Go Play Torchlight II

Needless to say, it's been a great fall when it comes to video games. We are only a couple of weeks into October and there are already countless great titles and game of the year contenders in the little bit of the fall to holidays release window. September brought FTL, The newest World of Warcraft Expansion, and Borderlands 2. Looking ahead to October we have Dishonored, and  a new XCOM and by Christmas we will have a new Halo, Assassin's Creed, Call of Duty AND even a new Nintendo console with a whole launch line-up of its own. That being said, there was an awesome and hopefully not overlooked little game that came out just a few weeks ago that you might have heard of called Torchlight 2. And I want to tell you about it, why its awesome, not perfect, but still one of the best $20 I've spent on a game in many moons.

Torchlight 2 is the most recent title from Runic Games, the game company that essentially was at one time Blizzard North, that follows in the footsteps of Diablo II and Torchlight in it's click-fest loot-driven combat. I know what you're thinking "but wait, didn't you write a whole post about how much you didn't like Diablo III, why do you like this game so much?" And honestly I can pinpoint one concrete reason as to why I like it so much, but its game experience as a whole just seems more like a Diablo game than Diablo III. This is likely driven by the fact that a large portion of Diablo II's development team. But despite being the same basic equation, the combination of similarities and unique innovation really shines through as  a unique and fun game.

As mentioned, this game follows the proven equation of click monsters, cast cool spells, level up, get loot, rinse and repeat. On its most basic functional level, it's the same as it always was. It's not anything new and special in that area, but honestly I have trouble knocking it for that since it functions so well. As your character progresses in level, you learn and improve your abilities and increase statistics through points. This is something reminiscent of the original Diablo formula, but has been moved away from in the most recent title in that series that has instead removed skill ranks and statistic scores in favor of new abilities and modifications more frequently. In that sense, going back to some of the original ideas, while also adding some new mechanics makes for a really great gameplay experience from the RPG standpoint. You don't get new abilities frequently, but the abilities are interesting, powerful and there are extra incentives for putting many ranks into one ability. Also, this iteration has included a separate category of passive abilities that can fundamentally change how you play your character.

While passive abilities are nothing new to this genre, they are extremely well implemented. You can choose not to put any points into the if you don't want to, or you can choose to do the total opposite and rely on them heavily for a totally different experience from the same character even when using the same abilities. This adds much needed variety for a set of characters that only have about 21 active abilities each and often they add something completely different and unique in comparison. As an example, the Outlander class is one that primarily uses ranged weapons and has a lot of abilities revolving around powerful shots, throwing knives and poison. That being said, one of the passive abilities causes your shots to have a chance to summon bats that fight by your side, which in tandem with some higher level abilities can allow you to change from a powerful shooting class, to one that uses swarms of shadowy followers to do your dirty work in just a few levels.

The classes themselves are a variety of fantasy archetypes with a few interesting combos thrown into the mix. Two of the classes, the Berserker and the Embermage, are essentially  re-imagining of two of the original Torchlight classes, but with new skill trees to keep things interesting and to allow multiple play styles with the same character.  The other two classes also take some influences from Torchlight but serve more new roles comparatively. I have already mentioned the gun-toting Outlander who is somewhat akin to aspects of both Torchlight's Alchemist and Ranger classes, but the last class is by far my favorite: the Engineer. The Engineer is a heavy weapons, heavy armor kind of class that relies on massive fiery hammers to split the earth in twain, powerful cannons to blow-apart monsters and helpful constructs heal and assist the party. It has some aspects of the Alchemist in its tree full of steam punk  robotics, but its emphasis on powerful defenses and heavy melee weapons with a fiery conclusion just, for my money, made the combat and gameplay more fun than even the long-anticipated Diablo III.

The combat, like every aspect of this game, is fast-paced and fun. You move at a quick but not neck-breaking speed, and the speed of enemies and abilities is subsequently fast. Even the leveling and missions are quick, and it creates an environment of frequent rewards that really makes you want to keep playing. If you are playing with a cooperative group, something that I STRONGLY suggest, the game can move even faster if you get a good group rhythm of destruction rolling through a ridden with the stench of evil. You will level up and gain fame faster than you can keep track of, and despite battles being over quickly and players feeling very strong, the combat never feels cheap, easy, or boring. That being said, not everything about the fast pace is a good thing.

The story and quests really throw a wrench in the pace of the game at times. The story is a pretty simple premise based around one of the characters for the first game becoming a villain and you spending your time chasing them through the world. There is probably more to it, and each act has its own missions to progress personal stories, but despite putting many hours into iti don't know much else. With the speed of the game as it is, especially if you are playing multiplayer, the mediocre story that's in the game borders on being a hindrance. The mission text is read to you in poorly voice acted snippets that if you accept the quest, completely stop. And the same goes when you finish a quest and accept a reward. I was honestly interested in hearing more, but I want to be able to hear it without having to stand and stare at a box of text and quest rewards I couldn't get yet. I generally enjoy a good story-driven game, and I was disappointed to have mechanics and pacing that inhibited consuming the story. A simple fix like allowing voice overs to continue after a quest is accepted or completed would really allow for players of all kinds to get what they want: if you are in a hurry you can cancel or ignore it, otherwise you can listen while you play with your new gear, go shopping or keep on fighting the good fight.

