Wow, okay! Welcome back to XPN Junkie! It’s been almost a full month since I’ve updated with anything, but rest assured, it wasn’t because I was out doing silly stuff, like enjoying life or being a husband. Oh no, I was grinding away at a game that turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated. And while I was doing said grinding, I started recording my gameplay footage. I started keeping track of what I was thinking while I was playing, and I started rehearsing… that’s right, rehearsing things that I would say, if I were physically telling someone about the game.

In other words, instead of my usual Backlog Barbecue write-up, I was contemplating actually making my first-ever Backlog Barbecue Youtube video. And you want to know what’s worse? I actually took the time to put it together!

While I was doing this, I learned a few things:

  1. I haven’t done a single second of video editing in almost two decades. While the basic concept hasn’t changed much, Adobe went and moved all the fuckin’ buttons around and changed what they look like.
  2. I also haven’t talked into a microphone in 20 years. It turns out I still hate my voice.
  3. 12-year-olds are cranking out more professional-looking videos than what I just spent a week on.

Needless to say, I haven’t yet decided if that video will ever be seen by the public. In the meantime, rather than re-writing something I’ve basically already written, I’m going to copy and paste the script for the video, since basically it says everything I needed to say anyway. So here we go.

*****

While Titan Quest first released on PC back in 2006, the version I played was the console re-release that came in 2018, twelve years later. This version is essentially the “Anniversary Edition” that bundles the vanilla game with the Immortal Throne expansion, as well as the graphical bells and whistles that came with it.

I bought it on sale for less than ten bucks, as kind of a “why not?” impulse purchase. I like ARPGs. Diablo III was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed Path of Exile immensely… before that game became so fucking hard I couldn’t take it anymore. But I snagged it because of one primary detail; the time period in which it released.

Titan Quest released back when ARPG’s were a thriving genre. Those of you that gamed in those days will remember a time when dungeon crawling hack n slashers were the epitome of online gaming goodness, and while PC gamers had been enjoying the pure, clicky-bliss of Diablo 2 and Sacred since 2000, us console gamers were finally getting a taste with the likes of Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath, D&D Heroes, and so on. In short, it was a throwback to a simpler time.

As it turns out, that can be a good thing… and a bad thing.

I started off Titan Quest under the impression that I was gonna push through it in about 20 hours or so. Again, as a player of console ARPG’s from that era, I was expecting a few Acts broken up into stages, each ending with a boss monster and a cool piece of gear for my troubles. Well, I was mistaken. By the time I finished up Titan Quest and its expansion, I had sunk almost 60 hours into the game. 60 HOURS.

That’s more time than I put into games I actually care about!

One of the things I noticed during my playthrough was that THIS outfit…

…is not in the game.

Now, the inclusion or lack thereof, of bikini armor isn’t going to make or break a game, but if you’re going to show it in your title screen, and on promo material you should probably include it in your game. Just sayin’.

Even though it’s a minor gripe, it does tie in to my #1 complaint with the game; the loot. Like any good ARPG, Titan Quest contains a metric shit-ton of loot. The problem is, 99% of it is crap. And I’m not talking about wading through mountains of loot drops to get that one good helmet, or badass sword, or awesome bow. I’m talking about wading through mountains of loot, TO NOT GET ANYTHING AT ALL. Titan Quest has, by far, the longest droughts between usable loot I have ever experienced in a game of this type. Once you acquire a green or blue item, you will go hours, literally hours, before getting something else you can use. And each item always has a trade-off, so while you might get something that looks great at first sight, after comparing it to your equipped item, you might find that the added damage or armor bonus isn’t worth losing the additional stats you already have. So that new blue or green gets dumped off at the nearest merchant and you’re back to once again scouring through piles and piles of useless crap.

Luckily, digging through said piles is made easier by a button function that the game forgets to tell you; Holding the A button (on Xbox at least, probably X on Playstation) will bring up a list of all the loot in your area, and holding X (or Square on PS) will automatically snag all the gold and consumables in the list. This makes things light years better, especially when the only alternative is manually wandering over the loot until it’s automatically selected, since there’s no manual selection in the game. I actually started out the game doing this, and was ready to call it quits after an hour or so. I didn’t find out about the item list until I looked it up online.

Something else the game doesn’t tell you, is that going into your options will let you filter out all the white and gray items, which, I mean, let’s honest, the game should automatically stop giving you after character level 5. I can’t see any reason why anyone would still want that shit once they get their first yellow items. And you’re going to see a lot of yellow items. Blues and greens didn’t drop with any kind of consistency, and good luck on completing an armor set. I never saw more than one item from any given set during my entire playthrough. I heard you can go back and farm certain bosses to try to complete the set, but who wants to do that in a game that already takes almost 60 hours to complete?

