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Why is titan quest so bad

spectre

Arcane
Joined
Oct 26, 2008
Messages
5,381
I feel that guy's pain. I did some game writing a few years back, and whatever I came up with that deviated from a standard cliche was discarded. Low intelligence characters speaking in broken sentences, axed, any attempt at putting in cockney or otherwise dialectically flaveored lines, axed.
An idea that a group of elves should be kidnapping non-elves and use them in blood magic rituals, axed, cuz, y'know, elves are good, noble and all.

The fear of making players uncomfortable is the cancer that's eating game design. I wonder, why don't they apply same standards to two guys showing each other their honor.

Still, I dunno if TQ would be saved by all that he proposed. The game's main problem is actually pacing as well as the broken drop algorithm. Although, nothing wrong in a Diablo clone getting some more grimdark.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2010
Messages
3,524
I lasted longer in Titan Quest than in either Diablo 1 or 2 or Sacred 1 or 2. Not really sure why, probably because I was more bored at the time I played it, given that they are really not all that different

I guess they are like the game equivalent of a cheesy action movie
 

CrimsonAngel

Prophet
Joined
Oct 2, 2007
Messages
2,258
Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong
From this post:
Medierra said:
I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it

the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence.

We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures.

I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil".

When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

Poor blighter never stood a chance.

That shit has Dragon Age 2 Written all over it only the guy who would have gone against it quit LONG AGO!.
 

xemous

Arcane
Joined
Aug 6, 2004
Messages
1,107
Location
AU
hack and slash games always a waste of time because they force u to do tedious repetitive boring shit. the only reason anyone would play through one are interesting locations and characters, none of which titan quest had.with the advent of lets plays you can avoid playing them altogether.

to make it even worse titan quest is huge. huge boring shit. diablo 1 takes about 6 hours to finish, has a semi-interesting story (i enjoyed it when i was a kid); titan quest takes 60 hours and i cant remember a single character or event or story element, nothing.

it's a piece of shit.
 

20 Eyes

Liturgist
Joined
Nov 23, 2010
Messages
1,395
From this post:
Medierra said:
I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it

the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence.

We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures.

I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil".

When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

Poor blighter never stood a chance.

That really explains why the game was so boring and soulless, while being a well-executed Diablo clone on the technical side.
 

Shannow

Waster of Time
Joined
Sep 15, 2006
Messages
6,386
Location
Finnegan's Wake
The fear of making players uncomfortable is the cancer that's eating game design. I wonder, why don't they apply same standards to two guys showing each other their honor.
Which is hillarious when you consider the most successful, "serious" fantasy book series: "A Song of Ice and Fire" (and others like "The Malazan Book of the Fallen", "The First Law", "The Prince of Nothing", "The Fencer/Scavenger/Engineer"-Trilogies, "Perdido Street Station", et al. All of which range from successful to very successful, AFAIK.)
They go out of their way to make their readers uncomfortable and still sell like hot cakes (when the overall quality is good enough).
 

Hoaxmetal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
The fear of making players uncomfortable is the cancer that's eating game design. I wonder, why don't they apply same standards to two guys showing each other their honor.
Which is hillarious when you consider the most successful, "serious" fantasy book series: "A Song of Ice and Fire" (and others like "The Malazan Book of the Fallen", "The First Law", "The Prince of Nothing", "The Fencer/Scavenger/Engineer"-Trilogies, "Perdido Street Station", et al. All of which range from successful to very successful, AFAIK.)
They go out of their way to make their readers uncomfortable and still sell like hot cakes (when the overall quality is good enough).
Books get away with way more than games/movies anyway, which is a bit weird. I thought that Clockwork Orange (movie) had some uncomfortable parts, turns out it's milder than the book.
 

Shannow

Waster of Time
Joined
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Messages
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Location
Finnegan's Wake
Books get away with way more than games/movies anyway, which is a bit weird. I thought that Clockwork Orange (movie) had some uncomfortable parts, turns out it's milder than the book.
Huh?
I criticized that devs/publishers pussy out of something although it has been proven to be successful.
You state that movie producers behave the same way, yet you sound ("books get away...") as if you thought that were an explanation or argument for pussying out...
Huh?
 

