Video Game / Titan Quest

Titan Quest is an Action RPG developed by Iron Lore Entertainment and published by THQ. The game released in 2006, with a very active player community in Germany.

The game is loosely based on Greek mythology, with the story starting the player character in the ancient Mediterranean (Act 1: Greece), traveling to Mesopotamia (Act 2: Egypt), and then taking the silk road from Babylon into China (Act 3: Orient). Titan Quest is notable for its pseudo-historical setting, and generally is fairly faithful to the eras it attempts to portray, though there are some anomalies. Mysterious monsters known as "Telkines" have appeared along with hordes of monsters, undead and demons, who serve the Titan Typhon, enemy of the gods.

In 2007, the Add-on Titan Quest: Immortal Throne added a 4th Act to the story, as well as several new game features (such as Artifacts, the ability to recover relics and charms from items or a caravan trader's chest accessible in most settlements that grants extra storage space and allows all characters of the same player to store and exchange collected items among each other). The expansion seamlessly continues the story where the original game had left off after the slaying of Typhon, sending the character first back to Greece and then onwards into the Underworld, the Elysian Fields, and across the river Styx to fight the god Hades.

The Titan Quest game can be (re)played from out of the Immortal Throne expansion. Installing the expansion adds all the new features to the original game. The original story must be completed first to unlock the in-game portal to the expansion's plot.

Classes in Titan Quest are called Masteries. The original game offers eight Masteries (Warfare, Defense, Earth, Storm, Hunting, Rogue, Nature, Spirit), while the add-on Immortal Throne adds a ninth one (Dream); these can be freely chosen and combined. Each mastery has several skill trees and specific weapon proficiencies associated with it, allowing further specialization. The first Mastery can be chosen once the character hits level 2. Upon reaching level 8, the player has the option of selecting a second mastery but does not have to, or he can postpone the choice to a later level-up.

A character's title (e.g. Warrior, Hunter, Druid, Spellbreaker, Ritualist, Templar, Brigand, Conqueror, Assassin, Warlock, Pyromancer, Seer, Soothsayer, etc.) and his powers are depending on his chosen Mastery or combination of Masteries, resulting in a total of 9 single-mastery titles and 36 dual-mastery titles. A table showing all the mastery combinations can be found here. Obviously, some combinations of abilities make more sense than others, i.e. combining a dual-wielding sword path with a defender path whose special abilities depends on the character using a shield is counterproductive. Combat-oriented and spellcasting Masteries can be freely combined for great synergies, which is often more useful than simply combining two combat styles.

In 2017, THQ Nordic (the current owner of the intellectual property) made an Updated Re-release called Titan Quest Anniversary Edition, for the PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam, and Nintendo Switch. It integrates 10 years' worth of technical updates, bug fixes, and some of the best community changes like increased speed, newly balanced skills and gameplay elements, new monster heroes, and more. Later that same year, to everyone's continued surprise, THQ Nordic released an entirely new expansion pack named Ragnarök which takes the player on a new journey through Celtic and Nordic Europe. It, too, features a variety of graphical improvements, new areas and weapons, and an all new 10th mastery. In 2019, a third expansion pack came out called Atlantis.

Provides Examples Of:

Some tropes were so numerous, they were split off into other pages, like:

• DummiedOut.Titan Quest

The other tropes are:

• Abnormal Ammo: One Easter Egg weapon the player can find in the Secret Passage is throwable snowballs. They deal damage comparable to other Epic-difficulty staves.
• Abusive Precursors: According to Phaedrus' backstory, Titans became angry when they saw mankind, created by the Gods, and soon tried to use all their powers to destroy them, forcing the Gods to pull a Papa Wolf/Mama Bear and fight back along with their creation.
• Acceptable Break from Reality: How the hell did that ghost caravan driver still able to smuggle my inventory in the Underworld? Never mind.
• Alien Geometries: The portals in Hades Palace allows the player to reach an isolated spot left of the main area by walking to the right.
• All Swords Are the Same: A sword is a sword is a sword, whether it's a gladius, scimitar, or katana.
• A Load of Bull: Minotaurs are a species of beastmen found in the harder parts of Greece. The Minotaur Lord is a boss found, naturally, in the Minoan Labyrinth. In addition, Act III has Yaogui, a demonic bull boss.
• All Trolls Are Different: Ragnarök adds Trolls to the list of enemies. They are Beastmen, you can collect their tusks to make talismans and their king Goldtooth is a boss you must defeat. They mostly look like gangly, pale humanoids.
• Always Chaotic Evil: All the monsters and enemies in the game, only excepting a single Centaur hero, a River Nymph, and a Satyr merchant found in Greece, who are friendly. It's explained during the story that the creatures used to be mostly timid or neutral, although it's hard to imagine how this could work for a few (such as the crocodile men).
• Ambiguous Syntax: Giant Slicers. Are they slicers that are giant, slicers that belong to giants, or slicers that slice giants? (Judging by where they are dropped, it's the middle interpretation.)
• Amplifier Artifact: Most equipment bonuses that aren't resistances or special skills take on this form, such as +% stat, +% damage, or + skill.
• An Adventurer Is You: Depending on which mastery do you pick, you can obtain different archetypes. Defense offers the role of The Tank, while the Rogue Mastery has skills associable with The Damage Dealer and The Mezzer.
• Antepiece:
  • Torches and Rebirth Fountains indicate that the player is going in the right direction. This is especially helpful in the Minoan Labyrinth, where they are one of the indicators of progression through The Maze.
  • The trolls in Teutoburg Forest run across shallow water to attack the player, which demonstrates where in the upcoming location Suebi Lakelands the player can cross water.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Titan Quest is the very first game to include pop-up windows for items comparison. This has now become a standard in all RPG games.
  • Unlike its Roguelike predecessors, items don't need to be identified.
  • All items you sell are found in the buyback window and can be easily bought back. This can be useful if you sell an item accidentally, as it won't get lost in the vendor's window. You have to be careful as the buyback windows has a limited capacity and leaving the area will empty it.
  • Spent points on a skill which you don't like, or which seemed useful at first but isn't needed in the late-game? A Mystic can remove the skill and refund the points you've invested in it, for a fee.
  • Unlike the predecessors of Titan Quest's genre, the player doesn't need scrolls to access earlier portals or perform Unknown Item Identification; casting a portal is free and all enchanted and unique items are automatically identified.
  • Bows don't require the player to separately carry ammunition, making them more manageable.
  • The auto-sort button in your inventory saves the player a great deal of time when doing Inventory Management Puzzle.
  • Grey-quality items, which have junk stats and little trade value, do not show up when drop tags are toggled on.
  • Auto-sort, post v.1.47, will combine incomplete relics and charms.
  • The 1.47 update adds a portal to the beginning of Olympus and moves the Rebirth Fountain that was there to after the Ancient Limos. These changes make it more convenient to farm Typhon, as it allows the player to bypass running through Wusao Mountain to get to Olympus and having runs slowed down by the Ancient Limos' life-draining attack.
  • The player can increase the game speed up to 25% to make grinding and farming less tedious.
  • Introduced in Immortal Throne:
    • The expansion introduced caravans. You can use them to hold your stash and trade your equipment between your characters.
    • A key to automatically pick up potions and gold was introduced in Anniversary Edition.
    • The quest "A Gargantuan Yeti" now gives +100% health to a player's pets, making them less squishy towards the end of the game.
  • Items introduced in the Ragnarök expansion tend to be "better"; better bonuses, more bonuses, and/or rarer bonuses. E.g.:
    • Only a few items in base game + Immortal Throne have Vitality resistance, making Hades a challenge to survive against, but Ragnarök items tend to be more liberal in handing it out.
    • Only a few items outside of Ragnarök give +% experience, while Ragnarök introduces a +% experience relic that can enchant all armor and jewelry.
    • Monster Invariant items found in Act V drop much more commonly and tend to have bonuses that make them a worthwhile choice over unique items, such as the Icescale set's Reflection, the Valhöll set's Act V-centric bonuses, or the Blacksteel set's copious bonuses to Earth and Rune Skills.
• Anti-Hoarding: The game tries, bless its heart. The player usually has enough inventory space for all of the equipment he/she might need, as well as a caravan for any other drops. This is far from enough if the player wants to keep every unique item, thus prompting users to create "mule" characters for the sole purpose of saddling them with extra loot or using external programs for more space.
• Armor and Magic Don't Mix: This trope is enforced, with melee armor having Strength requirements and magic apparel having Intelligence requirements. It's possible for a player to compromise and invest in both Strength and Intelligence, although that usually requires a dedicated setup instead of going with what the game gives the player.
• Artificial Stupidity: Justified. Most enemies are dumb and susceptible to arrow volleys while a summoned scarecrow distracts them, but some intelligent species exist (mostly humanoids) that will actually kite you, flee when attacked or summon distractions.
  • Crows, harpies and other flyers will take the long route and avoid obstacles to reach you, despite the fact that they can fly over them.
  • It's possible to exploit some bosses' AI to make them much easier to handle. For instance, there is a "safe spot" where Nebhaku can't physically reach, but it won't use its long-range attacks.
  • Your pets aren't the brighest of the bunch. When set their behaviour to aggresive, they'll seek out the nearest monsters, but will ignore any monsters they didn't saw along the way.
• Asteroids Monster:
  • Spriggans, small Waddling Head plants with vines as limbs, split into two smaller copies called Sprigglings upon death.
  • Richard 'Crash' Svennson, one of the bosses in Primrose's Passage, is a Blob Monster that splits into two repeatedly after its health reaches zero.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Cyclopes and most of the larger, more powerful enemies. That include a gargantuan Yeti on your way to China.
• Author Avatar: The Developers Rooms in the expansion packs contain enemy characters named after the developers.

