Titan Quest: Eternal Embers Review (Swanky)
More Titan Quest is always good, right? Well... yes (formerly yesn't).
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€ As of Aprith 16th, 2022 Public Beta #3 has dropped and it has fixed basically all issues I have with the game including EE champions, damage reflect, visual bugs and more. It even adds more gameplay content in form of cursed shrines that can net you additional loot. Because of this, I can now recommend the game again.
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The expansion itself is high quality and very, very long but also suffers from redundancy and bugs and non-communication from the devs.
First and foremost, the addon is only accessible on the highest difficulty. While that may be off-putting new players have the option to start a new character on level 70. The decision itself may be weird but the new items would have also be rebalanced for lower difficulties where this could cause severe balancing issues - Ragnarök partly had this issue back then as well. Also, playing through from level 1 can already take 100+ hours so it's probably a good decision not to lenghthen the grind.
The new mastery is neat and should be fully fixed as of patch #2. Good support class, strong aura and unique potion skills.
HOWEVER.
It's length works both for and against the game. Especially the new Egypt part is getting boring with the amount of tombs you will explore during the game, and the amount of undead you're running into certainly don't help, especially after patch #2.
If you're expecting them to have loot, you might get disappointed as well. The loot pool for the new act isn't spectacular and as of now I haven't found the loot from either Egypt or Orient of the original TQ here which could have helped to give at least some variety. Many loot piles and even big treasure chests in act 6 have a chance to spawn a group of undead or spiders instead of loot, and that gets old real quick.
The expansion also introduced a host of new bugs that are still present, such as visual clipping and bugging in the Great Wall area in the original third act of the game, as well as disappearing dialogue boxes (at least with the german translation) - so I would have to consult the questlog because I couldn't follow what the NPC was saying; the dialogue would just end abruptly after a second or two.
Also, Patch #2 has introduced new champion monsters to the new act which are horribly unbalanced, such as monk bosses projecting a reflect damage aura on bystanding monsters, or skeleton priests with plague or reflect. It's very, very unbalanced and can and will ruin your experience.
There's still an issue of Devs leaving us hanging without communication for extended spans of time but as of April 16th, we got an unexpected beta patch #3 which fixes basically all of the aforementioned issues. Because of this, I can recommend the game (and EE) again. Cheers!