Titan Quest II Playtest: Your Feedback and Our Next Steps
First of all, we want to give you an update about the release situation. We have previously announced that we will release Titan Quest II as an Early Access product in Winter 2024/2025 and we believe our product is in a great state for that. However, we are closely monitoring the market and realized there was a lot of noise with regards to ARPG in our targeted release window. We therefore decided to move the start of Early Access to summer. We hope to be able to announce a fixed date very soon.
As we continue our journey toward the Titan Quest II Early Access launch, we want to share our thoughts on the recent demo playtest.
First and foremost, we want to express our heartfelt gratitude for the overwhelming response. A very large number of you filled out our survey and gave us valuable feedback. Seeing you play, stream and discuss the game was incredibly motivating and showed us that we are on the right track in many regards!
What Was in the Playtest
For those who didn't participate, the playtest contained the Intro Chapter of the game. It introduced you to the world and setting, let you choose your two Masteries and ultimately pitted you against the first large boss: Appollonia the Terrible. (Survey results tell us: Her gameplay actually wasn't terrible at all! Almost all of you really enjoyed that fight. Phew!)
The most dedicated amongst you even grinded it out against the low-level enemies to test the abilities tucked away later in the Mastery tree, which was super cool to see!
Overall Experience
The vast majority of survey results showed that you really enjoyed your time with the Titan Quest II playtest. ~92% of you described your experience as being in the positive to very positive range. This is huge for us!
According to our survey, over 66% of you have recently played Titan Quest 1 or would consider yourselves Titan Quest experts. If those amongst you like the game, it means we managed to capture the Titan Quest spirit quite well.
Those of you who either never played Titan Quest or only remember it from back in the day really enjoyed the playtest as well.
This shows we're on the right track in keeping the old spirit alive while creating a modernized game. It's a thin line to walk, but it looks like it's working out!
Atmosphere & Presentation
An overwhelming number of you loved the visuals and audio of Titan Quest II. With visuals scoring a whopping 5.25/6 and audio an impressive 5.16/6.
The team is pouring a lot of love into making the world of Titan Quest II as vibrant and beautiful as possible. Many of you appreciate the more positive and bright feel of the world, which sets Titan Quest apart from many other settings in the genre.
Masteries & Combat
Despite some criticisms (more on that later), the core gameplay and mastery system were widely described as fun and engaging. We know the playtest only allowed you to play a small part of the game, so it’s hard to give a final verdict on these systems. We can’t wait for
you to get your hands on more content and Masteries during Early Access.
We were pleased to see that combat played out close to what we imagined – more active and requiring you to work around certain abilities from the more powerful enemies in a pack.
When we asked about difficulty, with 1 being "super easy" and 6 being "super hard," the average score was 3.63. This is a good place to be – challenging but not unfair. We want to strike a balance between engaging combat and an experience relaxing enough to enjoy after a
long day
Exploration and Quests
Many of you highlighted these in particular. The hidden areas, environmental storytelling, and narrative events were mentioned as elements that made the world feel alive and rewarding to explore.
This playtest only contained the smaller, more linear Intro Chapter, so expect much more openness and handcrafted quests, encounters, and events in the future.
Areas for Improvement
Your feedback highlighted some areas where we still have work to do. That's exactly why we chose an Early Access approach!
- Combat Feel: Some of you described combat as a bit "sluggish" or "slow." Our goal is to make combat more tactical and meaningful, but it should never feel sluggish. We're looking into improvements for this aspect.
- Aiming: Some mentioned difficulty aiming abilities, especially with bows. We've already made improvements to this system, but will keep an eye on it.
- Balance: This is an ongoing process. Some abilities might feel too strong, others not impactful enough or too expensive. Your feedback is invaluable as we continue tweaking these values.
- Performance: While most felt performance was in a decent state, some experienced issues. We're constantly monitoring and improving this. But some of the improvements to performance might happen when we close in on our 1.0 launch. It’s just much better to optimize when you have all of the pieces in front of you, without new ones getting added and existing ones being moved around constantly.
Improvements Already in Progress
We've already implemented several smaller enhancements, while too many to list them all, these ones might interest you in particular:
- Keyboard Control Type: We're adding a first-launch option to select your preferred control scheme with automatic binding adjustments. Either using the Mouse to move, or the WASD keys. This also adjusts some settings like what direction you dodge in to better fit WASD, if you choose that.
- Left Click Attack: This one’s for the Titan Quest old-school fans. You'll be able to choose between the "Classic Scheme" (movement and attack on left mouse) or the new scheme (movement left, attack right) at startup and don’t have to go to the controls to manually adjust it.
- Unspent Points: We're adding visual effects to make unspent points more noticeable in the Mastery Screen.
Looking Forward
Your detailed feedback is incredibly helpful as we refine Titan Quest II. We're now preparing for Early Access while addressing your concerns.
Some improvements will take longer than others, but we're committed to creating a worthy successor that honors the original Titan Quest's legacy while bringing in fresh ideas as well.
One final little data point: according to the survey, the overwhelming majority of you would recommend the game to friends already, which tells us we have a strong foundation.
Thank you again for your support and honest feedback. Seeing you play and talk about the game has motivated us even more to deliver the best possible experience!
The Titan Quest II Team