• Autosave: The game was rereleased with an autosave feature, making the save button on the pause menu redundant. It is still useful if the player is worried about losing a rare item drop.
• Badass Normal: The guy in the opening movie who manages to kill a gorgon by having a statue fall on her. Later, when Megalesios himself appears to taunt him, he just charges at him screaming.
• Badass Grandpa: Hippias, a Spartan nicknamed "The Ancient of War" for being a skilled fighter despite his advanced years.
• Bag of Sharing: Starting from Anniversary Edition, a player can transfer items between different characters through an in-game caravan, in which items are shared by all.
• Balance Buff: Every update introduces new buffs and nerfs:
  • A game-changer for Anniversary Edition is the inclusion of +% Burn/Electric Burn/Frostburn damage in most places that have +% Fire/Lightning/Cold damage.
  • On the other hand, in Anniversary Edition, resistances and certain chance effects cap out at 80%. "The Immortal Haruspex" could effectively dodge all projectiles thanks to its mastery's bonuses and equipment bonuses.
  • Undead have full immunity to certain damage types like Vitality damage, preventing Life Leech builds from lowering those resistances in later difficulties.
• Bamboo Technology: A lot of the equipment the player can salvage off enemies are primitive, yet due to Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness, they are as good or even better than blacksmith-forged equipment. Most egregious are "Barbarian" items dropped from Troglodytes, which are just rocks tied together.
• Barred from the Afterlife: In the expansion pack Immortal Throne, Hades' invasion of the mortal world causes Charon, the Styx's ferryman, to neglect his duties, resulting in the dead becoming stranded outside the afterlife. The player resolves this by killing Charon and presenting his oar to one of the trapped souls, allowing the soul to become the ferryman in Charon's place.
• Bat Out of Hell: Early in the game, you'll face giant bats. In the expansion, furies are far larger bats with a scream attack.
• Battle Aura: Many of the masteries allow the user to learn one of these for both the character and allies.
• Behind the Black: The first Troglodyte (and boss) the player encounters appears from underneath the hood of a tent.
• Benevolent Architecture:
  • The land around the player character naturally guides him/her through the use of torches and paths.
  • Dungeons indicate when a storyline boss is coming up by placing a gate before it.
  • The game also gives you chests guaranteed to have potions inside before certain bosses.
• Big Bad: Typhon in the original game and Hades in the expansion.
  • In Ragnarök, you have Loki and Surtr.
• Big Boo's Haunt: Several of them. The undead can be killed in any way, but they're extremely resistant to some forms of damage (such as pierce and poison) and completely immune to others (life leech). Since some types of characters rely on these damage types, killing undead enemies may be extremely tricky.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Several giant insects, usually in Egypt. Including spiders, scarabs, antlions, and mantises. They're accordingly classified as Insects, which also includes half-human examples such as Arachni and Scorpos.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch and Yeti: Yetis and Yerrens. The latter appears to be more civilized and forest-bound compared to the massive, ice-dwelling Yetis.
• Big Damn Reunion: By the time your PC goes to Hades, Orpheus has passed away long ago. However, even in death, Orpheus is trapped somewhere in the underworld and separated from his wife. Eurydice gives you a quest to find and rescue him. When you succeed, they are finally reunited.
• Bigger on the Inside: The Tower of Judgement in Hades takes the cake.
• Bilingual Bonus:
  • Before entering Mongolia (where you meet the Tiger People for the first time) you can see some banners with the hanzi for "tiger" on it. Other examples include the kanji for "Power" on the Tropical Arachnos' gauntlets, and the one for "Spell" on the Tigerman Shaman's robe banner.
  • The Mandarin word for "small" is Xiao... which ironically, contrasts with the "Colossal" Peng named Xiao.
  • The "Bai Hu" of "Bai Hu" Monster Invariant equipment literally means "white tiger" in Mandarin.
• Black Speech: The Machae demons speak in their own tongue, with the exception of Keuthonymos from "An Inside Source".
• Blade on a Stick: Spears, the favourite weapon for the Hunter Class. Despite being slow they're quite powerful and can pierce armor.
• Blatant Lies: After you helped the Triton High Priestess with a sidequest, she promises to come to your aid to take down the Serpentoid cult. She never shows up.
• Blob Monster: Magical slimes are a type of monster found starting from the second Act. They are resistant to damage and are slow as molasses.
• Bloodless Carnage: Deaths are clean ragdoll animations.
• Bonus Boss: Epic and Legendary mode add in certain specific areas extremely powerful monsters, including Talos and the Lernean Hydra in Greece, a Manticore in Egypt, a Dragon Liche in China, and Fafnir in The North. On normal mode, you'll only see them deactivated (e.g., Talos is immobile and web-covered, the dragon's just a pile of bones, etc.).
• Bonus Dungeon: The Secret Passage and Primrose's Passage are optional, endgame Developers Rooms. They both require secret keys to unlock the doors leading to them.
• Bonus Stage Collectables: Developer sets of equipment are only found in Developers Rooms.
• Boring, but Practical: Basic attack skills tend to be unimpressive in appearance and damage output, but the low energy cost means they will be used more often than not.
• Boss Banter: In the last act of the Expansion, every main boss will yell constantly during their boss battle and taunt you. Contrasting the bosses of the previous acts which, except for occasional growling and roars, were silent.
• Boss in Mook Clothing:
  • Boss in Mini-Boss Clothing, rather. Anniversary Edition adds Hero monsters that aren't pushovers like normal Hero monsters, and can instead be harder than storyline bosses.
    • Shadowmaw is the best example. You meet the boss halfway into Act I, between Delphi and Athens. Beating it before finishing Act I is considered an achievement on Steam.
  • Dactyloi. Huge melee damage, huge attack speed, fairly high health. Their most lethal attack is a ground wave that they spam continuously that will surely stunlock you, while dealing insane amodunts of damage. And in Legendary mode, they have 99% chance to avoid projectiles. Fun!
    • In Anniversary Edition, Dactyloi were removed and replaced with Dactyl, an actual boss.
  • Cyclopes near the end of the game deal huge amounts of damage using their shouting attack, stun the player with their Shockwave Stomp, and they come in groups, making it easy to get stunlocked.
• Bottomless Magazines: Played straight. Your bow never run out of arrows.
• Breath Weapon: Some enemies have these, but the most notable case is the Hydradon. Fire breath, poison breath and ice breath. All three deal massive damage over a very short time (generally more than potions can heal) and the ice breath also slows you down.
  • The Manticore on Epic and Legendary has a lightning breath that will likely annihilate the player before he/she can even touch a potion. Thankfully, it's easy to predict.
• Broken Bridge: In Act 1, Greece, you can hear from a nearby NPC that it was a cyclops who smashed the bridge to pieces. Soon enough, you have to kill that cyclops. Still, the bridge that would allow you to cross the river and short-cut from Greece to another area stays broken, despite the lazy workmen claiming they're hard at work repairing it. You have to go the long way around. A bit less noticeable than some examples because you are already on the opposite side of the bridge before you are told you have to go to the city that would have required crossing it in the first place.
• Call a Hit Point a "Smeerp": The game calls the mana meter "Energy", which makes sense, as that meter is used by all builds, not just magic-oriented ones.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Most of the Beast-type enemies the player will face are aptly named. Boars look are called boars, vultures are called vultures, etc. All crabs are called Karkinos, when they're not that big.
• Came Back Wrong: Halfway through the realm of Hades you have to fight an undead Typhon.
• Cap: There are caps on the various kind of speed possible:
  • Attack Speeds:
    • Dual thrown weapons have their attack speed capped at 141%.
    • Thrown weapons used alone or with a shield have their attack speed capped at 208%.
    • Dual Swords, Axes and Clubs, are capped at 200%.
    • Swords, Clubs, Axes, and Spears alone or with a shield, and bows, at 222%.
    • Staffs at 229%.
    • Fists or Fists and Shields: 300%
  • Movement speed is capped at 166%.
• Carrying the Weakness: Due to the Randomly Drops nature of the game, the player can find Demon- and Undead-class enemies equipped with weapons that deals bonus damage to that class.
• Catgirl: Maenads are depicted as cat-women with azure skin, cat ears and tails. They also meow like cats and are very fast. Later you can meet the Lamiae, which are more centaur-like and black in color.
• Chained by Fashion: Typhon still has the manacles on his arms as he invades Olympus from when Ormenos frees him.
• Challenge Run: Some achievements require the player take on a self-imposed challenge, such as:
  • Finishing Normal difficulty with 100 or fewer direct kills.
  • Finishing Normal difficulty without selecting a second mastery.
  • Finishing all three difficulties within 20 hours.
  • Finishing each difficulty without dying.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: In the early game, the player is focused on finding the right mastery, skill combinations, and playstyle for the game. As the game gets more difficult and level-ups become more distant from each other, the player becomes more concerned about finding the right equipment to survive the increasingly-challenging world.
• Character Level: The base game has a level cap of 65, the Immortal Throne expansion increases it to 75, and the Ragnarök expansion increases that to 85.
• Character Name Limits: 14 characters.
• Checkpoint: Fountains will automatically awaken as you pass near them. You can also manually reactivate an older checkpoint by selecting it.
• Chupacabra: The cryptid doesn't appear, per se, but you can run into a Bat hero called "Goat Sucker" in Act I.
• Classical Cyclops: Polyphemus the cyclops from the Odyssey appears as a boss. You also meet some other cyclopes while ascending Mount Olympus. One last one is shown turned to stone prior to the fight with the Gorgon Sisters. Finally, a duo of cyclopes named Brontes and Steropes are bosses in a sidequest of Act IV in Hades. All of them are massive reddish humanoids armed with stone clubs and capable of attacking with stone-shattering shockwaves and stunning howls. They were classified as Magical Beasts before Ragnarök, which classified them as Giants.
• Cobweb Jungle: Justified, as there are abnormally large spiders found throughout the game. And some are half human.
• City Guards: They only block your path three times in the entire game and are generally helpful.
• Classical Chimera: One of the bosses of Temple of Marduk in the Orient, during Act III, is a Chimera. It is shown as a three-headed monster with a lion head that is more focused on melee attacks, a goat head that has a short-ranged lightning attack and a snake that uses a long-raged fire breath.
• Clockwork Creature:
  • The "Construct" class of enemies tend to be this.
  • There is a mechanical eagle named Vince in Primrose's Passage.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Each mastery's skills have a color theme:
    • Warfare: yellow
    • Defense: silver
    • Rogue: purple
    • Hunting: orange
    • Earth: red
    • Storm: blue
    • Spirit: teal
    • Nature: green
    • Dream: rich blue
    • Runes: brown
  • Most damage types are color-coded, to make identifying resistances easier.
    • Fire is orange, Vitality is cyan or blood-red, Poison is green, and Bleeding is blood-red.
    • Both Cold and Lightning damage can be white, but they can be differentiated by the shape of the attack.
    • Life Drain is Red and Energy Drain is blue.
