I like Diablo style games quite a lot. I like Diablo quite a lot and while I didn't like Diablo 3 at launch, the expansion made it one of the best ARPG's on the market. I know a lot of people swear by Path of Exile, but I found that game too complicated and too sluggish to get into. To me a good ARPG gets you into the action quickly, with quick and responsive characters, and interesting loot that allows you to start tweaking your character's potential early.
The makers of Torchlight 1 and 2 agreed with me apparently because both of those games were fantastic. Allowing for quick story experiences that got you slaying monsters and collecting loot quickly and easily. While also giving you interesting items very very early. As a result I became a fan of Torchlight pretty quickily.
So when I heard about Torchlight 3 late last year I was pretty excited. I'm always down to play a new ARPG, but honestly I didn't expect the game to release anytime soon. Turns out I was half right. This weekend the game launched into....Ugh, Early Access, the fucking blight of gaming these days.
But it's Torchlight 3 a new game in a series I really like. So I got the game and downloaded it and instantly regretting my discision because the login server was broken. You know I'm pretty sure Early Access means you have access to more than the title screen right? $30 is a big ask for just a title card I think. Well all day Saturday the login server was busted. Sunday it was fix though, only to find that the game is online-only and the servers couldn't keep people connected for more than 30 seconds before curling up and vomiting them back to the character select screen.
Three days after launch the developers finally managed to do the most basic thing required of them when selling a game, making it playable. Last night I was able to dive and really dig into the game for a few hours.
Torchlight 3 currently has 4 classes, the warrior, the magicy dude, the archer lady, and a robot that kills people by summoning death trains. I chose the archer lady. After picking your character you get to pick a pet, much like in the previous games, a dog, owl, or llama. These pets fight along side of you, but their main purpose is to take all the shit you pick up and go sell it in town for you so you don't have to do it yourself. I like that they kept this system, it allows you to ignore the boring part of a looter by selling your crap automatically without having to stop your adventure. You continue to kill monsters while your loyal little doggy/birdy/llama fucks off back to town where all the vendors are incredible honest people and give your animal the correct amount of coin to bring back to you.
Combat plays out the way it should, each character has their own resource pool that works in slightly different ways but is all basically just a different flavor of the same thing. There are 14 skills you can learn and level up as you go for each character, these abilities are broken into different subclasses. For example the archer lady has a tree that's all about shooting bigger and better bullets, while also having a tree that is about summoning goblin archers to do the shooting for you. It's pretty standard stuff and it's interesting enough though the characters don't seem to have all that much growth right now. Could be later builds of the game will further expand the characters, or add more characters in general, I didn't bother to look it up.
What I really like about Torchlight 3 however is how they've kept their loot interesting and they don't lock it away until you put in an arbitrary number of hours. I got my first legendary item at level 2 about 20 minutes in, then I found another ten minutes later. Along the way I found greens and blues that all provided various resistances or armor or buffs or whatever. The legendaries were particularly nice because they enhanced fire skills and made me attack faster so that I was a flaming archer of death for about an hour before I out leveled them and replaced them with green items. But my new green bow that replaced my legendary rifle, made my arrows explode and I laughed in glee as goblins ran away in terror from my arrows of death.
The problem with most ARPG's is that everything interesting happens all late game and Torchlight doesn't do that. You find elite enemies with all kinds of abilities, you find interesting loot, and even new pets companions all pretty much from the start of the game. I find this approach more enticing because it doesn't make the beginnings of the game feel like a chore, a hurdle to get over before the interesting and fun parts happen. Diablo 3 has this problem with every season, in which you are forced to do the boring tedious level up process first before the actual game begins again. Whereas in Torchlight 3, I can see myself enjoying a seasonal event in which you start all over again because it is fun from moment one.
Fairly early in the game you get your own base, which you gather resources and materials to build crafting stations, vendor shops, and more. I didn't get too many chances to play with this in the first few hours, but I unlocked it and filled it with crafting stations. Presumably this fort becomes your hub in which NPC's will appear and send you on quests while also allowing you to unlock bigger and better buildings. It's a neat little system and customizing your own towns is never unwelcome. Especially since you can streamline your base design to minimize the time it takes to do your business before getting back out to the monster murder.
Unfortunately the game still has lag and disconnect problems. Hopefully that shit gets sorted out sooner than later. But outside of that, Torchlight 3 has a very promising foundation going.
UPDATE:
So Torchlight 3 is now out and fully released. I am pleased to report that the server issues are no longer a thing because you can play in single player now.
However the game did not shape out to the promise that it held based on the first two games. The game's combat ends up being kind of shallow and repetitive without a lot of build diversity. The starting classes are fairly unique which is a plus, but they don't really evolve throughout the end game. While the loot is certainly rewarding, it does lack quite of a bit of flavor.
This being a loot game the gear should steer players towards building unique combinations of skills on a given class in order to help the player create powerful builds around certain play styles. But the loot here just kind of gives you more of things. More X-type damage. Or extra levels in a given skill. It's all just baseline.
Earlier in the year Minecraft Dungeons came out and was like baby's-first-Diablo game. Torchlight 3 is only slightly more advanced than that. This is the game you play when you are too advanced for Minecraft Dungeons, but not advanced enough for Diablo 3 or Path of Exile.
