Titan Quest Gold Edition, flawed product

I purchased Titan Quest Gold edition 5 days ago and installed Titan Quest. I have not yet installed Immortal Throne. This game comes with version 1.3, which I believe to be the final patched version.

I have noticed the following problems:
(1) Game will crash upon inserting disk into dvd drive, resulting in BSOD with some obscure error number. I solve the problem by rebooting computer, Titan Quest then starts up.

(2) Game will randomly crash to desktop with no error mentioned. This could be after a few hours of playing, nevertheless unacceptable.

(3) Game performance [i.e. frame rate] drops considerably after playing for about an hour. If I exit game and re-enter, frame rate is acceptable.

My PC exceeds the Minimum requirements to play this game:

WinXP Home SP2, P4 2.4 Ghz, 2GB Ram, Evga 7800GS AGP, PSU: 535w Enermax with combined +12v rails 34amps.
Ingame settings: 1024x768, all settings on LOW. No AA, no AF on nvidia control panel. I've played around with vertical sync and tripple buffering, doesn't seem to make a difference. I've ended any unnecessary processes hogging Ram etc.
This is unacceptable considering the Minimum requirements, yet any settings especially Detail setting will plummet the frame rate.
Yes, drivers have been updated including the latest Dx9.0c.

In summary, the performance of this game is unacceptable including the crashes and poor frame rates. According to the Recommended PC, my only component lacking would be a P4 3.0Ghz. That's fine, but surely I would be able to play at medium settings, considering all you supposedly require is a P4 1.8 to run the game on Low settings. This is the only game giving a frustrating experience.

I am utterly amused at people that reformat their hard drive, uninstall and reinstall the game and all drivers only to find out, after all that time and effort, it did not fix any of the game problems.

This is a product that after 3 official patches has essentially done nothing to improve upon the problems I and others are having with this game. I expect a game product to perform according to PC spec Required or Recommended. Failure across the board. Whoever designed this game and the subsequent patches should seek a new line of employment; coding games is obviously not their strong suit.

Marc999 said:

(2) Game will randomly crash to desktop with no error mentioned. This could be after a few hours of playing, nevertheless unacceptable.

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Do you still have the disk in the drive? IIRC there was a similar big deal made because this was actually a security feature (DRM) where it performs a disc check, and if it isn't there, it terminates the program.

Yes, I leave the dvd in the drive.

Sounds indeed somehow like the copy protection check.

Maybe you should ask THQ ... Quickly, before they "forget" the game !

Because THQ has - I believe - the shortest attention-lifespan of all publishers !

i had all those problems when i played it basicly ..
the game had som horrible memory leaks ..apparantly thq didnt think they were very important

You all may remember my rants about TQ:IT and the no support at the time. Don't look for anyone from tech support or the publisher to do anything about it. Actually my problems were caused by a bad video card, and I can play the game fine now, but there are plenty of people with certain hardware configs that never got any kind of fix.

Here's the thing about Titan Quest, a game I really enjoyed (except the obviously rushed China levels, most of Egypt, and Immortal Throne) - it's incredibly picky when it comes to computers. And when I say picky, I don't just mean a little bit of RAM or some CPU specs; I'm talking right down to motherboard manufacturer.

I have no idea how this works, but you can have two completely identical systems with the only difference being company name (I'm not talking intel and AMD, I'm talking Asus and Evga), and TQ will crash every five minutes on one while running smooth as silk on the other. Hell, in my own experience, it doesn't like PQI memory!

There is nothing you can do except completely replace every component and *hope* TQ will like the new system.

Well, there is one thing you can do - get a no-CD patch. As it turns out, there's a rare problem were having the CD in the drive is detrimental to the game. It worked for me on my AMD system. Again, I have no idea how this works. Either Iron Lore are the biggest idiots in the industry, or maniacal geniuses.

Marc999 said:

Whoever designed this game and the subsequent patches should seek a new line of employment; coding games is obviously not their strong suit.