    • Exceptions include Pierce damage, which is more identified by weapon type than color.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: The game has six tiers, as said in the manual: Grey (broken), White (normal), Yellow (magical), Green (rare), Blue (epic) and Purple (legendary). Unlike other games, purple-tier items are available only on Epic and Legendary difficulty settings. There is also Dark Green (Monster Infrequent), distinct monster-themed items that infrequently drop.
• Combat Tentacles: Some of the creatures and also Hades's Turns Red phase.
• Comically Missing the Point: In Act V, a villager asks you to find his missing wife, as he's waiting for her to make dinner. When you find her in the woods, she's with a hunter and clumsily makes up an excuse that she was helping him sorting out mushrooms. She was obviously cheating on her husband. However, when you report back to the villager, he's excited at the prospect of eating mushrooms.
• Compilation Re Release: Gold Edition and Anniversary Edition are re-releases the original Titan Quest and the Immortal Throne expansion.
• Convection Schmonvection: Walking around lava-filled areas has no lethal effects on you.
• Cool Down: Using certain skills, drinking potions, using scrolls and using some of your artifacts special abilities have cooldowns. Although with the right equipment flags, you can steadily reduce these cooldowns... all the way to -80% cooldown.
• Cooldown Manipulation:
  • An uncommon bonus equipment can give is to reduce the recharge (cooldown) items have, down to a cap of -80% recharge.
  • The Nature mastery includes the skill Refresh, which instantly lowers recharge time by a fixed amount (-8 seconds - -68 seconds). Some items grant this skill as a bonus, too.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: Played straight in large parts of Egypt, where pretty much all you'll see is sand and tombs with the occasional oasis, although there is beautiful vegetation while you travel along the shores of the Nile or take a bath in the river. Averted in Act 3, where you'll run all over Asia and visit lush meadows, bamboo forests, snowy mountain peaks, icy caves, the Great Wall, and even a volcano.
• Copy Protection: The CD version of the game will crash during an early quest if it's a bootleg copy of the game. This led to people who pirated the game giving it poor reviews, leading to more people pirating the game to "test" the game before buying it, leading to more poor reviews, which contributed to Iron Lore's closing.
• Counter-Attack: There are many skills and items that grant the retaliation mechanic. The counter can be physical or magical.
• Covers Always Lie:
  • The original cover is guilty of this trope, displaying the Hydra half submerged in water, while in-game it is fought in a shallow swamp. And only in Legendary difficulty, meaning a lot of people probably completed the game once and forgot about it without ever seeing the creature.
  • The cover of the Immortal Throne expansion shows:
    • A female heroine using both a staff and a sword, something impossible to do in the game.
    • She's blonde and the female player design only has dark hair.
    • The heroine is facing Cerberus with Hades' forest in the background, while in reality you face him in the Tower of Judgment.
• Crippling Overspecialization:
  • Various unique items have stats that are only effective on very specialized builds. For instance, Painweaver is a bow that reduces the opponent's Defensive Ability by 80%, but Defensive Ability affects melee attacks only, meaning that the player character needs pets or a second weapon to take advantage of the benefit. More examples can be found here.
  • The game discourages Min-Maxing by making some encounters of the game really hard. Ghosts have high resistance to physical attacks. Device- and Undead-class enemies have high resistances (or are downright immune) to damage types such as Poison, Bleeding, and Vitality. A player who dumps all of their attribute points in Dexterity to maximize Poison and Bleeding damage, for instance, will struggle to beat enemies of the wrong class.
• Critical Existence Failure: The player and monsters can continue dishing out the same amount of damage until the last hit point is expended.
• Crossover Cosmology: Mythologies from Greece, Egypt, Middle-East, China, and, in the expansion, Celtic and Nordic lands all coexist together.
• Crutch Character:
  • Any equipment or skills with requirement reduction bonuses act as crutches. While the effect is useful in early- to mid-game, it peters out in higher difficulties, where the player has the necessary requirements. By then, the equipment slot or skills are better off invested in "real" benefits.
  • Any spells granted by skills can suffer from this. They are great in early - mid game if you Min Max the spell out, but at that point, the spell doesn't get any stronger on its own, so you're forced to find equipment that can buff it, while weapons continue to improve in damage.
• Cycle of Hurting:
  • It's possible for enemies to spawn close to a Rebirth Fountain and kill the player character over and over. This can be exploited to farm for experience, given that experience reclaimed from a gravestone is affected by experience multipliers.
  • A Machae Hero might drop a scroll called "An Entreaty", which describes the same fate happening to the enemy monsters. The Machae begs to his dark lord for but a simple request: to put his valuable loot somewhere else but on him.
• Darker and Edgier: The cover of the console version of the game is much more graphically violent than the PC counterpart. It has a satyr at the mercy of the player character who pins him on the ground with his spear.
  • The Ragnarök expansion introduces human enemies that can be killed by the player.
• Dark Is Not Evil: The necromancer-like Theurgist can kill monsters by sucking their souls, summon a Liche King to aid him and even control the minds of weaker enemies, all while protecting himself with blood pacts and other abilities with frightening names. However, he's identical to any other hero story-wise. The Rogue class, dealing with poison and sneaky attacks, also applies.
• Deadly Disc: One type of throwing weapon are Olympic throwing discus. And they are considered edged so they can be enhanced by Blade Honing.
• Death Is a Slap on the Wrist: If the player character dies, he/she merely loses experience and respawns at the last checkpoint, and 85% of the experience can be reclaimed at the point of death.
• Degraded Boss:
  • The first cyclops you see in the game, Polyphemus, is a boss, and he makes mincemeat out of the ordinary Athens soldiers joining the fight. By the time you reach Olympus, you'll be fighting groups of cyclopes on your way to the real boss.
  • Anteoks are first introduced in the "Outpost in the Woods" side-quest as the boss of the Ixian woods. It takes only a few areas for them to appear as regular enemies.
• Dem Bones: The game loves this trope. Hordes of skeletons of all colors lurk in the shadows (sometimes sunlight), including the normal looking ones in Greece, the black ones in Egypt and the Golden ones in China — all with prefixes that explain their coloration.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Due to the presence of Randomly Generated Loot, an object can have a prefix and suffix be redundant, such as a "Flaming War Axe of Flame".
• Developers' Foresight:
  • If the first Inventory Bag is not picked up from "Timon - Oligarch of Megara" before some point later in the plot, presumably talking to the Oracle of Delphi, when talking to him and picking up the bag, he says:
    What are you doing back here, warrior?
    Forget something?
  • Even if there are items in the game that lower your hit points and/or health regeneration rate, your character will always have keep one hit point, to prevent being stuck in an endless Cycle of Hurting.
  • Out on the Wild Heathlands, the player can encounter the Kornwyf, a demon with a scythe it drops as a quest item. The quest is to find someone who would find the scythe useful. Magoine in Glauberg Outskirts complains about life day-in, day-out, farming, and with all of the hubbub with the cultists farther out. If the player shows her the scythe, she says that she's too old to work with that.
  • The easy way to deal with escort missions is to clear the whole area of monsters before undertaking the quest. However, in the "Giesel" quest, new wolves will always spawn and attack during the mission no matter what.
• Developer's Room: There is a secret unlockable area in each expansion pack that can only be unlocked by a secret item found near the end of that expansion. Inside are Author Avatar enemies, and Easter Egg Lethal Joke Items can be found in the chest at the end.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Either twice or five times per difficulty. Depends on whether Telkines would count.
  • By the end of Immortal Throne, you'll have sucker-punched several eldritch entities, killed a titan twice, broke into hell and killed Hades.
  • Not to be outdone, Ragnarök ends up with you fighting and killing the kings of Trolls, Dvergs and Giants, the Nidhoggr and some Norse deities including Wodan and Loki.
• Die, Chair, Die!: The player can attack assorted static objects scattered around the world: training dummies and bells.
• Diminishing Returns for Balance: This trope is downplayed, averted, or straight-up inverted with mastery skill levels, but not usually played straight. Consequently, the game encourages repeated investment in a small number of skills to be effective rather than plinking one point everywhere.
  • Most skills add a constant numerical bonus every level, which gives a smaller percentage bonus overall.
  • Some skills instead have diminishing percentage bonuses. For instance, the Dream skill Psionic Immolation goes from 96 to 129 Electrical Burn damage from level 1 to level 2, which comes out to +33 or 34%. The skill goes from 494 to 544 Electrical Burn damage level 11 to level 12, or +50 or +10% damage.
  • Skills like Resilience and Accelerated Regrowth lower the cooldown of its base skill by a fixed percentage each level. The result of this effect is not linear; at level 2 Accelerated Regrowth, the player can cast Regrowth approximately once every six seconds (4/3x speed). At level 5, it becomes once every four seconds (2x speed) cooldown. At level eight, once every two seconds (4x speed).
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Certain low-level skills can become this if you Min Max them.
  • The Deathweaver's Legtip is a rare drop fairly early in the game which can massively boost damage for melee classes.
• Disguised in Drag: The "Princess" Ylva that has requested your help and fought alongside you against the Norse gods is actually the male Loki in disguise.
• Door to Before:
  • Or at least to areas which the player could have reached easily, like the Hathor Basin.
  • The Salt Mines in Act V have a "Creaky ladder" close to the area's boss that allows the player to quickly return to the surface.
  • Mimer provides a portal back to the surface after beating him at the end of his maze.
• Doppelgänger Spin: The bosses Aktaios and Mimer create copies of themselves with less health but do as much damage as the original, making it harder to beat the real boss.
• Draw Aggro:
  • The Core Dweller pet has the skill Provoke, which lets it take hits for its squishier summoner.
  • The Monster Lure skill draws the attention of monsters to a scarecrow, which can be rigged to explode after destruction.
  • The Defense mastery's Shield Charge has a hidden Taunt, most effective for tanks in multiplayer.
  • The Raging Bull and Torment axes give the player a Taunt effect when equipped.
• Druidic Sickle: In reference to the Celtic ritual of oak and mistletoe, the protagonist cna help recover a golden scikle for the druid Artebudz from the Troll King.
• Dual Wielding: Warrior classes can do this with swords, maces and axes. The Warfare mastery has a skill tree that boosts your offensive power when dual-wielding. The newly introduced throwing weapons can be dual-wielded as well, though not all the techniques are available.
• Early-Bird Cameo: There is a cave underneath Megara Bluff in Act I that the player passes through from the Road to Kenchreai in Act V.
• Easter Egg:
  • Several rare item drops take this form. One is a Wizard Hat that acts as a Shout-Out to Dungeons & Dragons, and another is a carrot used as a sword.
  • The Secret Passage level in the Immortal Throne expansion. You need to acquire an object called "The Overlord", randomly dropped by Hades. With it, you'll be able to unlock the Secret Passage at the beginning of Act 4. You'll face various foes and a Developer's Room, with programmers posing as monsters. It's also here you'll face to notorious Toxeus the Murderer.
