Titan Quest

[Becoming]

Has anyone tried the demo yet? I'm getting it right now and I was wondering if anyone else was curious about the game.

http://www.fileplanet.com/163335/download/Titan-Quest-Demo-%5BFilePlanet-Premiere!%5D (http://www.fileplanet.com/163335/download/Titan-Quest-Demo-%5BFilePlanet-Premiere%21%5D)

http://gamershell.com/download_13703.shtml

[extarbags]

What is it?

[BobJustBob]

Never heard of it.

[olaf]

I tried it. Another Action RPG! Graphics are nice and all but it felt like Diablo which I got sick of...a long time ago.

olaf

[CustodianV131]

OH a demo!!!

Great thanks a lot for the heads up! Can't wait to see thing in action! Hope the coop campaign will work as well as with Dungeon Siege then this will be a must have for me.

[Gordon Cameron]

I've had some interest in this and will check it out, although it makes me wish for a more substantial RPG with a mythology theme.

[Robert Sharp]

Never heard of it? That surprises me. There are ads for it in every mag, and they seem to be trying to push this one. It looks like it could be interesting, as Diablo clones go. I hope they don't blow it by not getting the word out. Of course, that assumes that they don't blow it by just making a crap game, but the previews look promising. I like the skill system a lot.

[Becoming]

So far I like it. That could be because i never played any Diablo games and haven't had a chance to get sick of them i suppose.

[Gendal]

Finished the demo, it's skill system is based on time delays, which I detest. It's still fun, polished, and very D2 derivitive, will probably pick it up when it comes out.

[DanielElliot]

What do you mean, skill system based on time delays? Do you mean you need to enter key combos at appropriate intervals to perform attacks? Or are you just talking about a cooldown time for skills, a la WoW?

[BobJustBob]

Never heard of it? That surprises me. There are ads for it in every mag, and they seem to be trying to push this one. It looks like it could be interesting, as Diablo clones go. I hope they don't blow it by not getting the word out. Of course, that assumes that they don't blow it by just making a crap game, but the previews look promising. I like the skill system a lot.

I get all my gaming news from here and neogaf.

[Gendal]

What do you mean, skill system based on time delays? Do you mean you need to enter key combos at appropriate intervals to perform attacks? Or are you just talking about a cooldown time for skills, a la WoW?

Cooldown time like WoW

[DanielElliot]

Didn't Diablo have that too?

[Gendal]

Didn't Diablo have that too?

In Diablo for most things you could whip out fireballs or whatever as fast as you wanted as long as you had mana. There was a delay but it was slight, with some magical items reducing it even further. In Sacred and Titan's Quest it starts out sloooooooow with skill purchases used to decrease the recharge time. Hate that. It slows down the game and acts as a skill point sink while not really increasing the strategy required to play the game. It's not a deal breaker and I still had fun with the demo, I just dislike that aspect.

[John Reynolds]

Considering I played Diablo 2 once when it was released, hated it, and haven't touched a action-RPG game since I've really been looking forward to this game. Didn't realize a demo was out, so my thanks to the thread starter. Here's hoping it supports widescreen resolutions.

[Drastic]

What irritated me about Sacred is that while upgrading one thing would reduce the time delay, upgrading the oomph of the skill would just increase it again. It sort of got in the way of feeling that I was advancing at all, more just treading goblin hordes.

[stusser]

I'm planning on buying this one, if the reviews are positive. It's been a LONG time since diablo2. Is the demo the first level of the game or separate content?

Not to diverge from topic, but I really hate it when you play the demo, get the full game, and have to replay stuff.

[Gendal]

Considering I played Diablo 2 once when it was released, hated it, and haven't touched a action-RPG game since I've really been looking forward to this game. Didn't realize a demo was out, so my thanks to the thread starter. Here's hoping it supports widescreen resolutions.

If you hated D2 I would be amazed if you liked this game, it borrows a lot. It does indeed support widescreen, 1920x1200 looks great.

[Gordon Cameron]

Very pretty game. Mechanics seem pretty good although I'm not getting quite the "crunchy" audiovisual feedback I would like. Items on the ground are hard to see unless you hold down ALT to highlight text. Sound effects and music feel a bit muted. Engine chugs sometime on my PC; I guess it's starting to show its age.

Seems okay so far. I don't have a really strong opinion one way or the other. But then, I've never been a big diablo fan so this may not be my particular cup of tea.

[selfnoise]

I had similar impressions. Very pretty, chugs a little, hard to find your loot. :)

[Donald L.]

hard to find your loot. :)

Hard to pick up some loot.

[Gendal]

Hold down Z to see everything on the ground, Alt only shows some things like non broken items I think.

[Becoming]

Yeah you can set it up to a few ways to view dropped items. Having never played a Diablo game I thought it was decently fun. The demo only chugged for me a tad when I ran into a cave to save a shepard from some goblin types. I'm guessing that was from the torch light being cast from my character.

[The Bitter Cynic]

I just finished the first quest. I like it.

What i liked best was after defeating said evil attacking the villiage, there was a chest to loot. Unlike WoW there was loot I could use, armor, a weapon, stuff, and no food.

I so love looting treasure chests....it's the reason I play RPG games(mmo or single player). Fight the monster and loot his treasure from treasure chests.

[Drastic]

This demo has taught me that Diablo-alikes get even better when they add absurd knockback. The "Hunter" class/skillset has a truly amusing charging super spear attack in the first tier that sends satyrs flying halfway across the screen. This is a good thing.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
Finally! I've been waiting months for someone to start a thread on this; since I've been working with the Iron Lore guys on it, I didn't want to get into the whole pimping thing.

On the performance side, the hitching that you're seeing in the undergrounds is actually a memory load; it's gotten much better, but we had to finalize the demo last month to get it out this early. Considering that the engine was essentially at beta at that point, I think it holds up fairly well. My biggest concern is that we may see some compatibility issues now that it's in the wild, but better to catch those prior to release than after.

On the item visibility, magic and better items have a little sparkle that goes off (and it's even color-coded to the rarity of the item), but I'm not sure if that made it into the demo. Items also now highlight when you mouse over them or hold down one of the item-showing keys, so they're much easier to spot; I know that wasn't in the demo.

The ambient music has been pumped up a bit, so it's more noticeable. Again, some of it you just can't hear at this stage, like the custom themes for certain key areas.

How much the delay timers affect your build depends a lot on what masteries and skills you choose. It was a useful way to give people some really uber-powerful abilities without risking blowing the whole balance of play, but some people may well disagree with that choice.

The Diablo comparisons are inevitable, I suppose, but I think people will get the differences more in the full game. One of the biggest things is the character-development system, which is much more dynamic and allows for some very creative combinations. Since you only get to have one mastery in the demo, and only have access to the first few tiers of skills, you don't really get the whole picture on how the skills and masteries build off each other.

Glad to hear some people are enjoying it. I know it won't be everyone's cup of tea, but I'm very happy about the way it's turning out.

Best,
Michael.

P.S. If you're at E3, stop by the booth. I've already seen a handful of Qt3'ers there, but I'm always up for meeting more.

[Luke M]

The Diablo comparisons are inevitable, I suppose, but I think people will get the differences more in the full game. One of the biggest things is the character-development system, which is much more dynamic and allows for some very creative combinations. Since you only get to have one mastery in the demo, and only have access to the first few tiers of skills, you don't really get the whole picture on how the skills and masteries build off each other.


I get the impression from the demo that the game essentially wants to be an action RPG with a flexible, classless character development system, but as soon as I pick one of the skill masteries, I can't pick any skills from any of the other masteries. This is a simply a demo limitation, then?

[stusser]

Yeah, you can pick two masteries in the full game.

Michael, is the demo the first level of final, or is it separate content?

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
We don't really measure things in levels, but yes, the demo is the opening of the game.

In the final version, you can choose any two of the eight masteries (one at level 2 and one at level 8), but you can only choose skills within those masteries. It's not a classless system so much as a system that lets you choose "classic" or hybridized classes depending on your mastery selections.

Best,
Michael.

[Jason Lutes]

Good stuff so far, Michael. Super, super slick. I'm liking what I've seen of the character building options, and there certainly has never been a more beautiful looking action-RPG on the PC.

Mechanics seem pretty good although I'm not getting quite the "crunchy" audiovisual feedback I would like. [...] Sound effects and music feel a bit muted.
I agree with this. The game pulls out all the stops visually, but the audio side of things doesn't rise to the same level, at least in the demo. Fighting through mobs of crazed satyrs with a bronze cleaver should sound more... "crunchy" is exactly the word.

All in all, it's enough to make me take a look at the release version. What's up with the "Custom Quest" option? Will there be an editor, and if so, how extensive is it?

[Luke M]

TQ's masteries system sounds similar to the dual-class system in Guild Wars. It's not as neat and flexible as a classless system, but I can have an idea of why limiting characters to two masteries is necessary.

[instant0]

Interesting.. Gonna try it out.. as soon as I'm done in BWL. :-)

No Starforce on the demo download I hope?

[Chris Nahr]

Great demo! Actually this is the first demo I played this year that I was immediately hooked on... wasn't too impressed with all those critically acclaimed RTS releases. Guess I have simple tastes.

There's a bit of stuttering at 1920x1200 but that's not unexpected, and besides the final build may fix it. Otherwise this looks just like the improved Diablo that I always wanted and nobody ever made (on the PC that is).

I noticed that the demo is multilingual -- will the full game also feature all languages in all versions? That would save me an import...

[Reed]

Have really been looking forward to the game and got some time in last night w/ the demo. It looks good, plays well and appreciate the lack of load times. Nice job so far! Pretty sure I'll pick it up at release, especially if the multiplayer is well implemented.

A few issues though:
- It feels a bit sterile. I think the sound is a big part of this, as well as the lack of blood. Also the font, which makes me feel like I'm in Windows.
- Dialog/character text scrolls waaay too slowly and when you click it doesn't show all text, but skips past it entirely. Almost immediately found myself just clicking through to get to the end and trigger the quest (if they have one).
- A different color exclamation mark for quest and non-quest NPCs would be nifty.
- Hard to tell apart rustry items from copper from bronze/etc.
- It's easy to miss the chests and such that can be opened. The sparkle just needs to be exaggerated a little more.
- Arrows don't stick into creatures or your character. Really felt this missing after Dungeon Siege and Oblivion.
- In the chaos of battle, it'd be nice to more easily tell which monster you have targetted. Simply giving them a light outline or changing their opacity slightly would help a lot.
- Along the same lines, doing that w/ items would help a lot too.
- Can't spin the camera?

[Becoming]

Also not to be entirely lazy, but what MP modes will it support? They are disabled in the demo, but i'd assume (hopefully) a nice co-op mode? I"m a sucker for good co-op gaming. Custom quests available in co-op mode would be damn cool as well.

[Chris Woods]

Been looking forward to this game a lot myself; got the demo last night and enjoyed it. A few things:

* Seconded on the no spinny-camera. It /has/ to be there, maybe I just couldn't figure out the keys for it.

* A "driving" mode - where the camera stays over my shoulder facing roughly forward, would be really awesome. Top-down is good, but since I can zoom in I'd like that to do something other than just reduce my range of vision.

* Second on the cooldowns also. I tried a pyromancer and it seemed silly. I'd cast my flame spell, then melee because I couldn't zap the monsters again for 5 seconds or whatever. I still ended up killing most things in Hand to Hand despite me being a "mage".

* Is there an easy way to cycle through RMB and LMB skills?

* Loot is doen awesome. The monsters actually use the equipment they have, so if you find a monster with an srtifact you can see the glowey-badass sword in his hand and he hits you with it, dealing all it's artifacty effects. I love this better then the Diablo Random Loot.

* Additionally, the "beast" monsters (Board, Birds, Harpies, etc.) drop appropriate things that can be used to augment your armor (Boar Hide, Harpy Feathers, etc.) rather then a snake carrying a mace or other weirdness in Diablo.

* Looks really good. I loved getting a powerful weapon and high damage boosting skill to start tossing enemies around when I was fully "charged". Knocking things over cliffs and whatnot is hot.

* More character creation options (Hair color, cut, etc.) would be really nice. I know they have to in-game effect, but that sort of stuff is just cool.

All in all, I will definitly get this. Been looking forward to it for a while and the demo does not dissappoint.

Chris Woods

[forgeforsaken]

I liked it quite a bit, but my one concern is the level of randomness. Other than the loot there really didn't seem to be any. I played through a bit as each of the 3 classes included to get a feel for them. Is there any randomness to the game on a map level or a monster population level?

[Drastic]

The apparent breadth and depth of the skill system makes me wonder if there'll be any ingame "respec" option, or if that'll just be a matter for waiting for third-party character hack tools. I can definitely see getting to a point a dozen-plus levels in when I'll start second-guessing, I don't know, going too heavily into one of the first tiers or whatnot.