Hoaxmetal

Arcane
Joined
Jul 19, 2009
Messages
9,157
I was just saying :roll:

Writers have more freedom to write what they want, when making a game you'll get butthurt press and rating increases for showing a butt, even more if you try to "make payer feel uncomfortable."
 

Mangoose

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Apr 5, 2009
Messages
24,716
Location
I'm a Banana
Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity
Easy question. Boring and repetitive enemies. Once in a while you get an interesting fight.

And the word, "interesting." should never be in the same sentence as the phrase, "once in a while."
 

oscar

Arcane
Joined
Aug 30, 2008
Messages
8,036
Location
NZ
There seemed to be a constant fear during the development of Titan Quest about upsetting this or that segment of the audience or someone's grandmother. I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life). We were building a game with relatively complicated and hardcore gameplay systems but trying to make it thematically and visually appealing to as wide a casual audience as possible. The end result, is that the game was a little more bland and generic in some respects than it should have been and the game world didn't do much to convey a sense of danger.

One example of this would be the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence. I guess somehow it is wrong to fight intelligent enemies but okay to slaughter dumb animals? We also weren't originally allowed to have humans die, ever, in the game and no human corpses.

One area where this handicapped us was in the creation of environmental assets that visually demonstrated the enemy's war against humanity. We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent. It was a struggle just to monster camp assets. All of the ruins were also removed from Greece at one point because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins... I had to fight for both of these things. Without them, Greece would have just been a featureless expanse of wilderness with occasional human towns that never really appeared to be in any serious danger.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures. It was highly controversial when the designs for the Limos and Arachnids were first presented. I had to personally fight to get those approved because they were considered too grotesque and scary looking even though they were based on actually mythology. Undead and the Spirit Mastery were also a struggle to get in the game. I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil". We managed to push a few more things like that through over the course of development but it was always frowned upon.

Basically, my belief is that Titan Quest never had as much style and character as it could have because we were afraid to do anything even remotely controversial. When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

We ended up with a game set in Greek mythology that barely contained any actual mythology other than the inspiration for some of the monsters and dialog on peripheral story-teller NPCs stuck off to the side in the towns. The first quest I put in the game, when we were prototyping it for THQ was modeled after one of the 12 labors of Heracles. The Erymanthian Board was terrorizing a town and the hunters they sent after it hadn't returned. You had to ascend mount Erymanthos, discover the wreckage of the hunter's camp, and then continue on to the snow-capped summit to battle the monstrous board. Of course, I was told we couldn't have snow on the summit because people might not realize it snowed in Greece and then later the whole quest vanished and was replaced by generic crap like retrieving a dowry ring so some chick can get married while monsters are overrunning the world.
 

Jasede

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Messages
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Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut I'm very into cock and ball torture
That's awful; you can't make a video game politically correct; not when it's supposed to be an atmospheric action game. It seems as if the higher-ups took an enormous soul-sucking device and drained all the life from what looked like it could have been at least worth playing once. You can't really make something great without offending someone.
 

Commissar Draco

Codexia Comrade Colonel Commissar
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Привислинский край
Insert Title Here Strap Yourselves In Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Divinity: Original Sin 2
There seemed to be a constant fear during the development of Titan Quest about upsetting this or that segment of the audience or someone's grandmother. I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life). We were building a game with relatively complicated and hardcore gameplay systems but trying to make it thematically and visually appealing to as wide a casual audience as possible. The end result, is that the game was a little more bland and generic in some respects than it should have been and the game world didn't do much to convey a sense of danger.

One example of this would be the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence. I guess somehow it is wrong to fight intelligent enemies but okay to slaughter dumb animals? We also weren't originally allowed to have humans die, ever, in the game and no human corpses.

