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October 29 2009

Torchlight: All Manner of Awesome
by Buddha

Anyone involved in the creation of Diablo and Diablo II is considered a gaming god in my book.  To put that statement into perspective, let me be very clear that this is not a big book… there are not many names in it.  That isn’t to say that there have not been a lot of phenominal games created over the years, but rather that few have attained that level of greatness for me.

Games, much like any other creative endeavor, are completely subjective.  Not everyone will agree with the choices I’ve listed in my book… however I know for a fact that a great many agree with me in regards to the Diablo series.

Flash-forward to present day Seattle where Runic Games has just released Torchlight, a brand new IP created by “a veteran team composed of the designers and leads of projects like Diablo, Diablo II, Mythos, and Fate. Our team has spent many years honing and evolving this unique style of gameplay.”

Please note the wording in that last sentence as it will be very important as we progress through this review of Torchlight.  To say that the game was inspired by Diablo II would be incorrect, as it was designed by the same folks who created Diablo II.  As such, it is more of an evolution on the style.  In addition to introducing new gameplay concepts, Torchlight uses and builds on a lot of previously used game mechanics.

Torchlight is familiar.  Not the story, quests or characters, as those are very different.  Rather the gameplay.

If you spent any time at all playing Diablo II, you will feel as though you’ve found an old sweater in the back of the closet and slipping it on made you sigh contendely.  If you never played Diablo II, you are not worthy of this review and should stop reading immediately.  That’s not to say that you wouldn’t enjoy Torchlight.  You probably would.  I just don’t want to talk to you anymore.

For the rest of you cool folks, who are nice and warm and cozy in their old sweater metaphores, lets keep going.

Town Portals, Identification Scrolls, Socketed Items, Talent Tabs… and that music.

In my humble opinion, no other music has ever evoked so much in so few notes.  Play the first couple seconds of the Diablo II score to any true gamer and they will not just identify it (without a scroll), but will probably moan breathlessly, as if fingernails were being seductively scratched down their back.  No other score has ever embodied so much emotion.

Matt Uelmen, the genius behind that score, composed over a dozen pieces for Torchlight totaling close to 40 minutes.  The music at times is nearly identical to the Diablo II score.  This provides a lot of warm feelings, however to be honest, I’d have liked to have heard something a little more unique.  Uelmen’s score for Diablo II worked in that universe.  That game was a lot darker in nature, whereas Torchlight is far more “cartoony”.

That’s not a bad thing.  Not by any means.  They are very different styles, which is why I feel that something different should have been used.

Certainly Torchlight has a darkness.  The story has elements of evil as well.  However nothing that compares to the depth that Diablo II attained.

Torchlight’s score does contain different songs, and they are fantastic.  The man is truly gifted, that’s for certain.  Perhaps it’s just me, however if I had created a brand new IP, I’d want something created specifically for it.  In much the same way that a blindfolded gamer can identify the Diablo II score, I’d want people to be able to do the same with my game’s score.

For $500, identify this game.

“Diablo II.”

Wrong.

“Torchlight?”

Gameplay

I’m willing to grant a lot more leniancy with gameplay, as game devs shouldn’t always feel the need to reinvent the wheel.  If something works, improve upon it… don’t change it entirely.

Ever plug in your original Nintendo game console for kicks and upon picking up the controller, smile at how familiar it feels in your hands?

That’s Torchlight.

If you spent any respectable amount of time playing Diablo II, you will feel completely at home in Torchlight.  You’ll hotkey all of your abilities and get used to hovering your fingers over the numbers and F-keys, as opposed to ASWD.  You’ll set Town Portals before boss fights.  You’ll hold Shift as you range fire and Alt to see all the fallen loot.

You will also quickly notice the improvements in gameplay.

To begin with, Torchlight (despite only having three classes), is very alt friendly.  Because of the way that the Skills Tabs are designed, you can pick and choose skills on any tab without having to worry about skill chain requirements.  This means these three classes alone can result in a multitude of very, very different play styles.