  • Primrose's Passage in Ragnarök follows suit. An NPC in Delphi leads the player on a cryptic puzzle hunt spanning multiple acts. Completing the puzzle leads to the player crafting an item called "The Primrose", which is used to unlock Primrose's Passage, which leads to the Temple of the Hidden Sun. Like the Secret Passage, the area features developers as enemies, with a Dark Chest of Wonders at its center.
  • Loki's Wand has a 20% to drop from the appropriate boss. It's used to unlock Ylva as a guest, who is a very competent fighter and will even heal the player character.
• An Economy Is You: Justified. As the merchant in Tegea explains, ever since all manners of beasts and monsters have started attacking human settlements, everyone wants to buy his weapons and armor over other goods—including the player character.
• Elaborate Equals Effective: Most of the weapons and armors follow this suit, although (owing to the game's top-down perspective) "elaborate" here doesn't mean that much.
  • The items in the Ragnarök expansion are generally less ornate, presumably due to a change in developers.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • The Telkines. Megalesios isn't that obvious — you can only see his upper face — but Aktaios is letting his shoulder tendrils poke out, and there is no mistaking Ormenos for anything else. Also Typhon and Hades's second form.
  • The Theurgist can summon one to help them in battle.
• Elemental Crafting: The player character starts with pointy sticks made of copper and iron and armor made from leather and armor. As the player progresses through the game, equipment changes to those with more elaborate metals and fabrics, until they reach Fantasy Metals and items of legend.
• Elemental Embodiment: Surtr, the final boss of Act V, has "Fire Incarnate" as his Boss Subtitle. You fight him in a Lethal Lava Land, and his second form emerges from magma and is magma.
• Elemental Powers: The main elements are Fire (Pyromancer), Ice/Lightning (Stormcaller) and Poison (Rogue). Also Dark (Theurgist) and Nature (Wanderer).
• Enemy Summoner: Some undead enemies summon other undead minions, and some insectoid enemies hatch babies to fight alongside them.
• Enough to Go Around: Played straight in multiplayer mode. Every player gets one copy of the necessary quest item, even if it's as unique as the shared Eye of the Grey Ones.
• Escape Rope: Similar to Diablo, Town portals can be placed anywhere, and also give a return trip back to where you left. In this game, they're free, and can teleport you to any major portal.
• Escort Mission: Several of them in expansions. Considering that the escortee will respawn if killed, they're bearable and you can clear the path before accepting the missions if you know who triggers the quests.
  • There are two of them in Immortal Throne.
    • The first, "The Torch-Lighter's Gauntlet", requires that the character stay alive as waves of undead target him.
    • The second, in "Flight of the Messenger", requires that the player take a ghostly messenger across Aneslasia to the Delian Meadows, where a war camp is.
  • In Ragnarök:
    • "The Trapped Nixie" quest requires the player character escort a water nymph from a drying pond where hostile Bilwis live to the wetlands ahead.
    • The quest "Giesel" has the player escort someone important to a man named Laidulf. That someone turns out to be a sheep. Unlike the other quests, Giesel can die, although the player can still bring her hide back to complete the quest, or give him a Lupine Necklace to show that the player avenged her death.
• Essence Drop: Charms are items that can be used to enchant equipment with a variety of boosts or used as ingredients to craft artifacts. Some Charms are very physical, such as Boars dropping Boar Hides, while others are more abstract, like Epiales and Bone Scourges dropping Tortured Souls.
• Everybody Hates Hades: Hades is the Final Boss of the Immortal Throne expansion. The excuse is that the events in the previous acts caused him to become Driven to Madness.
• Everything's Better with Dinosaurs: The "Raptors" you meet in Asia looks pretty much like dinosaurs. Since you also meet neanderthals and sabertooth lions, this is not excessively surprising.
• Everything Fades: Averted with most of the enemies, but played straight with certain corpses which will fade into nothingness when killed, (like demons, ghosts and djinn).
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • The only creatures that don't want to kill the player character are the squirrels, birds, etc. Everything else, except for very rare neutral monster NPCs, will attack you on sight.
  • The chests sometimes become rigged to shock the player in the The North.
• Evil Is One Big, Happy Family: Downplayed. The Serpentoids, the Tritons and the Potamois team-up to summon the Evil God Tiamat. However, that doesn't stop some of them to backstab each others.
• Evil vs. Evil: You meet a neutral Machae in Hades who can actually give you a quest where you end up killing a messenger and sabotaging the demon army. However, he gives you this quest because he wants Fame Through Infamy (or just fame, depending on the audience) rather than anything resembling genuine compassion.
• Exact Words: King Gylfi was approached by Loki and asked the king if he wanted a statue of himself. King Gylfi said yes and Loki turned him to stone.
• Exclusive Enemy Equipment: One of the selling points of the game is that all enemies will drop their equipment, allowing them to be used by the player. See that Satyr with the shiny sword? Kill it, and it's yours! There's also a chance of monster-specific Monster Infrequent (dark green font) items dropping that are way better than even some Epic rarity items.
• Expecting Someone Taller: In Corinth, Ylva, Princess of Scandia, has heard of the player character's heroic deeds. She was expecting someone taller. This makes some sense, considering the player character is constantly David in David Versus Goliath.
• Experience Booster:
  • One of the possible shrines the map can generate is an Experience shrine, which gives +50% experience for 60 seconds.
  • Items that grant persistent bonuses to experience are far and few between.
    • "Ceremonial" is a green-rarity prefix on head armor that gives between +3%-11% experience.
    • "Sacrificial" is a very rare suffix on amulets that gives up to +45% experience but eats away a huge chunk of the player character's health and health regeneration.
    • The "Crystal of Erebus" charm has a rare chance of giving +% experience as its completion reward. The problem is that the charm can only be completed once per difficulty level instead of farmed like other charms. In addition, it can only be enchanted on head armor, so it is not possible to adorn multiple pieces of equipment with the charm.
    • Otherwise, a few scattered unique items, set bonuses, and artifacts are all that give +% experience as a bonus.
  • The Ragnarök expansion adds Anti-Frustration Features to experience grinding:
    • The "Wodan's Knowledge" relic gives a boost to experience as its primary bonus, although it still gives the player character a health penalty. Unlike Crystals of Erebus, the relic can enchant all armor and jewelry, allowing the player to receive its benefits 7x.
    • The expansion is more liberal about adding unique items that give +% experience.
• Exposed to the Elements: The hero's trek to the orient uses the same tunic (plus armor) as was used in both Greece and Egypt. The trek requires passing through snow-covered mountains, and ice caves with the stock attire, although there's no environmental hazard due to the snow. Also, NPCs you see in the area don't have any special cold-weather clothing either.
  • In the Ragnarök expansion, it's possible to buy the Oriental Tunic, which switches the standard sleeveless tunic with a complete Chinese suit which includes leggings as pants.
• Eye of Horus Means Egypt: Naturally, considering the roles Egyptian Mythology plays in the game, this appears in the Egypt act. In a case of Shown Their Work, the Udjat of Horus relic protects the player by boosting his/her armor.
• Fake Difficulty: The Ragnarök expansion, as it was made by a separate company 10 years after the original game, has some unpolished parts.
  • The expansion lags a lot when rendering certain parts, making it easy for the player character to go from full health to dead without a chance to react.
  • The way the maps are set up allows for plenty of Camera Screw, with walls and overhangs acting as Obstructive Foregrounds.
  • Some bosses lack icons on the mini-map and don't have "gates" before them allowing the player character to prepare.
  • Random non-boss Majestic Chests in Act V suddenly become trapped, dealing high Lightning damage.
• Fake Longevity: The Ragnarök expansion:
  • Act V has much longer paths and forests compared to the other parts of the game, and checkpoints are placed farther away from each other.
  • Giants, found in the last part of the act, are Stone Walls. They are are common as Mooks, making it tedious just to wear one down.
• Fantasy Metals: The metals in the game start with regular (Bronze, Copper, Iron), then unusual (Azurite, Electrum, Chalcopyrite, Galantium, Turanite), to mythological (Adamantine, Orichalcum).
  • The Adamantine Sickle of Kronos is a unique endgame two-handed weapon.
• Fiery Salamander: One of the creatures inhabiting the fiery fields of Muspelheim are giant Salamanders that throw fireballs and drop Primal Magma.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The various masteries can loosely be split along these lines, which is reflected in the three stats of Strength, Dexterity, and Intelligence.
  • A trio of undead princes in Old Elesius are a warrior, archer, and mage respectively.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Done with the various magical staves, which can be fire-enchanted, frost-enchanted or thunder-enchanted. Fire, ice and lightning are also present as elements along with other lesser ones like poison and vitality.
  • The Elementalist class's arsenal consists of Earth Mastery's fire and Storm's ice and lightning skills.
  • On Epic, the three bonus bosses have these element, has seen in their breath weapon. Namely, Talos for Fire, the Manticore for Lightning and Dragon Liche for Ice.
• Fishing for Mooks: More squishy builds usually rely on picking enemies off in small numbers, sometimes using pets to lure the monsters' attention away.
• Flavor Text: For most monster parts, such as:
  • Boar Hide:
    Toughed hide of a wild boar.
• Flechette Storm: Throwing Knife becomes this with investment in the Flurry of Knives skill.
• Flunky Boss: Several bosses summon minions during the battle, such as Shadowmaw, Megalesios, Scarabeus, and Ormenos.
• Foe Yay: In-Universe and likely parodied by the "Diary of a Teenage Maenad", which implies that a maenad has a crush on the playable character, but is jealous because he/she keeps going for the sorceress or for "Stupid Susan" instead.
• Follow the Plotted Line: The game's maps are linear for the most part, branching only for a short while for one part of a quest or an optional dungeon. The player can expect to make progress in the main quest just by rushing to the next area and killing the boss there.
• Frazetta Man: Neanderthals appears as a bunch of wild, primitive men living on the mountains in the Orient. They're also a type of "Beast Men".
• Full-Boar Action: Feral boars are among the early enemies. Later you can see the Dusky Boars, some of which are the size of a bull. There are also some powerful boar men in Greece.
  • Ragnarök has the Golden Board Hildnsvini as a major boss later on.
• Fur Bikini: The Maenad's costumes.
• Game Mod: The game comes with a level editor.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality:
  • Played straight with some town guard NPCs, but averted with others which have a health bar and can die.
  • Escort Mission NPCs respawn if they die, except for Giesel.
• Gender-Neutral Writing: NPCs always refer to you as "Hero", "Titan Slayer", or otherwise a title that doesn't acknowledge whether you're playing as a male or female character.
• Genghis Gambit: At the beginning of the game, all of humanity had rallied together to survive the now-hostile world. Unfortunately, after the events of Act IV, the player character returns to Greece to find that, with the remaining threats slain, people have returned to fighting among each other.

