Torchlight II (not the MMO)

[Tebonas]

I just got a Shotgun with 4 Gem sockets which was an upgrade my Outlander could use right now and now she rapes everything in her path.

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot. I feel like Diablo 3 is punishing me for playing it, and Torchlight 2 is rewarding me.

[Ironwood]

Yeah, Diablo III made me feel like a janitor who was clearing a messy world of monsters and sub-par items.  Monsters get killed, items get cleared away to the vendors. 

[koro]

Very nearly everything you loot doesn't need to be ID'd, for what it's worth. The only things that typically do are uniques. I've got a good 20 or so ID scrolls sitting in my inventory, and I haven't bought a single one.

I mean, besides, your fucking pet can buy them for you, in whatever quantity you want, at any time.

[Quinton]

I mean, besides, your fucking pet can buy them for you, in whatever quantity you want, at any time.

Then why have them at all?  I'm not sure I get the point, except maybe that nethack did it, so diablo did it, so torchlight did it?  Seems like a vestigal game mechanic at this point...

[Tebonas]

You people realize that items selfidentify when you reach a target level for that item? Or you take a shortcut by spending 200 gold prior to that. Its the couriosity tax, and I'm completely fine with that. Also its more immersive than rightclicking on the item and suddenly knowing everything about it because the game says so. We forget that with all the streamlining, but these are still role-playing games.

[Ironwood]

Yeah.  There's also some respec bitching going on, despite that being a game design choice that, actually, you can use the console or mods to overcome.

Some people just like moaning.  Hell, I should know.  Installing this game has given me nothing but a weekend of pain.

Worth it though.

[Abelian75]

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot.

Man, it's too bad Runic didn't know that. They could have saved a shitload of money and time invested in all those models, effects and animations.

[Lakov_Sanite]

I'm dual wielding pixelated diamond swords, all other arguments are invalid.

[Xanthippe]

I mean, besides, your fucking pet can buy them for you, in whatever quantity you want, at any time.

Then why have them at all?  I'm not sure I get the point, except maybe that nethack did it, so diablo did it, so torchlight did it?  Seems like a vestigal game mechanic at this point...

Because it's like opening a present.

[Xanthippe]

I really liked D3 until they started 'fixing' things that broke my enjoyment. And the end game. Hated that. Also hate the clueless devs - the more they tried to explain, the stupider they sounded to me.

As much as I liked D3, I like Torchlight II far more. The more I play it, the more I like it.

[trias_e]

My outlander got some fun abilities at level 24.  Poison daggers and sandstorm.  I am now pleased with my class selection, and this game has become very fun.  Now I just need to get that leap ability asap.

The bosses are awesome.  Just the right difficulty so far on veteran, visually impressive, lots of stuff going on.  One boss felt like zoltan kulle mixed with the first phase of belial in D3.  Which was pretty damn hectic and fun.

[Fabricated]

If there is one thing they didn't really expand on in this game are the weird secondary spells. I mean, I really like the +Duel Wield, +Pet Power/Travel Time, +Elemental Resist, -Snare Time spells I have slotted but it feels like something more creative could've been done with it. Hell, why not go with the original version of D3's runes? Droppable runes you have 3-4 slots for max that modify one of your abilities to do something extra/different?

A quibble really; I can't wait to see how people modify the game. I'd be interested in seeing someone take a shot at adding the PoE potion system too.

[Ironwood]

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot.

Man, it's too bad Runic didn't know that. They could have saved a shitload of money and time invested in all those models, effects and animations.

I know you're being a snarky cunt, but I have to remind you of Nethack and all the other rogues that are still massively popular.

 

[Ironwood]

My outlander got some fun abilities at level 24.  Poison daggers and sandstorm.  I am now pleased with my class selection, and this game has become very fun.  Now I just need to get that leap ability asap.

The bosses are awesome.  Just the right difficulty so far on veteran, visually impressive, lots of stuff going on.  One boss felt like zoltan kulle mixed with the first phase of belial in D3.  Which was pretty damn hectic and fun.

I hated my Outlander until I realised that I should have taken tangling shot from the start.

 

[koro]

Fair warning for anyone who hasn't gotten to it yet: Act III will beat the stuffing out of you, at least on Veteran. My Embermage can still kill shit with a quickness, but I can get pasted just as fast.

[Abelian75]

I know you're being a snarky cunt, but I have to remind you of Nethack and all the other rogues that are still massively popular.

 

I was actually sort of thinking of nethack when I wrote that, since if you write off all the bells and whistles of D3 as irrelevant, then that kinda means all the fancy shit in TL2 that distinguishes it from ascii roguelikes is irrelevant, too.  But clearly it isn't.

(and yeah, also being a snarky cunt. I will admit I find the D3 hate and accompanying TL2 worship to be a little ridiculously extreme)

((but yes, TL2 is a good game that I am recommending to friends))

[eldaec]

The only gripes I've found so far are respec thing, and the 'hold left mouse button' function could work better, I find I have to reclick whenever a thing dies, also I'd like hold-clicking to pick up loot. Things die a lot and my finger hurts from the clicking.

