A new (beta) patch for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has seen the light of day, adding new multiplayer functionality and renderer updates.

We finally completed our initial chunk of work. We are sorry it took so long but we wanted to do it properly.

Changelog

24th February 2016
- Added new multiplayer and lobby system
- Implemented NAT Traversal and NAT Proxy Connectivity Layer
- GameSpy removed
- Added support for 1280x720 resolution

General & Renderer Improvements:
- Fix shadow acne artifacts
- Fix water shore disco color issue
- Improve shadows (using poisson soft shadows)
- improve editor region selection combobox
- improve lighting
- Re-work shader
- Add shader include support
- Improve Terrain Shader
- Force shader model 3.0
- Add artmanager rebuild menu option
- Improve archive compression level
- Improve archive file buffer size
- Add anisotropic filtering support
- Several small fixes
- Fix mouse pointer out of window issue (ClipCursor)
- Remove virtual memory check

Thanks Neon.

Worthplaying has news of an Unofficial fan patch for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne (55Mb).  I'm not sure we've noticed this before but you can read the notes and grab the file at Worthplaying or read the source forums at TitanQuest.net to find out more.

Are action-RPG's your thing? Then Titan Quest almost certainly scratched that itch for you in 2006! Mike Anderson takes a detailed look at the expansion Immortal Throne in our latest feature.  Here's a snip:

The main quest portion of the game is essentially a linear march to a final battle, yet it is so well wrapped up in the side-quests and diversions along the way that it actually feels more open than the original. The areas you encounter are larger and have multiple paths in and out with side-quests taking you in all directions. You are never in danger of getting lost, but some of the areas are large and challenging enough to be quite exhausting! This is a definite improvement that I noticed immediately when I started a new game after completing the expansion - and it is a highly welcome change, as the highly linear areas in the original tended to become tedious.

Read it all here.

Three new Titan Quest: Immortal Throne reviews have hit the 'net, so here's a list:

• Pro-G - 8/10
• The Gamers Temple - 90%
• Ace Gamez - 8/10

GameBanshee has completed their Titan Quest: Immortal Throne walkthrough for those needing advice with Iron Lore's action/RPG.

Iron Lore's Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has been reviewed at GameBanshee, with the author sounding surprised at the quality of the game.  The score is 8.3/10 and here's a grab:

I actually enjoyed this new act to the campaign more than I thought I would. Iron Lore Entertainment did two important things to make it better. First and foremost, they got the characters from Greek mythology more involved in the story. In Titan Quest, a storyteller would tell you about somebody like Herakles, but you’d never actually meet him or go anywhere where he’d had his adventures. In Immortal Throne, you visit all sorts of people and places. Odysseus and Agamemnon send you on quests, you have to duke it out with Charon and Cerberus, and you get to explore the River Styx and Elysium Fields. For me, this made the act much more involving than before.

Secondly, Iron Lore mixed up the quests a little better. In Titan Quest, just about every quest directed you to wander somewhere and kill something, which wasn’t very exciting, because that’s what you’d do when you weren’t on quests, too. But in Immortal Throne there’s more variety. There are some escort missions, there are some collection missions, and at one point you even have to find keys and pull levers. These aren’t exactly cutting edge concepts, but they go a long way in making the quests feel more like quests, and in breaking up the monotony of the combat. I also think Iron Lore did a nicer job with the ratio of quests to random killings. There are fewer optional caves, and fewer forests filled with nothing but optional creatures to kill, and that’s a good thing.

There's an edited developer chat log on Titan Quest: Immortal Throne at Xfire from a chat that was held a couple of weeks ago.  Iron Lore co-founder Brian Sullivan, designers Shawn Frison and Josh Glavine and Chris from QA answered the community's questions.

88% is the score for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne in GamerOver's review, which uses a bullet point list to discuss the new additions.  Here's t he opening:

I suspect if in the future I’m reviewing another expansion pack, TQ: IT is going to be the yardstick against which I measure it. Everything you would expect from an expansion pack is in here – a new character class (only in TQ they call them Masteries), new monsters, a new adventure, and generally just more stuff around in terms of items, scrolls, artifacts, and that kind of thing. More importantly, to me at any rate, are the numerous small changes they’ve made to the user interface, single and multiplayer, that take some of the tiny annoyances out of the game making the whole experience more fun.