• Get on the Boat: Boats are used as transportation between several areas of the game; between Athens and Knossos, Knossos and Rhakotis, and, in the Ragnarök expansion, Corinth and Heuneburg.
• Giant Enemy Crab: The player character receives a quest to defeat one near the beginning of the fourth act.
• Giant Mook:
  • The Satyr Brutes are taller and fatter than the normal Satyrs you've come across.
  • Larger Trolls have no magic or weapons. Instead, they carry large boulders and hurl them at you.
  • Troglodytes are this among the forces of Hades, combined with Smash Mook.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Multiple:
  • The Chimera... in Babylon. Hands up if you didn't see that coming, or thought you were looking at something like Mushussu before you highlighted her.
  • Arguably Scarabeus the Desert King, the first boss encountered in Egypt and fought for some reason in the underground vault of Rhakotis' library. The only enemies encountered before aside from beasts and scorpions were jackalmen and the occasional undead. Worse still, while sometimes giant scarabs spawn in the antechamber to his room, other times unrelated giant maggots appear instead, and there's really no indication on how Scarabeus got in the room.
• Giant Spider: Many of them are usually found underground or in forests. Unlike other examples, there are several species of them. You can also meet some spider-human hybrids called Arachnos in both Greece and China. The Anniversary Edition added an Epic Boss spider of humongous size named "The Boar Snatcher" in the spider cave in the Spartan Woods.
• Glacier Waif: Maces and Spears are really slow, and nearly all the long-ranged weapons have a slow fire rate. Hunters, however, possess certain skills that allow them to speed up the attack of both spears and bows. A bow-focused Hunter can annihilate nearly all the enemies running at him before they can reach him.
• Glass Cannon: Some mastery combinations make excellent glass cannons (pure mages being particularly good examples). Some enemies, mostly found in the late game, also qualify. Sometimes with devastating effects.
• Golem: Mulitple:
  • The bronze and iron Automata in Crete and Olympus,
  • The granite, clumsy living statues in Egypt's tombs.
  • The Terracotta Army in China. Hades has war constructs
  • Act V has both living Asgardian statues and Golem made of Crystals or black, rune-etched stone.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • There are multiple ways of duplicating items (Source):
    • The simplest is to save, move the item into shared storage, and quit the game without saving.
    • For people who want to do it more legitimately, the player can fight Doppelgangers, which copy all of the player's stats, skills, and equipment.
    • Due to a quirk with how the game manages drops, the player can let their Dvalinn's Simulacrum die, use a portal and return, and the game will have a chance of spawning death drops on the corpse.
• The Goomba: The crows and the Satyrs in act I. Act II has Jackalmen and Desert Raiders, III has Neanderthal and Undeads, IV has various types of demons.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: The beginning of Ragnarök has you fighting off an invasion of Tritons and giant Crabs lead by a colossal Sea Monster, which is implied to be an accident on part of some cultists worshippers of Poseidon.
• Götterdämmerung: Avoided, strangely enough. Though a player might expect Typhon to have cleaned out Olympus by the time the PC gets there, Zeus is apparently fine. He does decide to leave humans to their own devices, though the deities will presumably keep all the magic infrastructure working. Averted for, well, obvious reasons in Ragnarök, as the title suggests.
• Gradual Regeneration: Characters have this on both health and mana. Wizards can increase their magic regeneration simply by wearing wizard's equipment. There are also magic items and skills that boost the health regeneration. From Epic onward, it's possible to find green equipment with the "sacrifical" attribute, which actually decrease the health regeneration rate and overall health in exchange for more experience.
• Grid Inventory: Your inventory space is limited in grid-like fashion, although you gain a caravan and three extra bags on your journey.
• Guide Dang It!: From Anniversary Edition and onwards, there's no centralized wiki or guide for up-to-date information. A lot of guesswork is involved in determining if the damage calculation formulae or drop tables are still relevant. Most of the info that is out there is outdated... or in German.
  • Some secret bosses like Shadowmaw only spawn the first time the player opens the game from the operating system, unlike other bosses, which can respawn every time the player exits to the main menu.
  • Acquiring the Adamantine Sickle of Kronos. Unlike other unique items, the player needs to beat Ormenos a certain way: defeat him before you get close enough to trigger the animation to free Typhon.
  • Finding out how to enter the Temple of the Hidden Sun. There are no quest journal entries, and most people will look it up on YouTube or in gaming forums.
• Harping on About Harpies: Harpies in Greece, and later, Egypt. They're, oddly enough, classified as beasts, not beastmen (well, beastwomen, but...). The former are the classic ones and sometimes cast lightning magic, while the Egyptian ones are featherless with bat-like wings and vultures' beaks.
• Hell Hound: The Orthus is a demon-dog with two heads and a breath weapon, sometimes found in graveyards, underground tombs and in the company of the undead.
• Hell Invades Heaven: When you reach the Elysium you find out that the heroes there are fighting back the hordes of shades and demons serving Hades, who has gone mad with power. Odder than the standard example, because Elysium is still part of Hades's kingdom, yet justified because the heroes rebelled.
  • The final part of Titan Quest also qualifies as a variation; you have to prevent Typhon, the most fearsome of the Titans, from invading Mt. Olympus.
• Heroic Fantasy: Venturing through multiple myths and the underworld itself to beat creatures and even gods of legend.
• Hijacked by Jesus: At first, it seems like a Greek cosmology variation. While there are items referencing the Babylonian and Chinese pantheons as well, most of the important sages are revealed to be Order of Prometheus members, even the Yellow Emperor himself is only concerned with the welfare of the Olympian gods and the world-threatening antagonist is a Titan. However, an Egyptian NPC mentions that their god Set is called Typhon by the Greeks, meaning the different pantheons refer to the same deities with different names. This, in turn, makes it a version of All Myths Are True.
• Historical Domain Character: The poet Hesiod makes a cameo in Immortal Throne.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Multiple:
  • A wide variety of bosses have a Breath Weapon, where the player can dodge the attack and hit the boss while it's busy. Polyphemus will likely be the example the player encounters.
  • Nixies love to use hit-and-run tactics on you. They will shoot water from afar and keep out of distance. The water lowers projectile accuracy, too, so ranged builds don't have the advantage.
• Hitbox Dissonance: This frequently when shooting arrows or casting spells like Ice Shards or Volcanic Orb. When standing too close to a wall, your shots will be stopped by the wall even thought you aimed at the monsters.
• Holding Out for a Hero: Imhotep; the whole point of his Fetch Quests is to be able to invoke the gods to Deal With the Telkines, since he honestly doesn't see any other way out of the mess. When the invocation ritual fails, he realizes his insistence on divine intervention was actually a bad thing, as not considering letting the one who destroyed Megalesios deal with the remaining Telkines has basically given Aktaios extra time to find whatever artifact he's been looking for.
• Holiday Mode: Starting on December 22, 2017 until January 12, 2018, Holiday Mode is activated in the game:
  • One of the conifers on the Ragnarök title screen becomes decorated as a Christmas tree, and Christmas presents are scattered beneath it.
  • The Sylvan Nymph minion and Frost Troll enemies wear Santa hats.
• Horse Of Adifferent Color: Multiple:
  • Satyrs occasionally ride on Boars.
  • Dune Raiders occasionally ride on Hyena Beasts.
  • Neanderthals occasionally ride on Saberlions.
  • Frost Trolls occasionally ride on Wolves.
  • Whitefur Yerren occasionally ride on Bears.
  • Dvergr occasionally ride on Odontotyrannus-like creatures.
• Humans Are Special: Naturally only a human can save the day. However, following gameplay conventions the other humans you meet are almost as helpless as the gods are implied to be. One human is special.
• Humongous Mecha: Multiple:
  • Talos is one, complete with tons of health points, huge size, flamethrowers built in the palms and flail-like chain hands. Luckily is only encountered on Epic or Legendary.
  • The Siege Striders. They are giant four legged walkers that throw fire at you.
• Hurricane of Puns: A letter written by an undead soldier in Egypt is filled to the brim with death-related puns of all sorts.
• Hybrid Monster: Hooo boy, where should we start? Plenty of them, including: satyrs,centaurs, spider-men, fishfolk, minotaurs, rat-men, boar-men, gorgons, jackal-men, crocodile-men, scorpion-men, tiger-men, dragon-men, frog-men, elk-men, ant-men and panther-women. The Hunter class has a bonus against this kind of monsters, which are fittingly labelled "Beastmen".
• Hyperspace Arsenal: Your hero has an invisible backpack that can carry a huge number of armors, weapons, potions, jewellery, recipes and charms. And that's not even counting the three extra bags you acquire, plus the relic who isn't even stored in your backpack.
• Immune to Fire: Fire resistance is available as one of the main powers of the Earth Mastery, which focuses on lava and fire.
• Impossible Item Drop: Downplayed. You don't expect a swarm of wasps to drop equipment, but the "essence" of various bosses somehow explode into full suits of armor, weapons, jewelry, and relics.
• Instant Runes: Several skills in the Runes mastery, as well as the skills the Einherjar have in Act V, generate complex patterns of runes around the player or the ground.
• I Shall Taunt You: Loki does this to the hero in the opening movie of Ragnarök, as she's surrounded by a pack of ferocious wolves.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: Normal, Epic and Legendary.
• Idle Animation: Your character will start looking at the scenery and flip their weapon in the air when you're idle.
• Impossible Item Drop: Averted: every piece of equipment dropped by monsters is something that the monster was using, sometimes including unique and powerful weapons and armor. Gold, quest items and healing items are the few exceptions.
• Improbable Power Discrepancy: As enemy power level is proportional to advancement in the game, the game ends up with boars that are... well, boars, and boars that put the demons of Hades to shame in stats. As a result in Act V you have to fight bandits who are nearly on par with Hades' Machae soldiers.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • One of the earliest weapons in the game is a torch. One of the unique weapons that can drop on higher difficulty levels is a Legendary torch.
  • The player can use a hoe as a unique weapon drop, all the better to thresh Plant-type enemies.
• Improbable Use of a Weapon: Some spear-like weapons have a curved cutting edge like a glaive. You still use them to stab your enemies.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Primitive chests made from hollowed logs make sense for some of the monsters, but aside from a few explained instances there's less of a reason for treasure chests located in every cave, nook, and behind every boss.
• Informed Equipment: Averted, you'll even see the equipment of the Mooks. If you notice an enemy carrying exotic-looking equipment, there's a good chance they're unique items, with powerful stats that the enemy will also get.
• In Name Only: All of the weapon's names are taken from real life ones, but sometimes they don't match the model used. For example, the Saber (actually a straight longsword), Akinakes (a type of Persian dagger) and Naginata (a Japanese polearm).
• Interface Spoiler:
  • Phylades is marked as an interactive NPC on the City of Lost Souls mini-map before the quest "An Invitation" completes. Speaking with him triggers the next quest in the chain, "An Inside Source".
  • The player has a handy mini-map which gets uncovered around where the he/she explores. This should make the Minoan Labyrinth a cinch! ...Except the developers thought of that. Within the labyrinth, the map is only partially uncovered, with most of the walls missing.
• Intrepid Merchant: The player can find traveling merchants having set up shop in the far reaches in the wilderness. Given the setting, it's not out of the ordinary, albeit dangerous.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a day/night cycle where a day occurs every 50 minutes of real time and begins at 9 AM when you start the day. (Source) This has no effect on gameplay except by making some encounters easier or harder to see.
• Invisible Bowstring: Played straight as strings are not visible on bows.
• Item Crafting: The only items that can be crafted are Artifacts. These items can increase your stats, resistances and can sometime provide you with unique abilities. That is, assuming you can find the proper components, especially the formulas.
• It's All About Me: Demokrites, an oligarch of Corinth, comments that he knows of many criminals, but he only asks you to go after Sciron because it's damaging his trade routes.
• It's All Upstairs from Here:
  • The climax of the original game has the player character climbing up Mount Olympus to fight Typhon at the top.
  • Inverted in Immortal Throne, where the player descends into the bowels of Hades to meet Hades in his throne room.
  • Played straight again in Ragnarök, where the player climbs up the floors of Land's End in Muspelheim to reach Surtr.
• Jerkass: One merchant in the Spartan war camp is rude whenever you shop at his place. In the city of Delphi, the shopkeeper of magic is even worse. He insults you every time you browse his wares and when you leave him.
• Joke Item: The Deadly Joke two-pieces set. Wearing one item gives you increase stats, but also reduced some others. Wearing the second piece mitigate all the first item's bonuses and penalties, rendering the whole affair moot. The only benefit you receive is the completion bonus which grants you poison damage, confusion and sleep effects.
• Kaizo Trap: Some bosses have attacks that take a few seconds of summoning time, such as Typhon's meteor attack. It is possible for the boss to be defeated and the player character subsequently killed.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight in the first game (no expansion), where the "Sabertooth" sword, a green-level weapon carried by Tigermen, really looks like a katana and is easily the best sword in the game.
• A Kind of One:
  • "Of the Pegasus" is a rare suffix for leg armor, the counterpart to "Of the Gryphon" (for arm armor). Pegasus is the name of the single winged horse from Greek mythology.
  • "Orthus" is the name of a type of monster instead of a single two-headed dog. On the other hand, "Cerberus" gets it right.
• King Mook: Monster heroes and certain lesser bosses.
• Kleptomaniac Hero:
  • How the enemy army sees you. Considering what they're doing this can be Hypocritical Humor.
  • This is justified for side-quests, as the quest-givers are happy to give the details of their abandoned goods, as they're too dangerous for ordinary people to acquire.
• Large and in Charge: Usually the "champions" and commander monsters will be far bigger than their underlings.
• Legendary Weapon: The most powerful weapons and items are the "Legendary" or "Mythological" ones.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Obsidian Chambers in Wusao Mountain where the titan Typhon is locked up. In Ragnarök, Muspelheim and the End of the World, where the final battle with Loki and Surtr takes place.
