Titan Quest: Путь Титана

2006 action role playing hack and slash video game

Titan Quest is a 2006 action role playing game developed by Iron Lore Entertainment and published by THQ for Windows, first physically and then in 2007 through Steam. A mobile port was developed by DotEmu and published in 2016, and versions for PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch were released in 2018. All these versions were published by THQ Nordic. The story follows a player created protagonist as they navigate Ancient Greece, Egypt and China on a quest to defeat the Titans after they escape from their ancient prison. The gameplay is similar to the Diablo series, with player navigation being handled with a mouse driven tile based interface, and gameplay revolving around role playing mechanics and real time combat. Four expansions have been created for the game; Titan Quest: Immortal Throne in 2007, and three others between 2017 and 2021. Titan Quest was envisioned by game designer Brian Sullivan as a role playing game set in Ancient Greece similar to Age of Mythology. Production began in 2004 after a successful pitch to THQ. The script was written by Randall Wallace, while Sullivan acted as the designer. Despite being in a mythical setting, the team wanted to make the environments and towns feel as realistic as possible, leading to a large amount of research into ancient cultures. Enemies were inspired by the game's regional mythologies, with designs inspired by the stop motion work of Ray Harryhausen. The music, composed by Scott Morton and Michael Verrette, was created to avoid the looping tracks of other games. First announced in 2005, Titan Quest received generally positive reviews when released, being both praised as a good example of the genre while at the same time being criticized for its traditional gameplay. Sales of the main game and its expansion have been estimated as approaching one million units. The mobile port was tricky for its developers due to adapting the game for touchscreen controls: like the console version, it received positive reviews upon release. The engine and gameplay of Titan Quest later became the foundation for Grim Dawn, a video game developed by team members from Iron Lore following the studio's closure. A sequel, titled Titan Quest II, was announced on August 11, 2023.

Titan Quest is an action role playing game set in the pre Roman Ancient World: these include Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Silk Road leading through Asia. Players take control of an avatar: players are able to choose gender, name and tunic color. After a certain point in the game, the player has access to Mystics, NPCs which can reallocate skill points for a fee. According to Sullivan, the pre production process lasted over a year. Sullivan was involved in multiple areas of the development, but his main responsibility was game design and overseeing content creation. Titan Quest was aimed at both casual and hardcore gamers, as the necessary prices for games necessitated reaching out to a wide audience to get a profit. For this reason, the team chose the action role playing genre. The CGI opening cinematic was created by Blur Studio. They stayed within their mythological subject matter rather than straying into historical events: this was due to an incident during the release of Age of Empires where the developers needed to cut a scenario showing Korean people coming under attack from invading Japanese due to potential political and popular backlash in both countries. Together with Iron Lore staff, Wallace created a story where humans and the Olympians faced both the Titans and the mythical beasts allied with them that had retreated to the forgotten parts of the world. A large amount of research went into what environments, architecture and other elements could be put into each environment so it fit in with the game's setting. The majority of weapon design was handled by Joe Mirabello, who claimed to have created nearly 1000 different weapons split between six types. Enemy creatures were taken from the various mythologies the team drew from, and their designs inspired by the stop motion work of Ray Harryhausen. Sheidow valued the chance of working with mystical creatures, as his previous work had been limited to stock fantasy monsters from the Dungeons & Dragons universe. According to him, the process started when the chosen enemy monsters were given initial designs by lead concept artist Rich Sullivan. Each design was reviewed, and the most suitable was chosen. Creature designs needed to incorporate design choices from the game, such as the monsters' environments and individual fighting styles. They also needed to consider how much detail to put into character models depending on their relative position to the camera at any given time. When it reached the modelling stage, the monster designs were further refined to work within the restrictions of the game, then it was sent to the art time again for final adjustments and mapping of unique animations. The particle effects were handled by Travis Doggett: one of the more prominent pieces of his work were the mastery skills, which had particular themes related to their abilities. According to animator Brian Labore, model animation proved a taxing task, as there were over eighty different monsters which ranged from typical mythical beings to more exotic and unique enemies from each region. The player character also had "hundreds" of animations to incorporate. The game used a specially developed proprietary engine developed by Iron Lore staff. This was done as, when development started, no third party engines existed that could support the team's vision for the game: in Sullivan's words, there were "plenty of technology solutions for someone creating a shooter, but not as much for a role playing game". One of the key parts of the new engine was an environmental creation tool dubbed "the editor" by staff. This tool combined a tile based horizontal plain with a height based map, and allowed for subtle adjustments to environments and terrain with easy to use developer tools. Level and plain boundaries were set using cliffs and plateaus within the environment. Objects such as chests and enemies could be then "dropped" into environments using a point and click system, some of which could be directly integrated using special "tile" elements which stitched into the wider environment for objects such as bridges and crags. All of this necessitated a large amount of research on multiple subjects, including the flora of Egypt and the appearance of Ancient Greek roads and paths. This development tool was the version released with the retail version so players could create and share their own levels. This combination of height and grid based navigation and environments had not been done when the system was being designed in 2002: most of the map was shaped using the height map, while specialist features and horizontal navigation used the grid. In a preview about the game, the developers said the game was built around "database driven modular proxies", a system where different elements within environments were seamlessly interacted and could interact freely. The artificial intelligence (AI) was designed so individual units would behave differently depending on situation and combat ability. The pathfinding for AI units such as NPCs and enemy units was handled using the PathEngine, a licensed middleware engine dedicated to this task. Titan Quest was one of the first major Western titles to use PathEngine. Gameplay was compared frequently to Blizzard's Diablo series. According to Sullivan, the comparison was inevitable as Diablo helped define the genre, and was emphasized by the lack of action RPGs at the time. While the core gameplay remained traditional, they attempted to innovate in other areas. Character creation was simplified to simply choosing a name and gender rather than character types being tied to classes or chosen proficiency. They also effectively removed tutorials so players could get straight into gameplay, using games like Neverwinter Nights as an example of tutorials impeding players during early stages. Spawn points for enemies were governed by a random generation system, of what monsters are spawned depending on both environment and player level. Loot was controlled by a database system which mixed and matched characteristics to produce "over 100,000" item combinations. According to Bruno, the team were limited with the amount of impact and realism they could put into combat by the necessity of keeping the game within its prescribed ESRB age ratings of "E for Everyone" and "T for Teens": this meant that blood was non existent and hit reactions were minimal, negatively affecting player impressions of the game. Bruno later faulted the lack of secure multiplayer as one of the major faults with the game: THQ apparently was unwilling to invest in this. The sound design process for each object and character that needed sound effects was the same: based on their appearance, a new sound effect would be created. In the case of monsters, different sound effects were created for different scenarios, such as them seeing the player for the first time or when in battle. The sounds within environments were designed to be "real" and "visceral". The game's audio engine enabled these sound effects to be dynamically shifted depending on their setting. The vocals were provided by Taunia Soderquist. The game released for Windows on June 26, 2006 in North America, and June 30, 2006 in Europe. According to Bruno, when originally shipped, the ESRB raised the game's rating to "M for Mature" due to the scantily clad Nymph familiar, although the rating was later amended to its current one. The game was released on Steam on July 17, 2007 alongside its expansion by THQ. An updated version, subtitled Gold Edition, was released on October 22, 2007 in the West and April 25, 2008 in Japan. It contained both the main game and its first expansion. Titan Quest would be one of only three projects Iron Lore worked on in its lifetime, and the only original project alongside Immortal Throne: after completing work on Soulstorm, an expansion to Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War, the studio was forced to close in February 2008 due to difficulties in securing any funding for future projects. Some of team founded a new studio called Crate Entertainment and licensed the Titan Quest engine to develop Grim Dawn, dubbed by staff as a spiritual successor to Titan Quest. The Titan Quest intellectual property was purchased by Nordic Games (later THQ Nordic) after THQ began selling off its shares in the wake of its 2013 bankruptcy. Beginning in 2016, Nordic Games began supporting the game's Steam version with patches to fix gameplay and multiplayer issues, along with glitches and bugs. An overhauled version of the game, subtitled Anniversary Edition, was released on August 31, 2016. Compiling all updates and expansions up to that point, it was offered as a free upgrade for players who already owned Steam versions of the game.