The respec thing seems especially incongruous in a game that is so clearly set up around having continuous fun. Feels as if every possible corner has been rounded off in the cause of keeping it fast and fun. The fast part seems important, and it feels like Runic figured out that this is not a serious genre, it is really just one step up from a flash game, we will all get bored inside two weeks - so the game goes hell for leather with the noise and explosions from the first minute.

[Ironwood]

(and yeah, also being a snarky cunt. I will admit I find the D3 hate and accompanying TL2 worship to be a little ridiculously extreme)

I can understand that, but look, from my perspective, Diablo III fundamentally failed to deliver on almost every level as a game.  It looked great, yeah, and had the required level of 'polish', but beyond that it was utterly soulless and, FRANKLY, unplayable for enormous periods of time due to the always on BULLSHIT.  The AH made it utterly pointless and from what I've heard about the endgame, well, tbh, I gave up getting there.

Thus far in Torchlight, I have kicked up the LAN with the wife, had fun as fuck despite my SHITTY internet connection and found more loot and fun in 8 hours than I've had with Diablo III since I bought it.  It's that simple for me.  Almost every single design decision in D3 sucked for me and sucked hard.  Almost every single one in Torchlight 2 brought it back to the Diablo 2 roots that I was looking for.  It's not perfect, natch, but there's simply no comparison in what it actually IS.  It was also a third of the fucking price.

For me.


Your opinion.  May.  Vary.

[Ingmar]

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot.

I don't agree that the loot is the #1 thing ARPGs are about, which is probably the reason for my disconnect from people on this one.

[Ratman_tf]

"Everything else" is irrelevant in games that are just about amassing interesting loot.

I don't agree that the loot is the #1 thing ARPGs are about, which is probably the reason for my disconnect from people on this one.

For me, I want a fun game. Detailed description, I know. 
D3 was stolid. Poor design choices led to poor gameplay. The usual suspects, the AH, always online, poor items, and for me, uninteresting levels and things to fuck with.

T2 has better items, and lots of crazy shit going on. It's simply an amalgamation of good design choices that Blizzard failed to make with D3.

I don't hate on D3. For a single playthough, it's fun enough. But as the third installment of the Diablo franchise, it's simply disappointing.

[Ingmar]

See, I (with the caveat that I'm only a little more than an hour in to T2) find the actual act-of-playing-the-game stuff in D3 to be far better. Abilities feel more awesome, visually I find it a lot easier to tell what is going on, I find I really prefer the freely respec any time/rune system a lot better than T2's version, the game looks prettier, sounds better, etc.

I do think the genre is 'refined' enough now that a lot of this stuff is matter-of-taste more than black and white THIS ONE IS BETTER though.

[Rokal]

See, I (with the caveat that I'm only a little more than an hour in to T2) find the actual act-of-playing-the-game stuff in D3 to be far better. Abilities feel more awesome, visually I find it a lot easier to tell what is going on, I find I really prefer the freely respec any time/rune system a lot better than T2's version, the game looks prettier, sounds better, etc.

I do think the genre is 'refined' enough now that a lot of this stuff is matter-of-taste more than black and white THIS ONE IS BETTER though.

Curious what class you are playing. I rolled a berserker and liked it so much that I benched my engineer. The pace of combat and the movement speed on the berserker (especially when enraged) is great.

For me character progression is the heart of an ARPG, not combat, so Torchlight 2 is the best recent entry to the genre.

[Ingmar]

Berserker.

[Bunk]

For me Diablo 2 had two primary "sticky" factors - the Pavlovian response to cool loot, and trying different skill combos. I had fun trying to make a Teeth Based Necro work. Diablo 3, while it was a really pretty and polished experience, took those factors away. Instead of me restarting the game five times to try different builds, I got to try all five on my first play through. And the loot - yea, I played roughly 25 hours of Diablo 3 and I could not describe a single piece of loot I found to you. I had perhaps one moment of "Cool Shiny!" from a rare drop in Diablo 3, and it was obsolete 40 minutes later due to leveling.

Is TL2 the Tits and All That? Not sure yet, I've only played a few hours. I appreciate the fact that I have to pick a skill route and stick to it. If it turns out that I picked a shitty build, I can look forward to to trying something else with the reroll. D3 gave you no reason to reroll ever. I like rerolling. I had eight characters in WoW before I broke 50 with one of them.

Just a few hours in, I killed the first Boss with an Engineer, and I got a cool looking rare sword. It does significantly more damage than anything else I've found - one might even say its overpowered and unbalanced. This is a good thing. Who cares if its overpowered, it won't be in ten more levels, at which point I'll be looking for the next shiny. In D3, I never found anything that felt like more than a 5% improvement. In D3, I stopped picking up white gear after level 2. In TL2, I was using a white sword until I killed that boss, because with an ember slotted, it was the best sword I'd found. I was still picking up white stuff at level 11 - because it actually has a sell value. Why the hell do white items even drop in D3? At level 11 in TL2 I'm having to pick between two different Set Armors I've found (entire sets). Never found a single set item in D3.