[Troy S Goodfellow]

The apparent breadth and depth of the skill system makes me wonder if there'll be any ingame "respec" option, or if that'll just be a matter for waiting for third-party character hack tools. I can definitely see getting to a point a dozen-plus levels in when I'll start second-guessing, I don't know, going too heavily into one of the first tiers or whatnot.

One preview I read suggested that there will be limited "do over" options to correct or refocus your character.

Troy

[curst]

This demo has taught me that Diablo-alikes get even better when they add absurd knockback. The "Hunter" class/skillset has a truly amusing charging super spear attack in the first tier that sends satyrs flying halfway across the screen. This is a good thing.

No. No. No no no. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no a trillion times no.

Well, it may be fun if YOU get knockback attacks. I guess I can't really argue against that.

But try playing Throne Of Darkness' latter stages. In that game, EVERY attack gets knockback, based on how much damage is inflicted. The end result? Near the end, one enemy spell will send your guys careeming halfway across the world.

It was one of the worst things about that game, and that game was pretty awful in general.

[Juntei]

ACK! I can't get the demo to install :(
The only thing I can think of is that it doesn't like that my HDD is H:.
It displays:

Space required on H: 0 K
Space available on H: 110443504 K.

I would love to try this out but if i can't get it to install it makes me wonder if I will be able to install the full game :(

[Drastic]

No. No. No no no. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no a trillion times no.

Well, it may be fun if YOU get knockback attacks. I guess I can't really argue against that.

A fine point which I can't argue with. Absurd knockback from the player character, not the enemies. That'd remind me too much of the unpatched Ultima VIII, where two-thirds of every combat was spent watching the Avatar climb agonizingly slowly back to his feet like someone in need of a medicalert signal.

I've seen no sign of that in the demo, luckily.

[instant0]

Some comments:
The user interface fools the user into believing he can resize the windows with the small "arrows" in the lower left-right portions of the UI windows.

Also, it would be nice if you were able to move/rezise windows. Playing the game at 1920x1200 resolution gave me a lot of screen space for the game, unfortunately UI windows were locked to the left and right side of the screen so I had to move the mouse around a lot to reach the different buttons in those frames.


--
The game crashed when doing skill training, after I clicked undo.. not sure why, but I guess it did not like what I did.

--

When training skills I locked 3 of my skills and had no more, I immediately attempted a right click to "undo" my last step. This had no result. Instead I had to locate and use the undo button which removed all my skill steps.

Possibility of having a step-by-step undo on right click would be nice to see =)

--

Appart from that (so far) I like what I see. The UI could use some polishing, but it was fast and responsive, and did its job, so.. I guess it could slide.

--

[Matt Perkins]

The way you got quests, no way to accept or decline, felt forced to me. Even if I'm never going to decline, it made me feel like I didn't have a choice.

As for the rest of the game...I'm not sure yet. It did feel, someone else suggested, a bit sterile...I'm not sure how to define in that in specific terms, but that's how it felt.


Question: Does it support full on coop, ala Diablo II?

[markv]

I tried out the demo, I quite like it.

The things I noted were as follows:

No way to spin your camera around at all. I couldn't handle more than about 15 minutes of this, so I ended up quitting the demo before I got to experience the full wonder of it.

There was no way to control the moving of your character with keys. like wasd or whatever you want to assign it to. As fun as it is clicking the mouse all day long, I much prefer actual running around with the keyboard, so I can enjoy my beer while playing :D

Also, though I'll be honest and didn't actually look at the key commands for this one. I couldn't find a way to just scoop up everything with one click of the button ninja looter style. I want to be able to out ninja my friends with ease, without this function then I do not get to hear them piss and moan how I scooped all the loot, and then the enjoyment I get from games will be lost!

Otherwise this looks like one I might get :D

[Becoming]

I second the movement suggestion. Using the mouse to direct my character felt somewhat unnatural. It's not the biggest problem in the world, but an option to bind movement to any keys that I want would be greatly appreciated.

[Qmanol]

Didn't Diablo have that too?

Diablo didn't. Diablo 2 did, but only in the expansion, and only because the programmers were too pathetic to fix the graphics engine bugs that caused the game to be horribly laggy with too many spell effects on any non-glide card. So they put in cooldowns to compensate.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
I'm dead tired from being on the booth all day at E3, but I wanted to touch on a few of the questions that were asked.

Adjusting the sound options can bring the ambient music up and make the hit effects more noticeable. With a subwoofer, you can get a really nice rumble going with the hits that may help with the "crunch" factor on the sound side. We've changed the audio mix for the final game, but this may help you get more of what you're looking for in the demo.

Custom quest is for player-made content, which we are releasing both the world editor and quest editor to support. The editor kicks ass, using a variety of height-map based paintbrushes for terrain, with auto-stitching tiles for everything from objects to cliffs to bridges. It also does texture blending with the paintbrush system, which lets you do a lot of tweaking with very little effort. Players will be able to adjust item stats, make new quests, create new worlds. We probably won't be able to distribute the art exporters right away, so getting completely new models into the game may not be an option at first, but there's a ton of world stuff to work with in the base game.

The class system is a lot deeper than the two-mastery summary would suggest, but I don't have time to get into it all tonight. It's covered in several of the preview Q&A's out there, and if people really want to know, I can try to explain it more this weekend.

No starforce, not in the demo, not in release.

All languages are in the demo. Not all languages will be included in all territories, though, for the final version. Our marketing people make this call on a territory-by-territory basis.

Quest NPC's have exclamation marks; non-quest NPC's have diamonds.

Hold down ALT to filter out rusty/broken/worn items. Once you've got equipment in all of your slots, you don't really need to bother with these. Holding down ALT will also highlight all chests.

Highlighting of targeted monsters and objects has been upped significantly for the release build.

There is no rotating the camera in the final release. We would have had to make a lot of sacrifices to get the performance we want (our min spec includes cards as old as the GeForce 3 Ti 500) if you could rotate the camera. The same issue is why we don't have a "follow" camera. The camera does tilt to show you a little more when you zoom in.

Multiplayer is co-op (no PvP), up to 6 players over LAN or internet. Gamespy handles the back end, but there's an in-game browser for finding servers. We also support Xfire. Custom quests can be played in MP.

You can map scrolling the LMB and RMB skills in the keybinding tab of the options window.

Monster population is randomized. You won't see it as much in the demo as this is also the tutorial section, but the appearance of monster types, champions, heroes, equipment, and skills are all randomized. They also auto-scale (within limits) by player numbers and levels.

You can re-spec your skill point allocations at special NPC's, but it costs more the more often you do it, so you can't just endlessly change configurations.

The player can knock enemies around; enemies never knock the player around. They can, however, snare you, stun you, slow you, or disrupt your skills, if they have those skills. These are fairly rare behaviors in normal difficulty, mostly reserved for bosses. There are also items that provide resistance to these effects.

There are many more answers (and some troubleshooting work-arounds if you're having problems with the demo) here (www.titanquest.net).

Like I said, I'll be back by once I recover from E3 brain death if people have other questions.

Best,
Michael.

[Becoming]

Ahh, thanks for the update. Other than the movement question that answered pretty much all the rest I had. Six player co-op?! COUNT ME IN!

[Kool Moe Dee]

Unfortunately I found it rather sterile. Technically quite competent, but lacking whatever it was that made Diablo fun.

[instant0]

The way item pickup works is kind of annoying. Say you have to drop lots of inventory (Another thing; Auto-Organize the inventory please.... or have a button to do it). And then pick up another item. You click ALT and then select the name of the ITEM, often it will instead pick up the "top" item from the stack of items instead of the name you have picked..

o - item 1
o - item 2
o - item 3

all are listed with alt, I select item 3, but since item 1 is on "top" it sometimes gets picked.

Nothing you cant avoid by a more carefull clicking I suppose, but annoying nonetheless.

I do miss a 'pick up everything in the area' button. unfortunately, the way the inventory gets filled with items, it will leave a lot of free space and make you unable to pick up more loot, since it does not put a 3 and a 2 height item in the same column, but instead in sepparate ones.

Still, I thought it was fairly good. One thing that annoyed me was that I had to click the NPC text to get the next line of 'chat', instead of just clicking the NPC a second time. I would also like to see the chat window somewhat larger. On a 1920x1200 resolution the chat window is very tiny, compared to how much space available. I'd rather see npc chat implemented differently. E.g. showing you more of the text.

edit: Post 666 in a thread about a Diablo-style RPG :-) .. yay

Edit2:
Also, when purchasing items at a vendor, some items are coloured red and others are not. The red ones are the ones you can not purchase due to your skills lacking. However, there are also items that you can not purchase due to lack of coin.

The items you can not afford are not identified in any way until you mouse over them and the tooltip says they are too expensive.

The inventory on NPCs is also cluttered, and not sorted from lowest-highest price making it harder to identify equipment you can buy & use.

[Chris Nahr]

No random terrain generation? Awww... that pretty much destroys the game's chances to be a true Diablo successor. :(

But I'll get the game anyway. The various console clones of Diablo didn't have much in the way of randomness either, after all.

[fuzzyslug]

Has anyone tried out co-op in the demo? I saw the buttons but didn't attempt to click on them. Does it work?

[SlyFrog]

Has anyone tried out co-op in the demo? I saw the buttons but didn't attempt to click on them. Does it work?

I downloaded this, but I'm not really getting the buzz on it. I thought it gave some twist to Diablo or something. It's Diablo in Greece/Egypt/generic ancient world setting, with slightly nicer graphics.

That's fine, and I understand why that has some enjoyment in its own right, but is that it?

[Becoming]

Has anyone tried out co-op in the demo? I saw the buttons but didn't attempt to click on them. Does it work?

MP is disabled in the demo.

[Phred]

I'd like to see some sort of colored border around magic items in inventory and the shops. It's a pita mousing over every item looking for the magic ones atm.

[Jason Lutes]

Thanks for the thorough answers, Michael!

[jiffy]

It's a pretty good Diablo2 clone, and I don't mean that in a negative way. Has a lot of things that make it a sort of spirtual'ish successor to D2. The graphics engine is nice too, I like the way things like grass and whatnot sway when you walk through it.

I do wish there was a battle.net type of global server system where all your characters were stored on the server. The way it's setup now is that there's really no way to stop cheating and hacked characters. Not that there isn't on bnet, but it's a lot better overall.

[mtkafka]

If you can't wait for this.. try Sacred, it did a good job as a Diablo clone... underrated imo...

etc

[instant0]

Sacred is very good. Also check out Divine Divinity (Beyond Divinity has starforce, stay away!)

[Kunikos]

Enjoyed the demo but probably not enough to buy it... the lack of random generation of levels/terrain/etc pretty much kills it for me. Mayyybe if it drops to like $15 or something...

[Ryan A]

I saw Randall Wallace's name associated with this game. Does anybody know if he actually played a creative role with the game or did he just lend his name ala Tom Clancy with the Red Storm games?

[Dante Rising]

I really enjoyed the demo and I'm certain I'll buy this game within a week or two of release. My only complaint is that I was disappointed to see that every time I want to release an arrow, I need to click-click-click the mouse button. I know it seems lazy, but I prefer to just hold the mouse button down and attack until the enemy is dead. I understand that many people feel this is "the game playing itself", but I would have preferred to see an option that allowed the player to toggle continuous attacking on one mouse click. I have a fear of the carpal tunnel gods, ya know.

Having said that, I find all other aspects of the game to be quite competent. The graphics are very nicely detailed. I really love the transition from day to night.

[Becoming]

I'll probably buy it. The only thing I'd like is an option to move my character with keys instead of mouse clicking my way across the terrain. Aside from that I quite enjoyed the demo.

[John Reynolds]

Enjoyed the demo but probably not enough to buy it... the lack of random generation of levels/terrain/etc pretty much kills it for me. Mayyybe if it drops to like $15 or something...

That's what I like about it. I hated the randomly generated areas in Diablo 1/2. What's so special about the same areas that're roughly the same size and contain the same tilesets, with minimal overall differences? I'd gladly take instead static areas that're highly detailed and polished.

[foogla]

The stats are ugly. What's with the neon green on black? Other than that I am underwhelmed (except for the graphics). Too many better games still out there.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
On the Randall Wallace question, he wrote the main story and most of the dialogue for the main quest steps, in conjunction with the development team. Some edits had to be made as things changed in production, and there was a lot of back-and-forth to make sure that the game could support the story and the story matched the gameplay, but he was definitely more involved than just being a name attached to the project.

On the mouse-click question, you can actually just hold down the mouse button and keep attacking. With a bow, you usually want to hold down the shift key as well so you don't inadvertently move around. We don't have a one-click "attack until dead" functionality, though.

Best,
Michael.

[Robert Sharp]

That's what I like about it. I hated the randomly generated areas in Diablo 1/2. What's so special about the same areas that're roughly the same size and contain the same tilesets, with minimal overall differences? I'd gladly take instead static areas that're highly detailed and polished.

Actually, they often had different monster types too, which made the areas seem very different. I still see your point though.