Iron Lore's Titan Quest expansion Immortal Throne has been reviewed at Gameguru Mania.  The score is 84% and here's a grab:

The new act is fine but the real appeal of the expansion comes from all the cool things added to the base game. The big one is the new Dream-Mastery skill set which adds an additional nine player classes to the game. For instance, if you're magic-focused, it's got a trance that will increase your energy regeneration rate, some good passive defense, and some killer new attack skills. If you're melee-focused, it gives you a couple of group-attack skills, boosts to physical damage and defense, and the Phantom Strike skill is great for busting up those deadly groups of archers or mages. If you're a ranged character, you can manage crowds much more effectively with stuns and the new Sleep skill, as well as being able to reflect damage back at attackers or damage them when they get up close to you. The Dream master also gains access to a flying eye pet called the Nightmare that can be used in combat and can also boost the effectiveness of your other pets.

Worthplaying released a review of Titan Quest: Immortal Throne on the weekend with a score of 9/10.  Here's a snip on graphics:

Now that I've spent far longer than I intended describing a single new treasure type, how about I comment on the graphics? After all, this is still the main drawing card for us PC gamer types. Immortal Throne is surprising on this front in that it adds in display upgrades. Most expansions don't actually tinker with the engine at all, opting to merely give you more of what you've already seen. Well, Iron Lore has done this too — there's still an excess of beautifully detailed environments and tons of new models with less "recycling" than I expected. However, there are also a host of new upgrades to the 3D that pushes the entire experience up a notch or two: enhanced bloom lighting, tightened texture details, all new particle effects, and greatly increased reflection shaders. Going back and re-playing Greece, Egypt, Babylon, and China is more gorgeous than ever.

7.5/10 is the score for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne in gameSlave's review:

New content is great, but as ever it's in the nuances and changes that really make an expansion shine. Immortal Throne adds a host of important features absent from Titan Quest, simultaneously taking the game to new heights and improving the original experience even further. Of these changes, most important is the introduction of caravan drivers. Essentially a travelling bank, their presence will be welcome relief to those adventurers who simply have too much gear to carry. Drop of some items with one caravan driver and you can go and fetch it again from any other you encounter in the game world. In addition, there's a transfer area of storage - where you can store items to be transferred across characters. No longer do you have to throw away that amazing staff, just because your dumb brute of a warrior only knows how to cleave skulls with an axe. No, now you simply pop it into the transfer area for use by another character. It's a small change, but an absolute blessing for anyone who intends to play through the game more than once.

Describing it as "solid", Jolt has reviewed Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and awarded a score of 8/10:

All-in-all Immortal Throne is a typically solid expansion pack that adds a fairly considerable amount for both single-player and multiplayer gamers. There are no huge technical leaps or jarring presentational changes, just eight-or-so hours of extra content and some convenient and entertaining additions to the core gameplay. Of course, it’s much, much more of the same and other than having highly detailed graphics and comprehensive audio, Immortal Throne does just as little to advance the genre as Titan Quest did. A Gold Edition is available and will save you a few quid over buying the games separately, but you won’t get your money’s worth unless you’re prepared to spend a few dozen hours and what is little other than a very good Diablo clone.

'B+' is the score for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne in UGO's review:

One of the first things you might notice with Immortal Throne is that you now have a personal bank and a shared one. The personal one can be expanded twice for increasing sums of gold, and it winds up adding a sizable amount of space for your character. But your total capacity is even greater once you realize that you can create new characters and run them to the first village - then you can just drop items into the shared bank, switch characters, then pull them out of the shared slots on your new "mule" characters. These kind of features were added with external third-party utilities in the original Titan Quest, but now it's all done in game.

THQ gives an example of great customer support by making an English language mod available for German Titan Quest or TQ: IT players. The mod replaces all German texts and voices with their English equivalent. Of course the whole thing is unsuported - use at your own risk, etc.