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It's funny you should say that. They all are seeking a new line of employment. Iron Lore went out of business a few months ago.

This sad tale epitomizes a not-too-often cited component of th decline of PC gaming: PCs are fickle. Piracy and expense aside, there's just so much more that can go wrong with a PC release, because hardware is so varied, but also (owing to that) because practically each PC is running a different hodgepodge of software. Not just software software, but drivers and firmware. There's more or less infinite variety, and sometimes I wonder that games on the PC work at all these days.

I purchased not the Gold edition, but the original TQ and IT simultaneously and for under $10 collectively from my favorite eBay liquidator (no shipping charge either, I still don't know how they do that). I installed the original and immediately installed the expansion (which did take me right to version 1.3)

QUESTION: Just curious, why on earth would you not install the expansion immediately? Any changes any expansion make in the original game tend to be for the better. In this case, the forum folks (http://www.titanquest.net/forums/) heartily recommended installing the expansion before starting your very first game. But isn't that just SOP? From BGII to Diablo II to Gal Civ (um II), it's just sensible to install expansions ASAP. That way you'll have everyone to commiserate with when you start having problems, and usually the original campaign is left intact, with interface and other improvements to the gameplay experience.

Anywho, so I bought the game two weeks ago and have been playing it A LOT ever since (ah, summertime). I was going to report that in all those huors (60? 70? ) of gameplay, I only had one crash, but then I remembered that the crash in question was actually a power outage (curse you, summertime!). So my experience has been very different from yours. I am playing without any tricks, just have the expansion DVD in the drive.

I play for hours upon hours at a time, and the only issue I have is the well-documented "rubber-banding" where the game pauses and then catches up with itself in an annoying and potentially deadly lightspeed playback. I don't like it, but it hasn't killed me yet, and that's saying something.

So, how flawed can the game be? If there's some massive memory leak, does my version magically reseal its tanks? If there's some incompetent coding that causes CTDs, does my version of Windows detect and avert them? (ha, that would be something)

No, there's some issue with your PC. Maybe issue has too harsh a connotation (the term has been stretched); your PC might be perfectly fine or even awesome, having no problems anywhere else, but there's some little catch in one of the many, many components that have to come together correctly for 3D gaming, and for this one particular game, that little catch is fatal.

Now I'm no programmer, so I admit the fault may lie entirely with Ironlore. Bastards. Maybe there's some right way to code games so that they can overcome any little catches they hit with different people's configurations. I'm sure they could have done more. Certainly about that annoying rubber-banding...

But that's just my point. A PC developer seems to have an awful lot to worry about, and a console developer just doesn't. How many different firmware version and drivers are running on my PC right now? I wouldn't even know how to count them. Tens? Hundreds?

How many firmwares are running on a PS3? Like, one. And if it doesn't work, everybody knows it's Sony's fault.

Interesting comments. I appreciate the feedback to my rant. I didn't realize it was common sense to install the expansion immediately after installing the original, considering both came on the same Dvd and with patch 1.3 for TQ. I would have assumed since it was the Gold edition that either product would have the latest patches, which they do. Yes, there is some conflict between my software and/or hardware that causes TQ to malfunction. That's not my problem though, considering I simply don't have these issues with other games of late. Quite a few gamers have had issues with this product as well, so count yourself lucky to have drivers etc, that work like a charm with TQ.

Also, regarding the possibility of copy protection crashes, interesting idea yet highly annoying considering I bought this product off a retail shelf. Anyways, buyer beware in the end. Maybe I should be content with consoles rather than deal with the myriad of potential problems pc games can pose. In the meantime I'll just strike THQ off the list.

I bought TQ/gold last weak-end for peanuts, it was in a bargain basement clearance basket (only £6) so could not pass it by.
I installed TQ without Immortal Throne expansion (for now) and the game runs flawlessly and continuously for hours on end, no lags, no screen redraws etc' etc', i cannot find the slightest fault whatsoever with this game.

