If you love games like Diablo, you’re spoiled for choice nowadays. Last Epoch’s 1.0 launch arrived to great success, the Path of Exile 2 beta is on the horizon as its predecessor marches on unabated, and Blizzard’s own Diablo 4 has found its feet as it looks towards the Vessel of Hatred DLC. But there’s at least one more notable ARPG on my radar right now, and Titan Quest 2 avoids the live service structure of its contenders in favor of a complete game that’s packed with replayability. I sat down with the Grimlore Games team at Gamescom 2024, and came away excited by how TQ2 is building on the best parts of the original.
One of the most distinguishing features that makes the original Titan Quest stand out from other games like Diablo even today is its mastery system. Rather than choosing a traditional class, you instead pick a combination of one or two masteries, each of which focuses on different elements or playstyles. It’s a system that offers a wealth of replayability, even today, so it’s good to see that Titan Quest 2 is keeping this in place and building on it further, giving you plenty of ways to change how you play.
Along with the skills learned from your masteries, you have two global abilities – your standard attack and a dash. As you progress, you’ll unlock capacity slots that can be used to select a number of active and passive tweaks. You could, for example, transform your dash into a teleport for additional mobility, or sacrifice its invincibility frames in favor of a more aggressive maneuver. Building on this is the weapon proficiency system, which gives you two slots to assign from a selection of additional modifiers depending on the armaments you’re wielding.
Find a weapon that benefits a certain play style, and you can quickly switch out your modifiers on the fly to suit it. Our demo starts with a setup that allows cold damage to chill and then eventually freeze enemies, but we later experiment with an overwhelm mechanic, which builds up stacks that can be consumed when full to boost the effects of certain other abilities. Even further on, we switch again to a loadout that instead builds rage stacks, buffing our weapon damage as we rack increasingly more of them up.
Grimlore Games says it’s also worked hard to build a more upbeat setting than the traditional grimdark approach of many ARPGs. While you might be being chased by Nemesis, the Goddess of Retribution, and are desperately seeking the three Fates for a way out, the Greek fantasy world that whole incident takes place in is one that’s bright and colorful. It’s certainly landing well for me – I even took a moment to simply write, “it looks very nice” between scribbling down notes about the various mechanics during the presentation, and I stand by that statement.
That attention to detail goes down to elemental effects on weapon models and even the artwork for armor sprites on the ground, where you can see the individual varieties before you pick them up to more quickly identify them. While Grimlore says it’s designed Titan Quest 2’s combat so that you “have to pay attention to the enemies you’re facing,” especially when facing more serious foes such as enemy leaders and fully fledged boss fights, it’s not trying to make an overly punishing game.
You can respec anything but your masteries with relative ease. Portals allow you to quickly return to the exact spot you died and pick right back up where you left off. If you love seeking out side quests and learning about the locals, that option is there, but you can also ignore them completely if you’re just looking to blast your way through some monsters. There are also plenty of other useful convenience options, too, such as ways to manually tweak the level of monsters in an area if you so desire.
Titan Quest 2 is set to launch via Steam Early Access in the winter, either in late 2024 or early 2025. For now, you can wishlist it on Steam if you want to stay up to date with further details and receive a notification when it arrives. I’m certainly eager to jump in – much like its predecessor, I can see Titan Quest 2 becoming the ARPG you love to return to and discover a new build in when you’ve had your fill of a given season in PoE2 or Diablo, and that’s a spot the team at Grimlore seems more than happy to fill.
If you just can’t wait for Titan Quest 2’s launch, you’ll find plenty more gorgeous worlds to explore among the best fantasy games. Alternatively, if you just can’t get enough of number-crunching or a good old stats screen, here are the best RPGs to play in 2024.
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