Category: Gaming

Rift may be my WoW

Posted on by Nimgimli

A few weeks ago my social networking flock returned to Rift after getting excited by the announcement of an upcoming expansion. I dutifully followed because I hate being left out!

I wound up enjoying myself more than I expected to, and I’ve continued to putter around in the game, mostly playing on weekends. Work has been extremely stressful lately and it turns out Rift was something familiar and comfortable that I could slip into and kind of lose myself.

I think this is how a lot of people feel about World of Warcraft. They leave it, often loudly, and move on to other games but then months or years later they’ll (sometimes sheepishly) re-subscribe and find that a bit of time away has left them able to enjoy their old standby again.

WoW doesn’t work that way for me. I just don’t like it any more; I think I have too much baggage associated with it or something. But I vocally quit Rift and now I’m sheepishly enjoying myself again. So yeah, Rift is my WoW.

This is going to sound dumb but the addition of fishing to Rift means a lot to me.

Last night I played hooky from work. I had a ton of stuff I should’ve been doing but I was feeling mentally fractured and fragile and just needed to tune out. I installed Rift on the living room PC (and by the way, their streaming client technology is spectacular; I was able to start playing no more than 5 minutes after I started downloading the client), put my feet up on the coffee table and made room for my couch buddy (aka Lola the dog) to curl up next to me.

And I went fishing in Argent Glade. Fishing requires virtually no skill. You left click to cast, wait for the bobber to bob and right click to real in. Very similar to fishing in other MMOs. There’s a Survival skill that goes with it. So you fish to catch stuff, use the little fish you catch to create lures to improve your fishing experience, and use the big fish you catch to cook food that heals/buffs you.

The trainers and suppliers are right near the fishing hole in South Argent Glade so you barely even have to move. So I sat there, tuned out, fishing with one hand and scritching Lola behind her ears with the other, listening to the denizens of Telera as they came and went. (It’s pretty funny how much “roleplay” revolves around a male character hitting on a female character, often in the most frightfully clumsy way. I hope the players running the male characters are being intentionally bad at their pickup techniques!)

I didn’t “advance” very much (I fished up some gold and some artifacts and some of the food you can make has decent healing abilities) but I didn’t care. Finally there was a “downtime” activity to do in Rift and every once in a while I just want to be in a world without really doing much, but I need to do -something- else I get bored.

Now I’m really looking forward to both the 1.9 patch tomorrow and the expansion later this year (I think?). I don’t expect I’ll be playing Rift straight through, but I do expect it’ll be a game I keep installed on my system as my “comfort zone” MMO, ready to be re-subscribed to whenever the mood hits.

Time, adversity and too many choices

Posted on by Nimgimli

This morning I was reading Dusty Monk’s latest post over at Of Course I’ll Play It. It’s a great read about Guild Wars in particular and difficulty in games in general. Dusty just finished the Nightfall campaign after a lot of struggling, research and experimentation. So how’d that feel? To quote him: …when you do at last get through that last mission, you are filled with an incredible sense of accomplishment.

It got me to thinking about difficulty in games and overcoming adversity to get those tough wins. I have vague memories of such conquests from back in Ye Olden Times but really nothing that recent. So that set me off to naval gazing about my gaming habits again.

To be blunt, when I run into a really difficult point in a game these days, I just move to another game. I wish that weren’t the case but it is. Is it because I’ve become a gaming wimp? Do I just suck more than I used to? A little bit, particularly when it comes to twitchy games. My reflexes and eyesight aren’t as keen as they once were.

But the bigger issue is that I HAVE TOO MANY CHOICES! Whenever I’m playing a game about 85% of my concentration is on the game I’m playing and the other 15% is thinking about what I’m going to play next, since my “Pile Of Shame” (games I’ve purchased but not really played much) is always growing. So whenever I hit a point in a current game that stops forward progress it makes me feel like it’s going to be even longer before I get to the next game.

Now obviously this is a First World Problem. Gaming is my main hobby and I’m financially comfortable enough that I can buy pretty much any game I really want. I’m not complaining about that. But it does create a situation much different from the days when a good game would come out once a month or even less often. Back then I had fewer distractions and so I was more willing to stick with a single game.

So well I really enjoyed reading about Dusty’s extensive research (both hands-on and archival) that finally brought him to the end of his journey, I have to be honest with myself and admit that I’m never, ever going to finish a Guild Wars campaign if it means hours of research figuring out how to do it. In the same way I’ve accepted that I’m never going to play EVE Online meaningfully since it, too, is a game that requires a lot of research and playtime in order to play the game well. Wurm Online, same thing.

I love that these games exist but I have to accept that I just don’t have the ability to focus on one game for that long any more.

And yet at the same time I rant and rave about it when an IP gets a long-awaited sequel or reboot and it’s been made easier.

Because I am apparently a crazy person.

Side Note: My old PS3 died a week or two ago. Tried to fix it but no dice. So I ordered a new “Slim” model. Rather than copying the data from my old PS3 over, I just copied off my save games. On the new PS3 I’ve installed just 4 games. Assassin’s Creed 1, Little Big Planet 2, Dungeon Hunter: Alliance and Need For Speed Shift 2. My plan is not to install anything else until I’ve finished one of these 4, just as a way to try to keep myself focused. My old PS3 had 95 PS3 games and a bunch of Minis and PS1 classics installed on it. It was overwhelming!

