Gamer Commune

02-07-2010 Torchlight Comments

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A quick note about this review: I will probably be comparing the game to Diablo 1 and 2 because it is easily identifiable with a lot of people, and I don't really recall that well the other Actions RPG's I've played such as Titan Quest or Sacred.

The numbered topics in the "good" and "bad" sections are not intended to rank the topics at all. The numbers are more or less just a way to separate the different topics. They are also in no specific order other than the order that I thought of them if that means anything.

Index
The Good:
1. Gold Is Automatically Gathered
2. No Repairing
3. Your Pet Can Sell Items
4. The Shadow Vault
5. Retirement System
6. Enchantment System
7. Fame level
8. Low System Requirements
9. Shared stash
10. Gem/Item Salvaging

The Bad:
1. Overlapping Loot Drop Tooltips
2. Side Quests
2-1. Side Quest Text
3. No Multiplayer
4. Too Much on Screen
5. Gem Types and Qualities

The Summary

I just finished playing through Torchlight for the first time today. I played a little bit of the "Shadow Vault" open ended dungeon as well before retiring my character at level 40. I was unimpressed with the retirement system, but I think that's mainly my fault, after beating the game I installed a mod that made the enchanter 0 risk, then changed it to be super cheap (300 a pop) and super-enchanted an item like 50 times which I then passed down to the new character. It did make the item stronger, but the level and stat requirements actually went up instead. Oh well, Guess that's what I get for cheating.

Lets start with the good items, although if this isn't your first reading of a review for Torchlight, you've probably already heard these points before.

1. Gold Is Automatically Gathered - Gold drops, your character moves within range of it, and it's automatically picked up. This adds to the gameplay and doesn't take anything important away. It's everything that I like to see in game or genre progression. Diablo 1 had you carry gold around in your inventory taking up space, Diablo 2 took all that gold and made it a single number that didn't take up any space, and I'm hoping Diablo 3 will copy Torchlight (and Hellgate London and Fate) and implement an auto gold pickup.

Some might argue that it detracts from the reality, I have only one thing to say to that: Monsters, dungeons, magic. It's not about reality to begin with. Picking up gold wasn't fun, so it's out and will never be missed.

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2. No Repairing - Items never break and never need to be repaired in any way. I don't count wiping an items stats with a bad enchant as part of this.

I would like to mention that this does detract an element from the "Ironman" type of gameplay. The definition of Ironman, in relation to Diablo 1 and 2, varies but usually refers to playing the game with never going back to town to repair, sell, buy or heal. In the case of Diablo 2, you will need to go back to town to travel to the next act, but you aren't allowed to talk to any other NPC's. Managing your items durability was a key factor in this type of gameplay. Should you use that good sword now, or save it's durability for an area that's harder? What do you do if your sword breaks in the middle of a group of monsters?

Torchlight does have a Steam achievement "Ironman Victory - Defeat Ordrak without buying anything"

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3. Your Pet Can Sell Items - You should be careful with this feature, the pet auto-sells everything it's carrying and brings you back the gold. Any items you want to keep, keep in your own pack.

This is another one of those features I just love. It goes hand in hand with the automatic gold pickup. You already picked it up, determined it was crap and put it in your pets inventory. Why should you have to stop and go to town and click every single item to sell it to a vendor?

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4. The Shadow Vault - The Shadow Vault is a dungeon that opens up once you beat the main story quests with one character. All the information I could find on it says that it's an open ended dungeon. This adds a lot of end game content and competition almost to see who can get to the lowest level. The dungeon floors are randomly generated, the tile sets are random and the monsters are either random, or they are static for the tile set. I don't recall seeing any monster types on tile sets that weren't already associated with that specific tile set in the story dungeon.

The Shadow Vault is unique in that the dungeon scales to your level the first time you enter it(per character), or if it is "forgotten". The dungeon is "remembered" so long as you have a town portal open, if you go to the main story dungeon and open another town portal, the Shadow Vault will reset after 30 minutes.

If one of your characters has accessed the Shadow Vault, you will be able to take new characters who are level 1 and enter the dungeon which will be scaled down to level 1 monsters. If you enter the dungeon as a level 30 or 60 it will be populated with level 30 or 60 monsters. Every floor you descend will generally increase the monsters level by 1.

Here are some videos of people in some of the lower levels of the Shadow Vault. You can see that the monsters keep progressing past the character level limit of 100, and they get tremendously more difficult.

Floor 70 - Click to show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWFmP3csMDY

Floor 97 - Click to show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zw9OYtY6hqo

To be honest, I always wanted something like this in Diablo 2 so we could have something more to look forward to. It would be a great place to do something closer to Ironman in Diablo 1 where you didn't have to go back to town to progress further.

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5. Retirement System - After beating the main story, you can retire you character and pass on one of their items as an heirloom. The item gets it's stats upgraded, requirements lowered, and it's name is personalized with the retiring character's name. As far as I know, you can pass a single item down multiple generations and get it super powered.

This seems like a good idea, I didn't have much chance to play around with it though, and I think I broke it by moding the game and super-enchanting an item before passing it down. (see beginning of review for explanation)

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6. Enchantment System - What would an RPG be without one? good? hehe. The enchant system it another nice idea. I was constantly out of money because I wanted to enchant all of my items as high as I could. You get really suspicious of the "6% chance to disenchant" after awhile. I know it's probably just seeing what I want to see, but it sure seemed like it was a higher chance to disenchant than it listed.

