Titan Quest - Developer Comments

Neil79

Neil79

Neil79

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Crate Entertainment (Grim Dawn) designer 'Medierra' has made some interesting comments about the publisher interference in the design of Titan Quest in a thread about the recent Rock, Paper, Shotgun interview.
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We may agree to disagree or, perhaps, it may be just a misunderstanding based on an imprecise communication of ideas on my part.

Often when I talk about making the game darker, people assume I mean visually darker. What I really mean, is thematically darker. When I say "sexier" like God of War, I'm speaking figuratively and not talking about actual sexual content and I'm not advocating that it should have been like God of War. Mainly, I'm just saying that we should have been a bit bolder in our decision making and advertising of the game. There seemed to be a constant fear during the development of Titan Quest about upsetting this or that segment of the audience or someone's grandmother. I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life). We were building a game with relatively complicated and hardcore gameplay systems but trying to make it thematically and visually appealing to as wide a casual audience as possible. The end result, is that the game was a little more bland and generic in some respects than it should have been and the game world didn't do much to convey a sense of danger.

One example of this would be the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence. I guess somehow it is wrong to fight intelligent enemies but okay to slaughter dumb animals? We also weren't originally allowed to have humans die, ever, in the game and no human corpses.

One area where this handicapped us was in the creation of environmental assets that visually demonstrated the enemy's war against humanity. We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent. It was a struggle just to monster camp assets. All of the ruins were also removed from Greece at one point because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins... I had to fight for both of these things. Without them, Greece would have just been a featureless expanse of wilderness with occasional human towns that never really appeared to be in any serious danger.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures. It was highly controversial when the designs for the Limos and Arachnids were first presented. I had to personally fight to get those approved because they were considered too grotesque and scary looking even though they were based on actually mythology. Undead and the Spirit Mastery were also a struggle to get in the game. I was told that Spirit Mastery was too "Necromancery and evil". We managed to push a few more things like that through over the course of development but it was always frowned upon.

Basically, my belief is that Titan Quest never had as much style and character as it could have because we were afraid to do anything even remotely controversial. When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

We ended up with a game set in Greek mythology that barely contained any actual mythology other than the inspiration for some of the monsters and dialog on peripheral story-teller NPCs stuck off to the side in the towns. The first quest I put in the game, when we were prototyping it for THQ was modeled after one of the 12 labors of Heracles. The Erymanthian Board was terrorizing a town and the hunters they sent after it hadn't returned. You had to ascend mount Erymanthos, discover the wreckage of the hunter's camp, and then continue on to the snow-capped summit to battle the monstrous board. Of course, I was told we couldn't have snow on the summit because people might not realize it snowed in Greece and then later the whole quest vanished and was replaced by generic crap like retrieving a dowry ring so some chick can get married while monsters are overrunning the world.

So, this is where I'm coming from. I don't think the game needed to be all low-light environments or contain sex mini-games. When I talk about the difference between the TQ and TQ:IT box art, I'm talking about the difference between THQ hiring an outside marketing company to generate box art out of generic assets (ever look at the quality of the temples and stuff in the background?) vs. letting our artists design our own box art. The original box art we submitted for TQ was drawn up by our concept artist, featured a hydra that looked like the one in-game, had a far more interesting composition and better use of color. I think Titan Quest just needed more artistic freedom and personality so that something more unique and exciting could have been created in-game and conveyed by our marketing materials.

Of course, I'm probably also looking at this from the overly critical perspective of a developer evaluating their own work.
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Wow. Publishers are douchebags. One of the major problems with TQ was due the publisher. What a waste.

What were they trying to design, Hello kitty: Titan quest adventure?
 
Anyone who has read anything of Oedipus or Homer's Odessy or the Illiad would have been subjected to much worse material than this. Thank god that classical literature hasn't been the subject of such stringent censure as modern games have been. Heaven forbid that we should be exposed to the true brutality of our ancestry.

Whilst flawed, I do think that TQ was a decent game. Possibly this explains why it was more generic than it should have been.
 
I love Titan Quest but the above explains so much and looking back at the game I can see all of those stupid things now.


