Titan Quest

is a Diablo clone for Windows set in the ancient Mediterranean, Mesopotamia, and China and loosely based on Greek mythology. It 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. Playing as a young traveler you have to choose your path and stop the Telkine's plans of destruction and death, choosing two of eight different Masteries (Warfare, Defense, Rogue, Hunt, Earth, Nature, Storm and Spirit) to form your ideal warrior among many combinations of skills.

It received an Expansion named Immortal Throne, which adds a new Mastery (Dream), new items, new mechanics (such as the useful Caravan system to store items and exchange equipment between players) and a brand new Act set in Greece and the Underworld itself as the hero must face the restless hordes of demons and undead unleashed from Hades.

Years later, much to everyone's surprise, a new DLC was released: titled Ragnarök, once again it introduced a new Mastery (Rune) and expands the story furthermore, as the hero explore the world of Norse mythology, in a journey across the wild expanses of Germany, the snow-covered northern lands and the fabled domains of Gods and Giants to prevent the end of the world.

A later DLC, Atlantis, was released not too later, although this time it has a smaller content, adding a far shorter "side-arc", new items and new skills for existing classes.

Finally, the latest DLC released, Eternal Embers, introduces a new chinese-themed Mastery, the Neidan and a new potion mechanic alongside new items and a brand new arc set once again in China, but this time with a bigger focus on local mythology and culture, albeit exclusively avaible in Legendary Mode (the hardest one).

• An Adventurer Is You: While classes are overall structured to favor one approach over the other, you can still mix and match skills and classes as you like to obtain whatever you like.
• Alchemy Is Magic: The Neidan Mastery allows the hero to boost his power through drinking potion, breathe fire and summon Terracotta Warriors.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • From Immortal Throne, you can access a Caravan to store extra goods you don't need or share them among all players, so that you have an easier time assembling set items or you can ship useful rare items to characters who may need them more.
  • From Ragnarok, if you're really in a hurry to test the novelty of Act V but don't have the time or patience to go through Act I-IV before, you can pick the option to start the game from Act V straight away with a level 40 character. It does, however, comes with several disadvantages, as the level can feel barely enough (it is possible to end the vanilla game on that level on normal mode by grinding enough) and the fact that you're forced to rely on shop-only items and thus lack the potential build-related epic items you could have found in basic game).
  • From Atlantis, a new type of rare potions, the white Experience Potions, is introduced: they boost the gained experience for 1800 in-game seconds, making grinding less tedious if you're lucky enough to find some.
• Anti-Magic: One particular Stormcaller skill uses an electrical blast to completely remove spell buffs from enemies and/or deal massive damage to Magical enemies.
• 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.
• Atlantis: The setting of the expansion "Atlantis", it is depicted as a large island in the Atlantic Ocean, costantly shrouded in storms and thus unapproachable unless one's in possession of the required items (the Diary of Herakles, the Ancient Navigation Instrument and a Golden Apple from the Garden of Hesperides). According to the Last Atlantinean, it used to be a beautiful and advanced metropolis with great technology, being able to field metal ship that moved against wind, until Poseidon punished their hubris. Now the island is a damp and gloomy jungle/swamp infested with all sorts of enemies, while the city itself is now a sprawling maze overrun with trees and vegetation, while the coalition of Potamoi, Tritones and Serpentoids has taken over the place.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Cyclops and most of the larger, more powerful enemies. That include a gargantuan Yeti on your way to China. The final part of Act V has you carving a path across an army of Frost and Fire Giants. Some other bosses are of gigantic size, such as Typhon, all the bonus bosses or the Ancient One.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Justified.
• Awesome Yet Practical: The Seer's Trance of Wrath: a passive, aura skill which deals a lot of damage to all enemies around you, be them mooks or bosses. The only downside is that is a top level skill, and you'll have to get at least fifteen levels to get it and max it, but is still worth.
• Badass Normal: The guy in the opening movie who manage to kill a gorgon by having a statue fall on her. Later, when Megalesios himself appears to taunt him, he just charge at him screaming.
