Heroes!
With a new year starting we want to use this moment to take a look at the past months.
We couldn’t be happier with how Titan Quest II has been perceived so far.
We want to thank every one of you who played the game and gave feedback. It helps us to focus on what’s important to you during development.
Our launch and every major update had a survey included and we wanted to talk a little bit about the feedback we’ve gathered from those and other places.
We will first take a look at some high-level questions and then try to take a deeper look at certain parts of the game.
Overall Experience
The first thing we ask in every survey is some high-level questions about each part of the game.
- Overall Experience: 96% of you stated it was positive or very positive.
- Gameplay Experience: 94% of you stated it was a positive or very positive experience.
- Visuals: 96% of you rated them as positive or very positive.
- Audio: 94% of you rated this as positive or very positive.
- Story: 90% of you rated this as positive or very positive.
- Quests and Exploration: 91% of you rated it as positive or very positive.
These results are obviously huge for us and mean that overall we are on the right track. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have criticism of parts of the game. But the positives seem to greatly outweigh the negatives for most of you.
The Northern Beaches
Our first big update this year was the addition of the second chapter of the game: The Northern Beaches.
You also seemed to enjoy it a lot, as the overall experience was again rated with a
93% positive or very positive.
But let’s dig into the details of this update a bit.
[h2]Quests[/h2]
We asked you about the individual quests and while all of them were rated well, two among them stood out with exceptional ratings:
- A Turtle’s Lunch: 90% of you gave this a positive rating with 70% of that being very positive. We assume you all like cabbage? Or old turtles? Or maybe both? Anyway, this quest’s humor and quirkiness seemed to resonate with a lot of you.
- The Call of the Song: 93% positive, with 80% of those very positive. Who would have thought that creating a wonderful rendition of a Titan Quest classic tune would warm the hearts of even the bravest heroes?
[h2]Bosses[/h2]
The 3 bosses of the Chapter were also well received. Skylla took the crown with a
90% positive rating and half of those giving her the highest possible score as a boss fight.
We also inquired about Ajax the Magnificent, which is based on another boss you fight earlier in the campaign. The vast majority of you said they would enjoy occasionally reusing bosses as long as they stay part of side-content and have some new abilities. This of course doesn’t mean we will suddenly “spam” reused bosses everywhere. Don’t worry!
[h2]Criticism[/h2]
Let’s get a bit into the criticism we noticed around the Northern Beaches update and talk about how our plans are to address this.
[h3]Enemy Variety[/h3]
The biggest thing we saw mentioned is a lack of enemy variety. And we totally get that. The first two chapters take place in similar parts of the world and have you fight the Ichtians. And also a few Crabs.
If that’s all you get to see of the game, it can start to feel a little repetitive.
We can assure you that with future chapters we will venture into new areas and add completely new enemy factions to the game. You could already get a glimpse of this in our last update teasing the Arkadian Plains.
But we have also taken that feedback to heart and will produce some new enemy types we can retroactively add to the earlier areas of the game. This way the Flooded Farmlands and Northern Beaches should offer a little more enemy variety. This iteration will take a little more time though, as completely new enemies take quite a bit of work to create.
[h3]Quest Rewards[/h3]
We heard that you sometimes felt like the work you put into finishing a quest didn’t feel worth it due to a lack of meaningful rewards. Especially if the rewards are based on randomly dropped items, where you might get something that doesn’t really fit your build at all.
One first step we took here was the rework of the Embers of Night quest, which lets you use the Embers you find from the small exploration events throughout the world. We added a lot of rewards there and made it clearer to see what you can gain for collecting them.
Aside from this, we are also looking into making the item rewards from quests a little more fitting to your build. But that is still a work in progress.
Systems
Let’s talk about the systemic parts of the game a little more. Masteries, Items and Combat. As is natural in an ARPG, there is a lot of feedback regarding these topics.
[h2]Masteries[/h2]
Note Regarding Forge: As Forge launched recently and our holiday break happened afterwards, we didn’t yet get to fully analyze the surveys and feedback for it. So this article mostly talks about the information and feedback we received before launching Forge!From what we can tell you overall really appreciate the flexibility and experimentation that’s possible with the Mastery system.
It has been motivating (and sometimes frightening :D) to see what builds you come up with to defeat your enemies!
When it comes to the individual Masteries used, the spread is very even and no Mastery is very far ahead or behind in usage. There still are slight differences we thought might be fun to share:
- 1 Warfare: Looks like people like to get in the thick of it! Warfare is the most popular Mastery by a slight margin!
- 2 Storm: Cold and Lightning seem to tickle your fancy, as Storm comes in a close second.
- 3 Earth: Not far behind are the powers of stone and fire combined in Earth.
