Heroes,

Today we launch our latest major content update for Titan Quest II: “Arkadian Plains”, the third chapter in your struggle against Nemesis. This time the conflict takes you from the heights of Olympos into the middle of a war between centaurs and humans.

Here’s a preview of what awaits you in this new chapter:

This chapter focuses on bringing centaurs to life from the pages of myth, but they’re not the only new threat rising against you.

• New Main Enemy Faction: Centaurs. We’ve added 10 centaur enemies, from the easily-vanquished to high-tier champions. Some centaurs might even be friendly.
  
• New Enemy Faction: Boarmen. There are 4 types to fight against, with more coming in future updates.
  
• We’ve added new types of wild creatures for you to fight. We’ve also created new variations of existing creatures that are more active, to shake up existing encounters.
  
• 4 Bosses: We have three entirely new bosses for you to enjoy, and a new version of an old favorite.

The Arkadian Plains are filled with new treasures! Many of these are related to the centaur faction, but there are also other goodies for you to find as you perfect your build.

• We have lots of new armors and weapons tied to the centaur faction.
  
• New Charms.
  
• 10+ New Epic Items.

You started this journey with two feet in the human world, but as the story continues and your power grows, your impact expands far beyond what a mere mortal is capable of. You’re now a full-on demigod on the path to becoming divine. But don’t get cocky… new threats wait to be uncovered.

• 6 New Fated Quests in the struggle against Nemesis. Claim glory like never before. Become the champion of humanity against the centaurs. Fight in a gladiatorial arena. Befriend an Olympian. Free an oppressed city. Come face to face with forgotten villains from ancient myths and show them that a new hero is rising.
  
• 10 New World Quests. Become a key player in the wider war between centaurs and humans. Reshape the fate of both the mundane and magical denizens of the Arkadian Plains.
  
• Uncover hidden events and secrets in the expansive, hand-crafted open world.

The Arkadian Plains are a new area of the world with a completely different feel from the coastal regions that have come before, with lots of corners to get lost in.

• 7 new dungeons, culminating in a descent into the forsaken palace of a mythical tyrant.
  
• Explore the sprawling human polis of Tegea, surrounded by oppressive centaur camps as the human rebellion attempts to fight back.
  
• Venture into the totally new, drought-stricken, biome of the Arkadian Plains, featuring several sub-areas such as a dry lake or an overrun quarry.
  
• Step foot on Olympos itself.
  
• As usual, our maps are lovingly hand-crafted and filled with environmental stories and secrets.

We’ve kicked things up a notch with this update, providing a lot of entirely new things, lots of fun gameplay, while also ensuring that the story and world reflect how powerful your character is becoming. We hope you enjoy playing it as much as we enjoyed building it, and we look forward to hearing your feedback and thoughts!

—The Titan Quest II Team




Today we launch the next major content update for Titan Quest II - "Arkadian Plains", the third chapter in your struggle against Nemesis.
This time the conflict takes you from the heights of Olympos into the middle of a war between centaurs and humans.

• Added new Chapter region: "Arkadian Plains"
  
• Added four new boss fights
  
• Added 6 new Fated Quests
  
• Added 10 new World Quests
  
• Added 7 new dungeons
  
• Increased maximum player level to 50 (from 45)

• Added new armor and weapon base items
  
• Added new charms
  
• Added 10+ new Epic items
  
• Added unique "Mother Crab's Claw" necklace as a quest reward for "The Crab's Nest"

• Affixes: Added Multiple Health Potion Affixes
  
• Affixes: Added Retaliation affixes to Torso, Shoulder and Shields
  
• Affixes: New flat and increased armor affixes for all armors, armor affixes are now grouped, new affix tier names
  
• Affixes: New set of Energy affixes, with new distribution per Item type and higher weight and values overall

• Fixed bosses having slightly reduced Epic and Infrequent item rates
  
• Fixed weapons not dropping from Nemesis Troops
  
• Fixed jewelry not dropping from Bandits, Undead and Nemesis Troops
  
• Fixed some Epic and Infrequent items being affected by item weighting

• Added new Centaur enemy faction
  
• Added new Boarmen enemy faction
  
• Added new types of wildlife and existing creature variations

• Brute Leader: Fixed Radial Shockwave cooldown
  
• Human Scoundrel: Added fleeing behavior
  
• Skeleton Revenants: Added missing damage scaling to Revenant abilities
  
• Skeleton Revenants: Fixed disproportionate damage with their abilities, resulting in 1-hit deaths
  