[JM]

Enjoyed the demo - particularly enjoyed the weight of my melee attacks and the fact that enemies got knocked flying when a special power kicked in. Definitely will be buying this.

[Michael Fitch]

Actually, they often had different monster types too, which made the areas seem very different. I still see your point though.
Greetings:
We do randomize the monster spawns--moreso in the areas after the demo, which is, after all the tutorial. There are some static spawns, but there is a lot of variability (where champions and heroes show up, which skills monsters have, what equipment they're using, which types of monsters show up in an area) that can change the play experience significantly on different run-throughs.

We originally planned on randomizing the levels, but we discovered that we could make a much better-looking world by making the geometry static. Randomizing the content was, we decided, the better approach. YMMV, of course.

Best,
Michael.

[Ryan A]

On the Randall Wallace question, he wrote the main story and most of the dialogue for the main quest steps, in conjunction with the development team. Some edits had to be made as things changed in production, and there was a lot of back-and-forth to make sure that the game could support the story and the story matched the gameplay, but he was definitely more involved than just being a name attached to the project.

Awesome.. that means the SP story should at least be interesting... that Wallace fellow sure can spin a good tale (his latest novel, Love and Honor is fantastic and, of course, the screenplay for Braveheart kicked ass.

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope it will run on my POS Dell.

[Charles]

Now I just have to cross my fingers and hope it will run on my POS Dell.


Cross them tight -- I had a bit of chop on my athlon 64 3400+ with an ATI X800 XL. Of course, I had a few performance problems with windows lately, so I reinstalled on the weekend. Maybe that'll make a difference.

[forgeforsaken]

The demo ran really well on my long in the tooth system, the only problem was going from above ground into the cave, in which case it got really choppy during the transition. But other than that it was all good.

[Robert Sharp]

Greetings:
We do randomize the monster spawns--moreso in the areas after the demo, which is, after all the tutorial. There are some static spawns, but there is a lot of variability (where champions and heroes show up, which skills monsters have, what equipment they're using, which types of monsters show up in an area) that can change the play experience significantly on different run-throughs.

We originally planned on randomizing the levels, but we discovered that we could make a much better-looking world by making the geometry static. Randomizing the content was, we decided, the better approach. YMMV, of course.


Well, it just got you one more sale. To me, this was the heart of Diablo's randomization, not the terrain/features themselves. I often found those tedious because they could lead to skewed levels that were annoying to traverse. It was the monster and loot changes that made it feel different...that and being able to play as classes that just felt different to me.

[jiffy]

Well now, that certainly puts things in a better light for me. I definately like the randomized content, that's a big plus. I'm still kinda bummed about the lack of a "closed battle.net" server that you play on. Keeps the hacks down. The downside to this of course, is the TQ guys have to keep servers running and the whole nine yards that come with it. Perhaps the sequel will? :)

[Chris Nahr]

In case I haven't mentioned this yet -- I'd like to see an option for a scaled user interface. I had to drop back to the lowest resolution eventually because those numbers and equipment icons were just too small at 1920x1200.

[Charles]

In case I haven't mentioned this yet -- I'd like to see an option for a scaled user interface. I had to drop back to the lowest resolution eventually because those numbers and equipment icons were just too small at 1920x1200.


List of things the game would need to make it noticeably better (Developers in this thread take note! You will get better reviews!)

-Larger text boxes with instant text and a 'next' button.
-Scaling of UI elements
-a "pick up all" key.
-allow players to know when a character has no more unique dialog so we don't listen to the last one repeated each time.
-allow more forgiving targeting of ground items. right now it's pixel precise and that can be difficult.
-offer indicators of how much a skill point will improve a stat (this annoyed me, trial and error required to figure it out. )
-a toggle to keep text for ground items always on (maybe this is there and I just didn't find it, didn't see one in the options)


That's all I have for right now -- I hope other people add to this thread.

[LordGek]

Hey Gang,

While I am heartened to hear that the full game will have a lot more randomization of content, there was another aspect in the demo that was an absolute deal breaker for me, the save system.

The Titan quest demo appears to use the Diablo 2 style save system that ONLY saves your character's information but nothing from the environment which means, most annoyingly, any bosses you've defeated will pop right back up as soon as you re-load. This jut hurts on multiple levels. Beyond the biggest factor being the classic, "I'll just camp out next to this big boss' spawn point for endless items and big experience", it also means that if you save right before going in for that final fight against a boss you'll probably have to re-clear shoot just to get to where you were BEFORE you saved.

[forgeforsaken]

I think you respawn on death, so you don't need to reload. Like the Diablos.

[Gendal]

Even on a 24" LCD the text is far too small to read comfortably for me. Course that just reminds me of the other thread that about not bothering to read it in the first place. I like to read the text, even if it bores me silly 90% of the time, but if its a game with tiny text, weird fantasy fonts, or yellow on blue text I don't even bother.

Still looking forward to the game though. And at least we have 1920x1200 as an option.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
Just a few quick responses.

Scaled UI: We didn't have time for this originally; it's on our list for future development.


More text improvements: Not sure about these specifics, but we will revisit this after release.


Pick-up-all key: Not likely to happen. Would be tedious with all of the broken (gray) items, would cause problems in MP, might cause pathing/AI issues. It's a lot of work for a functionality that players really shouldn't be using. After the first few levels, you really don't want to be picking up everything.


End-of-unique-dialogue indicator: Since you don't need to know anything after the first one or two lines (during which the indicator is lit), and the rest is optional, this just isn't a high-priority item. Once you get the repeats, you know you're done.


Targeting ground items: If you're holding down one of the "show items" keys, you can click on the name of the item, so you don't need to be pixel-precise.


Indicators of attribute-point increments: Yes, this should have gone into the rollovers but didn't. We'll fix it at some point.


Toggle for always showing ground items: This would cause a number of problems (from clutter to targeting). Right now, when you're showing items, you're locked out of combat so there's no confusion about what you're trying to do. I don't think this is something we're going to pursue.


On saves: The character is saved when one of something like 12 conditions is met, and it happens seamlessly, in the background, not constantly, but close. The rebirth fountains are where you spawn if you die, or if you leave the game and come back. We've spaced these at about every 20 minutes of play time, so if you die, you don't have a long run back, and if you want to quit, you can find one quickly and not have to do a lot of re-treading.

If you leave the game and come back, we do re-spawn all of the monsters (including bosses). This is so players can do loot-runs and don't run out of monsters to kill (and loot); it also keeps the save files smaller and keeps the game consistent between MP and SP. We don't want to discourage loot-runs because they're part of the fun of games like this; we've placed the rebirth fountains strategically so these are not as simple as camping right next to the boss. That does mean that after you kill a gating boss (as opposed to one that is off to the side), you will want to keep advancing to the next rebirth fountain before you quit for the night. Lucky for you, we've found ways to place them fairly nearby.

I don't really understand why people have such a problem with this system, but I remember seeing a lot of similar complaints about DS 2, so if anyone would like to offer explanations about that, I'd be happy to read them.


Also, if anyone would like to follow up Charles' list of RFE's with more suggestions, we're always happy to get design ideas for free. :-)

Best,
Michael.

[markv]

There is still no mention of moving via the keyboard! Is this actually going to be put in, or will it be point and click movement only?

[Doug Erickson]

The demo won't install since my OS is on a different drive letter than C:. Way to test, Iron Lore! Man, this issue had better not be in the final, or PRE-ORDER CANCEL TIME GO.

[John Sansker]

No starforce, not in the demo, not in release.

Sold!!!!

[Chris Nahr]

The demo won't install since my OS is on a different drive letter than C:. Way to test, Iron Lore! Man, this issue had better not be in the final, or PRE-ORDER CANCEL TIME GO.

Flexibility is nice and all... but who the hell puts the freaking operating system on a different drive than C:? Is that a test system that you specifically put together to see how many programs you can break?

[instant0]

Flexibility is nice and all... but who the hell puts the freaking operating system on a different drive than C:? Is that a test system that you specifically put together to see how many programs you can break?

You are joking?
Only shitty installers have problems with that.

G:\Windows here. :-)
Oh yes; Please do not use installshield for anything -- ever.

Regarding TQ: I hope I can play COOP Lan, friend of mine and me started playing Dungeon Siege 2 cooperative last night, it was great fun although we could'nt be in the same party and one guy could advance the quests while another was on the other side of the game world missing the quest text.

[Chris Nahr]

Only shitty installers have problems with that.

Yeah, but the likelihood of encountering a shitty installer is very great indeed.

G:\Windows here. :-)

Um... why? I can see offloading programs and data to another drive but why not just leave the OS on the boot drive?

[instant0]

@Chris:
That is very very true, unfortunately.
I work with shitty installers every day at my current client... Oh how I hate the bastards who made installshield.


Partitions:
C:\Windows is XP32
G:\Windows is XP64
E:\Windows will be Vista

I actually think my 'Boot' drive is recognized as D:\ in WinXP.

Before I reinstalled XP64 I had to choose the boot drive during Bios Post, so I'd pick SATA0 which could put XP32 as C:\. To boot XP64 I'd have to pick SATA2, but then XP64 would be recognized as C:\ and XP32 would be F:\. Anyway that caused "some" problems with a few of the applications I ran in both operating systems.

Anyway; I see Titan Quest ships 2006-06-26 with a Artbook.
http://www.ebgames.com/product.asp?product%5Fid=B646517A
Looking forward to it.

Quick question: Does it require dongle-in-drive to play?

[Chris Nahr]

Oh, so you're multi-booting several Windows versions on the same machine. That explains it.

[Marcus]

Scaled UI: We didn't have time for this originally; it's on our list for future development.

The more I think about it the more I think it sucks that it wont make it in to release. I mean I think that most of us here are prolly at least running 1600 these days. I'll prolly still end up buying the game but I think its going to irritate the hell outa me.

[Charles]

Scaled UI: We didn't have time for this originally; it's on our list for future development.


Well, this is the single most important thing you should have in patch 1, if it won't make ship.


Pick-up-all key: Not likely to happen. Would be tedious with all of the broken (gray) items, would cause problems in MP, might cause pathing/AI issues. It's a lot of work for a functionality that players really shouldn't be using. After the first few levels, you really don't want to be picking up everything.


So don't pathfind, allow the player to set priority of what kind of items are picked up. Have the player pick up things in his immediate surroundings.

Also, please don't tell me how to play. I will continue to pick up everything unless you give me a spell that converts the items directly to gold.


End-of-unique-dialogue indicator: Since you don't need to know anything after the first one or two lines (during which the indicator is lit), and the rest is optional, this just isn't a high-priority item. Once you get the repeats, you know you're done.


Why not just hide the indicator altogether when the last unique dialog has been said?



Targeting ground items: If you're holding down one of the "show items" keys, you can click on the name of the item, so you don't need to be pixel-precise.


Yeah but holding down the show items key nonstop is a pain in the ass. Also, it seems to me that the targetable box for picking up an item by it's label is smaller than the label itself.


Indicators of attribute-point increments: Yes, this should have gone into the rollovers but didn't. We'll fix it at some point.

Cool.


Toggle for always showing ground items: This would cause a number of problems (from clutter to targeting). Right now, when you're showing items, you're locked out of combat so there's no confusion about what you're trying to do. I don't think this is something we're going to pursue.


That sucks.

[Charlatan]

Also, please don't tell me how to play. I will continue to pick up everything unless you give me a spell that converts the items directly to gold.
Even in the demo, my level 5/6 guy stopped picking up all the broken items. I mean, they sell for 1 or 2 gold each and to keep gating back to town to sell a full inventory of items for 20 gold seems a bit silly.

Does your level 60 WoW character pick up items that sell for 50 copper? Does Bill Gates bend over and pick up 100 dollar bills? Same principle!

[Charles]

Even in the demo, my level 5/6 guy stopped picking up all the broken items. I mean, they sell for 1 or 2 gold each and to keep gating back to town to sell a full inventory of items for 20 gold seems a bit silly.


I've had to stop picking up grey items because of pixel imprecision and the fact that the item highlight doesn't include them.


Does your level 60 WoW character pick up items that sell for 50 copper? Does Bill Gates bend over and pick up 100 dollar bills? Same principle!

Yes, and probably yes.

[JM]

Item highlight DOES include them. You're probably using the one that specifically filters out the crap, check the keybindings.

[Charlatan]

Yeah, there are multiple highlight keys. It's like Alt- show non-broken and higher, Z - show all, X - show only better than white.

And Charles - if you really wanna pick up all the broken items and port back and forth to town over and over to sell them.... have fun doing it!

[fuzzyslug]

Also, please don't tell me how to play. I will continue to pick up everything unless you give me a spell that converts the items directly to gold.

In their defense, they aren't telling you how to play. They just aren't directly supporting your OCD issues with a gameplay shortcut.

[Charles]

In their defense, they aren't telling you how to play. They just aren't directly supporting your OCD issues with a gameplay shortcut.


