I’d make a joke about the pistol having repeatedly fired blanks over the last couple of years, but I think that’s the point of a starting gun isn’t it?
Part of me wants to argue that the games industry has a long-standing history of under-compensating workers, which makes being within the top 25% not particularly impressive, but instead I’m just going to admit that you caught me ragging on EA with an easy jab.
They did lay off a shed load of workers earlier this year mere days after announcing record profits though. Still, they’re not quite the miserable black hole that they were in the ‘EA Widows’ era when they were forcing unpaid overtime on a straight up illegal level.
The past few Titan Quest DLCs were made by Pieces Interactive who are currently working on yet another Alone in the Dark remake. Titan Quest II is being made by Grimlore Games, who made the Spellforce 3 trilogy of RTS/RPG hybrids.
Not sure how much of an improvement that is, but it’s not quite the worst-case scenario. So that’s nice.
The gameplay loop uses getting to interact with the characters and to advance the various subplots as part of your reward/consolation at the end of each run. I’d call that story-heavy.