Titan Quest 2! Now there’s a name you can set your watch by. No colons, no special jargon, no twisted subtitles like “Gaia’s BOUNTY” or “Hyperion’s Wild Rumpus” – just the reassuring prospect of a titanic quest that, who knows, might involve actual titans. The action RPG by that name seems similarly straightforward: follow a storyline through a mythological world in a top-down view, smashing age-old Greek giga-crabs and the like to get shinier, pointier types of equipment. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that there’s an endgame where you farm monsters for crafting materials.
Like Pandora opening her box, but without the accompanying flood of disease, curses, and death, THQ Nordic has released a recent trailer that details it all. Here it is…
…And here’s a written review based on a presentation I watched earlier this week, for those of you too indolent to watch a video. The heart of Titan Quest 2 is the Mastery system, Masteries are sets of skills that work together to colorful effect. Players can choose two Masteries rather than choosing a fixed class, and different combinations of Masteries naturally result in different playstyles. You can also modify the skills themselves, by jiggling stats and adding fancy features like ground pounding or a soothing blast of permafrost.
Meanwhile, enemies form a series of factions with their own skills, tactics, and corresponding loot. They’ll work together to overwhelm you, encouraging you to experiment with your mastery. You can play the game in a less deliberate way, though, with certain skills and abilities that allow you to get through the swing of things. Then there are the bosses. Check out this miniature dragon in the footage. Can you pet the dragon? Maybe after it dies.
As for the buildcrafting odyssey that extends beyond the story’s conclusion, it’s what you’d expect. Loot comes in a variety of rarity colors, and painting your gear platinum (or whatever color you find the highest) is certainly a more enticing prospect than rolling the credits. There’s also a crafting system, later in the game, that encourages you to deliberately harvest materials from enemies.
I think this will amuse fans of the original Titan Quest as well as action RPG players put off by the grimness of Diablo 4 or even the relatively shiny Path of Exile. You don’t have to loot by the lithe of a dying torch in the fleshy folds of Hell. You can do it while standing knee-deep in the gentle waves of the Aegean. Look at those ruins and waterfalls! I can almost smell the sun beating off the mosaics. I’m not a large fan of loot-based games myself, but the gentle splendor of this game intrigued me. The large question is: will it be as fat and saggy with live-action elements as Blizzard’s work? Find out more at Couple AND GOG. No release date yet.
