I have played through diablo 1 and diablo 2 multiple times, I really wanted to like Titan Quest but found it lacking in too many areas. For a couple of you that posted I will put it like this so you might understand.

Diablo – Tons of atmosphere, TQ – not so much
Diablo – Narrative that helps the game flow, TQ – pretty weak
Diablo – the right amount of good loot drops to keep you wanting more, TQ – Total overkill with loot
Diablo – Random map generation, TQ – I don’t think they had this
Diablo – Easy party system through Battle Net, TQ – not so much
Diablo – Music and sounds that really bring you into the game, TQ – Weak sounds/music

Wander around to find some monsters, kill one or two before running away, then go make a cup of tea whilst your health regenerates. Over and over again.

Are Diablo and Depths of Peril just the same formulas? In which case I think I’ll give them a miss.

Chris: It was me noting that games that are genuinely awesome tend to actually not go bust as often while straight clones with nothing else tend to go bust more often. Piracy is always an excuse, because every company gets excessively pirated in the PC mainstream. Quality really doesn’t matter to pirates.

Janto: Was thinking about this on the way back from town. I suspect the best way of introducing a more unsual fantasy world now to the players is to start small with an indie project and try and grow. Regarding Thief and RoL, it may be as simple as Thief’s unusual nature isn’t quite so much in your face. It’s steam-punk, sure, but not enormously so – it’s just a medieval city in a lot of ways.

KG

This game sounds good to try out, and I would, except its stuck downloading at 9%.

I’m very curious about this seeming navel-gazing. Why aren’t people bored with the same old stupid (and frankly, ethically dodgy) fantasy stereotypes? Why are some good games with fresh settings (Thief) successful while others (RoL) fail to catch people’s attention?

But your intro makes no sense. If the failure of TQ was in fact caused by excessive piracy (and I don’t know that it was but that’s the rhetorical assumption you make here) then the game cannot possibly have suffered from insufficient quality in the eyes of the public (specifically excluding Kieron Gillen), because otherwise people would not have bothered to pirate it. A game gets pirated widely because many people want to play it, not because it sucks. If it does suck the pirate audience will largely ignore it, just like everyone else.

So either sales of a game are poor because of insufficient quality or because of excessive piracy, but never because of both at the same time. They’re mutually exclusive. Claiming otherwise is a common pirate excuse (“I only pirated because the game’s not worth the money!”) which is basically the software version of the old joke, “The food was terrible and the portions were too small.”

Or did you mean to say you didn’t actually believe that TQ was widely pirated? I’m reading your intro as if you did believe that was the case.

Besides, in the eyes of most people imagination is a completely optional aspect of a game’s quality. It’s not like the top-selling shooters are terribly original, for example. More likely it was TQ’s unusual historical setting that turned people off (i.e. *too much* unwanted originality), combined with some really ugly character art that made the game look as if it came from some Eastern European garage developer.

KG

Or more likely: They wouldn’t even have gotten a publishing deal, and would have gone bankrupt before ever releasing anything…

Well yes, that’s what annoyed me a bit recently – people salivate over even the idea of Diablo 3 (including me), but it turns out many didn’t even try the *demo* of TQ.

Really think TQ was a bit underrated, it was the only game in the genre in 8 or 9 years that’s even worthy of being mentioned in the same breath as Diablo 2 – in a genre that didn’t even need much innovation, only someone to finally get it right again after all these years – and it got ignored by many just because it didn’t say Blizzard on the box.