It was a weird surprise to see a new version of Titan Quest rise from the ashes of the series after all this time and the announcement of a new expansion sure was even more of a surprise to me. Titan Quest: Ragnarok continues the main story into the Nordic lands, adds a new class and probably reworks balance for a great number of skills and items. Is it the expansion I've been waiting for? Probably not. Is it a great reason to go back into Titan Quest? Absolutely.
When you launch TQ:R, you can now create an Accomplished Hero, a character already leveled enough to venture into the new DLC, with some money to buy gear. I've found that characters created that way are a bit weaker than those made from scratch, so that option didn't work out for me. I'm not sure if it's because you start with a ton of skill points to place in many skills or if the lack of legendary items hurts you, but I didn't go that way. I first started using the new class; The Runemaster. Sadly, it wasn't that great and didn't synergize the way I wanted it with other classes. Weird elemental abilities and passives that didn't work well with mages, not my kind of thing.
So instead I created a new character; a Storm mage shooting a ton of ice projectiles, combined with Dream for the survivability. I went through all the normal story, then got to the expansion. I took a while, but I think it was worth it. It was refreshing to see new content in a game I had played through and through. The new items and essences felt right at home and while the new maps were a bit more complex than the previous ones, they still kept their simple 'one room with one entrance and one exit' design that I loved in TQ over other similar games like Grim Dawn.
This expansion has you go through (and kill) pretty much all of Norse mythology. There was a bit I didn't like near Yggdrasil where all enemies automatically dealt damage to you when you attacked them. As a mage with low health and a really rapid fire spell, it was really annoying and there wasn't anything I could do except chug health potions. At some point you go to the Bifrost where Heimdall opens a bridge for you. You meet plenty of these recognizable mythological characters and I felt like I was in the plot of some off-shoot Thor movie. You finally defeat Loki and then some giant fire monster (I think it was the same one as in Thor: Ragnarok), which sends you back to the beginning of act 1, only in a tougher difficulty.
I really liked Titan Quest for many years, and this is more of it. The price point might be a little steep (26$ for this package isn't cheap) but it's a surprise that they've brought to us in 2017. I really would like to see a new character class that I really want to use if they bring us another expansion in the future. That's the kind of new content I'd really like to see. Other than that, if you have some nostalgia for TQ or like action RPGs, Ragnarok is a good addition to your collection.
