd definately be up for some multiplayer sometime.
PSN: FettS1
FFXIV: Kashell Valeth
Or I might buy it. But I don't know, probably not.
Suggestion: If talking about it is making you want to play too much, have a scheduled Game On with new characters who players shouldn't level outside of the Game On event (or just enough to catch up or whatever), and start a Game On campiagn or something. Then play with whothewhatever whenever.
I'm doing a pet-heavy build. The boss is going to rape me six ways from Sunday.
It has always been a curiosity to me that, unlike any other game in the genre I can think about, pets start as weak as they get (well, after the first few newbie levels), and only get better as the game gets harder. It's so... backwards.
I don't think I have my old character anymore... had a Corsair (defense/rogue... shitloads of damage, and tons of defense) that was pretty well off, and kicked a ton of ass. If it's still around, the character's on my old computer, and TQ isn't very friendly to transporting save files, as I recall.
I think you can just copy your entire saved folder over without any problem. I've done it from my desktop to my laptop.
In fact, I keep my TQ Vault data and a few characters I absolutely do not want to lose backed up on a flash drive. Never had any problem with it before.
So, surprisingly, I handed the Act 1 boss and his mini-boss their asses. It went way better than I was expecting.
Starting up Act 2 right now at level 17.
Not many (as in none) games do the whole gothic fantasy thing like Diablo/II. This looks better than Diablo III graphics-wise, though.
Might give it a try.
A couple of things I'd recommend;
Really no reason not to buy the original game plus the expansion. Expansion adds a badly-needed fourth act to the game as well as some swell features like the ability to transfer items in your stash from character to character.
There's an unofficial forum out there for TQ that still gets posted to. You can google for it fairly easily; it'll really expand your playing experience. First and foremost there's a fan patch that was put together after Ironlore went under; it doesn't do much in terms of balancing the classes (and they're horribly inbalanced), but it does fix a lot of bugs and in some cases makes skills work when they didn't at all before.
I played a Hunter/Nature character to about 20, then started over on a Warfare character who seconded in Dream. Umm, yeah. I think I spoiled myself on the rest of the game because that character absolutely destroys everything. Dream really is an overpowered mastery, it kind of trivializes the game.
There's a total-conversion (sort of) mod that replaces all 9 masteries with new fan-made ones, too.
Loot farming is very strange... In TQ, most bosses don't really drop loot. When you kill them, chests are unlocked that you can go open for goodies. Most of the time, the goodies are just gold and potions. And then you'll be just killing normal monsters somewhere and super awesome items will drop. There are very few times where boss runs are actually the best way to get equipment. But, once you get to the higher difficulties, several optional bosses are added in out-of-the-way areas which can royally kick your ass if you're not prepared, but unlock chests that can drop rather good stuff. And then there's the SECRET BONUS AREA OOOOOooooooOOOOOOooooooo.......
Also, it doesn't matter how many purple items you have, sometimes the best items are simple green magical items with JUST the right combination of prefixes/suffixes. Kind of like Diablo II before the expansion, which is nice.
Inquisitor77: Rius, you are Sisyphus and melee Wizard is your boulder
Tube: This must be what it felt like to be an Iraqi when Saddam was killed
Bookish Stickers - Mrs. Rius' Etsy shop with bumper stickers and vinyl decals.
All mobs drop all of the gear they are carrying. Most of it is just so shitty that it doesn't highlight. You can change that option in your settings.
Edit: That is to say, every mob that carries a sword drops the sword, no matter how rape-damaging it is. Even the crappy short swords that every mob carries drop.
I also have a terribly-built Assassin (Warrior/Rogue) from the first time I played through the game (before the expansion pack was released). He's 42, but needs a few more levels under his belt before he starts really kicking ass again. Also, better gear. He's mostly done with Egypt.
A couple of days ago I started a Templar (Dream/Defense), who is just tearing shit up. She's halfway through Egypt on Normal, level 20, and while she has died twice so far, it was my fault both times - I was stupid enough to fight within range of a centaur battle standard once, then I didn't notice a miniboss mage nuking the shit out of me in the labyrinth while I was dealing with the swarm of undead. If I'm being even halfway careful, she can just wade right into any situation and smite the ever-loving hell out of it. She is ridiculously overpowered, even though I haven't bothered putting charms/relics on any of her gear yet.