My pc is a bare-bones games machine running only 16 system processes with all extraneous utils' and extras omitted. All motherboard bios un-necessaries are disabled, no serial ports, parallel ports - no network card, all win/xp superfluous items disabled.

I purposely set up this second pc specifically for gaming several years ago approx' when 'Divine Divinity' appeared as it became obvious that conflicts with internet connections, anti-virus, firewall, etc were becoming the 'norm' - and honestly have never looked back in anger since.

So yes, as has been correctly mentioned, games will react differently on various machines. I hope this info' helps some gamers with yet another angle on the situation.

Yeesh said:

This sad tale epitomizes a not-too-often cited component of th decline of PC gaming: PCs are fickle.

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Bernd Beyreuther of Drakensang basicaklly once said the same in an interview.

You just have to bee too careful, and in two years there are newer things making newer problems.

And that, although things like the HAL and direktx exist.

Despite liking TQ, and seeing the expansion added more Greece to the game, I still didn't buy IT. Why? There were Christmas items that dropped.

Marc999 said:

Also, regarding the possibility of copy protection crashes, interesting idea yet highly annoying considering I bought this product off a retail shelf. Anyways, buyer beware in the end. Maybe I should be content with consoles rather than deal with the myriad of potential problems pc games can pose. In the meantime I'll just strike THQ off the list.

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Don't do that. TQ is coded worse than Oblivion - basing the entirety of PC gaming on one game's stability would be selling yourself short. There is a TQ demo, did you try that out before installing? Also, have you tried the no-cd patch?

The Christmas items only drop in the Easter Egg area, along with a lot of other nonsense, like Sherlock Holmes outfits and Cowboy Boots. However, the soundtrack there alone is worth a trip. Still,you can play the whole expansion on normal and never go there because the key is dropped by Hades in the late game, and you can't use it til the next difficulty level. There are some great battles and settings in the expansion, even though I find it excessively repetitive after awhile. It's certainly fun for one playthrough though.

Really? Hmm...

magerette said:

The Christmas items only drop in the Easter Egg area, along with a lot of other nonsense, like Sherlock Holmes outfits and Cowboy Boots.

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Yes ? This is rather a reason to buy it for me !

On a somewhat related note.

If you have the expansion, Immortal Throne, it is best to install it right before you start playing the game. Immortal throne adds features to the game that you can start using right away at the beginning of the game.

Yeesh said:

QUESTION: Just curious, why on earth would you not install the expansion immediately?

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In this particular case? The expansion introduces the "rubber bending".


As for PCs being fickle, I'll have to restate the point I saw someone make somewhere: How come Blizzard games (for example) tend to work on even the most unique hardware combinations? Might it be because they don't rush their games? Yes, arguably, they can only do that because of their current market position, but you could just as easily claim it's that policy that got them there in the first place.

I attempted to play through Titan Quest but unfortunately died of boredom about a fifth of the way through, as I usually do with ARPGs (same experience as Sacred, except Sacred was even worse due to the ridiculous respawns).

Anyhows, before I stopped playing I did find & install the Immortal Throne "unofficial patch" - you might want to check it out as it does resolve some of the outstanding bugs. See:

http://www.tqitfanpatch.com/

That's cool to know coaster--someone finally leaked them some code perhaps--I know when I was visiting the boards it was all locked up by THQ, the devs couldn't even talk about making an additional patch and the coder that re-wrote the game to minimize scene loadings and introduced the rubber-banding problem instead had flown in the night. Nice to see the fans step up to the plate, as they have with so many games.



Edit: here's a YouTube of the Secret Passage quest where Santa's relics can be found. The monsters are all character named after the devs.

Haven't read the whole thread, but I can still give one advice: When running into technical difficultuies in TQ, make sure to shut down everything that's not important when running the game. Especially anything resembling fake drives etc (Daemon Tools and similar).

Basically, I'd shut down everything except explorer and a few other things.