I'd like to apologize to those who've waited a long time for this mod to be released. I've been in your situation plenty of times, so I sympathize. I waited 2 years for Tormentress and Manastream. Tormentress I don't believe will ever be finished, and I've long since given up any hope that Manastream will come out as anything more than 2,000 hours of photoshopped elf boobs. Probably the biggest dissapointment was how long it took for Lilith 1.1 to come out, as it was my last chance to keep my girlfriend interested in Titan Quest just a little longer. After beating the original campain on all 3 difficulty levels, we turned to Lilith, which was fun at first, but by the end was a buggy, jumbled mess that felt more like a compulsive labor than entertainment. When 1.1 one did come out with the necessary fixes to unbreak our Lilith characters, my girlfriend was on to other games and activities, and I lost my number one mod assistant.
Now, during the course of this mod's development, I've been clear that I had fairly high standards. And during this same time, I got a number of repeated requests to just release the mod as is. Even by the time I released the beta, a few people that had been waiting for it had already moved on to other games. But, there were also a good number of new players who were interested in testing the mod.
The mod is done now. It was not done before now. If you wanted to play an unfinished version of the mod, there have been the betas available.
As far as trying to race to completion to beat other games, well, that's sorta silly. I don't make money doing this, so why would I try to compete with any game at all? *cough*Daeger*cough* And let's be clear, this is a mod of Titan Quest, which is still the best D2 clone out there. TQ will die only when Diablo 3 comes out. And while I haven't played Torchlight, I did play Fate, and from watching the gameplay videos, it looks like the exact same game. It's a Diablo clone, not a Diablo 2 clone. It will be an ultimately unsatisfying experience, like Fate was, in its monotony and lack of depth. However, it will give you a good 20 hours of fun before you start to see the endless cycle of it all, and realize just how worthless random dungeons are to re-playability.
Titan Quest is a great game. I didn't make Titan Quest. I made a mod for it. If someone is unhappy with how long my mod took to make, and won't play it out of spite, they're not hurting me. While this mod will be available to them, as it will be for everyone, it wasn't made for them, nor was its development in any way influenced by their personal gaming schedule or preferences.
I'm not out to appease customers, as I don't have any. :) I know that most modders like to pretend they're game developers or something, but I'm not one of those. For me, making this mod was an extension of the game--it's own kind of fun and entertainment. And while I appreciate all the compliments I've gotten on the mod, it's not why I made the mod.
Finally, I'd like to comment on my "obsessiveness": I do not regret waiting to release the mod until it was done, nor do I regret putting the mod work aside for almost 2 months, so close to the finish line, to deal with significant life events and demands. I could have just shoved the mod out the door, and left a lot of the polish off, but as everyone should know by now, I don't do that. Now, there are plenty of modders who don't care about that stuff at all. And, if that's what you really wanted, then you'll be happy to know that there are already plenty of crappy, half-assed mods for you to choose from. And as you play them, I have no doubt you will be able to appreciate how free the developer was from any obsessive need to make everything perfect. But, realize, the truth is, if I hadn't taken all that extra time with the mod, you wouldn't be pissed at all over the delays--you likely wouldn't even be following its development.
I'll admit Munder, I did uninstall titan quest to make room to plate torchlight (And yeah, it's like a meshed combination of diablo 2 and fate.. and it's amusing sure, but way too easy to become super powerful. It's good for a single play-through.. but I'd label it "mod quality" if anything. Not worth paying for IMHO.), but the second you have Underlord out, I'll be uninstalling it to make room for Titan Quest again. I'm bored as hell of Titan Quest, and your mod will be the very last time I'll play it. I bought Titan Quest years ago, and never really got involved in the community. When I got bored of it, I shelved it.
"Occult" mod was the first mod I ever really tried to play on it, and even in beta form, it breathed some new life into Titan Quest, even if only in me trying to make myself have 0 cool down and mad mana/regen so that I could constantly spam instant-cast lightning bolts and meteors, while maintaining survivability (Which was successful, btw. Even up to legendary Hades. Very gear dependent, however.) Sure, I tried Lilith, but when I couldn't even get the download link to work (it was down for about a week), and never even got a response to me pointing the dead link out, I decided anything that wasn't even good enough for it's creator to post an optional download link, wasn't good enough to waste my time on.
Occult Mod (Now Underlord), is something you've worked on for a long time, that I've followed silently for the vast majority of the time you've posted news on it, and only chimed in recently when I felt it was time to let you know that someone does care and that the people being pricks were not representative of the whole community. While I don't know what made you leave the community to start with, I can guess, after all, I've played Ultima Online on Player-Run RP-enforced shards for many, many years, and I know all too well how negative a community can be and how two-faced people in it can be. How administration can sometimes reward two-facedness, and punish people who are blunt and brutally honest, and whom refuse to wear a mask. The thing is, I know you've always done quality work, and while you claim you ran out of passion recently with the mod, and that you're pretty much just releasing it for the people who have been waiting, while you say that compliments aren't why you created it, I just want you to know that we do all appreciate it, and you are a vital part of the titan quest community, even if you aren't on the forums.