• Basilitrice: Atlantis introduces Cockatrices and Basilisks as enemies: the former are bipedal armless reptile/bird things with large beaks, sail fin on their backs and the ability to spit out poison. Basilisks are classified as Magical creatures and are enormous reptilian beasts with four legs and two mighty arms equipped with talons, menacing beak, luminous red eyes and a mane of feathers adorned with eye-like markings. They can briefly petrify the player with spheres of energy from their eyes.
• Battle Aura: The player can learn to grow them and can level them up.
• Big Bad: Typhon in the original game and Hades in the expansion.
  • Ragnarök at first implies that the Aesir have been attacking the humans for no reason, only for the player to eventually unmask a conspiracy spearheaded by Loki and Surtr.
  • Atlantis has: the fourth Telkine, Lyktos, his actions hidden behind those of the apparent mastermind, Tiamat.
  • Eternal Embers has the source of chaos, the Nine Suns
• 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. The expansions add even more in centipedes, swarms of bees/locusts and mosquitoes. The Karkinoi and Archaio Astakos are also part of this family.
• Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Yetis and Yerens.
• Blade on a Stick: Spears, the favorite weapon for the Hunter Class. Despite being slow they're quite powerful and can pierce armor. They range in appearence from simple lances to glaives and tridents.
• Bloodless Carnage: the closest thing to gore these games have are the splashes of blood/fluid from spells or insectoid enemies.
• Bonus Dungeon: The infamous Secret Passage. You'll need a special key to unlock the door. The expansions add even more, such as the Primrose Passage or Tartarus.
• Boring but Practical: Pretty much any passive skill or skill that substitutes normal attack, which allows you to improve your most basic form of attack with nearly no cost. Especially goes for the Rogue (each fourth attack deals massive damage), Warrior (attacks that gradually increases as the attacks proceed) and Hunter (boosts the speed of ranged attacks and their chance to both penetrate enemies and unleash shrapnels from every hit).
• Boss in Mook Clothing: Dactyls. 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 amounts of damage. And in Legendary mode, they have 99% chance to avoid projectiles. Fun! Later DLCs actually made Dactyloi in a proper boss.
  • Cyclops near the end of the game.
  • Basilisks in Atlantis: depending on which build you choose, Basilisks can be very dangerous as they dish out a lot of damage, can take punishment and they can petrify you for a short while, leaving you defenseless.
• Breath Weapon: Some enemies have these, but the most notable case is the Hydra. 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.
• Broken Bridge: 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.
  • A bit less noticeable than some examples because you are already on the opposite side of the bridge before you are told you to go to the city that would have required crossing it in the first place.
• Calling Your Attacks: Charon yells "RIVER! RISE!" every time he's about smack you with columns of water. After he gets into his One-Winged Angel form, he stops yelling it.
• Came Back Wrong: Halfway through the realm of Hades you have to fight undead Typhon.
• Cap: Of the statistics kind.
• Character Level: Which can go up to 85. Each new level grants you 3 Skill Points you can invest in your skill tree as you see more fit (though starting from a certain level you'll get less and less) and Stat points you can invest to improve your stats (Health, Energy, Strength, Intelligence and Dexterity).
• Check Point: Rebirth Fountains, which lights up when you approach for the first time.
• City Guards: They only block your path three times in the entire game, and are generally helpful.
• Cobweb Jungle: Justified, as there are abnormally oversized spiders found throughout the game. And some are half human.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • Damage types/Elements: Fire is orange, Cold is whiteish-blue, Lightning is blue, Poison is green, Vitality is red and Piercing has no color.
  • Masteries: Warfare is yellow/gold, Defense is silver gray, Hunt is light orange, Rogue is dark purple, Earth is red, Nature is green, Spirit is teal, Storm is light blue, Dream is puple-royal blue, Rune is brown and Neidan is bright yellow-red.
  • Shrines/Sanctuaries have a brilliant light on the top which can clue you in on its abilities: Health ones are red, Regeneration ones are purple, Mastery ones are orange, Battle ones are yellow, Experience ones are white, Cold ones are pale blue, Thorn ones are green and the special boosting one on Olympus is navy blue.
• Combat Tentacles: Some of the creatures and also Hades's Turns Red phase.
• Cooldown: Using certain skills, drinking potions, using scrolls and using some of your artifacts special abilities have cooldowns.
