Full disclosure, I'm a massive Diablo/Blizzard fanboy, so you can take everything I say with as many grains of salt as you like. First, I have to say that Torchlight 2 is much more the spiritual successor of Diablo 2 than D3 is. Where the D3 team has tossed out quite a few of the systems from 2, Torchlight has decided to keep them, for better or for worse.
Things I didn't like:
- Talent point character progression. I should specify that I only really take issue with this because of the inability to re-spec beyond level 10. If there were an option, even if it cost gold, but so long as it were infinite, I would be willing to retract this criticism. As it is, you're only allowed to respec up till level 10, and obviously this is well before all your skills are unlocked. Why didn't I like this?
TL2 has a similar skill/talent system to D2, which means that to make a really effective character, you're probably going to have to dump as many of your points as possible into your main DPS skills - but since you can't re-allocate points after level 10, you're left with the ugly situation of having to guess at the effectiveness of some skills you haven't seen the higher ranks of, and other skills you haven't seen at all. You also end up in the situation of hoarding skill points, sacrificing your early level experience for (hopefully) later effectiveness.
It goes without saying that the same issues apply to the stat point system. You can't change these at all, so when you find out you're going to be 1 shot with your lack of points in Vit - well it's back to square one.
-Massive scaling of Weapon Damage. Maybe this is only an issue in the early levels, but it seemed like every 5 levels or so, weapon DPS would double, and monster health pools followed suit. With the large variety of weapon types in the game, this could leave you out in the cold if you didn't get lucky with a drop. On the other side, my experience was that any time I got an upgrade to my weapon, the game suddenly opened up again. That sort of thing really cuts into the experience, at least for me.
-Mana. Probably only a low level problem, but it's one shared by D2. Especially for the physical DPS classes, my money's on "optimal" build putting minimal to 0 points increasing their mana pool, meaning that you spend a decent amount of time just swinging your weapon. While they did try to give your weapon swings more flavor with a variety of passive effects, in a way it puts you at the mercy of the drop machine. Rather than choosing what sort of skill you'd like to be your "spammable" damage, you end up being somewhat pigeonholed into taking the flavor offered by your current highest DPS weapon.
Things I liked:
-Gameplay! As you'd expect from this talented team, the gameplay delivers. I'll admit I got frustrated with the Elite difficulty more than once, but it made it all the more satisfying when I executed cleanly.
-Pets! Even if mine probably spent half the time "fleeing" the time he spent doing things was spent absolutely crushing the enemies. The fact that I didn't have to micromanage my followers health, or worry that if he died I'd have to go spend gold/time to resurrect him makes this my preferred implementation of a "sidekick" mechanic in any game.
-Art Style! I'll probably get called a blasphemer for this, but I love the style they went with. It really allowed them to create some awesome stylized visuals that lean towards wacky more than dark.
-Equipment Variety! Because you do end up using your vanilla weapon attack reasonably often, this was especially important. Each of the different weapon times very much had their own flavor, so that choosing a weapon was (at least when they were close) more than picking up the one with the highest DPS number.
Overall the game will be fun I'm sure, but not for me until someone else plays through a dozen times to figure out how in the world I'm supposed to spend my points so I can get to the business of killing stuff. The joy of discovery is well and good, but when making a bad prediction means the possibility of wasting dozens of hours - count me out.
I noticed the weapon-scaling as well. Though expecting to use mostly magic-attacks as an ember mage, I found that in some cases melee-ing mobs with your staff does more damage than using spells. But since I only tried the normal-mode up until now, that may well be different on the other difficulties. I suppose, that a lot more balancing will be done before the game goes final, so I don't worry too much about that particular problem.
Not being able to reset your skills and stats is annoying and should definitely be addressed. I remember that there were "forgetfulness-potions" of some sort in the first Torchlight, which had exactly the desired effect. But they weren't sold at default, you had to use a tiny mod which placed them in the inventory of a vendor. I imagine that TL2 could end up with the same approach, but I'd really prefer it if the devs would put a respec-npc of some sort in the game without the necessity of a mod. The costs of a respec could be ramped up depending on the player level and/or the number of talent-point-resets within a certain time frame.
I like the gameplay very much, it feels very responsive and most attacks really give the impression of having an "impact". The UI is an improvement over the one from TL1, though still not perfect. I don't know if I just overlooked an option, but it seems to me, that for changing the overlay-map to the mini-map, you have to press 'M' four times, because the "real map" has three possible positions. So instead of choosing between mini- and overlay-map with a single-button-press, you get to deal with a five-way-toggle between "map disabled", "overlay map on left/center/right" and "mini-map".
