The Road To 1.0

Heroes!

In our last post we announced the Titan Quest II launch date as the 19th of January 2027.

Now, we want to talk about what the 1.0 version will include and also give an overview of what’s planned until then.

Final Chapter: Taygetos Mountains

In the final chapter, it’s time to fulfil the prophecy and kill Nemesis before she completes her apocalyptic plans.

You’ll need to hunt her down in the Taygetos Mountains, snowy peaks home to the Cyclopes: an ancient race of monsters that Nemesis has turned into her private army. They're divine craftsmen to rival Hephaistos himself, and are supported by Automatons, mechanical fighters that help them run their giant, volcanic forges. You’ll have to cut your way through them all, and a few nasty surprises, to reach Nemesis.

This fifth and final chapter of the game will contain new bosses, environments, enemies and rewards, and will bring the conflict between the God-Marked and the Goddess of Retribution to its epic conclusion.

Endgame

We will also include our first Endgame activity for characters that have completed the campaign. While Titan Quest II will not turn into a season-based Endgame grinder, we still want to offer an incentive to keep going after the main story.

Improving your character further and further to beat the steepest of challenges is important for a lot of you.

For this we introduce a little bit of Kaos into the world. After completing a small quest you can activate so called “Kaos Curses” to increase difficulty in various ways. These Curses will buff stats of enemies, debuff your stats, add abilities to enemies, and more. You will be able to choose which Curses to activate to suit your build's strengths and weaknesses.

The more Kaos Curses you activate, the more rewards you will be able to get. In addition, at certain thresholds you will unlock new Endgame-specific activities that offer special rewards.

These rewards allow you to perform newly added Endgame crafting actions that will allow you to further upgrade your Relics and Charms and hunt for that perfectly rolled one.

Languages

We are also working on adding the final set of languages.

For 1.0, Titan Quest II will have support for text translations in the following languages:

Chinese (simplified), Czech, English, French, German, Polish, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Ukrainian

In addition we are adding voice-over for German.

Itemization

We are going to continue to improve our itemization on multiple levels. Our main goals here are to make it more exciting to find special items in the game and make the power progression feel more rewarding.

Concretely, we are looking at the following changes:

• Increase Affix Limit: We will increase the amount of affixes on items by 2. Until now Rare and Infrequent items were limited to 4 affixes. Now they can roll up to 6! This should greatly increase the variety and hopefully make hunting for them and crafting onto bases more exciting.
• Epic Armors: This, obviously, is a big one. We will add Epic Armors to the game that can offer build-enhancing synergies and a lot of power! We have brought some small teasers for these below.
• Change to Epics: We also wanted to improve the experience of epics in general. The most important part for Epics is to have a strong, unchangeable core of lore and power. When you find them, you want to know what you get and that it will be useful for the builds that want them. What this can mean though, is that repeated finds of a specific Epic become much less exciting, which becomes a problem in long term play. For this reason we will add a tiny bit of variance to Epics. They will now drop with two randomly rolled affixes in addition to their fixed core. This means the majority of every Epic is fixed and predictable, whereas a small part is left to the gods. This allows for potential godly rolls on Epics that are very rare, keeping the excitement of dropping them alive without sacrificing their unique flavor and identity.
• Rare Affixes: We are adding a whole new set of “Rare Affixes”. These usually have 2 powerful effects instead of one and an item can have a maximum of 2 (one prefix and one suffix). While these will be rare, they can make dropping items a lot more exciting. You will also be able to see directly if an item has Rare Affixes when checking its loot plate on the floor. Making sure you never miss these rare drops.
• New Affixes: In addition we are adding a set of normal affixes to round out the pool, giving better support for mechanics like Lifesteal. We are also adding things like flat Spell Damage and other affixes we felt were missing.
• Rework Infrequents: Most of our Infrequents weren’t as exciting as they should be, as their implicits sometimes were too niche. We are reworking the existing Infrequents to make them stronger and will also be adding new Infrequent Items to the game so you can target-farm the perfect items for your build better.
• Endgame Crafting: As teased above we will also offer certain crafting options that can be accessed via our Endgame. What these are will be revealed at a later date.

With all of these changes coming to items we want to address what this means for existing items and characters.

We have debated a lot on how to best handle this. Ultimately we decided that we are not going to re-roll existing items with these changes. We don’t want to change what you have farmed for and potentially worsen your build in the process, even if there is a chance for an upgrade as well. For this reason we will mark existing items with a “Legacy” tag and anything that drops from that moment on will contain the new rules and additions.

Epic Armor Examples

To finish the item section let’s take a look at some of those Epic Armors we have been talking about!

Epic Armors will exist in different types, some focussing on good stats to improve certain builds, while others open up unique interactions or trigger skill-like effects.

They also contain a preview of the 2 randomly rolled affixes, which you can see at the bottom.

Labyrinthine Armor can potentially be a staple for builds using the Overwhelm mechanic, allowing you to benefit twice after building it up once, while offering a solid set of defensive stats.

Demonskin Walkers are a great set of Boots when going for Doom builds. They allow easier application of Doom via Movement Skills and also in turn reduce their Cooldowns.