It's not an OCD issue, and even if you didn't want to pick up everything, having to specifically click on the four or five items that came out of a chest is unnecessary. You should be able to just pick them all up at once, at whatever threshold you desire. Even if there's only a single item on the ground I want to pick up, I'd much rather have a key I could hit than have to mouse click on everything.

[instant0]

I've also had problems getting the right items from the ground, and tend to pick up everything.. its not OCD as much as greed :-)

[unbongwah]

It's not an OCD issue, and even if you didn't want to pick up everything, having to specifically click on the four or five items that came out of a chest is unnecessary. You should be able to just pick them all up at once, at whatever threshold you desire. Even if there's only a single item on the ground I want to pick up, I'd much rather have a key I could hit than have to mouse click on everything.
I think you're gettin' made fun of `cause some of us - myself included - find it funny that you want better autolooting so you can do more loot hauls to sell off nigh-worthless crap. :-)

That said, customizable autolooting would be cool. Not as cool as "fewer but bigger" loot drops, IMHO, but cool nonetheless. :-)

[John Sansker]

Does your level 60 WoW character pick up items that sell for 50 copper? Does Bill Gates bend over and pick up 100 dollar bills? Same principle!

Yes, and probably yes.

I picked up everything that wasn't nailed down with my level 60 when I still played.

I don't know about Gates, but I do know that Donald Trump does in fact pick up pennies he sees laying on the ground.
In a magazine article, the interviewer asked him if this was true and he said something like "I want to be that kind of guy....even though I have millions/billions?.....I'm not at the point where I have enough money that I don't need an extra penny/nickel/dime that is just lying there on the ground. free" .

[Case]

I'm not at the point where I have enough money that I don't need an extra penny/nickel/dime that is just lying there on the ground. free" .

It's not free. The amount of time it took him to pick it up, given how much money he makes an hour, costs more than a penny.

[stusser]

That's false economy. You assume that the second wasted picking up a dime would otherwise be spent making money, which is not necessarily true. This kind of thing leads to cool little quotes that meet the math, like "It isn't worth larry ellison's time to pick up $1000 on the ground", which are cute at cocktail parties but ultimately deceptive.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
There is no movement via keyboard in the release version. It's something we'll look at for future projects, but is too large in scope to really consider for a patch.

The install issue with OS on drives other than C has been fixed for release. There is a workaround here (http://titanquestvault.ign.com/fullstory.php?id=17560) for the demo.

The CD is checked, so you need to have it in the drive to play.

So don't pathfind, allow the player to set priority of what kind of items are picked up. Have the player pick up things in his immediate surroundings.

Also, please don't tell me how to play. I will continue to pick up everything unless you give me a spell that converts the items directly to gold.
You, of all people, should understand that development is limited by resources and therefore happens according to priorities. Making six different options for auto-loot just didn't stack up to getting as much variety in the AI, releasing the editor to the players, or any of the other tech + design tasks that we looked at. I'm telling you now that it's not likely to be a priority for post-release support either, just so we're clear on it. I wouldn't want you to buy the game thinking we're going to implement these features and then be disappointed when we don't.

I won't tell you how to play if you won't tell me how to design (insert winky smiley here).

Why not just hide the indicator altogether when the last unique dialog has been said?
People would get frustrated if they, for example, had heard the quest dialogue, didn't play the game for a while, went back and wanted to hear the dialogue again.


Again, all feedback is appreciated. We may not be able (or willing) to do anything about it, but it's always good to know what people want. (Repeat winky smiley here)

Best,
Michael.

[Charles]

You, of all people, should understand that development is limited by resources and therefore happens according to priorities. Making six different options for auto-loot just didn't stack up to getting as much variety in the AI, releasing the editor to the players, or any of the other tech + design tasks that we looked at. I'm telling you now that it's not likely to be a priority for post-release support either, just so we're clear on it. I wouldn't want you to buy the game thinking we're going to implement these features and then be disappointed when we don't.

I won't tell you how to play if you won't tell me how to design (insert winky smiley here).



It's not design unless you feel it's part of gameplay to have the player clicking on ground items. And frankly, I can't see how that would work in to anyone's perception of fun. Rare is the review which states "Boy I love having to click on items on the ground!"

Also, I'm not telling you how to do anything -- I'm telling you things that a potential buyer would like to see which would make your game more appealing. Whether or not you want to do that, as you say, is your prerogative.

[forgeforsaken]

With the limited inventory and the amount of drops I can see a pick up all key being troublesome, as my inventory gets loaded with crap and the Rare item is left on the ground.

[Charles]

With the limited inventory and the amount of drops I can see a pick up all key being troublesome, as my inventory gets loaded with crap and the Rare item is left on the ground.

I must admit, I'm spoiled by games which don't copy diablo so exactly. Never understood the reasons behind a ridiculously limited inventory anyway. But hey, what-ev.

[BobJustBob]

That's false economy. You assume that the second wasted picking up a dime would otherwise be spent making money, which is not necessarily true. This kind of thing leads to cool little quotes that meet the math, like "It isn't worth larry ellison's time to pick up $1000 on the ground", which are cute at cocktail parties but ultimately deceptive.

Ah, but it still costs him to bend down and pick up that penny, in the form of energy expended that will have to be replenished by eating. Is it at least a penny's worth? I wouldn't be suprised.

[marxeil]

Anybody had a problem with the demo?
When I started it the main menu had all the options replaced with "Tag not found: tagMenu01".
I clicked one of them and the next screen had the same problem.

[instant0]

Anybody had a problem with the demo?
When I started it the main menu had all the options replaced with "Tag not found: tagMenu01".
I clicked one of them and the next screen had the same problem.

This might work?

All text is gone, replaced by "SimpleStringTag not found"
(This may occur if you are installing the game on a Windows OS that is not in English)
Solution:
In the Titan Quest\Settings folder open the defaults.txt file and add or edit the line to read:
language = English
to the bottom of the file.

Also in My Documents\My Games\Titan Quest Demo\Settings edit the options.txt file with the same line:
language = English
and save that as well.

This should make the text appear in english and then you can manually change the language when you are in the game.

[Lake]

I am liking the demo. I especially like the Inventory fung shui minigame. semi-colon dash closed parenthesis

[Robert Sharp]

It's not design unless you feel it's part of gameplay to have the player clicking on ground items. And frankly, I can't see how that would work in to anyone's perception of fun. Rare is the review which states "Boy I love having to click on items on the ground!"


It fits mine. I'd much rather be able to pick up only the items I want, and I see almost no use for a loot all button. I would hardly ever use it.

[SirBruce]

Part of the problem is really that, early on, you NEED to pick up even the broken stuff, because there's so little money to be had, and you can make 100+ that way in the early quests. Later on, it becomes less of an issue, and time-consuming to make all those teleport runs back to town just to net 20 gold or so. But I, like the other poster, still have a strong desire to pick up all the broken stuff.

Here's the design point -- if you don't really WANT or EXPECT players to pick up all broken items and run back to sell them in town with multiple trips, WHY have broken items at all? You can tweak the early quests to give newbies more cash. In the end, it's really just aesthics, the coolness of having the battlefield littered with all those broken bows and such. I'm not convinced that's really all that useful, but it's trivial enough to simply make it so broken items don't intercept mouseclicks and can't be picked up.

Now, I also don't like the fact that the world isn't saved on restart, and the monsters all respawn. But you say that's because you want to support loot runs, so I'm less bothered by that. It's not a design choice I would make, but at least it's valid for the design choice you've made.

Bruce

[John Reynolds]

Now, I also don't like the fact that the world isn't saved on restart, and the monsters all respawn. But you say that's because you want to support loot runs, so I'm less bothered by that. It's not a design choice I would make, but at least it's valid for the design choice you've made.

Bruce

This was probably my biggest gripe with Diablo 2 because it lessens any sense of accomplishment from having explored a specific area or dungeon.

[Michael Fitch]

Here's the design point -- if you don't really WANT or EXPECT players to pick up all broken items and run back to sell them in town with multiple trips, WHY have broken items at all? You can tweak the early quests to give newbies more cash. In the end, it's really just aesthics, the coolness of having the battlefield littered with all those broken bows and such. I'm not convinced that's really all that useful, but it's trivial enough to simply make it so broken items don't intercept mouseclicks and can't be picked up.
Greetings:
From a design perspective, we made a decision early on that we wanted monsters that use equipment to drop the equipment they're actually using so that players can take it for themselves. This led to the problem of having tons of white (normal) equipment lying around after every battle, and a lot of it was the same, and people were gathering everything up to take it back to town and sell it. So, we invented the gray (broken, worn, rusted) category, dropped its sell value, and made it not show up on the default show items view. The message to players was intended to be "hey, you can pick this stuff up if you want, but it's not going to do you much good".

If we had made those items non-interactive, it would have broken the prior design rule of being able to pick up and use the equipment of monsters you defeated. And believe you me, when you see a monster using really cool equipment and you go over and kill them and get it for yourself, that's a really neat thing. Just last night, I was playing and I saw this skeleton dude using what looked like an icicle, and I immediately went over and killed him, so I could get the unique frost-axe from him.

In the big picture of things, I'd rather have players learn to disregard the gray items than forego the pleasure of spotting something cool, killing the guy using it, then using that equipment to kill his buddies with.

Ultimately, we can't really stop players from making decisions that make the game less fun; we can't stop you, for example, from standing in one place for hours, or from setting your brightness on your monitor so low you can't see anything, or from running naked into a boss fight. On the development side, we try to encourage players (with incentives) to do things that will be fun and to discourage them from doing things that won't, but really, it's all up to the player to decide how they want to play.

It's cool that people disagree on some of the design decisions. You're never going to make a game that everyone agrees on as the best possible design. We made our choices, and we know that some people will like them and some people won't. That's great. If everyone wanted the exact same thing, life would be less interesting.

Best,
Michael.

[Qenan]

I tried it; seemed like a click-fest. Is there some outstanding positive that would outweigh the RSI?

[JM]

Holding down the button instead of clicking all the time? ;)

If you didn't like Diablo, you won't like Titan Quest.

[Qenan]

I didn't really like diablo.

[marxeil]

This might work?

All text is gone, replaced by "SimpleStringTag not found"
(This may occur if you are installing the game on a Windows OS that is not in English)
Solution:
In the Titan Quest\Settings folder open the defaults.txt file and add or edit the line to read:
language = English
to the bottom of the file.

Also in My Documents\My Games\Titan Quest Demo\Settings edit the options.txt file with the same line:
language = English
and save that as well.

This should make the text appear in english and then you can manually change the language when you are in the game.



Thanks, that solved it. I really think thay should solve this however. Some poeple will not bother asking how to fix a demo and just leave it.

[SirBruce]

From a design perspective, we made a decision early on that we wanted monsters that use equipment to drop the equipment they're actually using so that players can take it for themselves.

Right, but you haven't provided the rationale for this decision. Immersion? Or as a way of providing rewards to players? It's important to remember what the intent of a decision is, and not focus on the decision itself.


The message to players was intended to be "hey, you can pick this stuff up if you want, but it's not going to do you much good".

That's not a very good design idea. Heck, why not let players pick up rocks and dirt? It's not because the world would be too crowded; it's because you'd recognize that enticing players to pick up relatively worthless items isn't much fun. So you have to recognize that, and not paint yourself into a bad position by strict adherence to a previous design decision.


If we had made those items non-interactive, it would have broken the prior design rule of being able to pick up and use the equipment of monsters you defeated. And believe you me, when you see a monster using really cool equipment and you go over and kill them and get it for yourself, that's a really neat thing. Just last night, I was playing and I saw this skeleton dude using what looked like an icicle, and I immediately went over and killed him, so I could get the unique frost-axe from him.

This isn't the point. You could have made the *broken* and/or *common* stuff non-intereactive, because it's *not* "really cool equipment" you can get for yourself.


In the big picture of things, I'd rather have players learn to disregard the gray items than forego the pleasure of spotting something cool, killing the guy using it, then using that equipment to kill his buddies with.

You've created a false choice: that the game has to allow all monster equipment to fall to the ground regardless of entertainment or gameplay value, or none of it. I'm not saying monsters dropping their loot isn't cool; I'm saying don't have them drop (or don't let me pick up) loot that isn't cool.


Ultimately, we can't really stop players from making decisions that make the game less fun;

That may be true, but it's too easy to use that as an excuse to cover design flaws. Obviously, you want to design a game where players are making decisions that ARE fun. If a lot of players -- as evidenced on this board -- are pointing out a problem where they are motivated to do things that are NOT so fun, that points to something in your design that might need some modification.


It's cool that people disagree on some of the design decisions. You're never going to make a game that everyone agrees on as the best possible design. We made our choices, and we know that some people will like them and some people won't. That's great. If everyone wanted the exact same thing, life would be less interesting.

And if game developers simply made design decisions without listening to feedback, the entertainment value of games would be limited in their evolution. Your statement is saying something that I think everyone knows -- yes, we all have our opinion. Now let's discuss them, so we can judge whether or not those opinions have actual merit and value and how we can learn from them.