A few of the big sites have reviewed Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, with GameSpot turning in a 7.9/10, GameSpy a 4/5, CVG a 7/10 and Yahoo! Games at 4/5.  Let's start with a clip from the first:

Immortal Throne doesn't skip a beat following your defeat of Typhon at the end of Titan Quest. As you descend from Olympus, you find that the world is still in chaos and infested by monsters. So, you continue on your quest to figure out just what in the hell is going on. Turns out, hell is exactly what's going on, as much of Immortal Throne has you hacking and slashing your way through the surprisingly diverse underworld of Hades. You might assume that spending 10 to 15 hours fighting your way through Hades would mean a nonstop barrage of dank, dark dungeons. There's definitely plenty of foreboding areas in Immortal Throne, but there's also a good variety to the environments you'll fight your way through, from the sterling white marble of Rhodes to the flowing golden fields of Elysium. The game isn't shy about appropriating bits and pieces of Greek mythology as it sees fit, pitting you against the three Stygian witches who share a single eye and the three-headed Cerberus that guards the banks of the river Styx, while also having you interact with the sorceress Medea, as well as Greek heroes like Agamemnon, Odysseus, and Achilles.

...and a bit from GameSpy:

Iron Lore did a pretty darn good job in making Dream Mastery fun to use. While most of the original Masteries are pretty focused (i.e. Defense is for tanking, Earth is for nuking), Dream Mastery goes for the "does a little bit of everything, and kicks ass" line of thought. Notable Dream skills are the psionic burn, which adds a significant damage boost to your normal attack; Trances (Titan Quest speak for the Auras from Diablo II's Paladin) that can either boost healing, inflict damage, or even convert damage into health; a slick area-effect attack called Phantom Strike, and a pretty awesome pet (the Nightmare, a floating eye that can confuse monsters and give bonuses to all of your other pets).

...and Tom Chick writing for Yahoo!:

But at least they've given us enough new stuff to warrant another playthrough, plus the ten or so hours it'll take to go through hell. Not to mention the extra time you'll spend collecting ingredients for your artifacts. And then there's the time it'll take to level up a new character with Dream mastery. Plus the new characters you'll want to make to use the great loot you found that you can't use. Diablo 3? Never heard of it. We're too busy playing Titan Quest.

Eurogamer has reviewed Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, awarding the modest score of 7/10 - although that score seems to be partly based on "The Expansion Pack Conundrum" rather than any problems with the game itself:

Ultimately, this is another instance of The Expansion Pack Conundrum. Just what kind of recommendation can a reviewer give regarding something that slightly expands and slightly improves on an original game? Can we really be allowed to say "If you like this sort of thing, you'll like this" and expect to get paid for it? It's a tricky situation. So yeah, the caravan and general interface tweaks (such as inventory auto-sorting) should probably have been in the original game, and they do make the overall experience easier. But you will have to battle through many levels of original material to get to the new chapter, meaning this expansion pack isn't much cop for newbies. Still, I would be lying like a fat-faced liar if I said I didn't enjoy playing Titan Quest again. There's something gripping about the constant surge of beast-slaughter, and who am I to deny such primal urges?

Another good score for Immortal Throne with AtomicGamer's critique awarding 88%.  Here's a clip:

The new skill set included is called Dream Mastery, and it allows you to gain control over time, summon a new pet, and deal damage to your opponents. It's a very well-rounded mastery and combines with the other eight quite nicely. Beyond that, there's also a new item slot for something called an Artifact. You'll have to build these things out of a recipe, completed relics or other items, and a ton of gold, but they add tons of great abilities - they act like a super piece of jewelry. The guy you can build these at also has another feature which will be nice for those who are constantly changing loot: you can now break items away from relics you had put in them. There are two downsides to this in that it costs a lot of money, and you only get to keep either the relic or the item the relic went into. The other one is broken permanently in the process.