I've got a Slayer and a Paladin that are both in Act 1 of Epic right now.
Truth be told, you'll never bother stealing back life.
The pets are a major point-sink, but they're worth it. You likely won't be taking enough hits that it'd be worth investing in stealing life when you can just chug a potion.
I mean, try it out, and see how you like it. The Conjurer is plenty powerful and has a fair amount of wiggle room, but its main strength is in having the Core Dweller (which, maxed out, is borderline invincible in the later difficulties) and the Litch and the Outsider and Enslave Spirit.
The concern at that point is what you want to do for offense: Ternion Attack + Arcane Lore + Earth Enchantment with a fire staff? That'll do a nice chunk of damage. Or you could mix up Earth Enchantment with either Volcanic Orb or Eruption (or both, maybe). And don't forget Volatility! You might even find Flame Surge to be worth trying, although I've always felt its mana cost was way too high for what it does.
Just in case you or anyone else may be looking around, here are a few tips on the various classes:
There are some others that are incredible as well, like the Assassin (Rogue/Warfare), Slayer (Warfare/Hunting, arguably the most powerful of all builds), and Corsair (Rogue/Defense). And regarding the Templar, well... let's just say that Dream/Anything is powerful. Dream is wtfawesome.
Things I typically like:
-A single player build that can solo the entire game without major difficulties or uber/very specific item dependencies
-Pets pets pets (or other spells/skills that do the damage for me, and keep me out of harm's way)
-A laid-back playstyle
-Regeneration, self-heals, vampiric spells, or anything else that keeps me from potion dependency
-Versatility
-Ranged attacks and spells moreso than up-close-and-personal melee
Things that typically turn me off:
-A class that needs constant button-mashing, constant skill/item swaps, and insta-reaction time twitch play
-Coming across monsters that are completely immune to any atack in my arsenal, that I have to run from
-Needing to waste time/money on frequent potion restocking, hours of specific class-defining item hunting, or other similar metagaming in order to make the class end-game viable.
-Ammo
I have the game and the expansion rotting on a shelf, this post got me interested again - i'm really hoping there's a class in TQ that will be fun for my first go-through, based on the above.
Thanks in advance!
You should look at Spirit (Lich and outsider summons, life steal) and either nature (wolf and dryad summons) or fire (Molten guardian summon and blasty spells).
There's no build in the game that will get you as many pets as a skellymancer. That said, classes that have access to pets that are up 100% of the time (without +100% recharge gear) are Earth, Storm, Dream, Nature, and Spirit.
Earth only has one pet, but it's a fantastic tank. Storm only has one pet, and it's squishy as can be, but it has a 99% dodge rate and a very powerful group elemental damage buff. Sprit has one regular pet (the Lich; very well-rounded) and one periodic pet (the Outsider), plus a confuse ability. Nature has the most in terms of volume of pets; it can summon up to three wolves at a time (requires skill level 20, so you need either +4 skills from items or a mastery shrine), plus the dryad. Dream has a single pet, too; the Nightmare is fairly well-rounded, like the Lich, and will buff your other pets.
Mixing any of those will do well, but Dream/Spirit, Dream/Nature, or Spirit/Nature would probably be the closest you can get. Nature has the advantage of, while being the lowest offense, having a nice resist debuff ability that will let you tackle the resistances you'll run into later on.
Just be aware that while almost anyone can finish the game, Legendary is pretty damned hard, and you won't get through it without getting your hands on high-end equipment. This is true for virtually every character, though; you couldn't get through Hell in Diablo 2 with a Barbarian wielding a Shadowfang, either. :P And there are mini-bosses in secret areas you might stumble into in Epic and Legendary that will tear you a new asshole if you aren't ready for them.
Well, you're the only one who has said anything about scheduling games, so that idea may have to get the axe, too. Ugh.
Why is it such a bloody hassle to get people to play together, huh? :P
I just finished dinner, and I've got no plans tonight. I've got characters ranging from ridiculously over-powered and over-equipped at level 70 to... well, I could roll a new one, I suppose. Although I find starting Epic around level 40ish to be far more interesting.
But if you or anyone else wants to play tonight, it could be awesome.
Sure, I'd be up for a game. Let me think of what sort of character I'd want to make while I go dink around with my router.
3DSFF: 5026-4429-6577
My router and TQ seem to duke it out at times. Want to make sure I can connect/host properly.