Perhaps it's too late for you to change Titan Quest, but you still shouldn't discount what people are saying, nor should you be overly defensive about a choice you made. Perhaps you could say, "Yeah, that's a good idea; we might do something like that on our next game."

Bruce

[Charles]

Right, but you haven't provided the rationale for this decision. Immersion? Or as a way of providing rewards to players? It's important to remember what the intent of a decision is, and not focus on the decision itself.



That's not a very good design idea. Heck, why not let players pick up rocks and dirt? It's not because the world would be too crowded; it's because you'd recognize that enticing players to pick up relatively worthless items isn't much fun. So you have to recognize that, and not paint yourself into a bad position by strict adherence to a previous design decision.



This isn't the point. You could have made the *broken* and/or *common* stuff non-intereactive, because it's *not* "really cool equipment" you can get for yourself.



You've created a false choice: that the game has to allow all monster equipment to fall to the ground regardless of entertainment or gameplay value, or none of it. I'm not saying monsters dropping their loot isn't cool; I'm saying don't have them drop (or don't let me pick up) loot that isn't cool.



That may be true, but it's too easy to use that as an excuse to cover design flaws. Obviously, you want to design a game where players are making decisions that ARE fun. If a lot of players -- as evidenced on this board -- are pointing out a problem where they are motivated to do things that are NOT so fun, that points to something in your design that might need some modification.



And if game developers simply made design decisions without listening to feedback, the entertainment value of games would be limited in their evolution. Your statement is saying something that I think everyone knows -- yes, we all have our opinion. Now let's discuss them, so we can judge whether or not those opinions have actual merit and value and how we can learn from them.

Perhaps it's too late for you to change Titan Quest, but you still shouldn't discount what people are saying, nor should you be overly defensive about a choice you made. Perhaps you could say, "Yeah, that's a good idea; we might do something like that on our next game."

Bruce


Like, that's just your opinion, man.

[forgeforsaken]

Have you people actually played Diablo I/II, you know one of the best selling PC games ever? Just wondering because a lot of the complaints about what Titans Quest does would also apply to those games. I just get the feeling that there are a lot of complaints (not all) in this thread that don't get what this game is going for.

[Charles]

Have you people actually played Diablo I/II, you know one of the best selling PC games ever? Just wondering because a lot of the complaints about what Titans Quest does would also apply to those games. I just get the feeling that there are a lot of complaints (not all) in this thread that don't get what this game is going for.

Copying a game, down to its basic flaws, is never a good idea. Especially one so old.

Other games have since improved on Diablo 2's formula. Some game designers take pride in matching all the current advancements in a genre. Some game designers just stick to their guns.

[Shadari]

Other games have since improved on Diablo 2's formula.
Can you name them? I can't think of any. I know it's subjective and all, of course, but I'm still curious.

[Qenan]

Have you people actually played Diablo I/II, you know one of the best selling PC games ever? Just wondering because a lot of the complaints about what Titans Quest does would also apply to those games. I just get the feeling that there are a lot of complaints (not all) in this thread that don't get what this game is going for.

I had played some Diablo, but honestly didn't remember it being that click-heavy. I'll take your word for it, though. I do remember that I got bored of Diablo very rapidly.

[Marcus]

I am playing back through Diablo 2 right now and yeah its very click heavy but for some reason its just fun. I just slaughtering shit and finding that super rare piece of armor or charm or whatever. I dunno why its so much fun but it just is.

[SirBruce]

Have you people actually played Diablo I/II, you know one of the best selling PC games ever? Just wondering because a lot of the complaints about what Titans Quest does would also apply to those games. I just get the feeling that there are a lot of complaints (not all) in this thread that don't get what this game is going for.

Yeah, I played them. There's no excuse for repeating earlier design mistakes. I don't think there are a lot of complaints about Titan's Quest; it's a pretty cool and unexpected Diablo II clone in an interesting setting with what promises to be a compelling story. Now if they could just address a couple of the problems, it'd be great.

Bruce

[mouselock]

I won't tell you how to play if you won't tell me how to design (insert winky smiley here).

I'm absolutely not trying to tell you how to design, but the concept of this taking any significant time to implement confuses the heck out of me. You already have range checks to see if people can pick stuff up, yes? So what's difficult about saying:

for each object visible on screen
if object in range
if object >= quality threshold
pick object up

I'm just really curious as to why this is difficult. Not from a "You stupid developer, why don't you do this" perspective, but more from a "what type of layout do you have that makes this difficult to do?". I'm sure you're busy and such, so if you don't have time to respond that's cool. But I don't often actually get a chance to ask a dev why things which seem like they'd conceptually be simple aren't. :)

[Chris Nahr]

Michael, could you just ignore everyone else and implement a scalable UI? KTHXBYE!

[Marcus]

Michael, could you just ignore everyone else and implement a scalable UI? KTHXBYE!

Word on that.

[Charles]

Can you name them? I can't think of any. I know it's subjective and all, of course, but I'm still curious.

Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege both implemented a bunch of things that made managing items easier.

Also, if the designers want grey items to drop, but don't want people to pick them up and carry them around, then they should just make them have a zero sell value.

I mean, really, it's not that hard. If a game requires money to reach goals, then to reach the goals faster, you have to get everything that's worth money. The everyone-drops-everything style of gameplay, coupled with random items which siphon away the player's money in order to get better, leads to a system where to get more powerful quicker, you are forced to pick up and sell everything.

[Ryan A]

Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege both implemented a bunch of things that made managing items easier.


That's not what the question was, Charles. The question was if you've played any Diablo-clones that improved on its formula. And if you think Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege were better games than Diablo II, I think I'll take your nitpicks of Titan Quest as a ringing endorsement. Because while I never played Divine Divinity, I *did* play Dungeon Siege... and that game sucked.

Really, the only complaint I'm seeing in this thread that I find truly concening about Titan Quest is its online-play support. I'll chime in with the "Battle.net made Diablo and Diablo II what they were" crowd.

[forgeforsaken]

Divine Divinity is pretty good actually, though it has some serious skill balance issues.

[Jab2565]

Divine was good, but it did have some crashing issues, also I remember if you put a freeze enchancement on your sword, you become unbeatible by almost everything. It was cool for the final act that you become godly. Too bad I heard beyond divinity had starforce on it.

[forgeforsaken]

Beyond Divinity also seemed really really bad from the demo.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
So, just to keep things in perspective here, let's keep in mind that design is all about tradeoffs. You have a finite set of resources to work with, for one, so spending more time on one feature means you have to take time away from working on other features. For another, making things one way is going to appeal to one subset of the potential audience, while making things another way is going to appeal to a different subset. You can't make everyone happy, so you do your best to make things in such a way that it appeals to the largest number of people and you try to minimize how many people are going to be aggravated.

When I say that not everyone will be happy with the decisions we made, I'm not ignoring feedback or dismissing the people who disagree; I'm acknowledging that their opinions are valid and that we didn't just ignore that possibility, but rather that we knew about it and made strategic calls about what we were going to do. If I'm defensive about anything, here, it's that people seem to think we made these decisions without any awareness of their potential impact.

For example, we could have made gray items non-interactive, and while that may have made the compulsive pick-up-everything-that-can-be-sold min-maxers more happy, it would have pissed off all the people who wanted to have the "realism" of creatures dropping their items and being able to pick them up and use them. If we'd done it that way, I would still be in a forum explaining the decision, just a different group of people would be complaining.

We actually did make gray items have a zero sell value for a while, and when we play-tested it this way, people were more frustrated, because if they had bothered to pick these things up (which was a valid choice), there was no reward at all for having done it.

We also looked at restricting the number of monsters who would use items so that we could only equip them with normal or better items and not flood the economy, but that led to a lot of sameness in monsters (archer and mage monsters, particularly, were extremely rare), so that didn't work out the way we wanted either.

So, here's the conundrum: we wanted monsters to use equipment and drop the equipment they used (for "realism", as a differentiating factor from RPG's that didn't have any logic to drops [birds dropping suits of armor, etc.], for the cool factor of seeing a monster using something unique and being able to kill them to get it), we wanted players to be able to pick up anything that dropped (for consistency, for "realism"), and we wanted players to get a reward for selling anything they picked up (so that no equipment was completely useless). We looked at a lot of different ways to do this, actually implemented several of them to try them out and see what worked best, and this is what we ended up with. Is it perfect? No, I'm sure it's not. Will some people find our approach frustrating? Clearly. But, we had to make a choice, and we made what we felt was the best one. You're free to disagree.

Frankly, whether or not you can pick up gray items isn't going to make the difference between whether Titan Quest is a great game or not. Whether we got the feel of combat right will; whether we got the character advancement curve right will; whether we got the variety of equipment and skills right will; whether the game is bug-free or not will; whether the bosses are fun and memorable fights will; whether the game has that addictive "I'll just play for 5 more minutes" and you suddenly discover it's an hour later, that will. And ultimately, while we did everything we could to make those things true, it's you guys, the players, who will decide whether we got it right or not.

If you think we don't care about your opinions, you couldn't be more wrong.

That doesn't mean we're going to spend weeks on every rivet-counting issue, though. Some things are just more important than others. For example, just last week we were talking to the developers about patch support, and scalable UI was one of the items we discussed. Changing the gray item system was not.

As for why we didn't do a pick-up key for things near you, I'm not a programmer, so I can't get into the nuts and bolts of what it would have taken to implement it. From a design view, I think it would have caused more problems than it solved; if you don't pathfind, then people want you to; if you do pathfind, then your character is running around the screen out of your control; if you're in MP, it aggravates ninja-looting, and we would have had to work out an item-sharing feature; in SP, people would constantly pick up everything, then have to go into their inventory to throw stuff out that they didn't actually want. It's a gordian knot thing. The simplest solution is to let players pick up what they actually want. We decided to spend the time on other things, like balance and progression and AI and boss battles, and so on.

As for "I won't tell you how to play if you won't tell me how to design (insert winky smiley here)", that truly was a joke. When we design, we do tell you how to play, by setting the limits of what you can and cannot do, what will be successful and what won't, etc. My poke at Charles was that he knows this, and in spite of that, he's giving us grief for giving him too many options.

On the battle.net issue, I think everyone would have liked to have something like this, but again, it's about how you use your limited resources. We chose to focus on the single-player experience first, because we felt the online experience wouldn't be compelling without it. If we'd had the resources, we would have done the secure online server and character storage thing, but we didn't. However, because we weren't having to focus on that, we were able to do things like open up the game to modding, and we think that this will be something that will really pay off for players over the long term.

By all means, keep the feedback coming. It's always good to hear what people want, and we plan to support TQ for a long time to come, so there will be plenty of opportunities to incorporate changes.

Best,
Michael.

[Charles]

That's not what the question was, Charles. The question was if you've played any Diablo-clones that improved on its formula. And if you think Divine Divinity and Dungeon Siege were better games than Diablo II, I think I'll take your nitpicks of Titan Quest as a ringing endorsement. Because while I never played Divine Divinity, I *did* play Dungeon Siege... and that game sucked.

I didn't say they were better, I said they improved on Diablo 2 in certain areas, especially with regards to dealing with loot/inventory.

Divine Divinity was better than Diablo 2 on all fronts, IMO.

[SirBruce]

For example, we could have made gray items non-interactive, and while that may have made the compulsive pick-up-everything-that-can-be-sold min-maxers more happy, it would have pissed off all the people who wanted to have the "realism" of creatures dropping their items and being able to pick them up and use them. If we'd done it that way, I would still be in a forum explaining the decision, just a different group of people would be complaining.

I doubt that you'd have as many people complaining that some monsters shot them with a bow, they killed them, and a bow didn't drop. You could always say it was broken, after all. In the default way the game is set up, you don't even EXPECT most players to do anything but go after the valuable items.


We actually did make gray items have a zero sell value for a while, and when we play-tested it this way, people were more frustrated, because if they had bothered to pick these things up (which was a valid choice), there was no reward at all for having done it.

Er, wait... wouldn't having items with zero sell value also piss off people? Yes, as you discovered... and yet somehow you thought this was worth beta testing, but the other suggestion wasn't.


We also looked at restricting the number of monsters who would use items so that we could only equip them with normal or better items and not flood the economy, but that led to a lot of sameness in monsters (archer and mage monsters, particularly, were extremely rare), so that didn't work out the way we wanted either.

You could try to avoid the economy flood problem by simply change to rate at which prices escalated, although with your monster density at higher levels, that probably would have been a losing proposition anyway. Still, I can see why you'd still want the monsters to have a variety of weapons and be able to disconnect that from the money supply; that's why I probably would simply restrict the drops to drops I wanted the players to pick up.

Anyway, your team disagreed -- thanks for listening.

Bruce

[Ryan A]

I think this quote applies quite well to people like SirBruce:


It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly… who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who have never known neither victory nor defeat.