Runic Games have learned a lot in terms of questing and itemization however! In TL1, the quests rewarded extremely low amounts of xp and equipment of insultingly bad quality. Many items had curious stats on them, to the point were it wasn't even possible to tell, which class an item was supposed to be tailored to. Quests in TL2 let the player choose between different quest-rewards, which look much more reasonable than in TL1. Many could actually be used by my character instead of being five levels below the stuff that dropped from the mobs related to the quest I just got the reward for.
I like the pacing of the game as well. It feels very fluid and the character seems to run pretty fast compared to D3. This could be due to different camera-angles, zoom-levels, character-to-world-scaling, or other technicalities, but what do I care? The "send-your-pet-to-town"-feature is nice, especially the shopping list.
All in all I'm looking forward to playing the full version in a few months or so and hope, that they'll have ironed out the existing flaws until then.
- Talent point character progression. I should specify that I only really take issue with this because of the inability to re-spec beyond level 10. If there were an option, even if it cost gold, but so long as it were infinite, I would be willing to retract this criticism. As it is, you're only allowed to respec up till level 10, and obviously this is well before all your skills are unlocked. Why didn't I like this?
That's disappointing, hopefully someone will mod the respec potion back in.
On May 13 2012 08:41 eluv wrote: Full disclosure, I'm a massive Diablo/Blizzard fanboy, so you can take everything I say with as many grains of salt as you like. First, I have to say that Torchlight 2 is much more the spiritual successor of Diablo 2 than D3 is. Where the D3 team has tossed out quite a few of the systems from 2, Torchlight has decided to keep them, for better or for worse.
Things I didn't like:
- Talent point character progression. I should specify that I only really take issue with this because of the inability to re-spec beyond level 10. If there were an option, even if it cost gold, but so long as it were infinite, I would be willing to retract this criticism. As it is, you're only allowed to respec up till level 10, and obviously this is well before all your skills are unlocked. Why didn't I like this?
TL2 has a similar skill/talent system to D2, which means that to make a really effective character, you're probably going to have to dump as many of your points as possible into your main DPS skills - but since you can't re-allocate points after level 10, you're left with the ugly situation of having to guess at the effectiveness of some skills you haven't seen the higher ranks of, and other skills you haven't seen at all. You also end up in the situation of hoarding skill points, sacrificing your early level experience for (hopefully) later effectiveness.
It goes without saying that the same issues apply to the stat point system. You can't change these at all, so when you find out you're going to be 1 shot with your lack of points in Vit - well it's back to square one.
-Massive scaling of Weapon Damage. Maybe this is only an issue in the early levels, but it seemed like every 5 levels or so, weapon DPS would double, and monster health pools followed suit. With the large variety of weapon types in the game, this could leave you out in the cold if you didn't get lucky with a drop. On the other side, my experience was that any time I got an upgrade to my weapon, the game suddenly opened up again. That sort of thing really cuts into the experience, at least for me.
-Mana. Probably only a low level problem, but it's one shared by D2. Especially for the physical DPS classes, my money's on "optimal" build putting minimal to 0 points increasing their mana pool, meaning that you spend a decent amount of time just swinging your weapon. While they did try to give your weapon swings more flavor with a variety of passive effects, in a way it puts you at the mercy of the drop machine. Rather than choosing what sort of skill you'd like to be your "spammable" damage, you end up being somewhat pigeonholed into taking the flavor offered by your current highest DPS weapon.
Things I liked:
-Gameplay! As you'd expect from this talented team, the gameplay delivers. I'll admit I got frustrated with the Elite difficulty more than once, but it made it all the more satisfying when I executed cleanly.
-Pets! Even if mine probably spent half the time "fleeing" the time he spent doing things was spent absolutely crushing the enemies. The fact that I didn't have to micromanage my followers health, or worry that if he died I'd have to go spend gold/time to resurrect him makes this my preferred implementation of a "sidekick" mechanic in any game.
-Art Style! I'll probably get called a blasphemer for this, but I love the style they went with. It really allowed them to create some awesome stylized visuals that lean towards wacky more than dark.
-Equipment Variety! Because you do end up using your vanilla weapon attack reasonably often, this was especially important. Each of the different weapon times very much had their own flavor, so that choosing a weapon was (at least when they were close) more than picking up the one with the highest DPS number.
Overall the game will be fun I'm sure, but not for me until someone else plays through a dozen times to figure out how in the world I'm supposed to spend my points so I can get to the business of killing stuff. The joy of discovery is well and good, but when making a bad prediction means the possibility of wasting dozens of hours - count me out.
