I’ve been to the embassy and the Police station here but they’re not helping issues at all and our flight leaves in few hrs from now but I’m having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let us leave until i settle the bills..I am so confused right now and thank God nobody was injured because we complied immediately.

We are freaked out i really need your urgent help.

thanks,
Azri

Each mastery has 8 tiers at the moment but I’ve reserved space in the UI for a 9th tier. I may either add in 1 additional master skill to each mastery that will boost all essential stats and damage (to help boost power at very high levels) or I may save it to add in some future high-level skills in an expansion.

While the later idea of releasing additional skills sounds cool, I honestly have no idea right now, how I’d make that work since the masteries are already pretty loaded with 24 skills a piece. I think a passive “master skill” to boost power levels in the end-game could be cool though or perhaps a couple for elevating different stats.

Sources

We may agree to disagree or, perhaps, it may be just a misunderstanding based on an imprecise communication of ideas on my part.

Often when I talk about making the game darker, people assume I mean visually darker. What I really mean, is thematically darker. When I say “sexier” like God of War, I’m speaking figuratively and not talking about actual sexual content and I’m not advocating that it should have been like God of War. Mainly, I’m just saying that we should have been a bit bolder in our decision making and advertising of the game. There seemed to be a constant fear during the development of Titan Quest about upsetting this or that segment of the audience or someone’s grandmother. I was literally told by one of the higher-ups that the game should be designed so that his grandmother would want to play it (even though his grandmother had never played a game before in her life). We were building a game with relatively complicated and hardcore gameplay systems but trying to make it thematically and visually appealing to as wide a casual audience as possible. The end result, is that the game was a little more bland and generic in some respects than it should have been and the game world didn’t do much to convey a sense of danger.

One example of this would be the mandate that enemies not use language or build anything that would make them seem like they had more than animal intelligence. It was felt by one of the higher-ups that people might feel wrong killing enemies that displayed any obvious intelligence. I guess somehow it is wrong to fight intelligent enemies but okay to slaughter dumb animals? We also weren’t originally allowed to have humans die, ever, in the game and no human corpses.

One area where this handicapped us was in the creation of environmental assets that visually demonstrated the enemy’s war against humanity. We originally wanted to create enemy siege-works outside Athens but were told that would make the enemies seem too intelligent. It was a struggle just to monster camp assets. All of the ruins were also removed from Greece at one point because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins… I had to fight for both of these things. Without them, Greece would have just been a featureless expanse of wilderness with occasional human towns that never really appeared to be in any serious danger.

At the same time, we were told that enemies should seem like noble adversaries, not evil or demonic creatures. It was highly controversial when the designs for the Limos and Arachnids were first presented. I had to personally fight to get those approved because they were considered too grotesque and scary looking even though they were based on actually mythology. Undead and the Spirit Mastery were also a struggle to get in the game. I was told that Spirit Mastery was too “Necromancery and evil”. We managed to push a few more things like that through over the course of development but it was always frowned upon.

Basically, my belief is that Titan Quest never had as much style and character as it could have because we were afraid to do anything even remotely controversial. When I first designed the skill masteries, they were all based on Olympian gods, with skills modeled after the powers or attributes associated with different gods in mythology. This was rejected because it was potentially too religious and people might not want to feel like they were worshiping mythological gods to receive their powers.

We ended up with a game set in Greek mythology that barely contained any actual mythology other than the inspiration for some of the monsters and dialog on peripheral story-teller NPCs stuck off to the side in the towns. The first quest I put in the game, when we were prototyping it for THQ was modeled after one of the 12 labors of Heracles. The Erymanthian Board was terrorizing a town and the hunters they sent after it hadn’t returned. You had to ascend mount Erymanthos, discover the wreckage of the hunter’s camp, and then continue on to the snow-capped summit to battle the monstrous board. Of course, I was told we couldn’t have snow on the summit because people might not realize it snowed in Greece and then later the whole quest vanished and was replaced by generic crap like retrieving a dowry ring so some chick can get married while monsters are overrunning the world.

So, this is where I’m coming from. I don’t think the game needed to be all low-light environments or contain sex mini-games. When I talk about the difference between the TQ and TQ:IT box art, I’m talking about the difference between THQ hiring an outside marketing company to generate box art out of generic assets (ever look at the quality of the temples and stuff in the background?) vs. letting our artists design our own box art. The original box art we submitted for TQ was drawn up by our concept artist, featured a hydra that looked like the one in-game, had a far more interesting composition and better use of color. I think Titan Quest just needed more artistic freedom and personality so that something more unique and exciting could have been created in-game and conveyed by our marketing materials.

Of course, I’m probably also looking at this from the overly critical perspective of a developer evaluating their own work.

Original Post

Oh and to avoid any confusion cause by fan-voice and end up blaming the game studio, this is my quote not their. The video only just a sneek peek of Old Groove environment, just like the video title said.

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We expect to release our first video before the end of the month or, at the latest, sometime in November. We’ll be starting out with something pretty simple, just a quick pan-around of one environment to whet your appetite. We hope to release a new environmental every month or so building up to a gameplay video. At least, this is our current plan.*

*All plans are subject to change without notice and videos may be delayed or changed based on availability. Crate employees and their relatives are not eligible to enter. Videos may be void in some states. Please see official rules for more details.

Path of Exile is a free-to-play MMO not an exactly single player Diablo-style game. Check out this video by PCGAMER on the class and combat. Also inside, inventory peek, upgradable skill and item.

Darkspore Announcement and First Gameplay Trailer