General feedback

[lapis rapids]

I have spent a few thousand hours with the first game, so this is somewhat of a veteran's and long time fan's impression on the game.
Overall TQ2 has a good first impression on me, but has a lot of room for improvements. In its current state (even with additional masteries), I don't think it can keep up with TQ1, but I see the possibility of it becoming as good or even better.

Graphics

The graphics are fine overall and I think I won't have a big issue with it if it stays like that. However, one thing that stands out to me in comparison to TQ1 is that the colors are less vibrant. So the one concern I have in regards to this is that many areas will feel the same. I liked the colorful style of the first game a lot.

Soundtrack

While I think the soundtrack fits well, the main theme lacks some recognizability and power behind it. More importantly though, the in-game music needs some more variation in my opinion, since this is what you will hear most of the time while playing the game.

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Controls / Movement

The movement felt a bit clunky at first, but I'm getting used to it. Sometimes the character doesn't go where you think he should go, due to some odd collision issues. One issue that happened to me right away when I first entered the game is that I wanted to destroy an object, but the character didn't go close enough to the object to be able to hit it.

A major annoyance with the controls for me is how holding the left mouse button is handled with the settings "Context Sensitive LMB" and "Ability Interact Or Move". When I move around using the left mouse button, while holding the button and hovering over an item, object or enemy, the character will automatically attack the object/enemy or pick up the item. With a ranged build, this leads to the character often stopping to shoot at some clutter when you really just want to move around. How I think it should work is that the "Context Sensitive LMB" setting should remember the context on click, and never change the context while holding it. For example, I click on the ground and hold it, then hover over an enemy and I won't automatically attack it. When actually clicking on the enemy, I will attack it and can hold LMB to attack other enemies as well. At least having an option for the controls to behave that way would be very, very welcome.

Teleportation skills sometimes get you stuck on walls/fences or other obstacles, when they should teleport you past them. This sometimes leads to wasting more time with it than without it while farming.

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Items

I've found a good variety of items so far and am happy to see some things that made it into the game, such as staves with (instant) poison damage.
I have yet to see items that grant new skills, but I assume they exist. At least they should exist.
Also I have not found any items that reduce resistances yet, which makes me wonder how some builds will work out late-game. This was pretty much essential for some builds to work around immunities in TQ1 on Legendary.

Potions with effects are a great addition. I have not found any unique or rare ones yet though. Potions with unique effects would be really cool. Maybe even monster infrequents. For example, a health potion dropped by undead enemies could add life drain, but prevent health regeneration for X seconds.

What I'm missing is a very important aspect of the first game though. Relics and charams are a must, in some form. It does not need to be exactly the same as in TQ1, but both the collecting aspect of it as well as the possibilities for modifying items are core features of Titan Quest. In the 15 hours of playing TQ2, I already noticed the lack of them takes away a lot of the fun.

There's another thing I'm missing from TQ1, specifically from Immortal Throne. TQIT really made the game become what most of us fondly remember. The addition of artifacts in Immortal Throne added a lot to the build possibilities. Finding formulas and finally crafting the artifacts felt very rewarding.

I'm looking forward to whatever you come up with for the crafting system.

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Mechanics / Skills

The core skills are nice, but I haven't played around enough with them yet to really form my opinion on these. I like the idea to have some skills accessible regardless of masteries, because the modifiers allow a great variety of builds. On the other hand, I'm a bit concerned about balancing in case some of the modifiers turn out to be too powerful to be available for all masteries.

A percent-based chance to apply ailments depending on the damage type is nice, but I wonder if this is the only way to apply DoT. If so, this would make passive aura burn not viable, which would be unfortunate. There should be both, a chance to apply ailments and directly applying DoT.

PETS!! Where are they? For a single-player ARPG experience, I found it very nice to have access to pets with most builds in TQ1. Having a companion around with some buffs or skills just feels good. The Wisp in TQ1 was one of my favorites. Nature pet builds were a lot of fun as well. Apart from that, some mastery that includes a necromancy skill would be cool, too.

So far, I feel like we're missing some unique active skills to play around with. See Flurry of Knives, Lay Trap, Stone Form, Battle Standard in TQ1.

The limitation on skill modifiers seems a bit too restrictive. I think soft capping the capacity by raising the number of skill points required for adding more capacity above 10 would be much better than the current hard cap.

Are negative resistances still a thing? On legendary in TQ1 it was challenging to max out the resistances, which made creating perfectly optimized builds nearly impossible. That's a good thing. You want to make it very difficult in order to keep the player striving for improvement. If this mechanic is replaced by raising the maximum resistances late-game, that's fine too, as it's essentially the same.

The new potion system is fantastic.