I would agree with most of these points. Played first Torchlight and loved that you could send your pets back to town to sell stuff. I think I only went to town to return quests. My main problem with the beta is also the skill/stat system. It would easily be solved by having some form of respec. Maybe even for a beta have a free respec so people can try out all the different skills instead of having to remake characters. One thing I LOVED is that items have level requirements OR stat requirements. So if you don't meet the level requirement you could still use the item if you had the required stats, don't remember if they had this for the first game
Ok its official. I would really like to have a try at this game. If anyone hears anything closely resembling a giveaway, please post here so we have a chance at it. (Or better yet, PM me so I get first dibs =D)
Something I find lacking is their friend/chat system. The thing is pretty much non-existant. I couldn't figure out how to message my friend who wasn't in the same game as me and it was really frustrating
On May 14 2012 03:12 awu25 wrote: Something I find lacking is their friend/chat system. The thing is pretty much non-existant. I couldn't figure out how to message my friend who wasn't in the same game as me and it was really frustrating
yeah i dont think there is a chat system implenmented on the lobby, but u can see in which server they are when they are playin
I just got a beta invite, despite my never signing up for a key. I think they had my email from my posting on the Runic forums a few times when TL1 was new. Weird.
Not gonna lie, that youtube video actually convinced me to preorder Torchlight 2. I mean, you get the first game and the second game for only $20? What a deal!
TORCHLIGHT 2 Is now IN OPEN BETA STRESS TEST WEEKEND , everyone with runic games account can play it f
"Hi Everyone! We've been busy squashing bugs and deploying patches - 8, in fact! - since our last update. The Torchlight II beta is going really well, and is nearing its end. But before we go, we're going to do a wide network stress test this weekend! We'll be sending out many more beta codes to those who have already made their Runic Games Account. Haven't signed up yet? Go for it now! Creating your account is always your best chance to receive a beta invite - especially this weekend.
The Beta Weekend will start on Friday, May 18th at 11:00am PDT and go until Tuesday, May 22nd at 11:00am PDT. We will be staggering invitations to let participants know they have been chosen, but you will not be able to play until the start of the Beta Weekend on Friday. This is to help stagger downloading of the game client.
The beta will end shortly after this last big network test. We are going to get the last information we need for stress testing, and then get back to finishing the game! A longer beta means a longer wait until we can ship, and we are eager to finish Torchlight II and get it in your hands. Thanks to all our fans who've supported us, participated in, and promoted the beta. It's incredibly fulfilling to see you guys play the game and enjoy it as much as we do"
I got in earlier and played for a bit. It's awesome. it is so much better than TL1.
The only downside I would say is that the skill tree is a bit boring. It's more or less the same thing from TL1. But the overall gameplay I couldn't be happier with. I've enjoyed the first 15 levels of this way more than I did D3
On May 19 2012 06:44 pallad wrote: If someone still dont know !
TORCHLIGHT 2 Is now IN OPEN BETA STRESS TEST WEEKEND , everyone with runic games account can play it f
"Hi Everyone! We've been busy squashing bugs and deploying patches - 8, in fact! - since our last update. The Torchlight II beta is going really well, and is nearing its end. But before we go, we're going to do a wide network stress test this weekend! We'll be sending out many more beta codes to those who have already made their Runic Games Account. Haven't signed up yet? Go for it now! Creating your account is always your best chance to receive a beta invite - especially this weekend.
The Beta Weekend will start on Friday, May 18th at 11:00am PDT and go until Tuesday, May 22nd at 11:00am PDT. We will be staggering invitations to let participants know they have been chosen, but you will not be able to play until the start of the Beta Weekend on Friday. This is to help stagger downloading of the game client.
The beta will end shortly after this last big network test. We are going to get the last information we need for stress testing, and then get back to finishing the game! A longer beta means a longer wait until we can ship, and we are eager to finish Torchlight II and get it in your hands. Thanks to all our fans who've supported us, participated in, and promoted the beta. It's incredibly fulfilling to see you guys play the game and enjoy it as much as we do"
On May 20 2012 21:00 Killmouse wrote: got an extra beta key, if u want pm me with your email
@gone
Next time pls , dont write you have a beta key .. You send me , weekend beta key , that eveyone can have , just by making runic games account.. Look at my post up.
On May 20 2012 21:00 Killmouse wrote: got an extra beta key, if u want pm me with your email
@gone
Next time pls , dont write you have a beta key .. You send me , weekend beta key , that eveyone can have , just by making runic games account.. Look at my post up.
so it is a beta key after all? you just said it yourself
EPT