Magic find tank.  Tank tank.  DPS tank.  Magic wielding tank.  Ranged expert tank.  The list goes on and on… and that’s only the Destroyer.

Because Runic Games knows we’re going to create a mess of alts, they gave us a Shared Stash with which to, well, share our loot between characters…. and there’s already quite a bit of storage space on your character, your personal stash and your pet.

Yes, your pet.  More on that later.

Back to the loot.  So far, I haven’t come across any that is soulbound.  I have gotten three gold items across two characters, and so am not certain just how rare they are… however that’s not to say my heart didn’t leap each time one dropped.

Then when I out-leveled them, I simply put them back into the shared stash for an alt.

Finally, on the subject of alts…

Retirement System – Once characters are sufficiently leveled up, they can “retire” and bestow specific benefits and perks to new characters.

I haven’t gotten this far on a single character, and so have no idea what this entails.

“My mule is a dog”

Take a cue from Fable II, Runic Games decided that every bold adventurer should have a loyal companion… or a cat.  Your choice.

When creating your character, you will notice that you have the option of selecting either a dog or cat companion.  The dog looks more like a wolf, while the cat looks kinda like a cross between a lynx and a bobcat.  You can also name this critter.

This pet will fight with you, and unlike Fable II, you don’t have to worry about it dying.  When its health drops to the point where it would die, it just runs around as if feared.

You can arm your pet with certain items, and use it to store a bunch of loot.  You can feed it fish that will transform it into a variety of creatures with special abilities which is both fun and useful depending on the fight.

The best part however is that you can send your pet to town to vendor off everything in its inventory.  It’ll run off and come back a few minutes later ready to keep fighting by your side.

This means no more porting from within a dungeon just to empty your stash.  All you have to do is keep the pet loaded with the vendor trash and periodically send it to town.  There are even skills you can train in which make them faster so that the wait is lessened.

Which leads us to fishing.  Yes, there’s fishing in Torchlight.

I’ve never hidden my hatred of fishing in games, and I hate to admit it, but that same holds true for this game.  I simply do not find fishing fun.  I know this is a personal preference, as a good buddy of mine absolutely loves fishing in WoW… whereas I’d rather pop my kneecaps off with a flat-head screwdriver.

Now all that being said, at least the rewards from fishing in Torchlight are cool.  You can score some excellent bonus stats from fish (as can your pet).  It’s actually well worth fishing in this game.

“Where’d the boss go?  He was here last time.”

Unlike many other dungeon crawlers, Torchlight’s mines and dungeons are randomized.  This makes it a lot more fun to replay, though because there are limited settings, it’s not like you’re going to wind up in the savanah when you take the stairs down from the 4th level.  Still, it does add variety and I found myself working to go through the entire level as I didn’t know where bosses would be.

This is a pro and a con, in my opinion.

Part of the fun of playing DII was grinding levels for gear.  Meph runs on my magic find sorc.  I knew where he was.  I knew the settings.  I enjoyed the familiar feeling of knowing the mobs and settings.

Sure, randomization would have made each Meph run more unique, however there’s no saying I’d always get Mephisto.

As I said, randomization is both a pro and a con.  It’s something that I spoke of often when playing Hellgate, as it was touted at the time as well.

I like knowing where bosses are though.  I like knowing their loot tables and what might drop from them.

Lore.  Proceed with caution, there be spoilers below.

Torchlight is a mining village.  The mines nearby are rich with veins of Ember.  This magical esssence allows people to wield incredible power, however the cost is high.  Eventually, Ember corrupts all that it afflicts.

Here is an entry from Alric’s Journal:

“I’ve arrived in Torchlight and begun my exploration of the tunnels below.  These mines are vast and aglow with Ember; I’ve never seen so rich a vein.  Miners labor to extract it, and take no heed of my warnings.

I cannot blame them; I too could not resist the pull of Ember.

Thiks Ember is the same as that which afflicts me.  The taint within it resonates with the corruption in my bones.  I can feel it so clearly now, blight springs from the depths through the veins.

To purge myself of this evil, I must find the source.”