[Houngan]

Anyone remember Phantasy Star on the Genesis? After a certain level, you got this flute thingy that made all the shitbird monsters stay away from you. The practical application was that you were no longer bothered by pointlessly low-level monsters as you wandered through the newbie forests to get to the big-boy lands.

If the devs want people to play without grabbing the trash items, why are you dropping them? Code in a filter if that's the way you think the game should go. Value/CLevel < 10 = don't display, at all. Or whatever metric works. It'll take some balancing, but I for one would prefer it if every drop had some significance.

H.

[ydejin]

Code in a filter if that's the way you think the game should go. Value/CLevel < 10 = don't display, at all. Or whatever metric works. It'll take some balancing, but I for one would prefer it if every drop had some significance.

But that's pretty damn close to what they have now. It's just up to the user whether they want to hit the Alt, Z, or X keys (or whatever they're keyed for). Basically see most stuff, see stuff and crap, see only great stuff. Personally I think the system works just fine, and I'm happy with it.

[Gendal]

This whole loot display issue is such a non issue as to be basically silly to me. Scalable UI, now that's important.

One is a minor, minor annoyance, the other makes me go blind. Luckily it sounds like the devs have their priorities in the proper order. Proper for me that is.

[stusser]

Don't get me wrong, both dungeon sieges are mediocre games, nowhere near diablo. But they introduced a number of fantastic innovations to the genre which for whatever reason haven't been picked up by other developers. All concentrated on minimizing micromanagement. In particular,

- only drink as much HP/mana potion as you need
- combining potions
- auto-arranging inventory to maximize space
- cheap spell to transmute crap loot into gold
- key to automatically pick up all of the loot in the area
- packmule to carry loot

Hitting the ALT key and looking through dozens of worthless grey items isn't enjoyable. It isn't gameplay at all, really. It's tedious and annoying, and min-maxers will actually do it. And town portalling every 5 minutes to sell all of your worthless loot isn't fun either. I'm not saying that mobs should just drop gold and better items should be automatically equipped like The Bard's Tale, nothing that extreme, but there should be a happy medium somewhere in between.

[SirBruce]

Just using the right key doesn't totally solve the problem, since the other items still litter the ground and you can pick them up by accident. Also, as I pointed out before, your character is incentivized to pick up all of the cheap stuff at the beginning because even that little amount of gold is valuable and worth your time. As you progress further in the game, it becomes annoying to then have to switch awat from that learned behavior, not for any particularly good gameplay reason, but simply because the time and hassle of picking up and selling everything isn't worth it. And you still feel like you're leaving money on the ground.

Anyway, I'll stop now; I'm repeating myself. The point is people who are saying "just use the right key!" don't seem to get it. It's not logical; it's psychological.

Bruce

[Chris Nahr]

Okay, since you people keep obsessing about broken items, how about this:

A merchant or smith in town should allow you to repair items. Better yet, offer a general item upgrade facility. Of course it should be very expensive, i.e. not cost-effective, but I noticed that broken items of a given class tend to drop sooner than usable items. Sometimes the player might have lots of money and magic items to upgrade them with, and in this case it might be worthwhile to check the broken items and see if anything is worth grabbing and repairing.

That would give a purpose to broken items, beyond "realism".

[SirBruce]

Oh sure, but then you're actually talking about coding up a far more complicated system, one that directly impacts character progression. You could have sacrificial altars and crafting skills and all sorts of other systems to deal with broken or grey items, too. I wasn't trying to suggest totally new design ideas into a pretty solid game; simply offer suggestions to quickly address one of its more glaring problems.

Bruce

[Ryan A]

I wasn't trying to suggest totally new design ideas into a pretty solid game; simply offer suggestions to quickly address one of its more glaring problems.

Bruce

Do you look like The Comic Book Guy in real life or do you just sound like him on the internet?

[SwampIrish]

Does Bill Gates bend over and pick up 100 dollar bills?

EVERYONE bends over and picks up $100 bills.

[Charlatan]

EVERYONE bends over and picks up $100 bills.

I would think Bill G. has "his people" to do this. Saves wear and tear on his vertebrae.

[Ergo]

Will the game have true and native widescreen resolution support? It drives me batshit that so many games still don't support widescreen resolutions out of the box.

[shang]

Anyone else have severe control latency with the demo? I like lot of the ideas in the game, but the controls really bother me. E.g. when I click somewhere, there's a small pause before the guy actually starts running and if I'm attacking with a staff, the guy often keeps firing for a full second or two after I release the button (which prevents casting spells). I have a moderately beefy system, and I tried reducing all the visual options, but it doesn't seem to be performance related.

[SirBruce]

Do you look like The Comic Book Guy in real life or do you just sound like him on the internet?

Thankfully, only the latter.

Now if you don't mind, I'm busy bidding on a rare dvd episode of Voaygers! autographed by Jonathan Frakes.

Bruce

[Ryan A]

Thankfully, only the latter.

Now if you don't mind, I'm busy bidding on a rare dvd episode of Voaygers! autographed by Jonathan Frakes.

Bruce

what the hell -- get the one autographed by Jon-Erik Hexum if you're after an autograph. Phineas Bogg was THE MAN!

Ah... Voyagers! I think that was the first show to make me curse TV network executives for cancelling my favorite show.

[John Reynolds]

Will the game have true and native widescreen resolution support? It drives me batshit that so many games still don't support widescreen resolutions out of the box.

Considering that the demo does. . . .

[SwampIrish]

what the hell -- get the one autographed by Jon-Erik Hexum if you're after an autograph. Phineas Bogg was THE MAN!

Ah... Voyagers! I think that was the first show to make me curse TV network executives for cancelling my favorite show.

For me it was Fantastic Journey a few years earlier.

[Backov]

what the hell -- get the one autographed by Jon-Erik Hexum if you're after an autograph. Phineas Bogg was THE MAN!

Ah... Voyagers! I think that was the first show to make me curse TV network executives for cancelling my favorite show.

Loved that show.. May be urban legend, of course, but I heard the reason it was cancelled was because the star (the adult) - shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette with blanks.

[Mike O'Malley]

I heard that also, though my Googling to back it up has been for naught.

[Charlatan]

Loved that show.. May be urban legend, of course, but I heard the reason it was cancelled was because the star (the adult) - shot himself in the head playing Russian roulette with blanks.

Jon Erik Hexum did shoot himself in the head, as seen here. (http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/h/Jon%20Eric%20Hexum/jon_erik_hexum.htm)

[SwampIrish]

Consider this thread officially derailed and dead (here is it's death certificate):

http://www.findadeath.com/Deceased/h/Jon%20Eric%20Hexum/Hexum%20DC.JPG

[SirBruce]

I was being deliberately obscured because Jonathan Frakes was actually in an episode of Voyagers!. And since Jon Erik Hexum is long dead, a DVD signed by him would be a big deal. But perhaps that would have made for a better joke. Still, you can't go wrong with Jonathan Frakes.

Bruce

[markv]

http://www.startrek.com/imageuploads/200307/burton02/320x240.jpg

All this Frakes talk means only one thing.

PS - Either I'm blind, or there's still been no response regarding movement keys being added in to the game!

[shang]

Either I'm blind, or there's still been no response regarding movement keys being added in to the game!

There is no movement via keyboard in the release version. It's something we'll look at for future projects, but is too large in scope to really consider for a patch.

Keep wearing that visor!

[Destarius]

ACK! I can't get the demo to install :(
The only thing I can think of is that it doesn't like that my HDD is H:.
It displays:

Space required on H: 0 K
Space available on H: 110443504 K.

I would love to try this out but if i can't get it to install it makes me wonder if I will be able to install the full game :(

Same problem. I think if a demo fails to even install, that's not a good sign for the actual game. Looks promising, not going to spend $50 to see if it works. Developers: try harder.

PASS.

[Marcus]

I am honestly going to wait till they have a scaleable UI before I buy it.

[Ergo]

Considering that the demo does. . . .
Good to know, since I didn't play the demo.

[Michael Fitch]

Same problem. I think if a demo fails to even install, that's not a good sign for the actual game. Looks promising, not going to spend $50 to see if it works. Developers: try harder.

PASS.
Greetings:
You might try this (http://vnboards.ign.com/titan_quest_general_board/b23058/96793305/p1/?20).

For what it's worth, this problem (and many others) were fixed for the release version. The install issue actually came from the default settings in third-party code.

Best,
Michael.

[Destarius]

I appreciate the reply.

My Windows install is on H, so the work around won't work.

Seriously, you may wish to fix this type of issues in demos immediately. Showstopping bugs like this are an immediate no-buy for me. I can't be sure your 'fix' in the retail is going to work or not. I would think you'd probably lost a very significant portion of gamers who do not use regular Windows C: installs and tried to install the demo.

[JM]

For what it's worth, this problem (and many others) were fixed for the release version. The install issue actually came from the default settings in third-party code.

I can't be sure your 'fix' in the retail is going to work or not.

Ah, c'mon, they admitted the problem, said they know what caused it (installers suck) and have fixed it. It's not rocket science.

[Charlatan]

I wonder what percentage of people actually install demos and the like to the non-default directory. On the geeky forums I frequent, I often hear people complain about this issue, but I'm thinking that Joe Normal has his Windows setup with a C: drive and anything else is way beyond the norm. And I don't think you see much about this in even gaming mags. And it's clear that most QA setups for publishers don't have funny configurations, given the number of demos that won't install to other drives, locations, etc.

I'm very much a Joe Normal in this regard; my main drive is C: and I always install demos and the like to the default path, and I very rarely have issues.

And to get us back on track... looking forward to TitanQuest's release. The PR pieces at ign and stuff at GameBanshee have done a good job of getting me psyched for it.

[Matthew Gallant]

I wonder how many PC games don't have a test plan for installing to other drives and directories after those couple-a-ones a few years back that wiped your hard drive when you baffled them with non-default settings?

I mean, besides Titan Quest.

Destarius, that registry tweak hotfix would probably work if you changed the key to "H:\Program Files"

[Equisilus]

And to get us back on track... looking forward to TitanQuest's release. The PR pieces at ign and stuff at GameBanshee have done a good job of getting me psyched for it.

Speaking of release, why is it that Amazon.ca is always so behind in getting anything new posted if it's even remotely not a hugely popular title? Amazon.com has had Titan Quest listed since last year, yet all Amazon.ca has is the strategy guide. Annoying.

Since I shifted to online buying, Amazon.ca is my main alternative and yet I'm being stymied by lack of selection. Imagine that! Is it difficult for a distributer/publisher in Canada to get a game listed on a major online retailer like that?

[Destarius]

Destarius, that registry tweak hotfix would probably work if you changed the key to "H:\Program Files"

Apparently someone's already tried that.

It may be that the final installer is fixed, but as I've mentioned, I doubt I'm the only person who would be hesitant about spending money on a promise. If the fix was easy, they should just fix the demo too. How much work could that be?

[Kunikos]

I would think you'd probably lost a very significant portion of gamers who do not use regular Windows C: installs and tried to install the demo.

So, what like 90% of this group which is about 1% of Windows installs? LOL
I'm sure the publisher is quaking in their booties!

[Destarius]

I don't think we're as small a percentage as that. Really. I bought my system retail.

[JM]

Apparently someone's already tried that.

It may be that the final installer is fixed, but as I've mentioned, I doubt I'm the only person who would be hesitant about spending money on a promise. If the fix was easy, they should just fix the demo too. How much work could that be?

The demo's already out there. It's not worth the hassle.

[Michael Fitch]

Apparently someone's already tried that.

It may be that the final installer is fixed, but as I've mentioned, I doubt I'm the only person who would be hesitant about spending money on a promise. If the fix was easy, they should just fix the demo too. How much work could that be?
Greetings:
No worries. By all means wait until the game is released and there's proof that this issue has been fixed. Hell, wait for the reviews and see if people you trust like the game or not. There's nothing wrong with skepticism; we're not trying to make you do anything. I just offered up the registry thing as a possible solution if you wanted to try it.

As for fixing the demo, that's a trickier thing. We'd have to go back to that code branch, make the changes, re-package it, run it all through QA again, get our distribution partners to change the package they're hosting, get the word out to all the people who are mirroring it (people will blame us if a third-party is hosting the old version of the demo, we tell them the issue is fixed in the new version, and they download the old version by mistake and run into that same problem), and then get the word out to everyone who had problems with the demo. Of course, if you fix this one problem, then people are also going to expect you to fix all the other problems, which means you end up re-building the demo entirely, which is a lot more time and effort. Mind you, people are doing this more and more, particularly when the demo is poorly received, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be a winning proposition.

I get how from the consumer side the expectation is that everything will work flawlessly and if it doesn't, it's up to the publisher to fix it. From the publishing side, that's just not a reasonable proposition when you're talking about a free product.

This is one of those double-edged sword thingies. In order to get the demo out before release, we had to lock the code two months before we actually went gold. So, even after we launched the demo, people were hard at work on the retail game, and pulling them off of that to fix the demo would have meant fixing fewer bugs, doing less polish work, or pushing out the release date for the game. On the other hand, if we'd waited until people were available (making the demo post-GM), people would have complained that they didn't get the demo before release.