• Copy and Paste Environments: Played straight in Egypt, where pretty much all you'll see is sand and tombs. Averted hard in Act 3, where you'll run all over Asia and visit lush meadows, bamboo forests, snowy mountain peaks, icy caves and even a volcano.
• Critical Existence Failure
• Dark Is Not Evil: The necromancer-like Theurgist can kill monsters by sucking their souls, summon a Lich 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.
• 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.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Either twice or five times per difficulty. Depends on whether Telkines would count.
• Disc One Nuke: Certain low-level skills can become this if you decides to spend a lot of points in them.
• Door to Before: Or at least to areas which the player could have reached easily, like the Hathor Basin.
• 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 Rune Mastery also has a single skill that enables such feat.
• 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. Epic and Legendary equipment tend to look even better and unique. Downplayed in Act V weapons and armors, which simply have a different look in general.
• 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 him in battle.
• Elemental Powers: The main elements are Fire (Pyromancer), Ice/Lightning (Stormcaller) and Poison (Rogue). Also Dark (Theurgist) and Nature (Wanderer). Runesmiths can manifest their powers through explosive Energy, Ice and Earth.
• Elite Mooks: Some of the large group of enemies encountered in game are actually far stronger than they let out, such as the Yerren, the Machae or the Giants.
• Escape Rope: Town portals.
• Escort Mission: Two of them in the expansion. Ragnarök adds more, including one where the escortee (a sheep) can actually die, but you can still complete the mission (either by bringing back her fleece or a special necklace to prove you avenged her).
• Everybody Hates Hades: Guess who's the Bigger Bad in the Expansion?
• Everything Is Better With Spinning: The Warfare mastery has no less than two skills with this effect. Atlantis adds one special attack for the Hunter in which he spins the spear to attack all surrounding enemies.
• Exclusively Evil: All the monsters and enemies in the game, with the only exception of a single centaur hero 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). Atlantis adds a non-hostile Serpentoid, though it's implied he's manipulating the hero anyway, while a Tritones Princess claims that the Tritones originally were just loyal soldiers of Poseidon at war with the rebellious Potamoi, until the Serpentoids tricked them into siding with them, resulting in the current invasion of Atlantis.
• 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.
• Full Boar Action: Feral boars are among the early enemies. Later you can see the Dusk Boars, some of which are the size of a bull. There are also some powerful boar men in Greece.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Near the beginning of the fourth act. Atlantis adds a monstrous giant crustacean boss called "The Ancient One" as the guardian of the Navigation Instrument on Gaulos, while his little brothers called "Archaio Astakos" are later seen scuttling the ruins of Atlantis.
• Giant Space Flea From Nowhere: The Chimera.... in Babylon. Hands up if you didn't saw that coming.
• 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.
• 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: The bronze and iron Automata in Crete and the Olympus, the granite, clumsy living statues in Egyptian's tombs and the Terracotta Army in China. Ragnarök adds proper Golems in the form of massive elemental brutes made of granite or crystal.
• Gotterdammerung: 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.
  • The entire plan of the hidden villain in Ragnarök.
• Heroic Fantasy
• 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 Greek, meaning the different pantheons refer to the same deities with different names. This, in turn, makes it a version of All Myths Are True.
  • Thrown out of the window in Ragnarök, where you get to see the Norse Pantheon, completely unbothered by the matters of the Greek Deities. Eternal Embers would have a similar focus on China and Egypt.
• 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.
• 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 and even dragon-men, with the expansions bringing even more, such as frog-men, mermen, elk-men, humanoid snake-people and Trolls . The Hunter class has a bonus against this kind of monsters, which are fittingly labelled "Beastmen".
• 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 Use of a Weapon: Some spear-like weapons have a curved cutting edge like a glaive. You still use them to stab your enemies.
• Improbable Weapon User: Including a hoe of power and a carrot used as a sword.
• Informed Equipment: Averted hard, 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.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Played straight in the first game (no expansion), where the "Sabertooth" sword really looks like a katana and is easily the best sword in the game.
• King Mook: Aside from Monster Heroes, several of the bosses encountered in game (such as Nessus, Arachne, Nehebkau and Barmanu) are pretty much souped up versions of commonly-encountered enemies.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: How the enemy army sees you. Considering what they're doing this can be Hypocritical Humor.
