Titan Quest, a thirteen year old ARPG, just received a surprise new expansion pack this month that takes players to the lost city of Atlantis. I still remember seeing and playing Titan Quest at E3 and I knew then that it was a special game. But if you would have told me it would receive two major DLC packs a dozen years after its release (Ragnarok came out Dec 2017), I would not have thought that possible. However, with THQ Nordic’s acquisition of the IP, they have re-vitalized this Diablo-like favorite.
To actually get to the Atlantis content, if you haven’t already finished at least up to Act IV of the main game, you can create a new character and check the box for being an “accomplished hero” which starts you out at level 40. Atlantis is not attached to the main story, though, but you do need to be able to use the Portal Map to get to Rhodes and speak with a NPC at the shore. I didn’t know this either, but thanks to Youtube, I discovered this. My time in Titan Quest has been spread thin throughout the years, but it doesn’t take much to pick up and learn again. It’s a fairly deep ARPG, and with Atlantis, a lot of time of life upgrades have been included to help make play more efficient.
As far as technical changes, the Atlantis expansion supports DX11 support, and with that you get options you can toggle including Bloom, Ambient Occlusion, and Color Grading. None of these make an enormous difference in a game that looks somewhat dated, but is nonetheless beautiful, I’ve always loved the artwork and detail in Titan Quest. New Masteries are included and the Mastery Level has received an upgrade with the level cap being moved up from 32 to 40 now. You can toggle a variety of detailed stats to appear over characters now as well that report their damage or block status or other details. Spells can be cast quicker now too, and you can buy up to ten potions at once by shift-clicking. Moving items in your inventory is now faster as well, and items on the ground can be filtered such that you only concern yourselves with rare and legendary items, as designated by their color code (because if you’re in Atlantis, you probably don’t need lower end items anymore). Furthermore, a special merchant character will take the excess gold off your hands by selling you three classes of loot boxes (all in-game currency only, thankfully). The classes of lootbox you buy correspond to what items you can expect to yield from them, naturally. Finally, after what amounts to a relatively short campaign in Atlantis, there is a massive, endless dungeon with waves of enemies you can indulge in as well in the pits of Tartarus. This mode is playable with others in multiplayer, too.
For fans of the game, Atlantis is most certainly worthwhile. In playing Atlantis, I realized how far removed I had become from this ARPG franchise, and it was good to revisit. Quality new content as well as immediately-beneficial time of life upgrades to the game in general make Atlantis easy to recommend.
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