It's hard not to get caught up in the hype surrounding either Starcraft 2 or Diablo III, but of the two releases, I've found my excitement for Diablo has been far exceeding that of Starcraft even though I've never played a Diablo game. That I've never played Diablo probably has a lot to do with it, in fact---I played Starcraft extensively when it was first released, and so I know what to expect with Starcraft 2. Diablo III and the hack-and-slash RPG genre that it lords over, on the other hand, is new to me.
Because Diablo III is still a long way off, I thought that it might be a good idea to take a plunge into hack-and-slash to get an idea of what it's all about. Enter Titan Quest, which I've heard many people speak of as being the best rehash of Diablo's decade-old game design to date.
I managed to play the game until I reached Act II of the storyline as a level 19 Warrior/Hunter, and couldn't bring myself to go any further. In spite of this, it's important to mention that at no point during my time with the game did I particularly want to stop playing it, but I'll get back to that later. First, I'll tell you what's wrong with this game.
Titan Quest is forgettable for a number of simple reasons: boring environments, boring enemies, brain-dead combat, and a worthless story that is presented in an archaic MMO style.
One of the things that an RPG has to get right is environment. The whole point of playing an RPG is to be immersed in the world in which the game takes place. The world of Titan Quest is completely linear, completely repetitive, and completely devoid of life. The game is structured so that each quest takes you from one human-populated settlement to the next, and between each of these settlements are regions populated by enemies. Unfortunately, if you've traveled through one of these enemy-populated regions, you've traveled through all of them. Every cave looks the same, every ruin looks the same, every enemy encampment looks the same, and every tree and rock formation looks the same. Once in a while the colour palette may switch from green to yellow, but that's all you're going to get. It all looks very pretty, but no matter how good an environment may look the first time you see it, after the twentieth time, you'll wish you were looking at something else.
Traveling through the world also doesn't provide the player with the feeling that they are on a Grand Quest in an ancient, magical world. Every time you look at your hero's progress on the world map, you're very clearly reminded that the game is shepherding you through narrow corridors from one village to the next. And once you clear through an area, you have very little reason to go back, aside from backtracking to the merchant in the nearest village to clear up space in your inventory for more loot.
Matching the repetitiveness of the environments is the repetitiveness of the enemies. You'll kill the same animals, undead, spiders, cat-people, lizard-people, bird-people, and insect-people over and over again. This wouldn't be as much of a problem if the combat was interesting, but it isn't. That I chose warrior as my main class may have had some impact on the dynamics of the combat, but I doubt that other classes would be any more interesting. The combat involves clicking on an enemy and holding down the mouse button till that target is dead, and then moving onto the next. On only the strongest bosses did I ever run the risk of dying, but a good supply of health potions and vigilantly watching my health bar was all that I needed to get through even the hardest of battles.
The story is presented through speeches by NPC's that bookend each quest or sub-quest, and there are a few NPC's in each town that add some colour to the story, but it's all very forgettable. The motivations for each quest just don't matter. All you'll care to know is that you have to get from point A to point B, killing everything in between and opening every 'Pile of Bones' and 'Majestic Chest' along the way.
And that's essentially what this game comes down to: killing and looting. Looting gets you new equipement that boosts your stats, and killing gets you experience which allows you to boost your stats and fill in your skill tree. But I found even the skill tree to be a tiresome aspect of this game. Your character can have two specialties, and each specialty has its own skill tree. When I took my first look at each tree, I figured out exactly what skills I wanted my character to have, but the process of filling each tree is incredibly slow. As a level 19 character, I had accrued just about 60 skill points (you gain 3 skill points every level), and had only reached the second of six skill tree levels of each of my two specialties. Simply unlocking all six levels of one skill tree takes eleven levels worth of skill points, and that's before actually investing any points into skills. On top of this, maxing out any individual skill requires 6 to 12 points.
Unfortunately, the only thing that could increase the complexity of the combat in Titan Quest would be a wide variety of skills and skill combinations to choose from. That the addition of skills takes so long means that through the majority of this game (at least through the portion that I played), you have only a handful of abilities to choose from.
I mentioned earlier that although I couldn't bring myself to play Titan Quest past the first act, at no point during my play-through of that first act did I think about quitting the game. I see this not as a positive aspect of Titan Quest---"it wasn't so bad that I wanted to stop playing it"---but rather a commentary on games in general. The only things that would keep someone playing a game like Titan Quest is loot and character-building compulsion, or just the fact that playing a game mindlessly is easier and requires less effort than doing something else. Unless a game is so poorly designed that it actively makes you want to stop playing it, it is so easy to just play through games without actually asking yourself, "Am I having fun?"
I wasn't having any fun playing Titan Quest.