You can enchant (and potentially disenchant) most items, including rings, armor, weapons, uniques, set items, magic/rare items, and non-magical items. The first time you enchant something, the tooltip says it's a 2% chance to disenchant. The chance to disenchant increases by 2% for every time thereafter. There's also a chance of it doing nothing and you just lose money. I usually got to around 4-5 enchants before I stopped because I wasn't willing to risk 10-12% disenchant rate.

If the enchant is successful, you can either get a random magical attribute added to the item, or if the item doesn't already have 2 gem sockets, you can get up to 2 sockets added to it.

Note: Rings and amulets can have up to two sockets also.

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7. Fame level - Fame is just another form of experience. Every time you kill a named creature, or complete a quest, you get fame experience. For every level of fame you have, you get an extra skill point. There are 55 fame levels and 100 characters levels.

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8. Low System Requirements - My computer can barely play Fallout 3 or Red Faction: Guerrilla on the minimum settings, yet I turn all of the settings to max for Torchlight and my computer just laughs and says "that tickles". The game looks spectacular, and doesn't kill computers, what more could you ask for?

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9. Shared Stash - OMGOMGOMG, YES!

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10. Gem/Item Salvaging - Just wanted to come back and make a quick mention while I'm typing the Gems topic of the bad category below - You can retrieve gems from an item by destroying the item, or you can recover used gem sockets in an item by destroying the gems in them at specific NPC's. If you find a new badass weapon with sockets, you can save your hard gem upgrading work and just destroy the old weapon you were no longer going to use anyway.

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Now it's on to the bad items. None of these break the game by any means, but they're all minor annoyances that I came across while playing the game that anyone looking to buy the game should know about. It is a possibility that some of these have been fixed in subsequent patches, please check the most current patch for changes. These are based off of Torchlight Version 1.14 purchased through Steam.

1. Overlapping Loot Drop Tooltips - This was never really an issue for me because I was neurotic and picked up every single item to sell to support my crippling enchanting habit. I can see how this would be a major issue if you only wanted to pick up specific items, it would be impossible to click on the proper one.

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2. Side Quests - This is probably the worst of the "bad" category. All of the quests were exactly the same, just on a different level. you always had a "kill this named creature" quest, a "find this piece of ember" quest, and a "find this secret treasure in a portal I open" quest. The item and gold rewards for the quests were also always crap, the only reason to do them was for the fame exp.

With that said, the story quests aren't terrible. There's not a ton of depth to them, but at least they hold your interest for a little while.

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2-1. Side Quest Text - This gets a sub-note because... I said so. The quest text for the side quests is put together in such a way that it can be put together randomly as well. So get used to seeing the same 3-4 quest texts over and over with only key words changed.

example:
"Awesome! You killed **insert named creature** on dungeon level **insert dungeon floor**, here's your reward!"

"Awesome! You killed Gargamel the Feared on dungeon level 5, here's your reward!"
"Awesome! You killed Bob the Dragon on dungeon level 7, here's your reward!"

They have more than one variation of the text, but they eventually start to repeat themselves. These examples aren't actually used in the game, they're just to demonstrate the repeating text.

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3. No Multiplayer - Never mind, this is the new "worst of the bad category". I list this in the bad category, but it's really a testament to just how fun the game is to play. You will find yourself yearning to play this with your friends like you used to play Diablo 1 and 2. Runic Games is working on an MMO version of Torchlight, which will for all intents and purposes be the reincarnation of Mythos.

Quick history lesson:
Mythos was being developed on the side by people at Flagship Studios. (creators of Hellgate London) When Flagship Studios evaporated, Mythos did also... or so it would have seemed until two minutes ago when I looked up Mythos.com.

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4. Too Much on Screen - The beautiful graphics and damage/magic effects tend to be overdone when the action gets intense, and can hinder your view of battlefield. Nothing horrible, just a small annoyance when you loose track of your mouse pointer and start clicking the wrong places.

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5. Gem Types and Qualities - It's fun to collect the gems and upgrade them at the transmute NPC. (2 of one quality = 1 of a higher quality) There are just too many gem quality levels and types of gems. I consistently used up 75% or more of my storage space just holding onto them and waiting until I can upgrade them.

http://www.runicfollower.com/wiki/torchlight/Gems

There are 8 gem quality levels:
Cracked, Dull, Discolored, Whole(unnamed), Cut, Polished, Star, Flawless

Then you have the 9 different types of gems:
Pure Ember, Life Ember, Flow Ember, Fire Ember, Cold Ember, Core Ember, Deep Ember, Eyeball, and Skull.

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Summary:

Torchlight is everything I am looking for in an Action RPG, minus the multiplayer. If you are looking for something to kill time with on your laptop, or you have a computer that's a few years old, get Torchlight. If you're looking for a good single player Action RPG, or like to mod games and make your own levels, get Torchlight. If you're looking for any multiplayer whatsoever, wait to see what the MMO version of Torchlight will be like.

Torchlight retails for $19.99. I was interested but not converted to a sale until it was marked down to $9.99 on Steam.

http://www.runicgames.com/
http://www.torchlightgame.com/

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by MuntainDW