If you loved Diablo 2, and I guess that doesn’t necessarily have to be past-tense, then there is absolutely no reason you wouldn’t love Titan Quest. It is, in essence, exactly the same game. The inventory even looks the same. They may have juggled the skill tree around a bit, but they’re the same at heart. I love Diablo 2.

The game takes place throughout three mythological settings: Ancient Greece, Egypt, and the Silk Road. Characters start out “fob” (fresh off the boat, literally) in a Greek suburb and must fight their way to Leonidas and the spartans, finishing primary and side quests in search of an oracle. This game is so much like Diablo 2 that I can’t tell whether it’s awesome or weird. At the very least, it’s uncomfortable. The graphics, of course, are up-to-date with today’s games, but still give the isometric perspective of Diablo 2. The lighting is brilliant, the gameplay is relatively linear with a few wide-open areas to explore, and the combat is point and click in the same fashion as the Diablos. So, if I love Diablo 2 and Titan Quest is Diablo 2, then why the title?

Well, the game is fun, the plot fairly interesting and, from what I can tell, fairly accurate compared to what I remember from high school ancient history. Also, the stuff about the Spartans seems accurate compared to what I remember from the parts of “300″ that I wasn’t screaming or hiding. What’s nice about it though, is that the game pretty much delivers itself to you on a silver platter. While you can’t always see the edge of the map without a little wandering, the landscape is constrictive enough that you won’t go wandering in places you shouldn’t and miss parts of the plot. It’s also very hard to miss the primary quest NPCs. The primary quest line (and we all know how much I love those) is hard to miss throughout the game. The quest NPCs are marked very well throughout the cityscapes, and even the side-quest NPCs are relatively easy to spot (either that or I’ve missed a ton of side-quests, which doesn’t seem likely since I’m a map-exploring whore).

The battles themselves, like Diablo 2, are largely point-and-click. At the levels and for the amount of time I’ve played, success seems pretty proportional to player level and gear, although there have been several opportunities to advance simply with skill. I recall a certain ogre battle during which the enemy could be kited. The game, however, is balanced enough to provide you with the experience needed to gain the levels and beat the bosses. Not too much extraneous grinding required, at least not in first difficulty setting of the game.

I can’t really vouch for the multiplayer, as I have never played with another person (and probably won’t), but the single-player campaign is an almost relaxing cruise through history. I haven’t played the game all the way through (that’s the story of my life), but what I’ve done so far has definitely tickled my taste buds for an engaging single-player RPG in the traditional flavor. I’m excited to see what the game has to offer in the later levels, as well as what the expansion and its extra act.

One thing that games nowadays aren’t missing is quests. There are plenty of quests everywhere, some of them to kill ten rats, some of them to take this letter to the other npc, and some of them to guide you to the next step of your journey. In fact, there are so many quests in today’s MMOs that there are entire databases devoted to cataloguing them. So what? Maybe the reason that all of these quests need be organized and stored away on some too-often-visited website is because they’re so incoherent.

One of the main differences between offline- and online role playing games is the coherence of the main storyline. Why has such a crucial element to both character- and world-development been neglected for so long? Has the focus, up to now, always been on making a decent world for players to thrive in rather than giving them the means by which to thrive?

Playing the epic quest line in The Lord of the Rings Online has reminded what it’s like to have a strong storyline guiding your progress as you adventure throughout the world. While keeping to these quests is optional (and, of course, this is probably preferable to some), the development of your own character through the quest rewards as well as the development of other characters within the game world makes them very worthwhile. After having played World of Warcraft and EverQuest 2 for so long, I’d forgotten what it’s like to have such a strong storyline driving my character. Guild Wars has a similar emphasis on storyline, yes, but the Lord of the Rings story is one that I already know so well.

It seems to me that the one way, above all others (one way to rule them all), for Lord of the Rings to be successful was to get players engaged in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth. I think that by adding such a tightly-knit series of quests that lead your character through the war of the ring was the best possible method by which Turbine could have achieved that goal. Sure, the environment is great, the graphics are superb, and the combat is acceptable; without the back story, though, all of those things matter little. For each of those categories there are games which beat out Lord of the Rings Online; It’s when they’re combined, though, that this game really shines.

How is it that the EverQuests and World of Warcrafts of this decade were able to hack it with but barely a hint of a centralized plot? Sure, EverQuest has some lore that it always seems like they made up after the fact and, yes, World of Warcraft has like 8 books out which somehow makes the back-story more “legitimate”. These facts come up very often in game to anyone who already knows about them. Where’s the personal journey, though? I thought I was playing these games for myself, to have fun. Why would I want to do anything if it’s only going to bring some out some dark prophecy that was written about 4 years ago by some struggling fiction writer?

The thing that Lord of the Rings Online has that these games don’t is the way that it really makes you feel like you’re part of something bigger that’s happening within the world. Instancing open areas within the world really emphasizes this, as it makes you feel like you’re having a bigger effect on things than you really are. Helping warn a group of rogues that one of their own and one of your newly-found friends is after their lives is one of the many things I’ve had to do so far on my character, and the process of doing it in this game feels more like a single-player driven story than any other MMO I’ve played. I just never really “felt it” in any of the other games.

Seeing that flaming ring above an NPCs head, I think, is going to be just the thing that could keep me going in LoTRO for quite some time to come.