The first couple of reviews are in for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne and it seems like Iron Lore may have hit the spot.  1Up is first up with a score of 9/10:

To paraphrase a famous quote, I don't know if I can define "good gameplay," but I know it when I see it. And in 2006, I saw it for many, many late-night, eye-bleeding hours in Iron Lore's ridiculously addictive Titan Quest -- an action-RPG that, like many games before it, stole blatantly from Diablo II -- but unlike the others, Titan Quest utterly nailed that same elusive, indefinable magic groove that made D2 a classic. Put another way, Titan Quest was the first Diablo clone that deserved to not be labeled that way.

Now, Iron Lore returns with Immortal Throne, the first TQ expansion pack, and it's an essential addition -- both to vets and to new players -- fixing nearly everything that needed fixing in the original game, while adding a buttload of new content. Nothing here is mind-blowing...but once again, all the smart choices, cool options, and creative little touches prove that the developers know exactly what they're doing.

Strategy Informer's score is 8/10 and they similarly recommend the title.  Here's a bit on graphics:

Graphically the new underworld location really allows the Titan Quest engine to shine. Not much has changed technically since the original instalment aside from a few new advanced post-processing effects (it is less than a year old after all), but the level of artistry seems to have taken a definite step forward. It may seem a strange decision at first to present Hades in a series of murky blue/grey/green colour schemes rather then the traditional fiery depiction, but in doing so it allows the new content to take on a more diverse and ghostly appearance. This fits particularly well given the amount of spirits or ‘shades’ wandering around the environment looking for a way to gain passage to Elysium or just to cross the River with the hope of being judged. The lighting effects in particular are superbly atmospheric, with a genuine sense of menace coming from some of the building architecture and the angular, piercing shadows cast as a result. Texturing throughout is excellent and the new monster design (some 20 in total) is good, with some genuinely interesting additions to the cast of foes.

Iron Lore's Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has hit NA retail (thanks Worthplaying):

"Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is a thrilling new chapter that weaves together exciting story-driven quests with spectacular new monsters, treasures, and abilities," said Brian Sullivan, president and lead designer, Iron Lore Entertainment. "The expansion refines and builds upon the Titan Quest experience, and we are excited to release it to all our loyal fans worldwide."

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne is now available at retail outlets nationwide for the suggested retail price of $29.99.

With Immortal Throne due to be released next week, GameSpot has written about one more play session:

Aside from the more than 30 quests and the new skills and mastery, there are plenty of subtle tweaks that have been made to the interface of Titan Quest. For one, there's now an auto sort button for your inventory, so you no longer have to manually rearrange all those potions and weapons to figure out where you're going to put your new armor. There's also a caravan in town now, which lets you store items that can be accessed not only by your current character but also by any other characters you have saved on your PC. So if you're playing a caster and you find a killer new sword, you can toss it off to the caravan for your fighter character to pick up.

This interview with Iron Lore's Mike "V" Verrette was overlooked last Friday.  The subject is obviously their Titan Quest expansion, Immortal Throne:

Shack: Tell us about the new environments we'll be exploring in Immortal Throne.

Mike Verrette: Immortal Throne starts off in the Mediterranean where the player will visit places like the war torn city of Rhodes and travel to the grove of the great sorceress Medea in search of the entrance to Hades itself. Those lucky players that manage to gain access to the underworld will need to find passage across the river of Styx, navigate the plains of Judgment where they will eventually be tested to see if they are worthy to gain entrance to the fields of Elysium. Once there, players will ally themselves with some of the greatest heroes Greece has ever known in an attempt to gain access to Hades Palace and determine the source of the demonic army.

The team spent a long time developing the look and feel of Hades. We wanted something that didn't fit into the stereotypical fire and brimstone imagery that people commonly associate with the underworld. Instead we wanted to create an alternate reality where the undead thrived and lived out their eternal days. We wanted a world that had its own architecture, foliage, geology, etc. From the gameplay side we tried to approach the level design from a different perspective -- where we focused more on using elevated gameplay spaces and took full advantage of the three dimensional qualities of the editor and the engine.

Iron Lore's Michael "V" Verrette has chatted to FiringSquad about their upcoming Titan Quest expansion:

FiringSquad: When the time came to develop the expansion pack what were the development team's main goals?