You have, for myself, and for many other players, continued to breath new life into Titan Quest, not to mention the work you've done simply to make the game more playable and remove the many bugs that were inherent in it when it shipped. Even though you say you have no passion for the mod you made near the end, I challenge that and say that you must have had some passion left, since you did not simply walk away, and did finish it. When it comes to a Mod, or making your own game servers, or anything that requires hours and hours of coding, scripting, graphics tweaking, spawning, map making, storyline writing, and polishing, and when you're typically the one doing it all yourself, though you might get exhausted during the path, and tired near the end of the process, that passion never really escapes. When all is said and done, you look back at the people who enjoy your hard work, ignore the ignorant people who complain about every little thing, and experience that profound sense of satisfaction and pride, that your hard work and your passion has brought at least some measure of enjoyment to others.
Even though it was a long, difficult path, and even though, like me, you focused on all the little details and obsessively tried to make everything perfect, it is passion that makes a mod, a game, or a server great, and even when you're tired and just want to cross the finish line, that passion may diminish, but it never disappears. Once you reach that point, the passion simply switches from creating your work of art, to sharing that work of art with whomever you can.
Whether you want compliments on the mod or not, Munder, we all appreciate the work, and we all mean what we say. Your work of art is something that revitalizes a game that, had you and others like you not stepped in, would have died many years ago. It's not Titan Quest itself that made itself great, because it really shares so much in common with diablo 2, but the one thing that made titan quest different from diablo 2, the modding community. The community that you'll forever be a part of, because of the work you've done for vanilla, and for Underlord.
And that, Munder, is my wall of text for you, broken up into replies, courtesy of the "2000 character max" reply limit.
Thank you for the work, and for one more chance to venture into the breach, my friend.
Look at it this way.. You beat Duke Nukem Forever for production and release time.
lol @ walls of text. So glad I didn't have a char limit with the OP. :)
About your cooldown builds--thanks to Jiaco's work, 100% recharge will be near impossible to achieve. Only hardcore twinkers will be able to get it with a Dream-based build.
As far as the mod goes, I am proud of where the mod is now. However, after that 2 month or so break from it, I could have easily dropped it. I am a fiction writer, and enjoy that a lot, but during the time I was working on the mod, I didn't have the opportunity to write (for a lot of complicated reasons that have since been resolved), and though the distraction of videos games was nice, modding became a way to scratch that creative itch. And, as I do with my fiction, I thrust myself into it entirely, and in the same way--any of my writing friends could tell you how my stories are always finished months after I say they'll be done, and are alwasy 3-5 times as long as I thought they would be as well. :)
However, by the end of the mod, with no more roadblocks to writing, I very much want to get back to it. I am filling up notebooks with story ideas and scenes, but I don't feel like I can sink into the writing life again until I get this mod out there. Once that's done I'd like to relegate it to side-project status, lol.
So, when I say with little passion, it's because my "passion" is very much divided at this point.
All that being said, I'm glad that there are people who like the mod and enjoy it. Of all the games I've played in the last few years, it's nice when you do a little searching and find that there are people who've made mods to enhance the game and correct issues. Players can mod for free, which means they can often do what the developers couldn't afford to, as was the case with Oblivion and STALKER. With TQ, there's such a huge gap between what it is, and what it should have been, that there was a lot more room to influence it creatively.
He Munder,
Looks great, can't wait to play it!
No more 100% recharge?
So do you think it's impossible to play a 0-recharge-knife-sorcerer? If it is, I have about 3 weeks to do that in the regular game, as my once and only 0-recharge-toon.
Once Underlord is here, there will be no turning back to vanilla TQ. You wouldn't believe the amount of builds I already have planned out...waiting for this mod to arrive.
Would a venom-toon (DK) be more viable in your mod?
Anyway,
Thanks for your perceverance and seeing this mod through to the end. Lots of respect.
Vletr
Yeah, no more 100% recharge. Sorry, but it was long overdue. And, funny you should mention a 100% recharge knifer, as my friend made one in Uber, and with harrowing, was able to kill all Uber Legendary Megalesios in about 5 seconds. :)
The skills were not balanced to account for 100% recharge, and even according to the lead designer, it was an error on their part.
A venom-based build cannot rely alone on poison damage. For a while I was going to do a series of poison staves along with the vitality staves, as it seemed the dev's were going to but abandoned it. However, there's a problem with trying to use poison as a primary damage source while retaining its damage-over-time aspect, and that's the fact that poison doesn't stack from the same source. And, there's also the problem that flat poison damage and duration poison damage are handled differently, and effects that boost one do not boost the other. It quickly becomes an awkward mess trying to incorporate flat poison damage alongside the existing duration poison damage.
There are large sources of poison damage in Underlord, and there are larger boosts to it, but it still suffers the same limitations. It's just not like elemental damage, for example, so you can't think of it as a damage type like fire damage. This means poison will still be an accessory damage type in Legendary, though the poison-dealing masteries all have skills that reduce poison resistance. Still, the bundled effects that come with poison damage will still be the most attractive aspects of Legendary poison builds.
Quick question (maybe not the place here), undroppable items in regular game like entwined mark of calchas, can they drop in your mod? (Maybe they can drop and I was misinformed, but I never saw one...)
Thanks in advance....
Vorbis posted a bunch of broken links awhile ago in the bugfix thread that I fixed in Underlord, and I believe that was one of them. There's actually a lot of other bugfixes in Underlord that I'm going to be sharing with the current bugfix team, soon as I write up the changelog. Oh, how I'm not looking forward to that.
I can imagine it will be some list. I myself have been working towards graduating for 8 months now and have collected tons of articles, research and data. It's hell sorting it all out now and make it presentable to finally earn my PhD in Science.
Thanks for the reply.
Started my knifer today, my one and only 0-recharge toon....