These 2 games just puzzle me. They're both sequels to games I absolutely love, have been hopelessly hooked to, and improved on their predecessors in every way I could have wanted. Yet they both make a peculiar case of me having neither played nor liked either of them nearly as much as I loved the first ones, and peculiarly for almost exactly the same reasons. How should this be even possible?
Well, I know a few reasons.
Woah, that was a lot of text. Anyways, have any of you had similar feelings for these games? Or experiences where you should have loved a game but didn't?
Well, I know a few reasons.
- Whereas the first Torchlight was strictly singleplayer, the second one features multiplayer. Oh, scratch that, it feels more like designed entirely around multiplayer. The loot you get in singleplayer is simply complete garbage, and gives you absolutely no hope of beating the enemies on any higher diffculty setting than Normal. The only good loot you get is from multiplayer.
- I might be one of the probably around 10 people that likes Diablo 3's multiplayer more than TL2's. You see, the linearity of Diablo helps the players stay together since there's always only one way forward, in or out of locations and it's very easy to jump right into the thick of the action with the banners. TL2's maps are sprawling and require exploration, so more often than not my multiplayer matches have ended up with all players running in different directions with maybe one player desperately trying to get them together. And even when you get the group together, the open maps make it quite hard for it to stay together unless you have a very coordinated team.
- The environments. The first one had a very varied set of locations with specific enemies, color palettes and themes. While this holds also true in the second one, the 4-act structure limits the variety considerably, despite there being effort to introduce variety within acts. The dungeon-based, disjointed structure of the first made bother less when you jumped from a lava-filled prison to a drenched, jungle temple environment. But the second tries to introduce a consistent world, so it has to stretch its scope and try to make the change of environments make more sense, which in return diminishes their variety.
- Staggeringly, the story. I know it makes little sense to say the Torchlight series even has a story, but in the first one I at least knew who the villain was, what he was trying to do and how. In the second the Alchemist is never seen outside of animated cutscenes, and I completely forgot why he needed the mana guardians to weaken or something. To awaken some ancient evil I guess? But I didn't even know what I was supposed to be fighting when the final big monster showed up. I can't remember a single NPC name. I don't even remember there being any support NPCs. In the first you had at least one: Syl, the mage chick.
- The difficulty. I wasn't bothered by the first one being way too easy, even on Hard. But in TL2 the difference between normal and hard feels the same as being slightly caressed on the cheek and having your face smashed in with a sledgehammer. On Normal things are way too easy to the point of maddening boredom, and on Hard most of the bosses can kill you before you can even shout ?UNFAIR!? It doesn't help that they're usually aided by hordes of smaller enemies which can peck your health away even when you're repeatedly chugging health potions, slow you, drain your mana etc.
- I might be one of the probably around 10 people that likes Diablo 3's multiplayer more than TL2's. You see, the linearity of Diablo helps the players stay together since there's always only one way forward, in or out of locations and it's very easy to jump right into the thick of the action with the banners. TL2's maps are sprawling and require exploration, so more often than not my multiplayer matches have ended up with all players running in different directions with maybe one player desperately trying to get them together. And even when you get the group together, the open maps make it quite hard for it to stay together unless you have a very coordinated team.
- The environments. The first one had a very varied set of locations with specific enemies, color palettes and themes. While this holds also true in the second one, the 4-act structure limits the variety considerably, despite there being effort to introduce variety within acts. The dungeon-based, disjointed structure of the first made bother less when you jumped from a lava-filled prison to a drenched, jungle temple environment. But the second tries to introduce a consistent world, so it has to stretch its scope and try to make the change of environments make more sense, which in return diminishes their variety.
- Staggeringly, the story. I know it makes little sense to say the Torchlight series even has a story, but in the first one I at least knew who the villain was, what he was trying to do and how. In the second the Alchemist is never seen outside of animated cutscenes, and I completely forgot why he needed the mana guardians to weaken or something. To awaken some ancient evil I guess? But I didn't even know what I was supposed to be fighting when the final big monster showed up. I can't remember a single NPC name. I don't even remember there being any support NPCs. In the first you had at least one: Syl, the mage chick.
- The difficulty. I wasn't bothered by the first one being way too easy, even on Hard. But in TL2 the difference between normal and hard feels the same as being slightly caressed on the cheek and having your face smashed in with a sledgehammer. On Normal things are way too easy to the point of maddening boredom, and on Hard most of the bosses can kill you before you can even shout ?UNFAIR!? It doesn't help that they're usually aided by hordes of smaller enemies which can peck your health away even when you're repeatedly chugging health potions, slow you, drain your mana etc.
- The exact problem with loot from Torchlight 2 can be placed here word for word, just replace Torchlight 2 with Borderlands 2.
- The environments. This is probably the most baffling of all, since this was IMO the only major flaw of Borderlands 1. But in the first one you spent quite a lot of time and questing in the same environments, i.e. Fyrestone, New Haven and such, even occasionally returning to them for late-game quests. At least for me it helped to establish a sense of setting and place. But in the second one the environments rarely feature more than a few quests and are then instantly forgotten about. It felt like wasting the environments: why make these huge, colourful sprawling levels if I'm only going to visit there once, never to return?
- The difficulty. With the aforementioned crap loot, and enemies (especially tougher ones) having way way way WAY too much health for their own good, many times I just found myself cowardly sitting in a corner somewhre slowly peddling away at the enemies' health. It didn't feel challenging, it felt like a war of attrition.
- The environments. This is probably the most baffling of all, since this was IMO the only major flaw of Borderlands 1. But in the first one you spent quite a lot of time and questing in the same environments, i.e. Fyrestone, New Haven and such, even occasionally returning to them for late-game quests. At least for me it helped to establish a sense of setting and place. But in the second one the environments rarely feature more than a few quests and are then instantly forgotten about. It felt like wasting the environments: why make these huge, colourful sprawling levels if I'm only going to visit there once, never to return?
- The difficulty. With the aforementioned crap loot, and enemies (especially tougher ones) having way way way WAY too much health for their own good, many times I just found myself cowardly sitting in a corner somewhre slowly peddling away at the enemies' health. It didn't feel challenging, it felt like a war of attrition.
Woah, that was a lot of text. Anyways, have any of you had similar feelings for these games? Or experiences where you should have loved a game but didn't?