• Large and In Charge: Usually the "champions" and commander monsters will be far bigger than their underlings.
• Legions of Hell: While most of the Demons you encounter in the vanilla game are mostly isolated, non-sapient groups (with the exception of the humanoid Dune Raiders), Immortal Throne introduces the armies of Hades, sending out large numbers of organized, deadly demon soldiers such as the Machae, the Cherae and the Melenides. At one point you'll have to fight through an entire warcamp of demons or two to get where you need to go.
• Lethal Lava Land: The Obsidian Chambers in Wusao Mountain where the titan Typhon is locked up.
  • Act V adds the kingdom of Muspelheim and the World's End.
• Light Is Not Good: Not when Aktaios is trying to use it to fry you...
• Living Statue: In Egypt. Megalesios also summon some to delay you. In Ragnarök you have to fight a quartet of powerful statues to enter Valholl.
• A Load of Bull: Minotaurs. Also, a demonic bull boss in Act 3.
• 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) and the Avenger (Pyromancer + Hunter). On the downside, they tend to be left out of high level equipment for pure warriors or mages.
• Magic Wand: Staves. They come in three flavors: 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.
• Man-Eating Plant: They show up in Act 3 and 4 in a few different variations.
• Meteor Move: The Pyromancer's level 32 Skill can summon a small swarm of fiery meteors to land on a target, but not only a few enemies can use this, there are also other elemental variants involving ice (Barmanu and Tartarus), vitality energy (Callixena) or just physical boulders (Aegipan Geomancers).
• Mighty Glacier: The Defense mastery and most (if not all) mastery combinations involving it. Also applies for some kinds of monsters.
• Mooks: Of several ranks and species, usually Beastmen.
  • 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.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: Typhon.
• 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 Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In the middle of the third Act, you encounter two of three sisters who were blessed for helping the Jade Emperor so that no monster could sense them. One of the three got into trouble and broke the spell when she threw a rock at a Tigerman to save a deer who was about to get killed. She's promptly captured by the monsters and you have to rescue her.
• One-Gender Race: Actually pointed out by the Beastman Archer 783, who complains about the lack of female satyrs or male maenads and fear that they'll may be called "sexists". Comedy aside, the various monster race tend to be this.
  • Averted with a handful of them which are divided by sex, such as the Formicid and Tritones.
• 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 Babilon to China.
• One-Winged Angel: Charon has two forms, while Hades has three. Loki is initially fought in his Yilva disguise, Surtr has two forms and Lyktios ascends into Titanhood after you deplete his health 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.
• 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) deals more damage to demons. Starting from Immortal Throne, whole races of demons have been included, surprisingly enough the Dwarves/dvergs in the North.
• Our Dragons Are Different:: Other than the Dragon Men in China, you can also find undead wyrms under Mount Wusao. Act V adds the Dragonspawn, Nidhögg and Fafner as bosses, while Atlantis has Ladon (in the form of a two-headed wyvern) and Tiamat as an earth-bound, three-headed serpent.
• Our Genies Are Different:: Seen in Orient as grotesquely fat female spirits Dual-Wielding swords.
• Our Giants Are Bigger: Introduced as a monster type in Ragnarök, Giants are typically of enormous size and very resilient. Cyclopses and Gigantes are retroactively turned into this category, while the North has plenty of them, mostly Frost and Fire Jotnar, as well as Ulvjotun (wolfmen giants). Atlantis introduces the Guardians, a race of cephalopodiic fish-men of towering size armed with coral and shell-crafted equipment and tasked with patrolling the ruins of Gaulos and the Temple of Poseidon in Atlantis.
• Our Liches Are Different: As regular enemies, including a female Lich Queen as a boss and a Liche King as a summonable unit.
• Palette Swap: Seen in some enemies, such as the Jackalmen and Nightstalkers being variations of the Ratman's model, or the Merfolk from Act 5 being a mishmash of Gorgons and Centaurs.
• 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.
• Playing with Fire: The Pyromancer combines this with Dishing Out Dirt, making it a Magma Man.
• Poisoned Weapons: The Rogue mastery can do this at will, and it's really useful if paired with a bow weapon or throwing knives... both of which go nicely with this mastery.