• Level-Locked Loot: Every piece of equipment has a level requirement associated with it, depending on either the base item type and any affixes it has, for common equipment, or a preset value, for unique equipment. Most additionally have attribute requirements.
• Light Is Not Good: Not when Aktaios is trying to use it to fry you...
  • Of course, the Ragnarök expansion has areas in the godly Valhalla.
• Lightning Bruiser: Certain enemies, especially Tiger Men, Dragonians, Machae and Melenides.
• Limited-Use Magical Device: Scrolls are single-use magical items that allow any player character to cast powerful magical spells. Due to their high cost of purchase and long cooldown, they are usually used to beat a boss the player is struggling against.
• Literally Shattered Lives: A enemy that is frozen at the time of death breaks into ice chunks instead of executing its normal death animation.
• Living Statue:
  • Megalesios summons a set of four to delay you.
  • In Egypt, with a quartet of them serving as a major boss fight.
  • China gives you animated terra cotta warriors to deal with.
  • You also fight giant statues in Asgard.
• Loads and Loads of Loading: The game is free of loading wherever you go, as long as you don't teleport back to town. If so, the screen will fade to black and you'll have to wait several long seconds.
• Loincloth: Averted in the original series, played straight in the Expansion, which allows you to get new tunics based on the places you visit (Greek, Egyptian, Chinese, Ctonian and Nordic) plus the Loincloth option (a modest loincloth + breastband for female characters). The Egyptian tunic adds a more elaborate tunic with make up for female heroes.
• Loophole Abuse: There is no way to separate a charm or relic from the item it enchants without destroying one or the other. There ain't no rule, however, that the player can't complete the charm/relic while it's on the item.
• Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me: Shields can block a portion of damage even from magical attacks, making them very useful. The Defender is built entirely on this ability and can also employ Shield Bash to attack and stun enemies.
• Made of Explodium: The various crows you fight near the beginning of the game, which pop into a pile of feathers when they die.
• Magic Knight: Made possible by mixing melee and magic masteries. Combinations include the Thane (Warrior + Stormcaller), Juggernaut (Defender + Pyromancer), Warlock (Rogue + Theurgist), and the Avenger (Hunter + Pyromancer). On the downside, they tend to be left out of high level equipment for pure fighters or pure spellcasters, unless you pick your stat-ups to slant primarily towards either warrior stats or mage stats.
• Magic Staff: Staves. The common ones come in three flavours: Fire type (always deals the same amount of damage), Ice type (weakest but slow down people) and Thunder (damage swinging from very high to very low). They're the most suitable ranged weapon for magic users.
• Magikarp Power: Several builds struggle through the early game but have an easier time advancing through higher difficulties.
  • The Defender's skills are at most Boring, but Practical on Normal difficulty, and in contrast to other classes, make getting through the early game a slog. In later difficulties, however, the Defender's defensive buffs are invaluable when the player's resistances are drastically lowered.
  • The Wanderer's summonable pets are mediocre in Normal difficulty, but they get buffed considerably in Epic difficulty.
• Make Me Wanna Shout: Certain monsters (most notably the Cyclopes) are capable of damaging your characters by bellowing. The Warrior can do a similar trick blowing his horn.
• Man-Eating Plant: A variety of plant monsters are in the game, from Quill Vines, Bog Dwellers to Jungle Creeps. They show up in Act 3 and 4.
• Matchstick Weapon: One of the weapons found in the first area are torches that deal fire damage.
• Master of None: Due to stat requirements on gear, hybrid classes may find themselves locked out of end-game gear. The need to split points between multiple stats can also weaken their overall damage output.
• Misbegotten Multiplayer Mode: While Titan Quest's multiplayer mode is fun, well-balanced, and doesn't introduce bugs, the Steam version has issues with unlocking achievements in a multiplayer game.
• Missing Secret: The town of Knossos has a port much like the one at the beginning of the game, suggesting an alternate place to start the game.
• Money Spider: The game doesn't have gold drop from enemies types such as Plants or Beasts. Other types of enemies though, such as Beastmen or Demons, are known to trade and use gold. That means a regular Giant Spider won't drop gold, but an Arachnos will.
• Mook Maker: Dark Obelisks will indefinitely churn out Hideous Phasma, plasma skeletons with ranged Vitality attacks. And then there's the Dark Spirit Conduit, the Hero version of Dark Obelisks.
• Mooks: Of several ranks and species, a role usually played by Beastmen such as Satyrs, Jackalmen and Ichtians or Undeads. Act IV has several types of Demons serving as mooks in Hades.
• Mummy: Found in great numbers in Egyptian tombs. While they move with Zombie Gait, some of them are sorcerers and float around.
• Multiple Head Case: Being based on Classical Mythology, this was bound to happen:
  • Orthrus (2 heads). A regular canine-like enemy. Each head can breathe fire.
  • Hydradon (2 heads). A regular enemy, some sort of lizard-like monster. Also breathe fire.
  • Chimera (3 heads: a lion, a goat and a snake). Boss at the end of Suspended Gardens. Breathe fire and has a thunderclap attack.
  • Cerberus (3 heads). Boss found on the expansion. Like to breathe poison.
  • Hydra (7 heads). Boss on found the Legendary difficulty. The heads can breathe fire, cold, poison.
• Mushroom Man: Found in Act V. They come in different shapes, sizes and form of attacks. Hope that you've been working on your sleep resistance.
• New Game+: The player gets to keep all stats, skills, and equipment upon completing a difficulty and advancing to the next one. The player can also twink new characters by way of caravan, although most content will be locked behind level restrictions.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: The first two-thirds of Ragnarök? All part of Loki's plan to use the player character's Chronic Hero Syndrome to invoke Götterdämmerung.
• Ninja: One of the special outfits from the expansion, composed of body suit, hood, gloves, socks, katana, and sai.
• Nipple and Dimed: Bronze statues of naked people are found everywhere in the game. The female statues have no nipples on their breasts. In fact, no reproductive organs are present either, women or men. While missing nipples are an explained occurrence in real life, it doesn't make sense in the game's universe.
• No "Arc" in "Archery":
  • All ranged weapons move in a straight line. While this might be justified for magical projectiles, that can't be said for arrows or thrown weapons. The animation for throwing hatchets and axes such as Fenrir's Bite do show them arcing, although not enough to affect trajectory.
  • Enemies sometimes have attacks such as fireballs that shoot up and over in an arc shape, possibly bypassing any obstruction between them and the player.
• No Body Left Behind: Certain monsters, such as ghosts or demons or wraiths, will disappear after being killed. However, sometimes returning to the place where you fought them will actually show their ragdoll corpses strewn around.
• No Fair Cheating: Achievements are disabled if a game mod is active, but that doesn't prevent users from getting up to the point where they would receive an achievement, restart the game without the mod, and get it anyway.
• No Hero Discount: In the Ragnarök expansion, the player character returns to Greece as a hero and the people of Corinth are celebrating humanity's victory over the Titans. The merchants' stocks, however, remain at regular price.
  • The player character does receive enchanted equipment as compensation for completing certain quests.
• Non-Mammal Mammaries: The Gorgons and the Harpies, arguably. In a rather unusual and hard-to-spot examples, certain Skeleton Champions with Rogue skillset wear chest armor specifically modelled for a female character.
• Noob Cave: Helos Farmlands and Helos Woods are the sites of the first sidequest, introducing the player to basic battle mechanics with a Satyr Shaman as the boss.
• No Ontological Inertia:
  • Some enemies spawn other attackables, such as a Centaur Elder's Battle Standard, a Maenad Huntress's Bolt Trap, a Tsakonian Noble's Spirit Siphon, or bosses' flunkies. Most of the time, killing the source also destroys its spawn.
• Not in This for Your Revolution: In Immortal Throne, there's a resistance movement against Hades being organised by the souls of dead humans. The mastermind behind this revolution is a daemon in Hades' army, who doesn't much care for the welfare of the dead, but reasons that if Hades' coup fails, he'll be recognised as the only daemon who assisted them.
• Not the Intended Use: There is equipment in the game that gives +% to experience. The expected use of these items is to level up faster from combat. However, these items also increase the experience claimed from finishing quests and a player's gravestone. Cue people stacking +% experience items and intentionally dying and reclaiming their gravestone over and over again to quickly level up.
• Number of the Beast:
  • The Maddened God summon from the "Divine Scroll of the Maddened God" has exactly 666,000 health.
  • Toxeus the Murderer, a secret mini-boss with a ridiculous amount of skills and stats, has 6,660 health and 1,666 energy.
• Obvious Beta: Ragnarök has signs of being rushed for the Christmas release, due to glaring bugs such as:
  • Performance issues in the new act.
  • Drops and rewards not scaling to difficulty level.
  • Drops taking ages to stop moving and becoming selectable.
  • Sidequests becoming impossible to finish if done out of order.
  • Egregious misspellings and typos.
  • Steam achievements being broken.
  • The same can be said regarding the Atlantis expansion. Unlike the previous releases, the launch day release had crashes and slowdown bugs.
• One-Gender Race: Actually pointed out by Beastman Archer 783, who complains about the lack of female satyrs or male maenads and fear that they'll be called "sexists". Comedy aside, the various monster races tend to be this.
• One-Man Army: Eventually your hero: in more than one chance you'll have to make your way through armies of monsters of all kinds in order to reach (or escape) a besieged city/village/temple. Up to Eleven in Act 3 where you have to walk the whole way from Babylon to China.
• One Size Fits All: All pieces of equipment can fit a male or female character... even if it came from a Ratman or Gigantes.
• One Steve Limit: There is a villager named Admetus in the Act I village Ambrossos, as well as a separate(?) NPC called Admetus in the Act IV razed town of Paseron.
• One-Winged Angel: In Act IV, Charon will drop his robes and oar to turn into a winged demon with powers over the Styx. Hades will first grow some armor and tentacles and then turn into a wraith, while Surtr will transform into the Incarnation of Fire after being defeated once.
• Orcus on His Throne: Unlike the Telkines, who actively run around to complete their goal, Hades will be satisfied with staying inside his humongous palace waiting for you to come, as his minions spread death and destruction.
• Ornamental Weapon: The Ceremonial Buckler and items prefixed with the "Ceremonial" modifier can be used in combat, but they tend to give more "magical" bonuses in contrast to "physical" ones.
• Our Demons Are Different: Of various degrees, including corpse eaters, life suckers, sand beings and elemental creatures. Certain weapons (and some of the Seer's skills) deal more damage to demons. The Expansion added whole races of demons, including the witch-like Cheraes, the Empusae, the deadly Machae and others.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Other than the Dragonians in China, you can also find undead wyrms under Mount Wusao and an undead dragon as a bonus boss if you play on Epic or Legendary. Ragnarök adds more Dragons to the lot, including Fafner (Who resembles a massive, legless worm with humanoid arms and face) and Niddhoggr (who looks like a giant, spiky, eyeless lizard).
• Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dvergr are found underground in the harsh cold of Nordic lands. They're stout, violent, lovers of alcohol, and their technology borders on Clock Punk. Within the Halls of the Dverger are Dvalinn and Durin, the Ultimate Blacksmiths who forged Donar's hammer and Wodan's ring, and Freyja's necklace (Brísingamen). They're the only NPCs that can improve unique equipment. On the other hand, unlike most depictions of dwarves, Dvergr are classified as Demons.
• Our Genies Are Different: Seen in Babylon and China as grotesquely fat female spirits Dual Wielding swords. An Epic-difficulty scroll allows you to summon one to do your bidding.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Giant enemies (which are giant indeed) include Cyclopses, Yetis and, in the fourth act, Giants. The latters, interestingly enough, are Energy Beings as well. More Giants appear in Ragnarök, this time as a separate class of monsters.
• Our Liches Are Different: As regular enemies, including a female Liche Queen as a boss and a Liche King as a summonable unit. However, the first "Liches" you meet are actually normal skeletons with magical equipment and attacks.
• Palette Swap: Ratmen, Jackals, and Nightstalkers clearly have the same model, just reskinned.
  • This also applies to undeads of various types and colors. Early Wraiths even use the Zombies animation.
• Panthera Awesome: In China, you fight tigermen (with orange tiger, black tiger, and white tiger variants).
• Percent-Based Values: Boosts to stats from items, can be based on percentage of the character's initial value of that stat, like a 9% Strength boost.
• Percent Damage Attack:
  • One of the possible enchantments a weapon can receive is "+% reduction to enemy health".
  • Many enemies, likewise, can cleave the player's health with a percent-damage attack.
• Permanently Missable Content: Most items in the game can be farmed. Quest items can't, however.
  • If the player fails to speak with Leonidas in Sparta before meeting with him in Delphi, he/she will lose the +1 Skill Point bonus from finishing that leg of the quest.
  • The Crystals of Erebus are mechanically the same as other relics, but they are received through completing the quest "The Shards of Erebus". If player forgets to pick up one of the shards or destroys the relic, then the only way to get another of the relic is to start a new character.
  • The Power of Nerthus relic is a reward from progressing through Act V's main quest. The player can only receive the relic once, and it's impossible to receive another if it's destroyed on that character.
• Plaguemaster: Unlike the usual conceits, it's not the necromantic Theurgist who does this, but the Wanderer — the user of the Nature Mastery. The plague in question quickly conducts between enemies close to each other. In its base form, it just depletes a percentage range of health, but upgrades let it cut enemy movement, attack speed, and defenses.
• Player Nudge: Talking with an NPC will sometimes give the player a hint as to where the player should go next. For instance, a soldier after beating Nessus tells the player character that Leonidas is back in the Spartan warcamp. Timon, Huan Yue, and Borbeto explicitly comment that the player character didn't need to speak with them after finishing their role in the questline.
• Playing with Fire: The Pyromancer combines this with Dishing Out Dirt, making it a Magma Man.
• Point Build System: The player character doesn't directly get stronger upon leveling up; he/she needs to allocate attribute points and skill points to increase stats or skill effectiveness.
• Poisoned Weapons: The Rogue mastery can do this at will, and it's really useful if paired with the Throwing Knives skill, or a bow, which just happens to work nicely with this mastery in general.
• Poor Communication Kills: At first, it looks like the conflict between Scandia and the Aesir is this, as both sides are attacking each other without trying to talk it out. However, everyone, including yourself, were the victims of Loki's machinations.