There was never the sense of "OMG I'm not looking forward to this next bit..." that I get ALL the time in Diablo II, TQ was always a bit "weeeeee I'm going through the game and I'm having fun", whereas D2 was always a challenge... whether it was the challenge of a tough baddie with a ridiculous random attribute or the challenge of finding that last clean pair of pants.
 
This probably explains why I never liked it as much as Sacred / Sacred 2.

It was such a shame to see Ascaron go bankrupt when they made such a fantastic game. Now I fear that they are going to turn Sacred 3 into a cookie cutter grandma friendly game as well.

Diablo 3 is already doing so, which is obvious in its WoW like cartoon graphics (Torchlight and AoE online too).
 
Two thoughts spring to mind:


1) Many of the faults of TQ lie totally with the devs, and blaming them on over-zealous suits is being disingenuous. The worst problem was skills, their generally limited use, and lack of balance between them, never mind between the skill trees. The ridiculous posture an animations of the character looked like something out of a silent film, and the costumes were dull. Accurate maybe, but dull. I liked the game enough to play it all the way through - something that happens to only about 10% of games I play. But only once. I've tried creating other characters, but rapidly lost interest. There's simply no sense of your character getting more powerful, even when it is.

2) At its heart, this is part of the newbie v. experienced gamer struggle. Devs want to design for experienced gamers, because that's where the pleasure is. Suits want a game for all levels of skill, because that's where the money is. Despite the noise they make making you think otherwise, hard-core gamers are a small minority of the species: most gamers are casual, and will probably only buy three or four games a years, and play none for more than a few hours. Since there's no money in repeat playing of single-player games, financially it makes no sense to gear a game towards it. That means the game has to attract casual gamers first time, and they must get enough pleasure out of the game to want to buy another from the same company. It also has to be easy enough to be able to complete by a relative novice.


One of the reasons I preferred Sacred 2 to TQ was the better game balance. My first character was badly constructed as I didn't understand the game mechanics properly, and how to get the best out of them. Two skills were never used, and boosting combat arts resulted in very long regen times. But that character still worked enough that it's now level 114, 1/4 of the way through niobium, and still all but unstoppable. And realising how flexible the skill set is means that I've experimented: double-hander Inquisitors, dual-wield Dryads, etc. All that is down to the skill of the dev team, but would be equally acceptable to the company bosses. I'm sure there are hard-core gamers who say it's too easy - but they can still pick styles of play that make the game much harder (like dual-wield Dryads!).

By contrast, everything in TQ felt like hard work. Skills were seldom worth putting more than a couple of points into, and seemed designed to force me to switch between them as quickly as possible. If that's what you want to play like, fine; but the game should be able to deal with players like me who prefer one-skill-and-stick-to-it. And in case anyone thinks I'm picking on TQ, I'll illustrate with another very badly designed game, Hellgate: London. Hardly dumbed down, and if anything it failed because it was too complicated and it was too hard to work out resistances etc. And the same problem with skills, although the devs did say this was deliberate to avoid "cookie-cutter" builds. What it actually did, of course, was avoid anyone playing it.

You can't blame everything on management: some of the failings were developer ones.


M
 
Sacred 2 was a game that I could just play and get lost in for hours and hours on end.

It was so vast that I never even finished it on Silver, though I've played through it several times but never got all the way to the end (waaaay too big a game).

I loved the skills, the bosses (multiplayer lan games to boss farm), the armor sets, rare and unique weapons, so much stuff in that game was 100% perfect for the ARPG genre, just minus the constant mob respawns and not having skill respecs.

I also enjoyed torchlight, but it was highly simplified over the Sacred games. I tried TQ a couple of times, but just couldnt get into it.
 
Torchlight was superb fun. TQ1 was okay but, if the above is true, then the suits, who know nothing about games, should be reigned in.

The one thing about Sacred that I hated was the viewpoiint - it was horrendous.



M.
 
bhavv said:
This probably explains why I never liked it as much as Sacred / Sacred 2.

It was such a shame to see Ascaron go bankrupt when they made such a fantastic game. Now I fear that they are going to turn Sacred 3 into a cookie cutter grandma friendly game as well.

Diablo 3 is already doing so, which is obvious in its WoW like cartoon graphics (Torchlight and AoE online too).
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Diablo III going soft? Looks pretty full on to me.
 
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