A port of Titan Quest for mobile devices was developed under license from Nordic Games by DotEmu, a French developer who had previously developed a successful mobile port of Ys Chronicles I. The controls and interface were redesigned from the ground up to work for touchscreen controls, something the team spent months on. Despite the changes, the team worked to make the gameplay as close as possible to the original experience. They also put in additional options for actions such as targeting enemies with mastery abilities and searching for loot It released on May 19, 2016 for iOS. The Android version was released on July 7. Following the game's release, Dotemu handled the project to THQ Nordic, who re published the game in 2018. It was released a third time that same year under new developer HandyGames as Titan Quest HD. An updated version subtitled Legendary Edition releasing on January 12, 2021, which included all DLC and expansion packs up to that point. Titan Quest was later ported onto PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in 2018. The PS4 and Xbox One version were released on March 20, while the Switch version was released on July 31. These console versions were created by Black Forest Games.

Development on an expansion pack began shortly after the release of Titan Quest, with preparatory work happening during the final stages of the main game's development. The expansion, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, was first announced in late 2006 and eventually released in March 2007. Over eleven years later, a second expansion was released. Titled Titan Quest: Ragnarök, it was released on November 17, 2017 exclusively for the Anniversary Edition. A third expansion subtitled Atlantis was released in May 2019. It included new challenge modes and an in game casino. PS4 and Xbox One versions of both expansions were released in March 2020. Both Ragnarök and Atlantis were developed by Pieces Interactive. A fourth expansion, Eternal Embers, released in December 2021. Eternal Embers was developed by Digital Arrow.

On its release in the US, Titan Quest debuted at #3 in the dedicated PC game charts. In the UK, the game debuted at #25 in the multi platform charts. In a later interview, Bruno stated that the title had sold "surprisingly well" despite a slow start, with combined sales for Titan Quest and Immortal Throne reaching over one million units by late 2008. It also continued to sell well on Steam, though exact figures were not given. Titan Quest received positive reviews upon release: aggregate site Metacritic recorded a score of 77/100 based on 51 critic reviews.

On August 11, 2023, it was announced that a sequel, titled Titan Quest II, was in development.