Sing to me, Muse, of a time when action RPGs were just games you could play instead of Live Service Experiences with Battlepasses and Seasons and pre-planned DLC and forced always-on online that required waiting forever to connect to the server. It sounds insane, but I was there, all those years ago, when you could simply buy a game and play it, and the classes weren’t balanced around an imaginary eSport that had yet to take off or “we’re gonna try and make it an MMO even though it’s really not.” Titan Quest II is a refreshingly retro take on the ARPG where you can just buy the game and play it without worrying about the meta, subscribing to the Battlepass, or whether the servers are getting DDOSed because someone’s mad about their MMO addiction.
Titan Quest II Brings Back Old-School ARPG Fun
Stealth-dropped into Early Access on August 1st (I know, imagine a game hitting Early Access without a 6-month promotional blitz, tie-ins on the major networks, and merch deal!) Titan Quest II is the follow-up to one of the greatest action RPGs you probably played and forgot about if you’re of a certain age. This time around, Nemesis, the Goddess of Retribution, is after you, specifically, because you were a terrible baby and offended her (it’s slightly different, but I enjoyed the idea of a baby offending the Goddess of Retribution, so we’ll go with that), and it is time for some…retribution.
After fleeing your home island, which seems a lot like a decent excuse for a tutorial, you venture into a world of Greek monsters and mayhem, all of which is an excuse to click-click-click-click-click, make number go up, get loot to make number go up, and repeat. There is nothing sophisticated about it and, actually, you probably don’t need to consult the min-maxing sites to figure out which build to play because if you actually read the skill descriptions and ability descriptions and figure out how you want to play, get this…you can kinda just…build your own character and play who you want to play rather than there being a couple of correct ways to play because it’s a Live Service Environment, not that I am naming names or anything.
Right now, there are 4 Masteries, which are basically “classes”, but more like “packs of skills you can level up”, and you get to pick from two of them. What is great is that they all work pretty well together. There are both active and passive skills in each Mastery, and most of the base skills can be further customized. They are:
- Warfare: Exactly what it sounds like, Warrior-type skills.
- Rogue: Stealth and poison-type skills
- Earth: Fire and stone-type magic skills
- Storm: Lightning and ice-type magic skills
On my first character, I took Warfare since “fighter” is a good default and bought Sweeping Strike and added Rage Gain to increase rage generation and Sunder to break enemy armor, figuring I’d basically be a barbarian/berserker type that charged in and swiped around in huge semi-circles or circles for massive damage…but what was cool was that Warfare had tons of skills for ranged weapons, so it would be easy to take “Warfare” and build an entirely different character based on bows with different skills.
With this character, I figured I’d go with a fast-swinging dual-wield build, but I happened to pick up a big two-handed hammer that did outstanding damage. I decided “big hammer is good” and rebuilt for big swings with giant weapons. Once upon a time, this was fairly common, but after Diablo IV’s fairly limited build options, where each class might have 2-3 decent builds and 1-2 you’d want to play, talk about a breath of fresh air to switch on the fly because you found different gear.
I took Storm for my second Mastery to see if Magic hindered my ability to smash stuff as a warrior, and it…actually turned out to be pretty sick. I took Call Lightning because calling lightning whips ass, but it also provided skills that fed Rage, which powered my warfare skills for some interesting synergies. I charged into battles, cutting down swathes of enemies and calling down lightning, and it felt great.
Your basic skills can also be leveled up, so you know, the default attack can also be tweaked and improved, which provides for some really neat options and choices in building.
I made a second character based on Storm that was magic-focused, and, like I said, despite using Storm on two characters, this experience was completely different. For this one, I used ice shards and focused on Penetration, punching through one enemy to focus on others. This wound up working like a magic shotgun…until I added Homing to it and Torrent, which was like firing a shotgun full of heat-seeking ice missiles. Then I built around Cast Speed, which added rapid fire to my theoretical ice shotgun. Warfare was her second Mastery, and I built that around ranged attack using bows for when magic wasn’t working, providing a nice synergy with the penetration damage I was built around. It felt sick.
Note, I did this without having to consult any guides or tier lists, I just…picked stuff that looked and sounded like what I wanted to do. Once upon a time, you could do that.
Similarly, you can…literally explore. It’s not nearly as on rails as many modern games. Very early on, there was a voice demanding that I kill some wolves, so I ran over and killed them. A talking jar (look, man, it’s ancient Greece) demanded I take it to the Shrine of Hermes. Of course, I did that and got a nice reward…but that led me to a ruined temple with a ton of great loot. It wasn’t a part of either quest I was doing. No flashing arrow appeared. No, HEY DUDE GO EXPLORE THE SHRINE OF HERMES ALSO CONNECT YOUR TWITCH ACCOUNT AND DRINK MOUNTAIN DEW. In fact, I pretty frequently went “Huh, I wonder what that is over there” and went poking around an area and found cool stuff, loot, and enemies to kill.
The usual Early Access caveats apply: Not all the Masteries are in, not all the story is in place, multiplayer is buggy enough, there’s a big THIS IS UNSTABLE warning on it, I had some crashes and stutters here and there, maybe they take all the money and run off. But they have released a roadmap and plans for their content drops, and this team did do a ton of work supporting Titan Quest, which you should go play if you haven’t, so I feel pretty good recommending Titan Quest II unless you’re addicted to the Live Service Experience(™).
