Quest OCD and Titan Quest Online

I was really in the mood for some hefty grinding, role playing game style, today so I jumped on Titan Quest. When I looked at the co-op screen, there were around 190 people playing the game online. That really didn't surprise me though and I decided to level up my new character online while playing with others. The co-op in the game is fun but I didn't particularly have a good time during my online session because everyone just wanted to level up quickly and move from one location to the next without much pause. This is a new discovery for me because I have only played the game online with my friends. The problem that I have with this lightning quick pacing is that I am the type of person who would actually listen to the spoken quest-giver narrative again in the game even though I have listened to them twenty times in the past. This is the reason why I don't like long in-game cinematic in games because even if they can be skipped by a press of a button, I feel that doing so would take away the essence of what makes the game experience complete. I suppose it would be tolerable to not bother with the repeated quest details if I actually had completed the game many times over already. The other problem with my online session was the arrival of the high level players who just enjoy joining a public game to offer some "assistance" by wiping off an entire legion of enemies for you. Other players seem to like this because you still do get some good experience points from this. To me, if you take away the challenge and the hard work from a game, you also take away the fun and the involvement from it.

The action gets really hectic in multiplayer but not in a good way.

With Titan Quest, I usually get to the gameplay saturation point when my character hits level 20+. After that, I would stop playing the game for a while and when I finally return to it, I would create a new character to start the vicious cycle again. There was an improvement however on my part during the last cycle - I kept my previous characters when I would normally delete them because of the fear that I would be unable to get acclimated to them again. Maybe this time I will be able to get to the end.