Titan Quest Preview

In the tender care of Zeus

Sometime early last month, publishing house THQ announced development of a new action role-playing game by Iron Lore Entertainment, the company founded by Brian Sullivan, the co-creator of the cult classic Age of Empires. I was initially skeptical about the quality of the game, as it was always referred to as a Diablo clone. Their showing at E3 silenced skeptics and made everyone else sit up and take notice. Now, people just cannot shut up about Titan Quest.

Neck deep in Greek mythology, Titan Quest follows the story of the Greek gods known as the Titans and their clash with the new Olympian gods. According to Greek mythology, the Titans were powerful gods who once ruled the world. It was the Olympian god Zeus that engaged his Titan father Cronus in a battle that led to his dethronement. Zeus throws his father and the other Titan gods into the pit of Tartarus.

A bad case of Tartar

In the story of Titan Quest, the Titans escape Tartarus and of course being extremely pissed off, decided to lay the world to waste. This is where you, the player comes in. Your goal is to travel throughout the mythical worlds of ancient Greece and Egypt in pursuit of the secrets required to imprison the Titans once again.

The game throws you in an amazingly detailed world of ancient Greece and Egypt, steeped in mythology in all its grandeur. You will journey to places like the Parthenon, the Great Pyramids of Egypt, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon and the maze of Knossos.

If you were to glance at Titan Quest for a few seconds, you will initially be blown away by its stunning photo-realistic graphics and locations. Secondly, you will dismiss it as nothing but a Diablo clone. You couldn’t be more wrong. While it is true that the people at Iron Lore Entertainment are hardcore Diablo fanatics, it is wrong to pass this off so easily. Titan Quest brings an innumerable amount of new and exciting game play elements into the run-of-the-mill RPG, in addition to brilliant design and interesting multi-class character creation system.

Such intensity

Firstly, lets take a look at the surface of this game. The visuals in the game are simply remarkable. The locations and environment are gorgeously smooth, detailed and colorful. The characters, enemies and NPCs are well designed and fall perfectly in line with the whole mythological theme. Nothing is out of place. Overall, the graphics is top notch. Real time lighting and shadows make this RPG a beauty to behold. Another promised feature is a seamless game world, with minimal or almost no irritating load times in between.

Next, lets cut the game open and take a peek inside. The first thing we’ll look at is the character generation system. Not straying too far from conventional RPG character systems, Titan Quest lets you create and develop your character in a million possible ways. The character development system is typical, you gain experience and advance your character’s skills. The difference here is a broad multi-class system, so you can have a character skilled in numerous different fields. By broad I mean up to 25 unique classes. The game also features a wide array of weapons and items to boot. You can tweak your skills to your own liking and as you make your changes

Then, lets look at our wicked foes. The game features rag doll physics! Nuff’ said. But I’ll say more anyway. AI is seemingly advanced, with enemies working as a team, using the environment to their advantage and being more tactical, as opposed to traditional hack & slashers where the AI programming can be boiled down to one line – ‘rush at player in insanely large groups and unleash hell.’ Do not fear, the combat is simple and fast-paced and you’ll be laying the hordes of foes in your path to waste in no time.

In addition to all this goodness, the game will support co-operative play with up to eight players simultaneously. What we will have as a final product, hopefully in 2006 will be a promising next generation RPG, with not just pretty graphics but completely new and innovative game play elements, with a high potential for replayability.

The party of lore

Iron Lore Entertainment has been developing Titan Quest for almost a year now, without revealing any information about the game until E3. With a team consisting of people who have worked on games like Middle-Earth Online, D&D Online, Asheron’s Call 2 etc. and Brian Sullivan himself, we can expect a well realized high quality role playing game experience.

Meshach Thomas