At this point, the developers have moved onto other tasks, the potential audience for a fixed demo has shrunk considerably, and it's mostly moot anyway, as the reviews will be out in just a couple of weeks. The bottom line is that no matter how much money you spend and how much work you do, there will always be a group of people who think that you didn't do as much of either as you ought to have. That's fine, in the sense that everyone's entitled to their opinion, but at some point, you have to draw the line and say, we're happy putting this out there. Otherwise, you end up with DNF.

For what it's worth.

Best,
Michael.

[Destarius]

Lots of Stuff

I appreciate the effort to explain. It's great that developers bother to respond and explain. I also understand the need to balance competing interests, that's pretty much my life! =)

I will have to drop a line later into a TQ forum to see if they fixed this for good in the retail, and if so, then decide to buy according to the reviews.

I really don't buy the entire QA process though. This doesn't look like a major code revision at all. A small patch to only the install executable would have been sufficient. There are many other issues that I'd take up about your reasons not to fix the demo, but since you basically think a free product isn't worth your time, then it's ok.

[JM]

My answer was more concise.

[fuzzyslug]

I really don't buy the entire QA process though.

That must be because you aren't familiar with the QA process. If it is done properly, it can be a bitch -- a necessary one.

[Gendal]

That must be because you aren't familiar with the QA process. If it is done properly, it can be a bitch -- a necessary one.

Wildly unfamiliar. One tiny text change from say, a Mrs. to a Ms. in one line of dialog has been known to cause random crashes that have taken over a week to debug. Crazy eh? Welcome to the world of large scale programs and the pain to deliver them.

That's a rare case and the technicalities that led up to it fairly obtuse, but the point is shit happens. Which is why any QA department worth a dime knows that if anything gets changed you put it through the testing process again.

[John Reynolds]

Wife asked me what I wanted for my 3rd father's day gift, so I ordered Titan Quest on DVD and the strategy guide from Amazon.com, with $4 1-day shipping (thanks to a 3-month Prime trial period). Hopefully this game--like Oblivion did for roughly 6 weeks--breaks my EQ2 addiction.

[Destarius]

Wildly unfamiliar. One tiny text change from say, a Mrs. to a Ms. in one line of dialog has been known to cause random crashes that have taken over a week to debug. Crazy eh? Welcome to the world of large scale programs and the pain to deliver them.

That's a rare case and the technicalities that led up to it fairly obtuse, but the point is shit happens. Which is why any QA department worth a dime knows that if anything gets changed you put it through the testing process again.

Color me corrected. =P But that begs the question, if QA is so comprehensive, how did this slip?

[Damien Neil]

I get how from the consumer side the expectation is that everything will work flawlessly and if it doesn't, it's up to the publisher to fix it. From the publishing side, that's just not a reasonable proposition when you're talking about a free product.

On the one hand, I completely understand what you're saying.

On the other hand, a demo is a free product that's supposed to showcase how amazingly good the for-pay product is. When I encounter a demo that's sub-par or broken, I assume that it's a representative sample of the full version and move on with my life.

[OrangeCoke]

I didn't really notice the grey/broken items issue some folks are complaining about, so I guess it's a non-issue for me personally.

My main beef: it did feel a bit irritating to not be able to rotate the camera. Hard to explain why - I kept wanting to do it though, so it was a bit distracting that the camera was locked in place.

I also found the graphics had an odd "shimmer" effect in movement. This one is quite hard to explain - maybe it's my vid-card. While scrolling, it felt like every pixel was flashing or lagging somehow so that the whole image "shimmered" during movement, rather than a solid color that scrolled smoothly for my eyes. Very distracting and hard to look at for more than a few minutes. I'm actually re-installing the demo to refresh my memory on how it looked, and/or fix my settings to remove the effect.

If I can't fix it I'd probably have to pass on purchasing the game because I find the effect unpleasant to look at.

[Chris Nahr]

That does sound like a problem with your driver or video card. Any other games that give you trouble?

[OrangeCoke]

Not so far (tried games like Fate, Chaos Theory, SWAT 4), although this is my work PC so it's less of a gaming rig than it could be :). I should try it at home.

[Charles]

Just to correct a misconception. Installer testing and game testing are separate, as they are completely unrelated codebases. Fixing the installer wouldn't require a full retest pass of the game, as all you need to do is verify that the proper registry entries are made, and that the proper files end up in their final places.

The problem is that most developers (mistakenly) believe that they can simply grab install shield and voila! Ship the game! However this isn't really the case. The installer usually gets short shrift in testing, and that's how things like this happen. That being said, I don't think it's really worth it to release a demo with an updated installer.

But fixing the installer wouldn't trigger a full retest pass of the game.

[OrangeCoke]

That does sound like a problem with your driver or video card. Any other games that give you trouble?

Just tried it again - I'm thinking it's the frame-rate.

Using a 9800 XT at 1024 res, everything set to Medium.

[SirBruce]

Sounds like you need to turn VSync on.

Bruce

[Michael Fitch]

Just tried it again - I'm thinking it's the frame-rate.

Using a 9800 XT at 1024 res, everything set to Medium.
Greetings:
What kind of monitor do you have? The world does get a little blurry when you're moving if you have an older LCD with slow response times (when we scroll the world, we pretty much cycle every pixel). Vsync is also worth trying.

Also,
On the other hand, a demo is a free product that's supposed to showcase how amazingly good the for-pay product is. When I encounter a demo that's sub-par or broken, I assume that it's a representative sample of the full version and move on with my life.

That's your prerogative. As I said earlier, if we'd waited until the game was finished to release the demo, we would have been slammed for that. In game development, as in life, you can't please all the people all the time.

Best,
Michael.

[John Sansker]

As I said earlier, if we'd waited until the game was finished to release the demo, we would have been slammed for that. In game development, as in life, you can't please all the people all the time.


Heh, how true.
People are bitching about a demo. As near as I can tell this game is one of a very few in the last 5 years or so, where the demo actually came out beforethe actual game.
I liked the demo and actually pre-ordered the game before playing the demo.

[JM]

On the one hand, I completely understand what you're saying.

On the other hand, a demo is a free product that's supposed to showcase how amazingly good the for-pay product is. When I encounter a demo that's sub-par or broken, I assume that it's a representative sample of the full version and move on with my life.

Unless, of course, you're able to chat to one of the devs on a forum about the problem and he tells you exactly what the issue was and that it's fixed in the full version, right? :)

[AndrewM]

I also found the graphics had an odd "shimmer" effect in movement. This one is quite hard to explain - maybe it's my vid-card.

I have the same problem. I blamed it on my LCD monitor. I don't really notice it in other games, but as somebody else said, with Titan Quest, everything's changing all the time, so it is more noticeable.

[Destarius]

As near as I can tell this game is one of a very few in the last 5 years or so, where the demo actually came out beforethe actual game.

Hyperbole. Though I agree that the developers can't aim to please everyone and that is bound to end in tears. But a demo, that's why people use to decide whether to buy the game.

"Can I test-drive your car? I'm thinking of buying."
"No test-drives."
"Why?"
"Test car spoilt. You buy car. New car fixed!"
"How can I be sure?"
"I say fixed, it fixed. You buy new car now!"
"Why don't you fix the test car?"
"Test car already spoilt. Cost money to fix. Test-drive no earn money for me. Why fix test car for you?"

[Becoming]

Oooh, It's getting close now. I can almost smell some piles of coop plunder awaiting. Also (and I really hope I read this correctly) you can save mp coop games just like in singleplayer?! SOLD!

[John Sansker]

Hyperbole. Though I agree that the developers can't aim to please everyone and that is bound to end in tears. But a demo, that's why people use to decide whether to buy the game.


Would you rather that their demo was awesome and then the retail was borked? Recent Pool of Radiance comes to mind
Though pretty sure there was no demo for that before it shipped.

[Destarius]

Would you rather that their demo was awesome and then the retail was borked? Recent Pool of Radiance comes to mind
Though pretty sure there was no demo for that before it shipped.

Not all of us buy retail copies on the first day, that's the whole point of releasing a demo afterwards, to convince people to buy it. If there's a demo, I'd consider getting the game if I enjoyed the demo. If the demo is borked, why would I necessarily take the word of the developer that it's fixed? And what happens if there is some other problem with the retail copy to which the developer may also say, "Well, you're the minority. It's not worth fixing for you." Sorry, no sale.

[mtkafka]

Sorry, no sale.

And thus the world ends...

etc

[Ryan A]

I'm pretty sure Destarius will be single handedly responsible for the death of computer games.

[Ergo]

Nitpicky bastard, ain't he?

[Destarius]

I'm pretty sure Destarius will be single handedly responsible for the death of computer games.

Thank you thank you! For my next trick, I will sell the Golden Gate Bridge to Graeme Dice.

[Misguided]

I enjoyed the demo but had problems with the sound. It clearly didn't support 5.1 and many sounds were inaudible or muted. I'm assuming this is fixed for the final release.

The only other issue I had was that performance was choppy on my system (not simply in certain spots, but throughout). I attribute this to playing widescreen (1680*1050). I suppose I could play in a window, but I'm hoping overall performance will be enhanced in the final code.

That reminds me. The controls feel sluggish and unresponsive, but perhaps this was related to the above. For instance, I might release the mouse button but fire 2, even 3 more arrows. Did anyone else experience this?

[JM]

I had no problems at any stage at that res, but I do have a beefy machine.

[nutsak]

Saxman is my hero. He fixed the demo install issue.

Posting instructions

1) Make a file on the drive where you have the most room. Name it something ie: "See Drive"
2) In Explorer go to Tools -> Map Network Drive
3) Select your "See Drive" Folder and give it the drive of C: if you don't have it already (I don't have a C: at all)
4) Go into your newly made C: and create a folder called 'Program Files'
5) Follow the regedit instructions that were posted before...

[Charlatan]

Video review is up at Gamespot, see http://media.pc.ign.com/media/693/693967/vids_1.html

This is a worthwhile download, though the reviewer gives TQ pretty mediocre grades. His opinions:

- minions can make the fights (including boss battles) too easy (he runs in circles, pet is shooting, the mob ignores the pet and chases him).
- minion control is needed (i.e., the pet often shoots stuff that's out of his field of view, can't set pet to passive or control who it attacks).
- sometimes creatures shoot at you from off screen.
- somewhat low creature variety (i.e., not that many mob types, and some of them are effectively identical to others - skeletons in act 1 == satyrs in act2, etc).
- loot table seems non-focused (you can get lower level rare stuff late in the game)
- by the end of the game you're rich but nothing to buy with it, and,
- vendor stuff is typically worse than what you find, so no incentive to buy stuff

Seems like many of these issues could be cleared up in a patch though (which is what he said).

Final thought was that playing this game made him think about how good Diablo was, rather than making him curious to see what was ahead in TQ. So that's somewhat disappointing (but honestly, that's the way I've felt about most Diablo-alikes since D2). I've got it preordered, so I'm still in, but I hope the devs take the critique to heart and think about some of the issues presented here.

[mtkafka]

Video review is up at Gamespot, see http://media.pc.ign.com/media/693/693967/vids_1.html

This is a worthwhile download, though the reviewer gives TQ pretty mediocre grades. His opinions:

- minions can make the fights (including boss battles) too easy (he runs in circles, pet is shooting, the mob ignores the pet and chases him).
- minion control is needed (i.e., the pet often shoots stuff that's out of his field of view, can't set pet to passive or control who it attacks).
- sometimes creatures shoot at you from off screen.
- somewhat low creature variety (i.e., not that many mob types, and some of them are effectively identical to others - skeletons in act 1 == satyrs in act2, etc).
- loot table seems non-focused (you can get lower level rare stuff late in the game)
- by the end of the game you're rich but nothing to buy with it, and,
- vendor stuff is typically worse than what you find, so no incentive to buy stuff

Seems like many of these issues could be cleared up in a patch though (which is what he said).

Final thought was that playing this game made him think about how good Diablo was, rather than making him curious to see what was ahead in TQ. So that's somewhat disappointing (but honestly, that's the way I've felt about most Diablo-alikes since D2). I've got it preordered, so I'm still in, but I hope the devs take the critique to heart and think about some of the issues presented here.

These are similar complaints I heard with Sacred... which I thought was a good game. However I think the reviewer should have said alot more about the character development. The best part of these games is not just the loot (even the areas/dungeons themselves become besides the point) but the building of your character. I need to know if the balance and difficulty is good enough as well with the higher levels (like Hell difficulties). Fwiw, Diablo II was actually a helluva lot easier than Diablo I on release... and as well it was boring for long stretches. The saving grace of Diablo II over I was character development and loot. I actually HATE the environments in DII.. they generally were really drab and ugly (imo)...which goes to show how much loot and charcter focus DII has and was STILL a great great game.