• Power Glows: Aside from aura effects when using skills, bosses tend to have a special aura to make themselves more visible.
• Powerful Pick: Undead in the Salt Mines use pickaxes against the player. Comparatively, these pickaxes are weak, as they lack even Monster Invariant versions.
• Prongs of Poseidon: Naturally, Tridents show up as Spear-type weapons in the hands of Merfolk, some of which who have left their god Poseidon to pillage the human world. Poiseidon's personal trident, The Earth-Shaker, is encountered as a Legendary weapon.
• Protection Mission: In the expansion, you have to protect a banner from three waves of Demonic Spiders. You get unlimited retries if you fail.
• Public Domain Artifact: Given Titan Quest's mythological setting, most of the unique item drops reference the appropriate myths, usually with similar bonuses.
• Public Domain Character: Almost all of them, since they are from mythology.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: It makes no difference to the gameplay whether the player character is a man or woman. Dialogue will still be the same. The only difference is that some speedrun glitches require one gender.
• Purple Is Powerful: Legendary-tier items, considered the best in the game, are designated by purple text.
• Puzzle Boss: Typhon, as you have to destroy the statues surrounding him (or at least keep him away from them) in order to keep him from gaining new abilities. This is removed in the expansion however, but luckily his abilities are nerfed.
• Ragdoll Physics: Titan Quest is known for being one of the first Action RPGs to include ragdoll physics. With enough physical damage you can punt corpses all over the ancient world.
• Rainbow Pimp Gear: The Easter Egg items have this in spades. They have incredible bonuses, at the "cost" of having to run around the ancient world dressed up as a cowboy, pirate, Sherlock Holmes, Santa, or a mix of all four.
• Randomly Drops: Being a Dungeon Crawler Action RPG, all of the unique loot spawns randomly on enemies or in chests.
• Rat Men: Ratmen are a type of Beastman enemy, which are mostly found in caves and dungeons in Act I and III.
• Real Event, Fictional Cause: The collapse of the Colossus of Rhodes is attributed to the gods protecting humans from an attacking kraken.
• Real Is Brown: Averted. You're going to travel through vivid green jungles, shiny ice caverns, vibrant surreal landscapes in the Underworld and other exotic locales. Even in the second Act, which is set in Egypt and its sand deserts, you'll find plenty of colorful areas, mostly around the shores of the Nile.
• Reality Is Unrealistic: The North feels less classically ancient and more medieval, even though it is fairly faithful to the looks of historical northern Europe at the time.
• Red Baron: Most of the enemy bosses have titles of various kinds.
• Redshirt Army: Just to show off how powerful the enemies are, the Redshirt Army consists of Spartans.
• Regenerating Health: For both players and some monsters:
  • At the start of the game, you regenerate 2 health points every second. Various skills and gear can affect your rate by lowering or increasing it.
  • Certain types of Satyrs in the Helos area regenerate health, but not most.
• Replay Value: As of Ragnarök, the game has 10 masteries, the Combinatorial Explosion of 45 dual masteries, and multiple possible playstyles per mastery. There are many different ways to replay the game.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: The serpentoids in Atlantis. They are hostile enemies and their cult worship the snake god, Tiamat.
• Rings of Death: The Ragnarök expansion adds Razor Rings, a class of throwable weapons.
• Rise from Your Grave: Skeletons will unearth themselves if disturbed by the player or one of his/her pets. Bog Dwellers and Trolls will behave similarly, even if they aren't undead.
• Roar Before Beating: Jackelman Berserkers will occasionally howl before charging into battle.
• Robbing the Dead: There are plenty of crypts around the world of Titan Quest with plenty of gold and equipment inside. Or they could be trapped.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: Unlike most uses of this trope, Giant Rats don't show up in the early stages of the game; instead, Rat Men do. Giant Rats only properly show up in Act V.
• RPGs Equal Combat: The quests the game give you can be described succinctly as "talk to NPC, beat monster, get MacGuffin, return to NPC." There is a grand total of one quest ("Celtic Plaid") that doesn't involve dungeon crawling, and that's only in the "Ragnarök" expansion.
• Rule of Animation Conservation: Exploited. A Titan Quest developer has explained how Event Flags couldn't be triggered with a delay after an event, but it was possible to fake it by putting a long animation between the trigger and the event. The ambient animals around the map aren't there just for immersion purposes but are also there to make events timed right.
• Sadly Mythtaken: An NPC encountered at the beginning of the game states that Atlas held up the world. He actually held up the heavens.
• Save Scumming:
  • Some quests give out in higher difficulties have an increased chance of giving a unique item as a quest reward. It is possible to redeem the quest reward and restart without saving until the unique item Randomly Drops. This can be preferable to farming the item normally, given that quest rewards are limited to one equipment type, cutting down the drop pool.
  • The game discourages players pausing the game before certain death and quitting by making Death a Slap on the Wrist. Only people who are trying to complete a No Death Run tend to resort to this.
  • The community considers this No Fair Cheating in Self Imposed Challenges.
• Scenery Porn: The graphics are astounding for their time (2006), especially for a game that is best played with the camera as far overhead a possible. The lighting and texture work, coupled with some impressive views scattered around the game, create some extremely nice pictures that are very rare in the genre.
• Schmuck Bait:
  • The Ragnarök expansion adds booby-trapped treasure chests that damage the player instead of spitting out loot.
  • There is an unusually-placed Majestic Chest in the middle of the Teutoburg Forest. Upon opening it, the player character is ambushed by Robbers.
• Sea Monster: Act V's first mandatory boss is against the Ketos named Porcus, who's attacking the harbour. It's a gigantic hybrid of board and moray eel who can spit poison and summon reinforcements. It's also the first time in the game when you fight an enemy bound to a body of water.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Quest items can be transferred between characters, allowing the player to complete quests earlier than usual on a secondary character. This is especially convenient in the "Hades Treasury" quest, where the stones needed to unlock the treasury drop far ahead in the act, to a few rooms before the act final boss.
  • It's possible to use Colossus Form to glitch through otherwise-quest-locked gates for speedrunning.
• Set Bonus: Some unique items are parts of sets, and equipping more items that belong to the set give more perks. Note that these items don't have to be different. E.g., if one item is a weapon and you can Dual Wield, the set bonus can be given by wielding two copies of the weapon.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story:
  • The first part of Act II revolves around helping Imhotep perform an invocation ceremony as a substitute for the lost scrying pool. After two or three quests' worth of beating up Telkine thralls and recovering the needed artifacts... the ceremony completely fails.
  • A side-quest in Act III involves finding a peaceful hermit mage in the depths of Jinghe Valley, only to find his dwelling ransacked by monsters and the mage gone.
• Shock and Awe: The bulk of the Stormcaller's powers, mixed with Kill It with Ice.
• Shockwave Stomp: Cyclopes use this attack. Talos has a variant of this that literally sends out a shockwave.
• Shoot the Mage First: A magic caster in a group of enemies tends to be either the Glass Cannon and/or The Medic. Killing the caster first makes dealing with the rest of the crowd easier.
• Shout-Out:
  • Nikias, Betrayer of Sparta (a spectre boss from the expansion) may be a nod to 300.
  • Elite Gorgons tend to have a rattle on their tails, kinda like Clash of the Titans (2010).
  • One of random battlecry of the bandit is "Fresh meat!"
  • One of the chakrams is the Chakram of the Lawless. It is Xena's chakram and it's suitably an Epic difficulty item.
  • Another chakram (Death's Wings) resembles a miniature version of Eiserne Drossel, Tira's ring blade.
  • The bow Telliam's Will, to the William Tell legend.
• Shown Their Work: Most of the time, concerning locations and weapons, with some exceptions. (i.e. the Shamshir being a cleaver-like falchion, while the Real Life one is a long, curved scimitar). Some artistic liberties were also taken, especially regarding monsters.
• Sinister Scimitar: Most of the swords ingame are curved, so it's both played straight (by the countless monsters) and averted (if you equip your hero with a curved blade).
• Skeleton Key: Beating the Warden of Souls causes him to drop the Key of the Warden of Souls, which allows you to unlock any imprisoned shades (and get any chests inside the cell).
• Skill Point Reset: The player can visit a Mystic, designated by the a blue sphere over the NPC's head, to remove points invested into skills. Each skill point requires an increasing amount of money to remove, until it caps out at 45,000 gold.
• Skippable Boss: In multiple ways:
  • Technically, any bosses encountered through side-quests don't need to be beaten and thus count.
  • Every boss in Greece up to the Gorgon Queens can be run past. The Queens differ because the door to the way forward is Kill Enemies to Open.
• Slaying Mantis: Big giant mantis are preying on you in Act 3.
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The expansion adds some silly, funny letters that can be randomly dropped by certain monsters, including the letter of a satyr to his mother, the journal of a teenage maenad and an apology letter written by a troglodyte.
• Smash Mook: Cyclopes essentially fill this role, as do Troglodytes in act IV.
• Snake People: The serpentoids are humanoids snakes with four limbs and a tail.
• Snake Talk: The serpentoids speaks like this by rolling the "s".
• Socketed Equipment: A single charm or relic can be applied to each piece of equipment, providing different stat bonuses.
• Sole Survivor: Acrocatus is last living human of Atlantis.
• Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Equipment stats monotonically increase the further a player progresses, meaning that the weapons found in a small Asian village in Act III are much better than those forged by the battle-ready Spartans in Act I. Corinth is on the same map as the rest of Greece, but as it is only accessible in Act V, the equipment that can be purchased there are effectively one difficulty level better.
• Sound of No Damage: Any damage blocked by a shield gives off a satisfying "Clink!" sound.
• Spell Blade: The player can find weapons enchanted with elemental damage effects, and can additionally make their own by inserting the right Relic or Charm.
• Spell My Name with an "S": Ragnarok can't seem to decide whether to use modern or older romanization for the name of gods.
• Spider People: Arachnos have humanoid upper bodies and spider-like lower bodies. They specialize in Poison damage and trapping. The Tropical Arachnos have brighter bodies and helms that give them the head of a tarantula.
• Spread Shot: Several skills let the player fire multiple projectiles at the same time, such as Volley (for Hunting), Thunder Strike (for Runes), and Ternion Attack (for Spirit).
• Sprint Shoes: Leg armor sometimes gives bonuses to movement speed.
• Starter Equipment: Starting with a fresh new character will give you a small puny dagger, nothing more.
• Stat Sticks: Some weapons have enchantments that boost something besides weapon damage, such as elemental damage, pet damage, resistances, or dodge chance. For spell-based and pet-based classes, the player character might not use the weapon's attack at all and only use the weapon for the perks.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option:
  • Haerig, the town guard of Heuneberg who welcomes the player character, asks that the player character not talk to the town chief, as he's very busy. Naturally, the only way to continue the main quest is to talk to him.
  • Lili implores that the player character not proceed into Nerthus's lands, but that's the only way forward.
• Subsystem Damage: Armor values work this way, with each attack having a percentage chance of hitting head, body, arm, or leg armor, and the damage inflicted calculated as a function of the equipment in that slot.
• Summon Magic: Almost all the magic-related class can summon creatures to help them, ranging from melee creatures (Wolves and Depth Dwellers) to range creatures with magical skills (Nymphs and Liche Kings). Some enemies will summon other creatures to help them out. Last but not least, scrolls in the Expansion will allow you to summon useful (and temporary) escorts.