The story's uninteresting plot, nameless characters and downright unnecessary interactions, while seemingly tacked on, does to take away from the experience quite as much as I imagined. Normally when I'm 10-12 hours into a game and I realize that I don't know what's going on in the story I am typically either really disappointed, or just really happy that I've had so much fun without it. This game was some strange middle ground where I was happy how much fun I was having, but disappointed about how much I knew I was missing due to the pace encouraging running through the game at 100 miles per hour. While it did not do justice to the story, the pace did however mesh well with the bold and bright aesthetic of the world.

Torchlight 2 took the clean but cartoony visuals of the first game and ran wild to create the beautiful open world that the first game's dungeon delving predecessor seriously lacked. The overall look of the game just comes out really well, and the cartoon asthetic meshes will with the fast-paced combat and whimiscal general feel of the game.  This game has really hit the sweet spot graphically where its just simple and clean enough to run on any machine looking good, while still holding up graphically to both its predecessors and the current gen. What this game lacks in "Cutting-Edge Graphics" it makes up for in smooth animations, beautiful environments and powerful spell effects. The animation and effects around the spells are some of the best and worst things about this engine, and despite being extremely well done are amongst the only things I had a complaint about graphically. When things get really hectic, which by Act 3 is almost all the time, there are so many spells effects on the screen it becomes very hard to follow. When you have your own spells going off, pets running around, traps, and enemy spells it is not easy to follow everything that is going on, and the handful of deaths I have had so far have almost always been from losing track of my character and standing in fire/poison/lazers ect.

I can attest this somewhat to my color blindness on some level. Battling in chaotic spell effects and standing in things I shouldn't be was a constant struggle for my years as a raider in World of Warcraft and the feeling of dying for no reason brought back fond memories of being laughed at by my old guild for this reason exactly. This is typically how things went down in the heat of battle.All good points and bad points aside, at $20 new this game is better quality and more fun than plenty of $60 titles in the recent past (I'm lookin' at you Resident Evil 6). This game, despite its flaws is easily as good as any Triple-A title on the market, and if you are looking to have a good time by yourself or with friends, this game is far and away worth a buy, even with everything coming out this fall. Go buy it, it will be $20 to support indie games, and I promise some serious fun!

I'm Done with Diablo III, and I'm Not Mad About It.

That’s right, I said it. Diablo 3 really is a great game, I've put over 100 hours into it, and now I’m done with it, and I’m not mad about it. The first 72 hours of this game after launch, playing co-op with my friends almost non-stop, having new experiences and getting extremely nostalgic was, to this day one of the best experiences I've had with ANY video game. But, when a game is the follow-up to such a fan favorite, and comes from such a prestigious company, a lot is expected. And in a lot of ways Diablo 3 lived up to the hype. Diablo 3 is an absolutely fantastic game. It’s graphically beautiful, literally years were poured into this game’s aesthetic and it shows. Every room you enter is like walking into a painting. I spent hours of extra time in this game just walking around experiencing what the game had to offer. In every room I explored off the beaten path, I discovered not only the typical monsters and loot, but also a new piece of artwork to spray zombified guts all over! An on the topic of said guts-spraying, the combat and gameplay itself is the spell spamming, undead undoing, creature crushing action that you fell in love with in titles past. The basic concept of click ability A onto monster B, rinse and repeat until all the monsters are dead is still the core of the game. If anything the changes to the skill system and loot drops only improved that. Gone are the days of tiered skill trees, and per-level skill points. Replacing it are skills, modifiable via another similar in game system, that you gain access to over time as you level up. Similarly, the per-level attribute points were removed in this iteration, making the lives of casuals and Min/Maxers alike a little simpler.  Not having to worry about math equations and what is the ‘right decision’ every few minutes felt good, and changed the game overall for the better.

That being said, this game is not flawless, far from it in fact. When a game has had so much hype behind it, and so many people expecting so much there was no way they could have made a game that truly lived up to all of the hype.  No matter what was changed or kept the same from the past titles, someone was upset. If you change it too much, people will complain that it “isn’t Diablo.” If you only make a few changes and update the graphics, the fans will leave their gaming experiences wanting more, and wanting to know why they just paid $60 to play the same game they’ve been playing for 10 years already. So, if it’s such a great game, and I played Diablo II for so many hours over so many years, why did I stop?  I think I’ve narrowed it down to three main reasons: Inferno Difficulty Implementation, The Auction House Mechanic, and the lack of a Ladder system.