Here's a more generic review but optimistic...
http://palgn.com.au/article.php?title=Titan+Quest+Review&id=4784

Still, I really am excited about Titan Quest... reading about the skill trees (cool character combos!) and the graphics makes me really excited! My only concern is that the game doesn't get challenging on higher replays. Sacred took awhile before it really got challenging... and even DII until a few patches wasn't really difficult on Hell difficulty (with certain chars)... hopefully the higher replays in TQ are worthy of character/loot planning.

etc

[Charlatan]

Good points re: character development. And I agree - the meat of the game will be if character development is fun and if the loot is shiny.

And in Diablo2 I shuddered every time I had to go to act 3: at the time my son called the little guys with the dart guns "Fertishes" so that's what I call em to this day - and I hate the Fertish Jungle!

[Ryan A]

Pretty much every single one of those Gamespot complaints could (and were) be levelled against both Diablo and Diablo II, which the reviewer (like most in this thread) holds up as the holy grail of gaming.

[Equisilus]

Not surprised about those criticisms for TQ, and I wouldn't have expected it to be an amazing experience anyway. However, considering that it's still not available at Amazon.ca, I'm beginning to wonder if they plan on selling it in high numbers or not. When a distributer isn't on board with the major resellers, you have to think something is wrong. Or am I just being pessimistic?

[flyinj]

The review that was linked was an IGN review, not a Gamespot review.

[Equisilus]

The review that was linked was an IGN review, not a Gamespot review.

Yeah, I edited that same comment out of my response above. Last thing I needed was for someone to point out that IGN/Gamespot are somehow associated. I'd be horrified, I tell you! ;)

Now look what you've done.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
The Diablo 2 review (http://pc.ign.com/articles/160/160629p1.html) from IGN is actually an interesting comparison. Different reviewer, though.

Best,
Michael.

[John Sansker]

Not surprised about those criticisms for TQ, and I wouldn't have expected it to be an amazing experience anyway. However, considering that it's still not available at Amazon.ca, I'm beginning to wonder if they plan on selling it in high numbers or not. When a distributer isn't on board with the major resellers, you have to think something is wrong. Or am I just being pessimistic?

Ummmmmm (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BKYR0I/qid=1151219567/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0206699-1954245?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=468642)

[Equisilus]

Ummmmmm (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BKYR0I/qid=1151219567/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/103-0206699-1954245?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance&n=468642)

*sigh* Amazon.ca!!!!! Canada! I know it's available at Amazon.com but you'll note that they don't ship out of the US.

I've told Amazon.ca as much, and they've simply said they don't have any information about carrying the game at this time. They have the strategy guide, just not the game.

[John Sansker]

*sigh* Amazon.ca!!!!! Canada! I know it's available at Amazon.com but you'll note that they don't ship out of the US.

I've told Amazon.ca as much, and they've simply said they don't have any information about carrying the game at this time. They have the strategy guide, just not the game.

I take it you don't live close to the US border?
Do some ninja shopping in the US, then smuggle yer illegal game home?

[Equisilus]

I take it you don't live close to the US border?
Do some ninja shopping in the US, then smuggle yer illegal game home?

Ha! No, but it doesn't matter. I can always get it at a local EB. It's just that I vowed not to purchase from the local EB anymore because of their general crapness. So, I switched to online. Now I'm stuck trying to get Amazon.ca to carry products. Ah well. Perhaps I'll just wait on the new release and pick it up at a different store when they get it, like a Walmart (one of my least favorite stores, too).

That still begs the question of why the game's not promoted and distributed well in Canada. Seems to me that it's a sure way to knock sales at the most crucial selling point. It's not as if the game is a low-budget snorefest without interest.

[OrangeCoke]

Greetings:
What kind of monitor do you have? The world does get a little blurry when you're moving if you have an older LCD with slow response times (when we scroll the world, we pretty much cycle every pixel). Vsync is also worth trying.


Best,
Michael.

Yep, that must be it. My work monitor is a Samsung 740T, which I think is 25 ms response (yuck!). My home monitor is 8 ms, so I'll try it out at home.

[stusser]

Going to pick this up tomorrow. I don't realistically expect TQ to be much better than dungeon siege 2, but I'm so RPG-starved that I'll take what I can get. At least the graphics are a clear improvement.

[John Reynolds]

If it's any consolation, Amazon.com hasn't shipped my Prime, 1-day TQ DVD to me yet either.

[mtkafka]

MISTER TOM CHICK

gives it a 4.5/5

http://videogames.yahoo.com/gamereview?cid=1991812258&tab=reviews&page=0&eid=466425

etc

[Kalle]

That review clinches it, I'm getting this game.

[stusser]

I'm so hard up I'll buy games with "rpg elements" these days. I even bought (and subsequently returned, natch) dragonshard, and I hate RTS's.

[mtkafka]

Shacknews review... no score, but the write up at the end says, "Titan Quest is a very good game that can stand on its own two legs." comparing it to Diablo II.

http://www.shacknews.com/extras/2006/062606_titanquest_1.x

etc

[SuperHiro]

This may have been answered already. If so, please don't hurt me.

here's my system.

PIV 2.8 GHZ (dual core)
1 gig ram
ATI x300

yeah, that graphics card is the black mark of shame on my gamer card. Anyway, when I played the demo, the game ran okay for the most part, but it did chug in quite a lot of places (like going in caves, when lots of enemies were on screen). Did the engine get tightened up enough so I can get into 6 man mp without turning down my rez to ridiculous levels?

[forgeforsaken]

Going to hit the Bestbuy tomorrow to see if they have it.

[Michael Fitch]

This may have been answered already. If so, please don't hurt me.

here's my system.

PIV 2.8 GHZ (dual core)
1 gig ram
ATI x300

yeah, that graphics card is the black mark of shame on my gamer card. Anyway, when I played the demo, the game ran okay for the most part, but it did chug in quite a lot of places (like going in caves, when lots of enemies were on screen). Did the engine get tightened up enough so I can get into 6 man mp without turning down my rez to ridiculous levels?
Greetings:
Your video card is definitely the limiting factor here. The final game should run better than the demo did, but with that card, I'd run at all settings on low just to get the best frame rate. Frankly, that's how I play it on my laptop, and it still looks good, but man, on a top-of-the-line system, it's a sight to see.

So, up to you on how important graphics are.

Best,
Michael.

[stusser]

etc
Not to digress, but why do you end every post with "etc"? Is it a religious thing?

[chumpface]

I don't know why people have been beating up poor Michael in this forum. I loved the demo and will be first in line tomw when it comes out.

-signed,

a dev

[Becoming]

I'll be on board shortly as soon as I finish up some other games in progress. I appreciate the time Michael has spent on here feeding us info and I'm sold on the co-op. :)

[ydejin]

I don't know why people have been beating up poor Michael in this forum. I loved the demo and will be first in line tomw when it comes out.

I loved the demo too. I've got it preordered myself. Here's hoping it shows up at EB on Tuesday.

[mtkafka]

Not to digress, but why do you end every post with "etc"? Is it a religious thing?

It's a habit of mine since I couldnt come up with a sig along time ago... I even do it in 'professional' email by accident before backspacing... I cant stop I guess

etc

[instant0]

Any word on that UI resize/move option?

[Charlatan]

Chumpface:

You think people have been beating up on Michael? I think people have been appreciative that he's come along answering questions and responding to people's ideas and suggestions.

If nobody cared about Titan Quest or thought it sucked, a dev could come by and everyone would make miscellaneous polite noises, and that'd be it. But it seems that people like TQ, and think it could be oh-so-much better if only this, that or the other were changed. So that's why suggestions were flying around - and to have a Michael come back and give reasoning to the development process... well, I think it's been helpful for him, and good insight for me if nobody else.

All we need to do now is end the meeting with a group hug, then we can all go home.

[Michael Fitch]

Greetings:
I appreciate the sympathy, but it's not needed. Everyone around here has been articulate and insightful in their comments, even when they've disagreed with how we did things. If you want to see vitriol, wander over to the GameSpot forums, where people are denouncing us as incompetent because they don't understand how to run the work-around on their warez copy.

The UI resize at higher resolutions did not make it into release. It's on our potential future features list. Moving the windows around is not likely to happen, as it would require a complete rewrite of our UI.

Best,
Michael.

[instant0]

For fun I had to check out the Gamespot threads. Had forgotten how crazy some people are after I left BluesNews (as a reader).... Thanks for the reminder Mr. Fitch. :-)

[JM]

Curses. Gameplay are saying 3 days to go...

Oh well, preordered (and Untold Legends 2 on its way as well).

[Enidigm]

This looks like a fun game. I think i'll get around to checking the demo out.

[Anders Hallin]

Beat the demo, now I want the full thing.
Of course, I'm sure in the full game the trend of me putting a buff on a weapon and then immediately afterward finding a better weapon.

[TomChick]

I'm sure in the full game the trend of me putting a buff on a weapon and then immediately afterward finding a better weapon.

I think that's some physics principle in action RPGs. There's gotta be a word for that.

-Tom

[forgeforsaken]

I think it's sadistic programmers using if/then.

[Anders Hallin]

It will continue, was what I meant to write.

The "grass turns greener"-effect? Someone creative make something up.

[EvilIdler]

Of course, I'm sure in the full game the trend of me putting a buff on a weapon and then immediately afterward finding a better weapon.

When games do that to me, I like to pretend that the new weapon
would have been suckier if I didn't improve my existing weapon, because
the game logic wants to feed me crack to keep playing.

Various sites say it should be out in my vicinity now, but I haven't spotted
it yet. If it has co-op, it's a must-have. Eventually. Too many games to
buy already :)

[EvilIdler]

It will continue, was what I meant to write.

The "grass turns greener"-effect? Someone creative make something up.
I'm sure something in this list will fit:
http://www.murphys-laws.com/murphy/murphy-laws.html

Like "every solution breeds new problems".

[Gendal]

Loving the full game, been playing for 5-6 hours now, though this is one of my favorite genres. My one nitpick is studdering performance at high resolutions on what is otherwise a monster gaming rig (the demo didn't seem to do this). If I can play Oblivion maxed at 1920x1200 with no problems then I should be able to do so on TQ. The mitigating factor is apparently ATI cards, it supposedly runs much better on Nvidia. Which makes the little blurb in the manual pretty insulting really.

Minus that I am enjoying leveling up my character (warfare/spirit), collecting loot, and viewing the scenery. I would like a scalable UI and something I call a filtered click. By that I mean when I hold a loot filter key down I should only be able to click and pick up stuff that is currently shown. I am always picking up broken items and having to sort through my inventory and toss them back down.

[flyinj]

I don't know if I'm breaking a forum rule here but for the sake of everyone's enjoyment of the game-

If you run with the no-cd crack, performance increases, and it seems to remove 90% of the heavy stuttering.

Seems to be another instance of copy protection slapped onto the end product without testing. Much like Morrowind. Or Vietcong 1.

[Tom McNamara]

Turning off anti-aliasing seems to help a lot (and jaggies are mitigated by high resolutions), plus you can hold down the Alt key or "X" key, instead of the "Z" key, to filter out gray items. Alt will show white-or-better items, and X will show yellow-or-better.

[Marcus]

Frys has the game for 44.95 btw I almost bought it but I picked up a 400gig hd instead

[TomChick]

plus you can hold down the Alt key or "X" key, instead of the "Z" key, to filter out gray items. Alt will show white-or-better items, and X will show yellow-or-better.

Right, but Gendal was saying that you should be prevented from picking up the trash loot when you're holding down these filter keys. Which I think is a great idea.

-Tom

[Gendal]

Yep, the problem is I am always picking up stuff that doesn't show when you hit the filter key.

I have tried quiet a few different performance options. Setting detail to mid helps, but doesn't eliminate the shuddering and loading problems at 1920x1080 (I want 1200 but that's completely unplayable) so I just keep it at high. Yes I defragged. Multiple times. No nothing else is loaded, game has access to two gigs. Just tried the "reloader" no disc hack and I got my first crash after 5 minutes of play. It might have helped, jury is still out, but it's not worth it if it is going to cause crashes.

Back on a positive note I love the visceral feel of my dual wielding Spellsword. It feels great to wade into a passel of skeletons and just send them flying like a loony toons lawnmower. The better the hit the further they seem to fly back which is animated to an excellent degree. Add in the different animations from the varied passive battle skills and it's a sight to behold.

Edit: I think I have partially narrowed down my studdering problem, it can happen anywhere but never for more than a second or two but in the Ancient Tomb (repeated generic side cave) I usually grind down to 2-3fps if I am lucky, but just in certain spots. That's with zero monsters on the screen, just me and some empty tombs. I stood in one of these hot spots and reduced everything to low but it made zero difference.

[MikeSofaer]

I just picked this up, I'm excited to play it.

First impression: Why the hell are my mouse buttons switched? Do you hate lefthanders?

[VegasRobb]

Frys has the game for 44.95 btw I almost bought it but I picked up a 400gig hd instead

I got the 500gig hd, Ranv.

Might go back for the 400. Was it $119?