Helm of Aristomenes is great for Spirit-Based Summoner Builds. It helps your Shade economy, while also boosting Summon Capacity. The free Energy Reservation makes it easier to support a large amount of Summons and Auras. Note that with the Tier Unlock changes (mentioned below) other Masteries will also get to use Shades when paired with Spirit, if you choose to pick the according Modifiers.

Mastery and Player Systems

We are also looking into improvements for the heart of our game: The Masteries.

Overall we are looking at a lot of changes, but here are the high-level goals:

• Increase Mastery Synergy: We want to improve how your two Masteries synergize together. We want to give more incentive to hybridize between the choices.
• Clearer Mastery Identity: Our goal is to increase the identity of each Mastery. Your choices should matter more and offer unique opportunities for each Mastery.
• Better User-Friendliness: The Titan Quest II Mastery system can be a bit daunting at first. You have a lot of actives and passives and especially for newer users it can be difficult to find the right direction to go in. We want to improve this experience for newcomers and veterans alike.
• Increase Balance: We want to increase balance across the board. Underused abilities should become better and more powerful to use. And abilities that are far too strong need to be reined in a bit, so the rest can shine beside them. There will be a major balance pass for 1.0.

So, how do we plan to achieve these goals?

• Mastery Tier Mechanics: Each Mastery will have 2 powerful global unlocks on Mastery Tier 2 and 3. Usually these will be tied to a specific mechanic that we think this Mastery should excel at. These will define the identities and also increase synergy between Masteries, as they will unlock access to unique modifiers related to this mechanic across BOTH Masteries. So for example you will unlock the “Frost Lightning” Mechanic on Tier 2 Storm (an adjusted version of the currently existing Lightning Strikes). This will then allow you to add Frost Lightning related Modifiers to both of your Masteries, not only the Storm abilities. With this we will also be adding a couple of new mechanics (for example a “Glory” mechanic for Warfare that unlocks buffs when killing enemies) that should more strongly define their identity.
• Passive Reworks: We are reworking the passive trees. We want your choices to feel more meaningful, so we are moving to a system with less passive points, but more powerful feeling choices. Especially feats should feel more meaningful when unlocked. This is why we will roll out the Feat-System we already tried for Spirit, where every Passive will have a much larger choice of Feats so you can always pick the one that’s right for your build.
• Search Functionality: We have added search functionality to the Mastery Screen. You can use free-text search or keyword search to find anything you need. This should greatly increase your ability to build-craft and find the perfect feats and modifiers for what you are looking for.
• Rebalancing and Reworks: We are taking a look at a lot of abilities' balance and modifiers. This will include energy cost adjustments (for example Exhaust will become optional via Modifiers), addition of cooldowns to certain abilities (which gives you a nice goal to reduce it via Cooldown Reduction on Items), adjusting power of abilities and sometimes adding or adjusting Modifiers. The goal here is to give abilities that were lacking a much needed shot in the arm.
• Other Reworks: We will also rework some of the existing systems to make them more applicable. Barrier will get a streamlining pass to work better as a “passive” defense layer that always helps you, even if you didn’t manually activate it. Glancing Hits will become more present and be featured more within Masteries and on Items. They will offer the 3rd main defensive layer besides Armor and Barrier. There will also be many other smaller changes like this.

This is a lot to take on and we are pushing as hard as we can to make this happen. We will continue to work on these topics even after 1.0 and of course improve the game on the systemic side as needed based on your feedback.

Creatures and World

Our goal here is to increase creature variety and make it more exciting to travel through Titan Quest II’s beautiful world by adding slight elements of randomization via Hero Monsters and Buff Shrines.

• New Mini-Factions: We are adding Harpies and Satyrs as small factions. These will be spread throughout the existing world to increase creature variety and add more of that mythological feeling you all are craving. These factions will be a bit smaller in creature numbers initially, but be bolstered throughout future development post 1.0.
• Encounter-Pass: We will also make a pass over earlier Chapters to increase creature variety, density and overall encounter quality.
• Hero Monsters: We will be adding hero monsters that can randomly spawn throughout the world. They will have unique abilities, offer a larger challenge and greater rewards. These are an ARPG classic and we are happy to finally add them to Titan Quest II.
• Buff Shrines: Another ARPG staple. Buff Shrines can appear at certain spots in the world and will give you powerful temporary buffs. Like boosts to experience gained, your overall combat prowess, or defenses.

Performance and Bugs

One major area where we are spending a lot of time on improvements is the game’s performance. We hope to improve stability, framerates and smoothness significantly for the 1.0 launch.

In addition we are also fixing bugs in large amounts, trying to make the game as stable and frictionless as possible!

Road to 1.0

So with all of the major topics we want to touch on out of the way: how will these roll out?

We are currently still planning with 2 minor updates. These will include some of the features mentioned above, but the exact scope is still to be determined depending on how far we progress until that update’s launch date.

Some things are locked in already though, so we can share they will contain:

• Update 1: Buff Shrines and a first set of Hero Monsters.
• Update 2: Some of our Epic Armors, the Mastery Search functionality and PC Multiplayer Lobbies.

We hope that you are as excited as we are about our road to 1.0 and the release of Titan Quest II on January the 19th.

The Titan Quest II Team