Inferno Difficulty
When it was announced that there was an extra difficulty to be added after Hell in D3, I was nothing but excited.  I often find games that are too easy, or completely the opposite, so challenging that the time to reward ratio is completely unfavorable.  My faith in Blizzard led me to believe that it would be what equates to a proper hard-mode that only the most skilled of players would be able to navigate.  Then I got there, and much to my chagrin it was not that way at all.  It was implemented it a way where the difficulty was all over the place, which really threw off the pace of the game. I came into inferno and everything was just as I expected it, and it was good. It was a lot like hell but I enemies were more challenging and I had to change my strategy accordingly.  And then I got to a champion pack with 4 affixes, I remember the first group I found: Mortar, Waller, Vampuric, Fast.  And this is where the difficulty curve hit a brick wall. Even with the ability to change up my abilities, runes and equipment to suit the battle on the fly (which is very much discouraged by the nephelem valor buff mechanic), there was literally NOTHING I could have done to make this a fair fight. So, I was left with essentially three options, none of which creating anything that resembles compelling gameplay.  I could run past them, further into the area and hope that they stop pursuing me and just hope that I don’t die and have to run past them again. I could chip away at their life bars slowly by kiting them in circles until I died, and then doing it again and again until they died. This would of course, also take lots of time and money in repair costs. Or I could go back to hell difficulty and grind act 4 repeatedly to get better equipment; an act of the game that is the perfect combination of being too short, feeling too long, and ending with an extremely uninspired and anti-climactic boss fight ripped directly from World of Warcraft.  I eventually went and did exactly what blizzard told us we didn’t have to do: I looked up a build. I found a build that I never would have thought of and it made life in inferno a bit easier, but it still suffered from what I like to call Deus Ex: Human Revolution syndrome when it came to elite mobs and boss fights. I am not a game designer; I don’t have the answer as to how to fix Inferno. But, I will tell you one thing, there is nothing compelling about inferno difficulty. Either you grind and grind until you make progress, or you fork up many of your very real dollars to buy what you need to progress: a fundamental change to the Diablo equation that really subtracts from the game feel.

The Auction House
When the Real Money Auction House was announced, it was literally all anyone in the video games industry could talk about for a solid two weeks. Every blogger, every podcaster, every news site, even non-game related media covered it pretty extensively, and for good reason. It was new and crazy. The idea of paying real money for in game items was not a new one, it had been done by high school kids and Chinese gold farmers alike for many years. But for the first time ever, the company had taken control of the market and allowed the transaction’s through legal and regulated channels, that of course made them money. There were many good points made on both sides of the argument. Being able to buy power in game with real money was scary and offensive to many, allowing players with more real money to get a distinct in-game advantage that would normally only be earned through many hours of devoted farming. But on the other side, Blizzard wasn’t doing anything new, the same services existed in the backwater of the internet, and often ended in stolen identities and lost money, so why not regulate it? Well, as it turns out neither of those aforementioned ‘problems’ really are what happened.  I didn’t feel jealous of other players buying with cash, and I didn’t feel like Blizzard were money-grubbing either. The auction house just changed how people played. Trading items, a foundation of the economy of the other games, was essentially completely eliminated. The crafting systems, which many of us who played right at launch dumped all of our gold into, wound up being completely useless due to always being able to get better items at auction. It’s an addition that’s supposed to make it easier to gear your character, but all it did for me was turn a fun game into a gold grind. There exists means of combating this within Blizzard’s vast history: implementing a ladder season system.

Where’s my ladder?
It is my very unprofessional opinion that a lack of a ladder system will severely affect the long-term life of the game.  I am going to log back in on a whim six months from now, and all my characters and gear is going to still be relevant, no new content will be added, and I’m going to be just as bored as I was three weeks after launch.  The elimination of non-played characters and the regular reset of the ladder seasons kept me coming back at least once a year for the entire lifespan of Diablo 2. I know that idea borders on arbitrary game-lengthening mechanics, but if you are coming back, having fun and not regretting that you did, I cannot in my right mind say that that’s a bad thing. This could solve a few problems with the game: Items going back to non-ladder status would keep prices fluctuating, players would feel incentivized to come back regularly to start over with their friends when the ladder resets, and you could increase the item drop rate because there would be a set end date to the relevance of the items. For my money, adding a ladder system would be a win-win-win-win situation.

I really really want to absolutely adore this game, and in a lot of ways I do. I’m not looking forward to PvP patch that was promised. And the endgame content they promised is likely more than 8 months away, with Pandas coming in September and the next installment of Starcraft 2 long  after. There doesn’t look like there is much on the horizon that will keep me playing, but despite all that I said that seemed contrary, I am not really mad about it. If you are on the fence about getting the game still you should get it, you will not be disappointed.  If you still play it and you can look past the flaws and love the grind, keep on keepin’ on! But if you’re anything like me, you’ve loved what you had, and you’ve moved on until the next Chris Metzen redemption story, or in other words, the first x-pack!