The Turtles in Titan Quest (not the actual monsters)

[WNG]

Hi.

So during my mod-making moments I noticed how the developers love turtles a lot.

For example, in the texture file of Diogenes' Chiton (a legendary mage body armor), we can see they put in a symbol of a turtle on the medaillon.
https://imgur.com/a/hlpYlfK

In the texture file of Harpies, they fit in a small turtle similar to the Overlord! (though it never appears in game.)
https://imgur.com/a/xx08Kp0

Speaking of the Overlord, he's the key to a secret passage...

I'm very confident that there is lots of other apparitions of those turtles. I'm just wondering what is this turtle craze about.

[nargil66]

This is probably the signature of the guy who made the textures.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

It's a subset of the infamous squirrels in the game.  They also hide in all sorts of places in the game.  There's one in the Secret Passage for example and another near Nessus' area.  We had an hilarious thread going on the old forum about what came to be called Rally Squirrel and his many minions whom we were fighting against. Got quite silly at times. 

[WNG]

This is probably the signature of the guy who made the textures.

Much probably. And I guess this is why there is a turtle called Dave at the entrance of the Rhodes' passage.

It's a subset of the infamous squirrels in the game.  They also hide in all sorts of places in the game.  There's one in the Secret Passage for example and another near Nessus' area.  We had an hilarious thread going on the old forum about what came to be called Rally Squirrel and his many minions whom we were fighting against. Got quite silly at times. 

Yeah, also found out some items in the editor that were squirrels. Funny stuff

[Medea Fleecestealer]

One of the designers on the game was Dave Kondor.  The SP was a last minute addition snuck into the game by a few of the devs evidently.  It's been known for a while that the names of the monsters in the SP are most of Iron Lore's design team.

[Prosoro]

I didn't know about the squirrels but definitely noticed all the turtle 'overlords', like the one in the bird bath at the top of the hill in Athens
 
Good spotting on the Diogenes' Chiton.  I believe there's a legendary chest piece that's stylized with turtle shell called something like the Overlords Armour.  This turtle thing even followed over to Grim Dawn with the keystone above the Prison entrance in Devils Crossing having Arthur's signature and a carved turtle 

[Laionidas]

[Typhon]

I believe there was a squirrel around right before Polyphemus walks out of his cave. Too bad they didn't make a squirrel enemy for the passage.

[Endymion]

As a matter of fact, squirrels have an actual technical purpose as timers for quest events. There was an article in some magazine that included how TQ's lead designer had to come up with it as a workaround in last moments.
Also little rats have a similar use, mostly in Act IV, but they're usually hidden in scenery objects.

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Ha, well I never knew that.  Found the article I think you mentioned Endymion and not that very long ago either - November 2017.  Here's the TQ bit.

"Without a doubt the hackiest thing I remember from Titan Quest is how we managed the event scripting. The quest / event tech had a major weakness in that there was no way to delay an action once it was triggered. So if you wanted something to happen 5 seconds after a player ran through some bounding volume, there was no way to set a delay. It would always be instant.
We were nearing the end of production, so it was hard to request additional features, as engineers were slammed just trying to meet their milestone deliverables. One of the QA testers had started helping out with scripting work, and figured out that there was in fact a way to delay an action from triggering based on the length of an animation.
He ended up using these squirrels we had as ambient creatures as the animation timer, and they became the default timing mechanism. He created an invisible version of the squirrel, which he would place in the levels where he needed them, then would time everything based on the duration of their idle animation. Because of his creative problem solving, he was promoted to designer on the next project."

Arthur Bruno
Owner / lead designer, Crate Entertainment

And my guess, comparing the design teams of TQ and IT, is it's the same Dave Kondor I mentioned.  In the TQ manual he's credited as being Q/A - Design Implementation, but in the IT one he's part of the design team.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/310570/Developers_share_their_most_memorable_dirty_coding_tricks.php

Got to post this over on the GD forum as well, I bet a lot of people don't know that. 

[Endymion]

Yes, that's the one. Although they're not invisible at the moment, for instance aforementioned squirrel before cyclop boss is an actual quest object.
Also I'd add this practice became obsolete in IT, most quest actions had a proper delay timer built in by that time, as far as I remember. Albeit squirrels are still in use to this day.

[WNG]

Thank you for the informations! I like its special meaning during the game, along with the other animals.

[WNG]

Another sighting of the turtle... do you see it?

https://imgur.com/a/XITT0no

[Medea Fleecestealer]

Nope, never spotted that one before.  Good catch. 

[Laionidas]

Yes, that's the one. Although they're not invisible at the moment, for instance aforementioned squirrel before cyclop boss is an actual quest object.
Also I'd add this practice became obsolete in IT, most quest actions had a proper delay timer built in by that time, as far as I remember. Albeit squirrels are still in use to this day.

They could've added some squirrels to Ragnarok,.. the quest timing is horrible in Act V 

I needed to talk to Wodan after he ran, but he wouldn't run unless I talked to him, and once he started running the dialogue cut off. The result was quite funny, as it made him look like some angry spoiled kid, rather than the allmighty Allfather.

By the way, does anyone know how to access the dialogue texts outside of the actual game? Stuff like the above happens a lot in Act V, and I also sometimes click through dialogue a little too eagerly, so I'm missing parts of lore. I'd like to read them casually afterwards.