Comparing Diablo 3 to Torchlight.

[kortin]

D3 doesn't take 20-30 hours to complete does it? There's no way I pissed away that much time on it, pretty sure it's physically impossible.

I had 21 hours in the game by the time I beat the game on normal. That's even just going directly to the quest objective without seriously exploring. I expect another 25 hours AT LEAST before I beat the game on Nightmare. Then there's Hell and Inferno to do. And that's not even counting Co-op with friends. The game is considerably cheap considering how much time is liable to be spent in it.

Honestly, I have plans to pick up D3 and TL2. Both look like exceedingly good games, and I don't see why someone wouldn't get them both (other than monetary restraints, but even then you don't have to get them in the same period of time). They're both excellent games and well worth the money spent on them.

I don't frankly care how good or bad D3 is. Always-online, real money auction house, locked difficulties and other crap (like being unable to use any name for a character), etc mean it's an immediate fail. I won't even consider the gameplay, the intricacies, the strategies, the evolution over it's predecessor, the story....all irrelevant as it is immediately in the "will never buy" category based on the above.

Sucks to be you, mate. You're missing a good game by being prejudiced like you are.

Odd comparing Torchlight to Diablo 3....
Anyways, curious where people are reporting 20-30 hours of gameplay on the initial run. I mean what constitutes a run through the game? I remember in beta people were farting around checking every nook and cranny like it was a game with hidden collectibles. That consumes massive amounts of time, but instead if you go straight from point A to B that time is vastly shortened. Hell some people have been reporting speed runs of Diablo 3 in 6-7 hours, Total Biscuit talked about it on the TGS podcast.

That's completely different. Most NORMAL people don't do speed runs of a game until they've played through it. Playing the game like it is can get you a good 20 hours of game time.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Borderlands a hack and slash, transmuted into the form of an FPS. Swap guns for swords and you have the same tried and true kill/loot mechanic. Borderlands, excepting for poor multiplayer integration (and the PC version being a rather lazy console port), is a fantastic game without any of the nonsense.

+1

I think that you can make a very good case that Borderlands does the "loot-based ARPG" thing much better than the clicky ones because it replaces grinding for better gear with getting better at shooting dudes in the face.