• Power Glows: When you pick up a power up at a sanctuary, the hero will gain a glow for a short while. Some skills and auras bestow such an effect on the user.
• Punch Out a God: By the end of the game, you'll have sucker-punched several eldritch entities, killed a titan twice, broke into hell and killed Hades. The full list of victims in the three later dlcs include: most of the Aesir pantheon (non-lethal), Surtr, Ladon, Tiamat, the Last Telkine turned into Titan, the revived Akhenaten and the Nine Suns.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: The biggest difference you get based on gender is the look of two different sets of armors (the Gorgon's one and the Empusae's): on a female character they look, respectively, as a metal bikini + shoulderpads and sash combo and a pair of breast cups with ornaments, collar and loin sash. If a male character equips them they change appearence (the former turns into a one-piece breastplate, the latter becomes a metal muscle armor.
• Puzzle Boss:: Typhon, as you have to destroy the statues surrounding him (or at least keep him away from them) in order to avoid to power him up. Note that this element of the fight was removed from the Expansion onward.
• Ragdoll Physics: Most enemies. With enough physical damage you can punt corpses all over the ancient world. Only a handful of enemies (mostly from the expansion) aren't subjected to this.
• 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 desrts, you'll find plenty of colorful areas, mostly around the shores of the Nile.
• Redshirt Army: Just to show off how powerful the enemies are, the Redshirt Army consists of Spartans.
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Crocodile men in Egypt. Atlantis has the sinister Serpentoids as enemies encoutered in several areas of the game, as the one faction that manipulated the Tritones and the Potamoi into forming an unholy alliance.
• 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.
• 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.
• Shock and Awe: The bulk of the Stormcaller's powers, mixed with Kill It with Ice.
• Shown Their Work: Most of the time, concerning locations and weapons, with some exceptions. (i.e. the Shamshir being a cleaver-like falchion while in Real Life is a long, curved scimitar). Some artistic liberties were also taken, especially regarding monsters.
• Smash Mook: Cyclops essentially fill this role.
• Spider People: Arachnoi, first encountered in Greece: most you encounter have hairless, spiny arachnid bodies (usually striped and colored brown, green or purple) and humanoid torsoes from where the spider head should be. Tropical ones met in the Orient are slightly larger, with black legs and the head of a tarantula instead of their human one.
• 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, ranging from smaller enemies to devices which helps them out. Last but least scrolls in the Expansion will allow you to summon useful aids.
  • Valkyries are an especially annoying example, as the troops the summon do not die when they do and give no experience either.
• Swamps Are Evil: Usually infested by Ichtians 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 are all named after the creators and developers of the game.
• Take Your Time: There are 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.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Supposedly, the three factions serving Tiamat (Tritones, Potamoi and Serpentoid) do not get along with each other despite being allied for a common goal. Unfortunately, this doesn't extend to the point of an Enemy Civil War, although you can find friendly Tritones who're apparently against their own traitorous brothers, but too few to help.
• The Time of Myths
• 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 coursings in Babylon.
• 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 be amazingly skilled in combat and capable of casting powerful magic.
• Underground Monkey: Happens with certain types of mooks. You start with Satyrs, the Dark Satyrs, then Mountain Satyrs. And so on.
• Unnecessarily Large Interior: Justified by the setting.
• Viewers are Morons: One quest would have the PC climb on top of a snowy mountain in Act 1. This got axed because THQ argued that players would be confused as to why there was snow in Greece. THQ wanted all ruins to be removed from Greece because someone was afraid that players might not understand why, if the game took place in ancient times, that there would still be ruins.
• The Voice: Zeus.
• We ARE Struggling Together!: As a scholar in Athens muses, the Telkeins' armies have caused a strong camaraderie between the Greek cities that would normally be at each other's throats.
• Whatevermancy: Necromancy, geomancy and venomancy just to name a few.
• Wolfpack Boss: The gorgon queens in mid-late Act I. Also the Grays during act IV. Topped in Act V when you have to simultaneously take on a series of gods in Valholl, including Baldr, Tyr, Freyja and Odin himself.
• 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.
• Zerg Rush: The main strategy of large enemy groups. And they can be deadly later on.