In contrast, it feels like Black Forest Games just took a paint bucket full of shader effects and dumped it all over the game when creating the console versions. The textures were a bit cleaner thanks to access to raw art files, and the lighting engine got a modest overhaul to bring shadows and shading more in line with modern games, while still retaining the look of the original. I liked the lightly-touched up graphics in the 2016 PC Anniversary Edition. It’s great that you can still run from one end of the world to the other without loading on the consoles…but sad that it’s sometimes faster to run back into town rather than fast travel there.Īh, sickly green and sickly yellow. Part of the charm of Titan Quest is that it takes place in a large seamless open world, and the fast travel times need to be short in order to keep the fun and the illusion alive. And since you’ll be doing that so often, it adds up to a truly sad number of extra minutes over the life of a ~60 hour game. A 12 second round trip feels like light speed compared to 40 seconds on the Switch. Instead it’s forced to push its way through whatever issues exist in the code just to offer a tolerable experience. The Xbox One X has a fast CPU at its disposal, and enough RAM that it should be able to hold basically the entire data of the game in memory at all times. Until you think about the hardware you’re using. Which is pretty good! Not PC good, but still just above what I’d call good. On Xbox One X, load times average around 6 seconds. That’s still kind of long, but if you play it right after playing the Switch version, the reduction is dramatic. The average load screen during fast travel is about 10 seconds. The base PS4 does a lot better…relatively speaking. This is enough loot to require multiple trips through the load screen nightmare. I guess I could just not pick up the loot, but then I wouldn’t get the gold I need later in the game. When you only have one bag in the opening hours, you often need to make multiple runs in a row to sell everything. That means you’ll drop the stone, click on it, wait 20 seconds, sell all your stuff, click the return portal, and wait another 20 seconds to get back into the game. The Nintendo Switch is the worst offender, with fast travel loading screens that regularly take 20 seconds. On consoles, the loading times are so profoundly extended that it all but kills the entire flow of the game. On a PC, even on a modest mechanical hard drive, the loading screen takes under 2 seconds. The limited inventory space is mitigated by a magic stone you can drop on the ground, creating a portal that lets you zip back to the last town to sell off your junk. Early in the game, your character has a limited inventory space that fills up very quickly, and as you reach certain milestones you earn new bags that expand your carrying capacity. Here are some of the many reasons why I’ve failed…and also a bit about why I haven’t yet given up. I’ve purchased all three versions because I love Titan Quest and hate myself, and I’ve been desperately trying to finish at least one of them across my standard PS4, Xbox One X, and Switch for the better part of half a year now. To be fair, it has improved by leaps and bounds since its original launch thanks to a long series of patches.īut with how solid the core game was, there’s no excuse for how many problems this new version has. The new Black Forest Games port launched in a very rough state, coming to Xbox and PS4 in March and not hitting Switch till the middle of summer. It was the second time that Titan Quest got a port to a non mouse-and-keyboard control scheme, the first being a mobile port done by DotEmu a couple of years ago.ĭotEmu’s port was very true to the original vision. This year, Black Forest Games (makers of the recent Giana Sisters games) was hired to take that Anniversary Edition and put it on consoles. It also laid the groundwork for a brand new expansion, Ragnarok, which launched in 2017. It combined the original game and expansion into one package, cleaned up the interface a bit, added some light new graphical touches, and made the whole thing much more compatible with modern systems. It was a 10th anniversary celebration of a deservedly-loved game. Two years ago, THQ Nordic and Pieces Interactive surprise-released Titan Quest Anniversary Edition on PC. The new console port, released this year on PS4, Xbox One, and Switch, found all sorts of exciting ways to take a rock-solid foundation and mess it up. It’s a classic PC action RPG that was state-of-the-art in 2006, combining new ideas and technologies with a design that sought to improve on Diablo II.
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