I hear that epic and legendary items don’t drop until you play the game at a higher difficulty, but the higher difficulties are locked until you finish Normal. You have to play through the entire game, then play through it again to get the better loot. With games like Diablo III offering smaller gameplay chunks and more farm-friendly maps, I can’t see anyone sticking with the TQ for that long, in this day and age.

So why, if the game is so long, with so little remarkable gear, and NO BIKINI ARMOR, did I even stick with it for so long?

Well, I’m not really sure, to be honest. While the auto-targeting combat is not terrible, it’s a bit frustrating and not nearly as satisfying as some of the combat in later ARPG’s. Yet, there’s something to it, whether it is that un-ending grind for better loot, or just the allure of traversing vast swathes of land, cutting down everything in your way, that just sinks it’s hooks into you slowly, and before you even realize it, you’re vowing to see it through to the end.

At least, I did, when I thought it was going to take me about 20 hours. When that time came, I was already invested, and it was a battle of attrition. I was going to finish it.

In hindsight, I was enjoying it for a long while, but the game far out-stretched its welcome. After coming to the realization that my character was never going to be as badass as I wanted, I simply resigned myself to playing it through to the end.

At least it was easy enough.

That is, until I came to this motherfucker. <clip of Typhon>

This is Typhon. He’s the final boss of the vanilla Titan Quest experience. And he’s a bastard. Nothing up to this point even posed half a challenge. This guy was immediate death. Over. And Over. And over.

Eventually I found a strategy that wittled him down, but it did include a Google search and a bit of tweaking to the attributes of my gear, namely upping character’s Vitality resistance.

Here’s the thing; Typhon and so many of the deadlier enemies in Titan Quest, all rely on Vitality Damage. i.e. Attacks that drain your health. Keep that resistance high enough, and you likely won’t have much trouble with anything the game throws at you, well, at least on the normal difficulty.

After Typhon, the game kicks on over to the Immortal Throne expansion, but really it’s more of the same, except with some different scenery. As is the tradition with expansion packs, the graphics are a little bit better, but the expansion is where the game really started to drag for me.

Maybe it was the larger, more open areas, or the slightly higher number of side quests, or maybe it was the fact that I was getting upwards of 50 hours in play time, but the game really just started to out-stay its welcome. I was playing this game for the better part of a month at this point.

Luckily, Hades, the big bad of the Immortal Throne, was a bit of a pushover. I was expecting the same grind with him that I had experienced with Typhon, but really I only died once against him, and it was more to my own carelessness than anything he did. The second time, I kept an eye on my health bar, ran around in circles a bit, and attacked when I had the opportunity. I really expected a bigger fight, but at the same time I was grateful that it was over.

Completing the Immortal Throne will throw you back to the title screen and unlock the next difficulty (though the third one still remains locked), which is called “Epic” even though it’s really just an extension of Normal mode. Seriously, the game starts you over with all your gear, and the enemies were all the appropriate level with my character. I was level 40, being attacked by level 40 monsters. That doesn’t seem very Epic to me.

The game does include a multiplayer component, either online or in splitscreen, but I only played it solo. In all honesty, with the amount of loot comparing I did on my own, I can’t really see anything being accomplished with a group. With every mound of loot being scrutinized by not only myself, but anyone else in the party, it just seems like it would be a lot of time spent doing very little. But that’s just me.

So there you have it. Titan Quest. A 12 year old game thrust into the modern console age, asking us to abide by a decade old loot system and an annoyingly obtuse auto-target. I hate that I enjoyed it, even though the game was a bit too long for its own good. At the time of this writing, the achievement for completing the game on Normal has less than 6% unlock rate on Xbox Live. Granted, that’s only Xbox’s metrics, but it’s telling.

Oh, that achievement graphic by the way?

Yep, bikini armor.

We’ll see if THQ Nordic has any intentions of updating the console versions of the game. The PC has an additional two expansions, Ragnarok and Atlantis, the latter of which has only recently released. Maybe they’ll make the trip over, and if they do, maybe I’ll re-evaluate my desire to hop back in. But for now, Titan Quest takes its place in the gathering ashes of the Backlog Barbecue pit.

*****

So there you have it. I know, this was a long one, but I was trying to make a video that had some meat to it, not just two or three minutes of me yapping. Instead it’s a little over ten minutes of me yapping. I might go in and trim it down, do some additional editing, to get it under ten. Who knows, you might see it on here soon.