Titan Quest II

TLDR: Good Baseline but needs more work. Has a few design decisions I cannot get behind so far +++ Graphics, Environment, Sound, Build Variety, Overall Gameplay, Overall Performance --- Skillprogression, Enemy Variety, Difficulty, Loot, Sometimes small performance hiccups #### Generally the game is beautiful with nicely handcrafted worlds, good sound and playability. Due to the two-Mastery System and customization of skills you can (in theory) get a lot of specific builds/playstyles going which also feel decent to play (very much like TQ1/Grim Dawn). It is worth checking out but if you havent played TQ1/GD yet, I suggest you rather play those for the time being. Unfortunately as a TQ1/GD Veteran I am still a bit disappointed with the actual game in practise. My first gripe is the skillsystem: just like in TQ1/GD you have a mastery that you put points into in order to unlock new levels = skills in your skill tree. In TQ1/GD you got 3 skillpoints per level that you could use freely - increase mastery, increase skill, increase a passive, whatever you felt like was best. In TQ2 you are being handheld: one mastery point per levelup, 2 active skillpoints, 2 passive skillpoints. This causes a much slower progression and forces you to use skills that you might not want to use for a long time because you cannot get the mastery high enough. And since you have two masteries, if you want to play 2 "late-tree" skills from two different masteries, you cant until many many hours into the game. Idk why they changed the skill system from TQ1/GD which allowed for way more flexible skill progression and instead force us into this corset. At least respecing is fast, maybe even too fast because you can change things on a whim, making skills feel less impactful. Hopefully they revert this and make it like in TQ1/GD: only Skillpoints per level for free use + SP from quests + Respec only back in town (maybe with monster respawn). Speaking of monsters: enemy variety is quite low. If youre like me and you only fight against healthbars and enemies die so quickly you barely see them, you might not mind as much but prepare to fight against hordes of the same boars, birds, crabs, fish people or skeletons - just like in TQ1 essentially. Also the games difficulty is very very low when you know at least a little bit about ARPGs. Sure you can increase the difficulty in town for gold but I reckon if even endgame boss enemies die in a few seconds, theres something to be done about scaling. Scaling as the issue comes probably from the lackluster loot. So far I have not found a single interesting item. I get showered with the same yellows over and over (which I HAVE to pick up in order to use the crafting system properly) but nothing interesting is in there, even the legendaries. It is all "+ health", "+ % damage" or something like that. The most "interesting" thing I have found so far is "+ lvl 2 passive skills"-kind of affixes which often only count for one specific mastery and are therefor useless most of the time. I hate PoE and D3 for starting this "+% damage"-gearing meta, it is so dull and causes more issues with balancing than making things fun and interesting. So imo: less but more meaningful/interesting loot & scale back on those +% modifiers. I run the game on max settings on 21:9 2k and it runs very very well most of the time but sometimes has some small stutter sessions, so performance wise its pretty good. TQ2 is a game to keep in mind and watch/wait for patches and changes/additions, but right now youll probably have more fun in Grim Dawn (or even TQ1, on phone for instance which works surprisingly well)