Torchlight critique

I've finished one full playthrough of Torchlight (10 hours on Normal difficulty) and thought I'd share some thoughts. Honestly Torchlight is a casual enough game it's not clear it bears very detailed critique, which is exactly why I am going to share some detailed comments.

Top line: it's a lot of fun, and at $20 is a bargain. If you like Diablo and fun action RPGs, buy it. This is the game Blizzard could have made years ago as Diablo 3, as opposed to making us all wait 10+ years for a sequel. OTOH this is not the game Blizzard has made, it's not that good, and the reasons it's not are instructive.

 

First, the good in Torchlight. It's super fun. The game plays fast and not too demandingly. You run around and kill things and big numbers pop up and you get loot and it's propulsive, compelling fun. So many games in this genre get something wrong: the graphics are laggy, or the combat is too slow, or the tactics are too complicated, or there's too much time wasted on inventory management or reading quests or the like. Torchlight really nails the basic action RPG mechanic, very nicely tuned, and I wish more games would learn from that. Particularly for graphics; it's nice to have something look good and run at 60 fps on modest hardware without tweaking.

The simplest criticism of Torchlight is it's 100% derivative. It's true, the game is very much a Diablo clone down to using the same composer to make the music and sound effects almost identical. I'm generally impatient with derivative games, but honestly Diablo was so fun and it's been so long I'm OK with a clone. (I missed out on Fate and Titan Quest, so can't compare).

Torchlight does have one major innovation: the pet system. Diablo 2 had some summonable combat pets but they weren't very compelling. Torchlight resurrects the idea of a basic dog/cat companion from Nethack, plus lets you have a significant coterie of minions. My pet-focussed alchemist had 9 permanent allies (6 imps, 2 golems, and a cat) and frequently summoned another 9 temporary allies (6 archers, 3 zombies) for total mayhem. Particularly fun when combined with a Thorns aura so that the monsters beat themselves to death on my pets. The pet AI is just good enough that having 18 companions actually works. In particular the engine never got bogged down and pathfinding was good enough. Your main pet (the cat/dog) is also quite nicely personalized with custom gear, spells, even changing forms by feeding it fish. Spell-casting is particularly nice; it was startling to see my cat heal me or summon his own flaming sword minion to help take out the bad guys.

There's also a minor innovation in that Torchlight is designed for replay. When you finish the main game there's an infinite dungeon where you can keep going down against harder monsters, forever. There's a shared loot stash so you can share gear between characters. And you can retire a character and transfer some fame and one superpowered item to a new character, a nice way to clear a slot without feeling like you're losing anything. Nice design.

Some of the derivative game mechanics doesn't work so well. There's gems to socket in gear, but the gem bonuses are basically useless in armor. There's lots of random loot, but the loot progression is so screwy that at level 30 the gear that drops is not significantly better than the level 10 gear. Torchlight copies the unidentified loot / identify scroll mechanic of Diablo but forgets to give us a cheap/easy way to identify everything in town. Takes a lot of pleasure out of the loot part of the action RPG cycle, particularly when you realize the enchanting economy is unbalanced and it's better to make your own gear with the enchanter than hope you get a minor upgrade from a boss drop. To some extent Diablo 2 suffered from this problem as well, but not nearly as much, and over the patch evolution D2X became a finally tuned game. 

My other main complaint with Torchlight is it stripped the RPG element out of the action RPG a little too much. The backstory is generic and unmotivating. There are no compelling characters. There's only 3 quests: "Go to level X and kill this mob. Go to level X and loot this thing. Go down and wait for the girl to pop out of a portal and advance the story". No one reads quest text in most RPGs anyway, so it's not a big loss, but I think in stripping the story trappings so far away Torchlight is a bit too empty of a game. Blizzard is very good at storytelling in its games, a virtue I often overlook.

There's also something funny about the difficulty and pacing of the game. Normal mode was way too easy for me, right up until the last few levels where I suddenly died 7 times (3 times in the final boss fight). That's partly because I got sloppy, playing faster, and partly just the mechanics of the game where one unlucky crit is instadeath. No big deal unless you're playing in hardcore mode, where death is permanent, I doubt I'll be trying that mode. Diablo 2 had its difficulty spikes too (particularly Duriel, the Act 2 boss), but in general the challenge curve felt smoother.

So while Torchlight is fun and a game I enthusiastically recommend, it was interesting to see the places where the game doesn't quite work. Most of the flaws were present in Diablo 2, as well, but Diablo 2 overall was a better designed game. But what's most interesting is that Diablo innovated the genre, Torchlight is just copying it. I'm hopeful that Diablo 3 will be a significant innovation over Diablo 2 as well.

Now excuse me, it's time to re-roll a melee character and dive again.

PS: a couple of UI tips. If you click the "Alt" button you can turn the loot bubbles on permanently, to aid looting. You can bind the F1-F12 keys to switch the right mouse button action by hovering over the action in your spellbook and pressing the F key. And Shift-F9 takes screenshots which end up in an obscure Application Data location.

Comments

[James]

You should try playing on hard or very hard, the difficulty progression seems much smoother and each tileset gets progressively harder. The last one in particular had several mobs that were capable of oneshotting my low def vanquisher in hard.

I've heard that they plan to add a multiplayer component and possibly more content as well as give the general public free modding software so its easy to say we can expect a ton of player created content.

[Frac]

Agreed. It's a blast and I play it a lot, but it sure has a lot of problems. Besides those you mention, it has so many game mechanics bugs that I wonder how much play testing they did. At least it doesn't crash very often.

There are issues that we seem to have to fight for every time a game of this genre is released. Adjustable alpha on the mini-map (you can barely see it), configurable loot pick-up, stackable gems, bigger stacks, bigger inventory, faster running in town, a mouse pointer that you can actually see during combat, better (more forgiving) mouse targetting...

Anyway, enough talk. Back to the game...