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The Strange Awesomeness of Titan Quest (PS4)

Tags: #Dragonborn1721  #Titan Quest 
  • February 10, 2019

    The Strange Awesomeness of Titan Quest (PS4 Review Thingy)

    I'm a pretty huge Titan Quest fan, loved the game since I first played it (which would've been around 2010 I think, maybe earlier) and probably have a couple hundred hours put into the game...No probably around 500-750 combined. I've played both the original PC and Annivesery Editions and just picked up the PS4 version of the game a few days ago because...well it was around $10 and I wanted to play a game that I could reasonbly download (12 GB took me like 5 days of non-stop downloading...stupid shitty internet). 

    I was under no assumptions when I bought it, it's a port of a game from 10 years ago (13 actually...) from PC to Console which is almost never a good thing. Along with that it's essentially a Diablo-Clone and Diablo 3 didn't even work that well on Console. So, I really had no expectations that Titan Quest would work well, or that it would be anywhere near as fun as the PC version which for some strange reason is one of my favourite games of all time. I was right, the game is, in a lot of ways kind of a mess, but not in the sense that it makes me want to stop playing the game. In fact, in some ways it's weird little bugs, issues and porting troubles have made me enjoy the game even more and has lead to a 30+ hour (so far) journey into trying to complete the game with a character I enjoy playing. So let's jump into a few of the more obvious issues, and ones that would normally make a game a lot harder for me to get into.

    Enemy Targeting

    Titan Quest is, as I've mentioned, originally a PC game which kind of meant mouse and keyboard combat that was incredibly simple. Hotkeys from 1-9 (or 0...), click on enemies to target them, win. It was fun, and it was very much a game that you just played to calm down rather than needing to chain combos and pull or perfect timing to win (at least on the first few difficulties). But on PS4 they made the baffling decision to implement a shitty auto-targeting system that can send you just about anywhere within range slashing at an enemy...even if your surrounded by other enemies or want to target someone further away. It's completely random, can't be turned off in any way and doesn't allow you to set rules for how it chooses targets. By this I just mean being able to auto-target the strongest or weakest enemies, maybe a specific subt-type or any other number of categories that you might see in a basic Tower Defense Game. Anyway, the issue is compounded by the fact that the way you choose targets (and you can) is a baffling 'target-cone' that struggles in close range and can't target enemies if another is in the way making it almost impossible to target mages if you get swarmed first. 

    It's a combination of two baffling systems that really makes it difficult to play a character of any type. But in a strange way, this has made the game a lot more challenging to play. Having to navigate through the battlefield or arrange who your attacking before it starts with the understanding that you can absolutely fuck yourself over if you choose the wrong target is...strangely nice. It's irritating as shit of course, but in the same way that Dark Souls can be irritating at times. 

    Visual Glitches

    So, once I get around to being able to upload some of my videos for the game it'll be a bit more obvious what I mean here, but the visual glitches in the game are either terrifying, hilarious or annoying as hell. On an obvious note, I don't really like this one as much as the Enemy Targeting problems because it seems lazy instead of just trying to implement something that is genuinelly tough to get right in this sort of game. Having Visual Glitches to the extent of this game is just, well it's not a great look for a game that's been enhanced. It's not always an issue, honestly the game actually looks insanely good for a game as old as it is (even if it was visually updated), of course your character looks like molten clay, but a lot of the world is honestly really pretty when your not ignoring it. 

    Anyway, you'll constantly have enemies flickering at the edges of your screen as you approach a group, either in chessboard-like patterns or just fading between horrific grey blobs or just fading out of sight. Luckily it's not an issue once you actually get up to the enemies, but it's still rather annoying. On top of that you have spell (or damage) effects that just seem to be pushed to the extreme or turn invisibile. Enemies can turn into the endless squares, red blurs or any number of other issues. 

    It's just not a good look for a game, but they don't actually effect gameplay so most of the time it's funny rather than annoying. I'd still prefer it if they jumped in and fixed them, but there are more pressing concerns.

    Conclusiony Thingy?

    Eh, there's probably a few other things I could rant about, the inventory management is pretty shit but at least you've got an auto-sorting mechanic which isn't any worse than other games (you just have to hit it 8 times before it sorts it perfect) but the rest of it is terrible. I don't play with sound so I have no comments there (and yes I know that's weird). Oh there's no way to scroll through text, but I think that was an issue with the PC version as well (rather than allowing you to just read at your own pace it has a sort of auto crawl effect which is very annoying because I'm a fast reader). Basically it's not a perfect port, or even a very good one. I'd probably give it a 5/10, but the game itself is still as fun as ever in my opinion. It's a game that requires you to enjoy the genre, but it's made by people with an insane amount of passion, with many of the people working on similar games to this date (Grim Dawn which is probably even better than Titan Quest) and even pulling an AoE 2 and releasing new DLC years later. Now it's on PS4, and for some reason I still love the ever-living shit out of this game, bugs and all.