Titan Quest

Let's get this out of the way up front: Titan Quest is no Diablo. It's similar in many ways to Blizzard's masterpiece and it's obviously aimed at the same people who enjoy that sort of glib frantic action RPG clickery. In some ways, it's every bit as good as Diablo. In other ways, it's better. In yet others, it's not as good. But overall, it's very much its own thing, with refreshing and unique gameplay that stands on its own, and dazzling technology that elevates it head-and-shoulders above anything it resembles.

The basic vibe is undeniably the action RPG that Blizzard all but codified with their bazillion-selling quintessential hack-n'-slasher. The fundamentals are almost identical, from the overarching premise (left-click, loot, repeat) right down to the interface, which has been established in much the same way click-dragging is established in a real-time strategy game or WASD as the movement keys in a shooter. It's unfair to criticize Titan Quest for its similarities to Diablo when these are largely a matter of simply admitting that there's no reason to tinker with the conventions of the genre.

Titan Quest manages to distinguish itself mostly in terms of character development. In Diablo, you chose a profession and probably ended up with one of the two or three viable character builds for that profession. But Titan Quest uses a system similar to Guild Wars: you choose a basic mastery, then several levels later you fold in a second mastery.

These masteries are basically classes, but there's more choice in the skill trees. In addition to choosing among new skills or upgrading old ones, you're constantly faced with the option of investing points to unlock higher-tier skills. This is compounded even further by the fact that you've got two separate masteries on which to spend your oh-so-valuable points (leveling is nothing if not stately in Titan Quest, where you have to really earn your carrots). Now you're dealing with one of the basic tenets of great gameplay design: forcing the player to make difficult choices among very attractive options.

Titan Quest also differs from Diablo in the way loot works. The treasure you'll find ties in neatly with your character build. You can simply kit yourself out with bits of this and that, but if you pay attention to the way equipment affects your character stats, you'll see the wisdom of focusing on specifics to suit the way you want to play. If you're a fighter, do you emphasize high armor for survivability or rack up piercing damage that bypasses enemy armor? If you're a caster, do you boost your intelligence for faster mana recovery or use a special weapon to leech mana? There are very few equipment slots on your character, which means you'll have to make difficult choices, and loot and money are plentiful enough to allow you to dress, as it were, the way you want. Again: difficult choices among attractive options.

The loot system is also great for working in a subgame about collecting and completing sets. And not just those virtually-impossible-to-compete sets of legendary equipment that you had to trade online to get in Diablo. Those are in there, but the more relevant collecting is matching sets of monster charms and relic fragments. These work like jewels in Diablo in that you can stick them into equipment to improve it. But whereas Diablo required special socketed equipment, anything in Titan Quest can be a candidate for sets of charms or relics, each of which you'll probably want to complete to unlock a special random bonus. It's very "Gotta catch 'em all!" This can make it worthwhile to do runs through earlier areas once they've been restocked by monsters.

The loot system in Titan Quest seems awfully generous at first. In a showy bit of stunt design, Iron Lore has actually equipped monsters with inventory items, which they'll drop when they're killed. Most of the items break by the time you've knocked a creature into its death animation. But the end result is a battlefield littered not just with corpses, but with equipment as well. This is stunt design because it's largely useless. You'll quickly realize that you only need to pay attention to the magic stuff, which is easy enough to do with the "filtered loot" hotkeys. But all that stuff on the ground is indicative of how much detail and muscle there is in this graphics engine.