When you get to town and head over to the mine, you notice a battle involving several people and mobs.  You find out that Syl (a hawt warrior chick) has been summoned by Master Alric to assist the town of Torchlight.

Syl’s companion, Brink, takes charge however and dashes into the mine to fight off the evil.  Syl asks you to give him a hand.  You meet up with him inside after a few moments and he fights alongside you until you finally reach Alric, who has been completely corrupted by Ember.

Alric transforms Brink, setting you up for your first boss fight.

First thing you want to do is open up a Town Portal.  Depending on your class as well as the amount of potions you have on hand, you’ll need it.  If you do use it, don’t forget to slap another one up asap.

Now that being said, Torchlight has a different game mechanic for resurrecting.  You can resurrect on the spot losing both money and experience.  You can resurrect at the start of the closest level, losing only gold (my rez of choice).  Or, you can resurrect in town losing neither.

I still find the ol’ school method better, as the Town Portal also allows you a quick dash into town whenever you’re low on health and need a breather.

The fight as a Destroyer (tank) requires a lot of health and mana pots.  I tanked the Brink beast using a board and sword.  I didn’t have as much DPS, however the shield helped me last longer as I fought him toe to toe.

Brink’s got a massive amount of health however, so I had to run in circles while healing up, letting my dog (Bubbles) chomp on his ass (though I doubt it did much… he may as well have been humping his leg).

My son did the same fight with his Vanquisher.  He didn’t need any health pots at all, though did nothing but kite Brink.  It was a very long fight, but he managed to finish it completely unscathed on the hardest difficulty mode.

Finally, I ran through that fight on my Alchemist.  Let me just begin by saying I’ve been holding onto really good gear for this Alchemist from runs on my Destroyer.  So he was decently geared, including a gold wand that I love more than any epic I’ve ever gotten in Wow.

Let me also say that so far, the Alchemist is by FAR the fastest leveling class.  This bastard mows down mobs faster than a landscaping expert on a turbo charged ridding lawn mower.  I’ve been going the minions route with him, so he’s got three little minions, zombies and skeletal archers (in addition to his dog).  He’s also got a fireball spell that does decent damage, and then there’s the wand.

I did a lot of kiting, and had to keep resummoning my minions, however the fight didn’t require a single pot (health or mana).  The wand’s DPS was more than sufficient while my mana regenerated.

The death of Brink leads you to the next quests with Syl who comes into the chamber just in time to see Brink’s corpse hit the ground.

Done yet?

Not by a long shot.

Toss in a level editor that is incredibly robust (I mean, they used it to create the game), and you’ve got the ability to create your own adventures and share them online.  Add to this the fact that the game’s systems requirements are so low, that in the words of @Samodean during episode 5 of For The Lore podcast, you could run this game on your alarm clock.  The game has a netbook setting, which means you can play this anywhere, anytime.

My only beef is that the Mac client isn’t released yet… however they are working on it.  I so want to play this on my MacBook.

Ok… now ya done?

Nope.

Though Torchlight is a single-player game, they are in the process of creating a Torchlight MMO (with a rough timeline of 18 months production).  They’ve got fantastic ideas for how they want the game to improve for an MMO, and it’s obvious they’ve been studying what audiences want.

The only problem with that timeline is that it may land at approximately the same time as Diablo III… and that’s the kind of competition that can kill a game.

That being said though, Runic Games is planning a free-to-play service for the Torchlight MMO, and with a very strong background in the genre (I mean hell, these are the guys who worked on Diablo and Diablo II), who knows just how much they’ll be able to accomplish.

I for one can’t wait.

Ok, now I’m done.

I think it’s quite obvious that I’ve a lot of love for this little game.  It works on so many levels and makes me smile.

It came out during a very, very tough season, up against heavyweights like Borderlands, Dragon Age Origins, Brutal Legend, Uncharted 2, and then some… and yet everywhere I turn, I keep reading about this hidden gem.

Fact is, it really isn’t hidden.  Everyone knows about it.

And everyone knows how utterly fantastic it is.

Screenshots

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