• Skeleton Revenants: Added a telegraph for the explosion and increased its delay
  
• Snapping Turtle: Replaced attack with a bite

• Fixed self-inflicted damage canceling interactions
  
• Fixed random rolls in repeated triggers and periodic gameplay effects always rolling the same values for application chance
  
• Lightning Strikes: Fixed a bug that would cause Lightning Strikes to impact performance over longer periods of time
  
• Doom: Fixed a bug that would cause Doom applications to impact performance over longer periods of time
  
• Rupture: Fixed a bug that would cause Rupture procs to impact performance over longer periods of time

• The player character now faces cursor direction, highlighted objects and attacking enemies
  
• Fixed mismatch between projectile trajectory and aim animation when putting the cursor very close to the character

• Added preview versions of French and Chinese translations (currently wrongly marked as "community translation" in the settings)

• Added secondary hover health bar when hovering over creatures during a boss fight or when another health bar is pinned
  
• Added option to pin a quest in the quest tracker, which will keep it always visible on the HUD
  
• Teleportation targets in the map are now grouped by type to make it easier to locate Rebirth Waypoints
  
• Fixed smaller icons (especially map and mini map icons) appearing jittery when moving or animating them
  
• Removed saturation limits for hair colors in the character creator. This allows a wider range of possible hair colors
  
• Changed character creator panels to accept current settings instead of canceling when clicking out to close them
  
• Spell telegraph indicators are now hidden if the UI is hidden
  
• Fixed caravan tabs being reordered after purchasing a new tab

• Added native support for Sony DualShock 4 and DualSense controllers (no longer requires Steam Input emulation)
  
• If you are using Steam Input emulation, the gamepad will still show up as an XBox device regardless

• Updated to Unreal Engine version 5.7.2, which fixed multiple hardware specific render crashes and improved render CPU times
  
• Addressed several causes of frame hitches during gameplay (e.g. reduced time for UI updates)
  
• Decreased overall texture memory usage
  
• Fixed bugs that would cause using some mechanics like Lightning Strikes, Doom, Rupture, etc. to degrade performance over time
  
• Added additional frame rate limit options for 45 and 90 FPS
  
• Loading screens will now wait for PSO precaching of the target location, which should reduce shader compilation stutters after teleporting to a new location
  
• Removed some unnecessary engine modules like Chromium Embedded Framework to make the builds leaner

• Primary Attack - Cold Explosions: Fixed a bug that would cause cold explosions procs to impact performance over longer periods of time

• Ignite - Explosion: Explosion doesn't trigger anymore on enemies that are not affected by Ignite in the first place

• Heat Of The Forge: Fixed Retaliation feat giving abnormal amounts of Retaliation

• Taste for Blood - Lifesteal: Flat additions to base lifesteal are now correctly applied
  
• Trick Shot - Ranged Weapon: Adjusted allowed weapon combinations: Sword/dagger weapon combination is no longer allowed to use this modifier as it was only intended for daggers, spears (optionally combined with shields) and ranged weapons

• Cyclone: Fixed Amplify stacks sometimes not going up when using Blizzard or Thunderstorm modifiers
  
• Cyclone: Fixed Amplify sometimes not being correctly removed after reaching the natural duration
  
• Cyclone: Fixed different modifier combinations causing issues with Amplify count and basic functionalities
  
• Cyclone - Localized Storm: Fixed Removed Amplify amount being sometimes incorrect
  
• Ice Nova - Flash Freeze: Fixed a possible crash

• Relics and Charms: Players now start with 2 Charm slots. Further Relic and Charm Slots are unlocked as per the following list:
  
• Level 10: + 2 socketable slots (total: 4), max relics: 1
  
• Level 25: +4 socketable slots (total: 8), max relics: 2
  
• Level 40: +4 socketable slots (total: 12), max relics: 3

• Forge - Magma Shell: Retaliation amount now properly scales with level

• Brute Leader: Increased Radial Shockwave damage
  
• Ichthian Commander: Increased animation speed of Shield Bash
  
• Ichthian Hydromancer Leader: Increased projectile, explosion damage and projectile speed of Ice Lances
  
• Emperor Crab: Increased Water Sprout damage

• The in-game Bug Reporter will always reject reports with a "Category cannot be blank" error

Heroes!

With a new year starting we want to use this moment to take a look at the past months.

We couldn’t be happier with how Titan Quest II has been perceived so far.