• Super Weapon, Average Joe: Mooks can spawn wielding an Infinity +1 Sword, and the player has to kill that mook to collect the item. Woe betide the player who is unprepared for having that very weapon used against him/her!
• Surplus Damage Bonus: Enemies will be sent flying depending on how much extra physical damage is done. A Seer can bowl down waves of enemies with maxed-out Distortion Wave.
• Suspiciously Specific Denial: One of the merchants in the Underworld will assure you, in a not-quite-convincing tone, that he is not selling supplies to the daemon army.
• Swamps Are Evil: Usually infested by Ichthian and other unpleasant monsters. This is taken Up to Eleven in the Stygian Marshes in Hell.
• Take That, Us: The various monsters you meet in the Secret Passage and Primrose's Passage are all named after the creators and developers of the game.
• Take Your Time: There're no timed missions of any kind in the game. Even the sidequests that revolve around saving a NPC in danger aren't timed. At only one point in the game you're required to do something quickly, but if you fail to do so, you simply have to deal with a few additional enemies during a boss fight.
• Taken for Granite: In the Pythian Caves and the ruin nearby, the area is cluttered with statues of people and monster (a Cyclops) turned to stone by the Gorgon Queens. Also, Medusa has a petrifying gaze as her special attack that can turn the player to stone for a few seconds.
• Technicolor Death: Many act bosses encountered during the Main Quest have dramatic deaths. The Telkines shrink and explode into light, Typhon dramatically reaches for skies and burns away into bones, and Hades explodes into motes of light. Surtr's death animation is less flashy, with him just fading into wisps of flame.
• Technicolor Toxin: Poison is universally represented by a vibrant green color.
• Tech Tree: The skill masteries in Titan Quest are more like Tech Stalks. Masteries have base skills and modifier skills, but no "branches". The player has to unlock the prerequisite skill to invest points in modifier skills.
• Theme Naming: The Ronzer's Gift set of The Fragile and The Frail, a ring and bracelets that reduce the player's abilities in exchange for more Intelligence.
• Thriving Ghost Town: Given software limitations, even the capitals of civilizations are rendered as the size of a small village with a dozen NPCs.
• Three-Stat System: Strength Dexterity and Intelligence, each one being of differing use depending on which of the Fighter, Mage, Thief archetypes your character build ends up leaning towards.
• The Time of Myths: Monsters still roam the land, though they were originally more passive, and the gods still commune with mortals.
• Too Awesome to Use: With the Ragnarök expansion, the player can improve a Rare/Legendary item just once per difficulty level. This limit, as well as the random nature of improved stats, makes many players feel like the perk is never worth using.
• Too Important to Walk: In Hades, you meet the shade of a nobleman who complains about afterlife services: Charon has left his post and no longer ferry souls across the Styx. When you resolve the problem, the shade is upset that he has to walk to get into the ferry.
• Took a Level in Badass: Look at your hero at the beginning of act I, then look again at him at the end of said act. The same goes with certain types of mooks. For examples you first meet ratmen as a race of pathetically weak scumbags in Greece, but later you'll fight with their stronger cousins in Babylon.
• Top-Heavy Guy: Troglodytes, who also have an oversized arm and a smaller one. Male characters sport this as well, but it's not as obvious.
• Trick Arrow: Hunters can enhance their arrows, allowing them to pierce through targets and even explode in various damaging fragments upon impact, making them deadly against groups of enemies.
• Twinking: The in-game caravan allows players to transfer equipment between characters. There are level restrictions on equipment to prevent twinked characters from trivializing the game. It's still effective to twink a character to get him/her up to speed, however.
• Ultimate Forge: The Master Forge Chamber is the only place in the game the player can improve Rare- and Legendary-tier equipment, and even that's limited to one item per difficulty level, and one random improvement per item.
• The Unchosen One: The player character is a random fellow (not even a Helot as he shows up in Helos apparently looking for something that is never mentioned again) who just happens to become amazingly skilled in combat and capable of casting powerful magic during his journeys. You start the game clad in a tunic and with Starter Equipment of just a knife.
• Underground Monkey: Happens with certain types of mooks:
  • You start with Satyrs, the Dark Satyrs, then Mountain Satyrs. And so on.
  • Act I Arachnos have Act III counterparts in Tropical Arachnos.
  • Corpulent Djinns are green, Poison-element versions of the Frost-element Djinn. Instead of appearing up in later stages, they both spawn in the same places in Act III.
  • Typhon is fought as a boss again in Act IV after coming Back from the Dead.
  • In the Ragnarök expansion, the player returns to Greece for the first part of the act. Most of the enemies there are reskinned versions of original Greek enemies.
  • Carrion Crow -> Mad Crow
  • Gorgons -> Tritones
  • Mud Spitter -> Mud Spitter
  • Karkinos -> Pale Karkinos
  • Harpy -> Isthmus Harpy
  • Centaur -> Fierce Centaur
  • Eurynomus -> Bodyfeaster
• Underused Game Mechanic:
  • Sleep Resistance, Petrification Resistance, and, on pets, Mind Control Resistance exist but are woefully underused. Only Megalesios and Ithsmus Harpy ~ Siren can mind-control pets, only the Gorgon Queens boss trio petrify, and no enemy uses Sleep to stop the player character when Stun and Freeze are more common.
  • Bleeding and Poison have "instant" variants that don't deal Damage Over Time. Only one weapon, Fafnir's Teeth, released in the Ragnarök expansion, deals Instant Poison damage, and the only other option is for the player to equip Freyja's Coronet to add Instant Poison damage to attacks.
  • The game features an option for PVP combat, but that option is buried far away from the light of day.
• Unnecessarily Large Interior: Justified by the setting.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Averted—one selling point of this game is that all enemies will drop the equipment they have, whether it be junk, unique, or an artifact.
  • Played straight with the crossbow and cannon wielding Dvergr in Ragnarok, which you can't pick up.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: No one in town react to your traveling companions either they be wolves, a Liche king, a Core Dweller, a Storm Wisp, a Sylvan Nymph or a nightmarish flying... thingy.
• Updated Re-release: 10 years after the original release, Titan Quest Anniversary Edition is now on sale. Sports technical improvements, bug fixes, skill rebalance, new monster heroes, a larger stash and more.
• Upgrade Artifact: A large variety of items boost the player character's skills so long as the player character equips them.
• Useless Useful Spell
  • The Rogue's Disarm Trap skill. This passive skill reduce the damage you receive from traps. Except traps aren't that deadly and are immobile.
    • On the other hand, it also allows you to do extra damage to them, and in the expansion there are some late-level, extremely powerful monsters encountered in Hades that are classified as "Device", just like traps. Anniversary Edition upgraded it so it works on Constructs as well, helpful against Talos.
  • The Spirit Mastery's Enslave Spirit skill. Mind-controlling enemies to fight for the player sounds useful, but bosses are immune to the effect, so the player is essentially controlling one Mook to fight against hordes of other enemies. In addition, the effect only works on enemies no more than five levels above the player's. It doesn't take long for even the average Mook exceed the spell's level cap.
  • Any weapon that deals a Percent Damage Attack will be resisted by bosses.
• Utility Weapon: Onager is a unique Rare axe with unexceptional bonuses for damage. It does, however, give a whopping +22 health and mana regeneration, ideal for regeneration-focused builds.
• Verber Creature:
  • Dune Raiders are more of a description than a name, but what would you otherwise call a Knife Nut demon that speeds around the desert?
  • Shadowstalkers are demons that emerge from inky black shadows. They're the favored minions of several Flunky Bosses like Yaoguai.
  • Nightstalkers are completely unrelated to Shadowstalkers. They worship the night, but they look more like the Jackelmen or werewolves than demons.
• Videogame Caring Potential:
  • Scattered around Hades are Soul Cages, which contain trapped Shades. While some of the Shades inside are NPCs, most of them have no plot significance. The only reason the player can choose to release the Shades is to do a Good Thing (well, and an achievement).
  • The quest "Wine from the Rhine" ends when you give Cunobelenus the wine Borbeto made. It's completely optional to let Borbeto know what Cunobelenus thought about it, but he thanks the player for coming back and giving him the news.
• Video Game Perversity Potential: Titan Quest is made to be moddable. It's no surprise that one of the earliest and most popular mods edit the player models to be more Stripperiffic.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: Inverted. City guards don't improve level and armor the higher the difficulty is, making them incredibly squishy.
• The Voice: Zeus speaks with the player after defeating Typhon but does not appear in person.
• Wallet of Holding: The player character can carry hundreds of millions of gold coins on his/her person. In higher difficulties, it's not uncommon to find thousands of gold coins in a pile of bones, and for merchants to sell a piece of armor for a wheelbarrow's worth of gold coins.
• Warm-Up Boss: The satyr shaman on the outskirts of Helos, which is always fought near two shrines which offer some form of healing.
• Water Source Tampering: Similar to Diablo, you receive a sidequest where you must clear a lair of monsters that have tainted the town's water supply.
• Weapon of X-Slaying:
  • The "of Necromancy" modifier gives bonus damage against Undead.
  • The "of Demonology" modifier gives bonus damage against Demons.
• We ARE Struggling Together: As a scholar in Athens muses, the Telkines' armies have caused a strong camaraderie between the Greek cities that would normally be at each other's throats.
• Welcome to Corneria: Each NPC has several unique lines that he/she will say if the player interacts with them repeatedly, but once they run out, they will repeat the same "goodbye" line.
• Whatever Mancy: Necromancy, geomancy and venomancy just to name a few.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: One useless unique drop is the Letter from Beastman Archer #783, in which the hapless beastman points out that someone's been killing everyone and taking all their stuff and money, which is why they have so much crappy equipment.
• When Trees Attack: Plants are a category of enemy which start showing up in Act III which tend to deal piercing and poison damage.
  • Ascacophus make up Medea's guards and a type of enemy found in Act IV, which are large, humanoid trees with piercing attacks.
  • The Nightblossom is a unique boss found in the swamps of Soronis. It shoots high-damage blades when a player character is in range. A Fetch Quest requires a petal from the Nightblossom to use as a potion reagent.
• The Unpronounceable: Hero Formicid names are a both Punctuation Shakers and vowelless, sounding like an insect's clicks.
• Winged Humanoid: Several monsters, like Harpies, Desert Hags, Pengs,Empusae and Valkyries.
• Wolfpack Boss: The gorgon queens in mid-late Act I. Also the Graeae during act IV.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: No matter what, you can't stop Megalesios from destroying the scrying pool connecting the mortal and divine realms.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The daemons in Hades keep shades trapped by making shades believe they are only limited to their mortal abilities. Admetus is able to use his imagination to free himself from his prison.
• Your Size May Vary: Used with weapons: weapons wielded by larger enemies like reptilians or the Yerren appears huge and gigantic, but they turn into their regular size when dropped.
• Zombie Apocalypse: The dead rise from remote graveyards to haunt the living, summoned by Telkine magic (act I-III). In Act IV, Hades is deemed responsible for the current state of things, while in Ragnarök it's implied that the living dead are a result of the Aesir's war against mankind.
• Zerg Rush: The main strategy of large enemy groups. And they can be deadly later on, especially when there's an artillerist behind them.