Ok, enough rambling. TLDR: Rerolling is fun, "balanced" loot drops are not.

[Tannhauser]

I had fun in D3, the gameplay was pretty solid and the music and graphics were second to none.  But the loot was disappointing and I really didn't care to get to Inferno to get the 'good drops'.

Guess I expected Robot Jesus.

T2 is just as fun, but also has great items I can use, no AH and, oh costs 1/3 less than D3.  If I had known T2 was going to be better than D3, I'd have waited.  

D3 is one of the reasons I'm not getting MoP Day One.  Blizzard has lost their shit/mojo/Force.  Think I'll wait and see what other folks here think of MoP.  I have T2 and GW2 to tide me over.  

[Megrim]

For me Diablo 2 had two primary "sticky" factors - the Pavlovian response to cool loot, and trying different skill combos. I had fun trying to make a Teeth Based Necro work. Diablo 3, while it was a really pretty and polished experience, took those factors away. Instead of me restarting the game five times to try different builds, I got to try all five on my first play through. And the loot - yea, I played roughly 25 hours of Diablo 3 and I could not describe a single piece of loot I found to you. I had perhaps one moment of "Cool Shiny!" from a rare drop in Diablo 3, and it was obsolete 40 minutes later due to leveling.

Is TL2 the Tits and All That? Not sure yet, I've only played a few hours. I appreciate the fact that I have to pick a skill route and stick to it. If it turns out that I picked a shitty build, I can look forward to to trying something else with the reroll. D3 gave you no reason to reroll ever. I like rerolling. I had eight characters in WoW before I broke 50 with one of them.

Just a few hours in, I killed the first Boss with an Engineer, and I got a cool looking rare sword. It does significantly more damage than anything else I've found - one might even say its overpowered and unbalanced. This is a good thing. Who cares if its overpowered, it won't be in ten more levels, at which point I'll be looking for the next shiny. In D3, I never found anything that felt like more than a 5% improvement. In D3, I stopped picking up white gear after level 2. In TL2, I was using a white sword until I killed that boss, because with an ember slotted, it was the best sword I'd found. I was still picking up white stuff at level 11 - because it actually has a sell value. Why the hell do white items even drop in D3? At level 11 in TL2 I'm having to pick between two different Set Armors I've found (entire sets). Never found a single set item in D3.

Ok, enough rambling. TLDR: Rerolling is fun, "balanced" loot drops are not.

Class design figures into it quite heavily for me, which was one of the main issues I had with D3. The only really interesting character was the Wizard, and that was because they finally dropped the 'elemental' caster archetype and went back to the D1-styled caster, with a varied repertoire. The other classes ranged from ok (Witchdoctor) to ohgodkillmenow (Daemonhunter).

It remains to be seen if the TL2 classes have interesting (and deep) design, as I've only played the Engi so far - and it has been awesome.

[koro]

Someone on the Penny-Arcade forums found this, and I really really want it:

[Amaron]

I got more time to play finally and I'm liking it.  I think it's fair to say it falls far short of D3 in a couple area's though.  Like abundance of abilities for one.  D3 was constantly throwing new abilities/runes at me.

TL2 gets the important things right though.

[apocrypha]

holy shit....I just found notch's mine..



spoilered for awesomeness.

also found in it.

What, no screencaps?

[schild]

Minecraft area is the hidden zone in Borderlands 2 also. Good times. Minecraft in all the things.

[Tmon]

I prepurchased and didn't even realize the game had gone live until I read this thread last night.  It scratches my just one more thing and then I'll go to bed itch quite nicely.  About the only problem I have is that it will be eating into my GW2 time.  I'm playing an outlander and the rapid fire ability combined with a nice shotgun drop is just crazy fun.

[koro]

Christ, Shockbolts suuuuuuuuck. Low damage (25% of weapon DPS by default), huge mana cost (even more than the already costly Prismatic Bolt spam), and don't even build your Charge bar. I couldn't respec out of that quick enough.

[Soulflame]

My staff wielding melee embermage smacks things around in quite a satisfying way.  Putting points into staff -> reduces resists, elemental aura that inflicts statuses, plus elemental brands, and of course the magma mace.  Will pick up the flame aura that reduces incoming damage.

[Ratman_tf]

I prepurchased and didn't even realize the game had gone live until I read this thread last night.  It scratches my just one more thing and then I'll go to bed itch quite nicely.  About the only problem I have is that it will be eating into my GW2 time. 

My problem as well, I just finished Fall of Cybertron a bit ago, and between games and overtime, my attention span is taxed. Slyfeind was all "Are you still playing Guild Wars 2?" 

[Ironwood]

How was Fall of Cybertron ?