We want to thank every one of you who played the game and gave feedback. It helps us to focus on what’s important to you during development.

Our launch and every major update had a survey included and we wanted to talk a little bit about the feedback we’ve gathered from those and other places.

We will first take a look at some high-level questions and then try to take a deeper look at certain parts of the game.

The first thing we ask in every survey is some high-level questions about each part of the game.

• Overall Experience: 96% of you stated it was positive or very positive.
  
• Gameplay Experience: 94% of you stated it was a positive or very positive experience.
  
• Visuals: 96% of you rated them as positive or very positive.
  
• Audio: 94% of you rated this as positive or very positive.
  
• Story: 90% of you rated this as positive or very positive.
  
• Quests and Exploration: 91% of you rated it as positive or very positive.

These results are obviously huge for us and mean that overall we are on the right track. Of course, this doesn’t mean that you don’t have criticism of parts of the game. But the positives seem to greatly outweigh the negatives for most of you.

Our first big update this year was the addition of the second chapter of the game: The Northern Beaches.

You also seemed to enjoy it a lot, as the overall experience was again rated with a 93% positive or very positive.

But let’s dig into the details of this update a bit.


We asked you about the individual quests and while all of them were rated well, two among them stood out with exceptional ratings:

• A Turtle’s Lunch: 90% of you gave this a positive rating with 70% of that being very positive. We assume you all like cabbage? Or old turtles? Or maybe both? Anyway, this quest’s humor and quirkiness seemed to resonate with a lot of you.
  
• The Call of the Song: 93% positive, with 80% of those very positive. Who would have thought that creating a wonderful rendition of a Titan Quest classic tune would warm the hearts of even the bravest heroes?

The 3 bosses of the Chapter were also well received. Skylla took the crown with a 90% positive rating and half of those giving her the highest possible score as a boss fight.

We also inquired about Ajax the Magnificent, which is based on another boss you fight earlier in the campaign. The vast majority of you said they would enjoy occasionally reusing bosses as long as they stay part of side-content and have some new abilities. This of course doesn’t mean we will suddenly “spam” reused bosses everywhere. Don’t worry!

Let’s get a bit into the criticism we noticed around the Northern Beaches update and talk about how our plans are to address this.

The biggest thing we saw mentioned is a lack of enemy variety. And we totally get that. The first two chapters take place in similar parts of the world and have you fight the Ichtians. And also a few Crabs.

If that’s all you get to see of the game, it can start to feel a little repetitive.

We can assure you that with future chapters we will venture into new areas and add completely new enemy factions to the game. You could already get a glimpse of this in our last update teasing the Arkadian Plains.

But we have also taken that feedback to heart and will produce some new enemy types we can retroactively add to the earlier areas of the game. This way the Flooded Farmlands and Northern Beaches should offer a little more enemy variety. This iteration will take a little more time though, as completely new enemies take quite a bit of work to create.


We heard that you sometimes felt like the work you put into finishing a quest didn’t feel worth it due to a lack of meaningful rewards. Especially if the rewards are based on randomly dropped items, where you might get something that doesn’t really fit your build at all.

One first step we took here was the rework of the Embers of Night quest, which lets you use the Embers you find from the small exploration events throughout the world. We added a lot of rewards there and made it clearer to see what you can gain for collecting them.

Aside from this, we are also looking into making the item rewards from quests a little more fitting to your build. But that is still a work in progress.

Let’s talk about the systemic parts of the game a little more. Masteries, Items and Combat. As is natural in an ARPG, there is a lot of feedback regarding these topics.

Note Regarding Forge: As Forge launched recently and our holiday break happened afterwards, we didn’t yet get to fully analyze the surveys and feedback for it. So this article mostly talks about the information and feedback we received before launching Forge!

From what we can tell you overall really appreciate the flexibility and experimentation that’s possible with the Mastery system.

It has been motivating (and sometimes frightening :D) to see what builds you come up with to defeat your enemies!

When it comes to the individual Masteries used, the spread is very even and no Mastery is very far ahead or behind in usage. There still are slight differences we thought might be fun to share:

• 1 Warfare: Looks like people like to get in the thick of it! Warfare is the most popular Mastery by a slight margin!
  
• 2 Storm: Cold and Lightning seem to tickle your fancy, as Storm comes in a close second.
  
• 3 Earth: Not far behind are the powers of stone and fire combined in Earth.
  
• 4 Rogue: While still picked a very healthy amount, Rogue currently is the least used Mastery. This is interesting, as Rogue does arguably have some very powerful abilities and passives and greatly contributes to why the strongest builds currently in the game are so good.