- 4 Rogue: While still picked a very healthy amount, Rogue currently is the least used Mastery. This is interesting, as Rogue does arguably have some very powerful abilities and passives and greatly contributes to why the strongest builds currently in the game are so good.
When taking a look at individual abilities we do see a slightly more noticeable spread. Some abilities are used more than others, as is expected of course. A trend that also mirrors what we get from feedback elsewhere is that “spammable” abilities with low Energy costs are far more used than high Energy or Exhaust abilities.
This year we will make larger passes over balance with the main goal of making more abilities in the game exciting to play. The sandbox of the Mastery system is very important to us and we would love all of the pieces in it to pull their weight and be fun!
[h2]Combat and Difficulty[/h2]
Titan Quest II aims to have a more active combat that requires you to react to enemies and offer exciting boss fights. It still is an ARPG though and we understand that people also sometimes just want to relax and slay some things.
Finding the right balance here can be tricky, but from what we gathered things are going well so far.
When asked about difficulty on a
scale of 1-6, most of you give it a rating between
3 and 4, which is exactly where we would want the game to sit. Challenging enough to be engaging, but not so difficult it gets frustrating.
Now of course this greatly varies depending on the builds used, experience of the player and individual boss you might be fighting.
So while the experts amongst you running top tier builds might not see as much of this intended difficulty even on higher Ritual levels, more casual players might be very close to the experience we want to deliver for them.
This is a decent spot to be in, as we still want to reward build-crafting and tinkering with the numbers.
While overall we are happy with how our combat is playing out, we will continue to try to balance the game in ways that allow our intended level of challenge to exist in the game for most players.
Itemization
Items have been a topic that we received a lot of feedback on since the game launched. We have also done quite a few improvements here already.
The most voiced point of criticism was that you felt like you didn’t find enough upgrades for your build.
Now this is a tricky problem, as Titan Quest II has a very broad and sandbox approach to character customization. You don’t have a fixed class as you can combine two Masteries freely.
You also can use any attribute with any Mastery should you want to focus on it. There are just a lot of possible combinations, so also a lot of moments where the loot can feel unrewarding.
The problems we identified here were the following:
- Power increase was too small: It wasn’t satisfying to find a new item that gives you a 1-2% increase on some affix and that’s it. This didn’t feel like its worth the time and effort. To combat this, we added more Affix Tiers to items. This means that the power of an affix is not only determined by the item’s level directly, which would cause very small and gradual increases per level. Instead it is determined by the Tier that the affix has, which spans multiple item levels. This way we could pace things out a little more and make sure that you have a more noticeable change in power when getting to a new tier.
- Too much gear you can’t wear: It’s already hard to find an item with a good spread of affixes. And it gets even harder if you can only wear a small percentage of the items you find. We have made adjustments to our systems so that you should find more gear you can actually wear. Don’t worry, you still find things from all other areas as well. We think it's important in an ARPG to find a thing and go: “Oh, I want to use this on another character!”. But the amount of those should be a little lower than after launch. Overall we think this put things in a much better place, even though there might have been some small Poison Bow related hiccups on the way.
- Lack of exciting affixes: We are still missing some affixes that are inherently very exciting and powerful. We cannot go into details here, but please know that we are going to be adding new types of affixes during the Early Access period and they will hopefully help with this problem!
- Epics lack power: We are aware that the epic items in the game often aren’t exciting enough right now. We did already make some passes here in the past, but feel like they’re not in the right spot still. We will keep iterating and make sure that epics feel… well… epic.
Another thing we did was the addition of
Charms and Relics. They are easy to see when they drop and are also rather rare, but powerful. They give you a meaningful boost and add a new thing to the item hunt to be excited about. The system is still fresh, but from what we saw you really seem to enjoy it so far.
We do already have another batch of improvements for the itemization in our pipeline and hopefully we can bring you those early this year.
The Future
So what will this new year bring for Titan Quest II?
So far we have been delivering new content at a high pace, usually much earlier than outlined in our Roadmap. You might remember that we promised a major content update every 3 months and a minor one in between.
Well, 4 months later we have already had 2 major updates (Northern Beaches and Forge/Relic/Charms) and multiple minor ones (including the Character Editor).
We cannot promise that we will be able to keep this pace up and most likely will have to go back to what we initially promised: A major update every 3 months. You can be sure though, that we have great things in store for you and the game is going to keep getting bigger and better throughout next year.
Soon we will also post a new Roadmap that contains information for the intermediate future, as many of you have already been asking for that.
We hope this year you continue to help us make Titan Quest II the game you all want to play.
Your help, feedback and support have been integral to us and we can’t wait for more.
The Titan Quest II Team
