Best to let things settle a bit, perhaps.
I have unfortunate news for everyone else who spent too much time reading about Greek mythology when you were a teen: We can’t play Titan Quest 2 as soon as we’d hoped. In a Steam news post today, developer Grimlore Games announced that the Ancient Greek Diablo-like’s early access launch is being pushed back to summer.
Considering it was originally announced as a Winter 2024/2025 release, we probably shouldn’t be surprised, because, you know. That was a season ago. The reason, Grimlore Games said, is that it was “closely monitoring the market and realized there was a lot of noise with regards to ARPG in our targeted release window.”
If anything, that’s an understatement. In the last six months, Path of Exile 2 hit its own early access launch, embarking on a rollercoaster of difficulty discourse and disastrous patch rollouts. Diablo 4, meanwhile, is causing upsets with ever more expensive cosmetic bundles. And while those two heavy hitters stir up turmoil, Last Epoch has emerged as a Diablo-like dark horse for discontented loot goblins.
So, yeah. Things are a bit loud in ARPGs at the moment. Probably better for Titan Quest 2 to wait for the volume to die down. But despite the delay, Grimlore said it’s gotten “incredibly motivating” data from its closed demo playtest in March, which contained the game’s introduction chapter, Mastery selection (subclasses, basically), and a boss fight with what looks like some kind of giant, horrible griffin.
In a refreshing case of game development transparency, the studio shared some of the numbers from its playtest survey, and the responses from early testers sounds promising. 92% of surveyed players reported a “very positive experience,” which includes the 66% of players who described themselves as recent Titan Quest players or TQ1 experts. Good sign if the diehards are pleased.
Grimlore said results were similarly positive for the game’s atmosphere, quests, and combat design, with players reporting—on a scale of 1 to 6—an average difficulty rating of 3.6.
“This is a good place to be—challenging but not unfair,” Grimlore said. “We want to strike a balance between engaging combat and an experience relaxing enough to enjoy after a long day.” Given my own appreciation for casually blowing up screens of skeletons, that’s reassuring to hear.
The studio did acknowledge areas that players identified as needing some improvement, however—namely that some described the combat as feeling a little low tempo. Grimlore said its goal is to make combat feel “tactical and meaningful, but it should never feel sluggish,” and that it’s “looking into improvements.” Work’s also been done to alleviate struggles that some players had with aiming abilities during fights.
We don’t know when exactly to expect Titan Quest 2’s early access launch this summer, but the developers said they “hope to be able to announce a fixed date very soon.”
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