And it's a shame because Torchlight 1 and 2 were genuinely great, and Torchlight 3 really just feels like they couldn't live up to the legacy the first two games game them and everything just falls flat.
The makers of Torchlight 1 and 2 agreed with me apparently because both of those games were fantastic. Allowing for quick story experiences that got you slaying monsters and collecting loot quickly and easily. While also giving you interesting items very very early. As a result I became a fan of Torchlight pretty quickily.
So when I heard about Torchlight 3 late last year I was pretty excited. I'm always down to play a new ARPG, but honestly I didn't expect the game to release anytime soon. Turns out I was half right. This weekend the game launched into....Ugh, Early Access, the fucking blight of gaming these days.
But it's Torchlight 3 a new game in a series I really like. So I got the game and downloaded it and instantly regretting my discision because the login server was broken. You know I'm pretty sure Early Access means you have access to more than the title screen right? $30 is a big ask for just a title card I think. Well all day Saturday the login server was busted. Sunday it was fix though, only to find that the game is online-only and the servers couldn't keep people connected for more than 30 seconds before curling up and vomiting them back to the character select screen.
Three days after launch the developers finally managed to do the most basic thing required of them when selling a game, making it playable. Last night I was able to dive and really dig into the game for a few hours.
Torchlight 3 currently has 4 classes, the warrior, the magicy dude, the archer lady, and a robot that kills people by summoning death trains. I chose the archer lady. After picking your character you get to pick a pet, much like in the previous games, a dog, owl, or llama. These pets fight along side of you, but their main purpose is to take all the shit you pick up and go sell it in town for you so you don't have to do it yourself. I like that they kept this system, it allows you to ignore the boring part of a looter by selling your crap automatically without having to stop your adventure. You continue to kill monsters while your loyal little doggy/birdy/llama fucks off back to town where all the vendors are incredible honest people and give your animal the correct amount of coin to bring back to you.
Combat plays out the way it should, each character has their own resource pool that works in slightly different ways but is all basically just a different flavor of the same thing. There are 14 skills you can learn and level up as you go for each character, these abilities are broken into different subclasses. For example the archer lady has a tree that's all about shooting bigger and better bullets, while also having a tree that is about summoning goblin archers to do the shooting for you. It's pretty standard stuff and it's interesting enough though the characters don't seem to have all that much growth right now. Could be later builds of the game will further expand the characters, or add more characters in general, I didn't bother to look it up.
What I really like about Torchlight 3 however is how they've kept their loot interesting and they don't lock it away until you put in an arbitrary number of hours. I got my first legendary item at level 2 about 20 minutes in, then I found another ten minutes later. Along the way I found greens and blues that all provided various resistances or armor or buffs or whatever. The legendaries were particularly nice because they enhanced fire skills and made me attack faster so that I was a flaming archer of death for about an hour before I out leveled them and replaced them with green items. But my new green bow that replaced my legendary rifle, made my arrows explode and I laughed in glee as goblins ran away in terror from my arrows of death.
The problem with most ARPG's is that everything interesting happens all late game and Torchlight doesn't do that. You find elite enemies with all kinds of abilities, you find interesting loot, and even new pets companions all pretty much from the start of the game. I find this approach more enticing because it doesn't make the beginnings of the game feel like a chore, a hurdle to get over before the interesting and fun parts happen. Diablo 3 has this problem with every season, in which you are forced to do the boring tedious level up process first before the actual game begins again. Whereas in Torchlight 3, I can see myself enjoying a seasonal event in which you start all over again because it is fun from moment one.
Fairly early in the game you get your own base, which you gather resources and materials to build crafting stations, vendor shops, and more. I didn't get too many chances to play with this in the first few hours, but I unlocked it and filled it with crafting stations. Presumably this fort becomes your hub in which NPC's will appear and send you on quests while also allowing you to unlock bigger and better buildings. It's a neat little system and customizing your own towns is never unwelcome. Especially since you can streamline your base design to minimize the time it takes to do your business before getting back out to the monster murder.
Unfortunately the game still has lag and disconnect problems. Hopefully that shit gets sorted out sooner than later. But outside of that, Torchlight 3 has a very promising foundation going.
UPDATE:
So Torchlight 3 is now out and fully released. I am pleased to report that the server issues are no longer a thing because you can play in single player now.
However the game did not shape out to the promise that it held based on the first two games. The game's combat ends up being kind of shallow and repetitive without a lot of build diversity. The starting classes are fairly unique which is a plus, but they don't really evolve throughout the end game. While the loot is certainly rewarding, it does lack quite of a bit of flavor.
This being a loot game the gear should steer players towards building unique combinations of skills on a given class in order to help the player create powerful builds around certain play styles. But the loot here just kind of gives you more of things. More X-type damage. Or extra levels in a given skill. It's all just baseline.
Earlier in the year Minecraft Dungeons came out and was like baby's-first-Diablo game. Torchlight 3 is only slightly more advanced than that. This is the game you play when you are too advanced for Minecraft Dungeons, but not advanced enough for Diablo 3 or Path of Exile.
And it's a shame because Torchlight 1 and 2 were genuinely great, and Torchlight 3 really just feels like they couldn't live up to the legacy the first two games game them and everything just falls flat.
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