One area where this handicapped us was in the creation of environmental assets that visually demonstrated the enemy's war against humanity. We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent. It was a struggle just to monster camp assets. All of the ruins were also removed from Greece at one point because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins... I had to fight for both of these things. Without them, Greece would have just been a featureless expanse of wilderness with occasional human towns that never really appeared to be in any serious danger.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures. It was highly controversial when the designs for the Limos and Arachnids were first presented. I had to personally fight to get those approved because they were considered too grotesque and scary looking even though they were based on actually mythology. Undead and the Spirit Mastery were also a struggle to get in the game. I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil". We managed to push a few more things like that through over the course of development but it was always frowned upon.

Basically, my belief is that Titan Quest never had as much style and character as it could have because we were afraid to do anything even remotely controversial. When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

We ended up with a game set in Greek mythology that barely contained any actual mythology other than the inspiration for some of the monsters and dialog on peripheral story-teller NPCs stuck off to the side in the towns. The first quest I put in the game, when we were prototyping it for THQ was modeled after one of the 12 labors of Heracles. The Erymanthian Board was terrorizing a town and the hunters they sent after it hadn't returned. You had to ascend mount Erymanthos, discover the wreckage of the hunter's camp, and then continue on to the snow-capped summit to battle the monstrous board. Of course, I was told we couldn't have snow on the summit because people might not realize it snowed in Greece and then later the whole quest vanished and was replaced by generic crap like retrieving a dowry ring so some chick can get married while monsters are overrunning the world.

So this why this felt like boring hore to play it for 2 hours? (bought in Supermarket for 4 Euro or so among with other game This is only why I did played it for 2 hours) .... much more banal shit boring than Lionheart.
Shame on developers for being such pussies, shame.:decline:
 

johnnie_W

Barely Literate
Joined
Jun 27, 2018
Messages
2
This game isnt just good, its awesome (this is coming from die-hard diablo fan, been playing it for 15 years)
Just recently bought the anniversary edition, didnt know about this game 10 years ago since was too occupied with playing diablo
Of course nothing can compare to diablo but Im enjoying this game so much, already completed the game using runes + warfare masteries, now trying out some more of a defensive build with nature + defense since combo Ive mentioned first was impossibly hard without the proper equipment
I see a lot of you been talking about the pace but its even more than fast(you can set the game speed to very fast ingame and default movement and attack speed get very fast) and you can actually complete the game faster than diablo II
There is too much variety and skills, way more than in diablo, with all of them being useful(yeah there are synergies and one mastery provides a synergy for skills from another masteries so you are completely wrong about it)
Someone also mentioned stat points but each stat point is very important and contributes to your final build
Overall game is so much fun, very challenging and it gets pretty damn hard in epic and even more hard in legendary(there are plenty of things that can kill you with a single shot and playing on very fast makes it even harder cause projectiles are flying so fast making it harder to dodge)
To say enemies are uninspired is a complete joke, even a group of 3-4 machae master archers(not to mention machae grandmaster archers or some of dragonians who are complete dope) can kill you with single volleyshot on legendary, Id say some enemies are more challenging and hit way stronger than burning souls or charging serpent magus in diablo II, for bosses Id say toxeus and night mistress from titan quest(typhoon and hades can be too if you dont know how to deal with them) are way more challenging than memphisto, diablo and baal alltoghether
 

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
Messages
5,687
Location
Perched on a tree
aron searle
Because, why not ?
90% of the released games aren't worth playing, why would this one be any different ?

Do yourself a favor and play (replay ?) Divine divinity and Beyond divinity, it's like Diablo, except they're good games with interesting quests and side quests, a living world, a plot, huge world with massive outside areas, not just dungeons, a great enchantment system, one smart travel system and more ...
 

Fargus

Arcane
Joined
Apr 2, 2012
Messages
2,350
Location
Moscow
Divine divinity and Beyond divinity

Divine Divinity is good, this game is an example how to make Diablo clone enjoyable. But Beyond Divinity was broken as fuck, i couldn't finish it. Not to menton boring and much worse than DD.
 

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