Michael Verrette: We viewed the expansion as an extension of the original Titan Quest. Many of the features and improvements players will find in Immortal Throne were things that we simply could not squeeze into the development cycle for the first game. In fact, the team was already ramping up on Immortal Throne production within a week of going gold on the original Titan Quest so for us it has really been one long project.
Some of the other goals we had for Immortal Throne were to continue the story line and further develop the growing rift between the gods and mankind. We also wanted to provide further character development through an additional skill mastery, more equipment, raised level cap and additional quests.

Iron Lore Big Kahuna Brian Sullivan has penned the third Immortal Throne dev diary for GameSpot, writing about the Underworld:

The expansion begins in front of a temple to Apollo above the city of Rhodes, where Zeus has chosen to return you to the earth. You don't take more than a few steps when a ghostlike figure appears to you out of thin air. It is the shade of Tiresias, greatest of all seers. He tells you that terrible things are going on below, in the realm of Hades, the land of the dead. So you set off on a journey to find an entrance to the underworld. And when you finally get there, you discover there are a lot of things that aren't right, not to mention a massive army poised to invade the surface world!

Iron Lore's Titan Quest expansion Immortal Throne has gone Gold and will hit NA stores on March 5th:

Titan Quest™: Immortal Throne™ Goes Gold

THQ and Iron Lore Entertainment Set to Release Epic Expansion Pack for Critically Acclaimed Titan Quest

AGOURA HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--THQ Inc. (NASDAQ:THQI) today announced that Titan Quest™: Immortal Throne™, the first expansion to the award-winning action role playing game Titan Quest™, has reached the gold master stage of development and is entering manufacturing. Titan Quest: Immortal Throne brings an all-new level of action to the franchise, with new quests, items and classes set within the richly-detailed underworld of Hades. Developed for Windows PC, the game is scheduled to ship to retail outlets worldwide on March 5.

“Titan Quest: Immortal Throne adds a new level of immersion and depth to the franchise, allowing players to delve deep into the Hades underworld,” said Brian Sullivan, president and lead designer, Iron Lore Entertainment. “With a myriad of new class and skill combinations, and over a dozen hours of exciting story-driven content to explore, newcomers and die-hard fans alike will enjoy groundbreaking RPG action.”

About Titan Quest: Immortal Throne

Developed by Iron Lore Entertainment, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne features a rich, original storyline with more than 12 hours of single-player content per difficulty level. New game-play features include an all-new skill mastery that combines with existing masteries to form eight new playable character classes. Titan Quest: Immortal Throne also adds dozens of terrifying new monsters, hundreds of unique weapons and an additional 10 levels of character and skill development.

Also, the German edition is Gold according to THQ.de.  You can also grab a new trailer with 1m of footage at 3D Gamers.

Titan Quest Vault has the latest monthly State of the Game with producer Mark Verrette writing the re-launch of the official site and various press coverage for Immortal Throne.  Here's how he closes:

Other than that we are in great shape to meet our March 5th ship date! The team is catching a little bit of a breather and then we are ramping back up on a whole bunch of stuff that I of course can not talk about!! But that’s how it goes in the ever so glamorous world of video game production.

TQ Vault also added the attribute progression for the new Dream Mastery skill to their info pages.

Iron Lore's Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has been previewed at GameSpot after spending some time with a high-end character:

One of the major new features of Immortal Throne is the new dream mastery. In Titan Quest, there are no distinct class types, such as warrior or thief, as there are in most role-playing games. Instead, there are nine masteries that you pick two of when creating a character. That way, by combining different masteries together, you can create all sorts of interesting character combinations. For example, you can create a magic-wielding fighter if you combine the warfare mastery with the storm, nature, or spirit masteries. The new dream mastery focuses on tapping into the power of the dream realm. For instance, the temporal flux ability lets you accelerate time around your character, letting your character attack more quickly while causing enemies to move more slowly. The trance of convalescence results in increased life recovery and damage absorption for your character and allies. And the distortion wave causes ripples in the fabric of reality, damaging enemies considerably. The new dream mastery is also available if you create a new character in the original game (assuming you have the expansion installed), so you can play with these new abilities from the very beginning if you'd like.