When taking a look at individual abilities we do see a slightly more noticeable spread. Some abilities are used more than others, as is expected of course. A trend that also mirrors what we get from feedback elsewhere is that “spammable” abilities with low Energy costs are far more used than high Energy or Exhaust abilities.

This year we will make larger passes over balance with the main goal of making more abilities in the game exciting to play. The sandbox of the Mastery system is very important to us and we would love all of the pieces in it to pull their weight and be fun!

Titan Quest II aims to have a more active combat that requires you to react to enemies and offer exciting boss fights. It still is an ARPG though and we understand that people also sometimes just want to relax and slay some things.

Finding the right balance here can be tricky, but from what we gathered things are going well so far.

When asked about difficulty on a scale of 1-6, most of you give it a rating between 3 and 4, which is exactly where we would want the game to sit. Challenging enough to be engaging, but not so difficult it gets frustrating.

Now of course this greatly varies depending on the builds used, experience of the player and individual boss you might be fighting.

So while the experts amongst you running top tier builds might not see as much of this intended difficulty even on higher Ritual levels, more casual players might be very close to the experience we want to deliver for them.

This is a decent spot to be in, as we still want to reward build-crafting and tinkering with the numbers.

While overall we are happy with how our combat is playing out, we will continue to try to balance the game in ways that allow our intended level of challenge to exist in the game for most players.

Items have been a topic that we received a lot of feedback on since the game launched. We have also done quite a few improvements here already.

The most voiced point of criticism was that you felt like you didn’t find enough upgrades for your build.

Now this is a tricky problem, as Titan Quest II has a very broad and sandbox approach to character customization. You don’t have a fixed class as you can combine two Masteries freely.
You also can use any attribute with any Mastery should you want to focus on it. There are just a lot of possible combinations, so also a lot of moments where the loot can feel unrewarding.

The problems we identified here were the following:

• Power increase was too small: It wasn’t satisfying to find a new item that gives you a 1-2% increase on some affix and that’s it. This didn’t feel like its worth the time and effort. To combat this, we added more Affix Tiers to items. This means that the power of an affix is not only determined by the item’s level directly, which would cause very small and gradual increases per level. Instead it is determined by the Tier that the affix has, which spans multiple item levels. This way we could pace things out a little more and make sure that you have a more noticeable change in power when getting to a new tier.
  
• Too much gear you can’t wear: It’s already hard to find an item with a good spread of affixes. And it gets even harder if you can only wear a small percentage of the items you find. We have made adjustments to our systems so that you should find more gear you can actually wear. Don’t worry, you still find things from all other areas as well. We think it's important in an ARPG to find a thing and go: “Oh, I want to use this on another character!”. But the amount of those should be a little lower than after launch. Overall we think this put things in a much better place, even though there might have been some small Poison Bow related hiccups on the way.
  
• Lack of exciting affixes: We are still missing some affixes that are inherently very exciting and powerful. We cannot go into details here, but please know that we are going to be adding new types of affixes during the Early Access period and they will hopefully help with this problem!
  
• Epics lack power: We are aware that the epic items in the game often aren’t exciting enough right now. We did already make some passes here in the past, but feel like they’re not in the right spot still. We will keep iterating and make sure that epics feel… well… epic.

Another thing we did was the addition of Charms and Relics. They are easy to see when they drop and are also rather rare, but powerful. They give you a meaningful boost and add a new thing to the item hunt to be excited about. The system is still fresh, but from what we saw you really seem to enjoy it so far.

We do already have another batch of improvements for the itemization in our pipeline and hopefully we can bring you those early this year.

So what will this new year bring for Titan Quest II?

So far we have been delivering new content at a high pace, usually much earlier than outlined in our Roadmap. You might remember that we promised a major content update every 3 months and a minor one in between.

Well, 4 months later we have already had 2 major updates (Northern Beaches and Forge/Relic/Charms) and multiple minor ones (including the Character Editor).

We cannot promise that we will be able to keep this pace up and most likely will have to go back to what we initially promised: A major update every 3 months. You can be sure though, that we have great things in store for you and the game is going to keep getting bigger and better throughout next year.

Soon we will also post a new Roadmap that contains information for the intermediate future, as many of you have already been asking for that.

We hope this year you continue to help us make Titan Quest II the game you all want to play.

Your help, feedback and support have been integral to us and we can’t wait for more.

The Titan Quest II Team