Titan Quest Playstation 4 port

[ladyabaxa]

Some readers might already be familiar with an RPG called Titan Quest. It's basically Diablo in ancient Greece. It was released previously on Steam and I must say to anyone looking to play the game get that version instead. After some time with the PS4 port I must say THQ Nordic dropped the ball on the port.

It was released March 20th, 2018 and here I sit on August 16th, 2018 disappointed that patching the game has done NOTHING to fix the following core issues with the port. This is not intended to be an exhaustive list since I've only seen portions of the game.

1. Manually targeting monsters in battle rarely works. Fighting one enemy in a group and the game decides to swap your targeting to something else? Good luck getting it back until after you've killed that second foe. Particularly egregious against bosses who are huge damage sponges.
2. Likewise targeting items on the ground to pick them up is extremely finicky. In order to pick up any drop the player has to find and maneuver over a few pixels next to the item to get its name to highlight. It's neither fun nor exciting doing laps around a gold drop or potion trying to find that tiny activation area. It gets especially bad in indoor areas where chests sit on boxes, next to walls/pillars, or there are other obstructions around them. The steam version handles this with mouse-over and of course the PS4 doesn't natively employ a mouse so it had to be changed but the implementation is lacking.
3. Spoken dialogue does not sync with dialogue windows. The text scroll is far too slow. In fact it's so slow NPCs can finish the spoken portion of their script and then move on to walking around or doing other things while the window is still trying to catch up! For a player trying to read the dialogue this is aggravating.
4. Frame rate issues are rampant. If you hate lag you are going to have a very bad time with this game. The laggiest times I've seen aren't even in combat, thankfully. One of the laggiest spots seen thus far was a single vendor and a teleport by the water where the game just starts struggling for no good reason. It's embarrassingly bad.
5. Texture/model popping is also rampant and may factor into the framerate drops. Nothing quite like walking down a dirt path bordered by grass and seeing the grass flicker in and out of existence. Apparently this is after a so-called upgrade to the graphics. Frankly I'm hard pressed to see how this is an improvement.
6. The magma golem might spontaneously disappear. It isn't dead - it's lifebar is still intact - but it's nowhere around. Eventually it reappears. Eventually. It can be resummoned but that takes time and mana and in combat both of those can be in short supply.
7. The game might just up and crash. Remember to save often!
8. When the player has one or more pets and is stationary said pets don't remain stationary. Instead they wander around a bit on a short leash. This is a problem when they hit NPCs because the entire screen shakes. The most common NPC a player might be stationary next to? Vendors, of course! Have fun trying to shop while your pet is trying to move through an NPC and failing causing the game to act like it hates everyone with motion sickness.

In short, save your money. Get it on steam or a Diablo clone actually designed to work on Playstation hardware. Titan Quest clearly isn't.