Iron Lore's Titan Quest: Immortal Throne has been previewed at GWN.  Here's a small grab:

All of that is just the beginning of what Iron Lore has in store for us, however.  In order to address some of the concerns of the original game Iron Lore has gone out of its way to set things straight.  For example, in order to help players out with their abundance of loot in the original game, Immortal Throne adds caravans to the mix.  Now when players find themselves overburdened with loot they can store the items via their friendly neighborhood caravan.  Want to retrieve said item?  Simply track down said caravan located in any city within the game.  Or better yet use the caravans to transfer the item to your other characters.

Iron Lore Producer Mike Verrette has penned an article on Hades in the upcoming Titan Quest: Immortal Throne for IGN:

The Immortal Throne expansion pack has a much darker, mysterious, more sinister tone than the original Titan Quest, and we wanted to make sure that fell came across clearly in game world. A major design issue we faced was that we needed to create a mythological world that was technically "underground" but also gave the feeling that it existed in a completely different dimension. On a high level, it was important that we created a new experience for players that would contrast the "fire and brimstone" stereotype that often gets associated with Hades. To the Greeks, Hades was much more alive than the volcanic landscape so often used to depict the Underworld. To help reinforce this distinction, we chose to work with a color palate of blues, greens, purple and grays, rather than the usual. orange, reds and blacks. For us, Hades is a world that was very much alive despite being inhabited by those that were already dead.

Titan Quest Vault has an interview with Iron Lore's Michael Fitch about the upcoming Immortal Throne expansion:

Can a player begin Immortal Throne with a fresh level 1 character?

Michael: You bet. We expect that a lot of players will want to try out the Dream mastery and the various combinations it can form with the existing masteries, so we went back and revisited everything from the very beginning. Caravans, for example, you’ll find starting in good old Helos. Scrolls and artifacts are also available in Greece, but it will probably take new characters some time to build up the gold and materials necessary to make use of those. Of course, you can always slide some nice equipment across using the transfer feature in the caravan interface, so players starting new characters will likely have an easier time of it than they did the first time around.

Iron Lore producer Mike Verrette has been interviewed at GameBanshee about their upcoming Titan Quest expansion, Immortal Throne:

GB: When did development of Titan Quest: Immortal Throne actually begin and where do you currently stand in the expansion's development cycle?

Mike: Production on Titan Quest - Immortal Throne began in early June, just a few short weeks after we went gold on the original Titan Quest. Even while we were wrapping up work on Titan Quest we were already working on creating feature lists and determining what types of changes and improvements we wanted to make in the expansion. That allowed us to really hit the ground running in June. Currently we are working through the final weeks of bug fixing and testing and things are looking really well.

THQ has tossed up an official product page for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne, with a basic list of features and a trailer.

Ian Frazier, the man behind Lazarus and one of the designers on both the original Titan Quest and the Immortal Throne add-on, introduces and explains the new skill of Dream Mastery in a video which shows some actual gameplay as well. Check it out here. 

It's Chapter 2 Dream Mastery. 

Strategy Informer dropped us a line to say they have 28 new screens for Titan Quest: Immortal Throne.

Gamespot editors have posted the second video Designer Diary, this time weighing in at ~52Mb in low-resolution (available for signing on at no cost).

The video spotlights the new Dream Mastery and is hosted by Iron Lore's Gameplay Designer, Ian Frazier. Highlights of the video include:

• The Dream Mastery is a tab is available to any sort of character and any potential build.


• Dream Mastery, while mainly a support tab, can also be used as a primary skill tab as well.


• Players can start from the beginning of the game with Dream Mastery as their main tab.

The vast, desolate stretches of the Plains of Judgment, set among rocky peaks and gaping chasms, are nearly enough to sap even the bravest of will or hope. This is the forbidding waste that, from time immemorial, every soul has crossed to reach the Tower of Judgment, and there be judged. It is also the home of most shades--all whose lives were neither exceptionally good nor terrible. Pale shades linger here and there across the plains, over the centuries and millennia slowly losing the last trace of memory and identity, fading into empty, pale forms.

