After a year’s hiatus, a buddy of mine recently began playing TQ along with the Immortal Throne expansion and tried to convince me to do the same. I resisted – since the game runs fiendishly slow on my computer – until I discovered an internet repository of player-made character skins.

It’s just like it sounds. Players have discovered a method to change the standard tunic-wearing character models into something more exciting. Care for a bikini-clad female? You got it. How about a pharaoh-looking dude? Did and done. Maybe an invisible character? Sure, why not. The only limitation appears to be the imagination of the skin creator (although you won’t be seeing any characters with tails or huge angel wings because that requires re-coding the actual model instead of merely changing how an existing one looks).

Now before I dish out the link that’ll breathe new life into your stale characters, an equation of caution. 1 female character + a predominantly male skinning community = varying amounts of nudity if you’re not careful. The links I’ve provided below did not contain anything indecent the last time I checked, but if you’re easily offended by “nude” pixels or you know that your parents wouldn’t approve of such a thing, I’d recommend steering clear of the site altogether – just to be safe. For everyone else (or the curious or the rebellious) here’s the main site. If you feel lost, a good selection of female skins can be found here and for males check here.

After you download a skin, you’ll need to install it to the right place. Most skins come with instructions on how to do that, but some don’t. Here’s the lowdown just in case you need it:

• 1) Locate the Titan Quest Database folder (NOT the Immortal Throne Database folder, for those with the expansion). The default path is:
  C:\Program Files\THQ\Titan Quest\Database
• 2) Create a folder called creatures and open it.
• 3) Create a folder called pc and open it.
• 4) Depending on your skin, create a female and/or male folder and open it.
• 5) The path should now be Database\creatures\pc\female
  or Database\creatures\pc\male
• 6) Move the .tex file to its new home.

Now all that’s left to do is to activate the skin in-game. Let’s say you downloaded a female skin and the .tex file is named femalepc01_lightblue.tex. The lightblue refers to the dye color needed to unlock the skin. Therefore, simply purchase that particular dye, quaff it down, and wait for the transformation.