Head over to Worthplaying for seven new screens from Titan Quest: Immortal Throne.

TQ Vault has noticed a State of the Game post from Iron Lore on the forums that informs Immortal Throne is now in the polishing phase:

Hello Everyone,

First off I want to wish everyone in the community happy holidays from everyone here at Iron Lore. We haven't been hanging out in the forums much this past month as we have been cranking on Immortal Throne. We have moved past the production stage and are now in the optimization, polish and bug fixing stage - and if I may say so - the game is looking pretty sweet!

We have all kinds of press stuff coming your way: dev diaries, designer guides, new web site, screen shots... that should all start rolling out later this month. So life around the office has been pretty busy. In the few hours a day we haven't been working we have been playing some Gears of War - online multiplayer of course - and checking out the Wii. The bowling game happens to be the current favorite, and amazingly enough no one has managed to propel the controller through the 50" flat screen yet.

I"ll be sure to keep everyone posted as more info about TQ Immortal Throne gets released.

~V~

Gamespot has two treats for you today, the first being an official trailer. You can grab it at the link above. It weighs in at approximately 51.5Mb in lo-res.

The second TQ fix comes by way of a Designer Diary #1 giving loyal viewers a look at an overview of The Immortal Throne. Producer Michael Verrette gives the particulars:

In Immortal Throne, players return to the Mediterranean and are eventually sent into the underworld to combat an evil advancing army. We raised the level cap to 75 to allow for natural character growth throughout the expansion levels. Players will journey through historic Rhodes and Epirus, transverse the famed river Styx, cross the Plains of Judgment, and clash swords with the generals of the dark army on the famed fields of Elysium. These levels comprise 15 hours of new gameplay at each difficulty level, as well as more than 30 new quests.

The expansion will still feature the fast-paced, action-oriented gameplay found in the original Titan Quest, and the loot-collecting is better than ever. We have added over 400 new pieces of equipment. There are new affixes for weapons, new relics and charms, and 20 new monster types to hunt for rare loot. Caravans now travel between all the major cities providing players with added storage space for collecting items they may not wish to carry with them at all times. Additionally, caravans will enable players to transfer items between their characters.

Gamestar has eye candy from the Titan Quest addon Immortal Throne.

The previously-revealed Titan Quest expansion titled Immortal Throne has now been officially unveiled:

Titan Quest: Immortal Throne Scheduled to Release in Early 2007

 

AGOURA HILLS, Calif., Nov. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- THQ Inc. (Nasdaq: THQI - News) today announced that Titan Quest(TM): Immortal Throne(TM), the first expansion to the critically acclaimed Titan Quest(TM), is currently in development and is scheduled to release worldwide in early 2007. Titan Quest: Immortal Throne expands on the popular original property, transporting the epic story from the swamps of the Mediterranean to the depths of Hades.

"The summer release of Titan Quest marked a strong global success for THQ on both a critical and commercial level," said Bob Aniello, senior vice president of worldwide marketing, THQ. "Titan Quest: Immortal Throne will provide the large existing fan base with exciting new content."

"We're excited to continue working with THQ to provide fans with the fast-paced, story-driven gameplay that made Titan Quest a global success," said Brian Sullivan, president and lead designer, Iron Lore Entertainment. "With eight new character classes, an entirely new epic underworld to explore, and dozens of other new features, the expansion takes the game's character development and player immersion to the next level."

About Titan Quest: Immortal Throne

Developed by Iron Lore Entertainment, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne features a rich, original storyline with more than 12 hours of single-player content per difficulty level. New gameplay features include an all-new skill mastery that combines with existing masteries to form eight new playable character classes. Immortal Throne also adds dozens of terrifying new monsters, hundreds of unique weapons and an additional 10 levels of character and skill development.

The FiringSquad has the title of the Titan Quest addon: It is called Immortal Fire and...

...will contain about 10 to 15 hours of additional gameplay with over 30 new quests, 20 new monsters, a new Dream Mastery system that adds eight additional classes to the game...