TESO apathy: Has the MMO marketplace finally hit a saturation point?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’m still catching up on E3 2012 stuff. Reading a ton of posts, watching videos and drinking it all in. One interesting theme I’ve plucked out of this huge mass of content (almost all of it produced by people who write about games for a living, so keep that in mind…game journos get a lot more over-exposed to genres that we regular gamers do) is a reaction to The Elder Scrolls Online that ranges from tepid to openly hostile.

It seems (in game journalist circles anyway) that no one wants this game.

I’m not sure I want it, either, so this isn’t meant as any kind of attack on gaming journalists or on anyone. But I think it postulates an interesting question. If “we” aren’t excited about an Elder Scrolls MMO, does it mean we’re just done with MMOs?

Though at the same time my friends are SUPER excited over the upcoming Guild Wars 2 MMO.

So are we seeing the difference between gaming journalists and regular gamers? Or is it that the Elder Scrolls have such a long history of being deep single player experiences that’s putting us off TESO?

Game Informer ran a bunch of video interviews on TESO that actually piqued my interest a little bit at least. The combat actually sounds a bit GW2-ish. Instead of a bunch of skills you’ll just have a handful but all of them will be “awesome” and the goal is to have the player’s concentration focused on the game, not the UI. These are both good things in my mind.

OTOH it’s hard to get away from the “more of the same” vibe that TESO gives off, too.

So is GW2 going to be the last hurrah for AAA MMO titles? Or is TESO just something unique: a setting that none of us want to play with (lots of) others in. My feeling has always been that most Elder Scrolls players are more interested in smaller-scale multiplayer (if they want multiplayer at all) that they can experience with friends, rather then running through a world of characters named Legolaazzs and Drizzzt.

[Apologies for typos…I’m writing on the big screen TV and can’t see what I’m writing very well! LOL]

Krater first look

Posted on by Nimgimli

Fatshark’s Krater launched today and I couldn’t wait to take it for a spin. So what’s Krater? The official blurb:

Krater is a squad based roleplaying game set in a colorful post-apocalyptic world. It combines the combat mechanics of action-rpgs with the top-down view of the classic old-school RPG and RTS games. The game brings you far into the future of a post-apocalyptic Sweden.

It plays a little like the original Dungeon Siege, maybe a little like Dawn of War II (I base that on what I’ve heard…I’ve never played DoWII). You have a party of 3 characters to start: a tank, a dps and a healer, and you move them, RTS-style, by right-clicking on terrain. You can move them all, or just one of them. So mechanically it plays a bit like an RTS, but each of your guys has stats and gear and other RPG tropes. Each guy can use 2 skills (at a time) and you fire them off by clicking hotbars or using number keys, a la an MMO. The trinity is MMO-like too. The tank has skills that generate hate, the healer heals and the dps has some stuns to do a bit of crowd control.

I’ve played for just a very few minutes but wanted to knock out a video. Sadly it didn’t come out too well. I’m still learning the ins and outs of Pinnacle studio and I have no idea why it reduced my full res Fraps files to postage stamps. Ah well. Thanks to Chris from Levelcapped I have a better quality video now.

So far the game seems like it’ll be interesting and delightfully weird, but it’s a bit janky too. You’ll see a few times where I take a curiously long time to decide to gather loot. Actually that’s my clicking around the button trying to get it to ‘take.’ You’ll also see guys running back and forth oddly as they encounter obstacles. Finally, there’s no multiplayer in the game yet; that’s supposed to come on July 10th.

Krater is $15 and you can get it on Steam or on Fatshark’s site (where you can but a special $10,000 edition and have your game hand-delivered by the developer).

Bird on a Rift-y wire

Posted on by Nimgimli

So I joined the flock and re-subbed to Rift yesterday, for a variety of reasons, the main one being that gamer enthusiasm is, for me at least, super contagious. Too many of my friends seemed to be having a blast for me to not at least take a peek in. I mean, it’s only $15 to sub-up for a month and satisfy my curiosity.

What I found was that really, things haven’t changed. Player population is still a huge issue in the mid-levels. I play on Faeblight, Guardian side, and I checked the Social Window at 9:30 Eastern on a Saturday night and here’s what I found (click for a readable version):

You can see that the level 50 population seems pretty healthy and there’s a reasonable amount of under 20 people running around but between 20 and 40 is deserted. Now, I don’t know how accurate the Social Window is — honestly these numbers seem crazy small even to me. But they do bear out my anecdotal experience; it’s really difficult to get a group together in the 30s.

The reason this is a problem is that there are Story-Quests that require a group. In my particular case, I had to close a Fire Rift (a static, placed Rift like you encounter in the intro, not a random Rift) in the Scarlet Gorge. Ironically I did encounter another player in the Gorge and helped him close the Rift before I got the quest, but when my time came there was 1 other player in the zone and s/he was AFK or just ignoring me. I tried and tried to solo that Rift but it’s designed for 3 players and even though I was over-level I wasn’t -that- over-level. I’d given up on the whole thing and was riding out of the zone to find other entertainment when I got a ping of exp/reputation and I realized someone had just killed a Rift mob I’d previously tagged. I rode back, dragging a train of mobs with me in my desperation to get there on time (I’d pushed the Rift to stage 4 of 5 solo) and found a level 50 taking down the final boss. I auto-joined her group and managed to tag the mob with 1 spell before she killed it, and I got the quest complete.

I know the announced expansion will support Mentoring so that those level 50 players can come back to the rest of the world and help out the mid-tier folks and get some fun out of doing so, and I think that’s the single most important feature of the expansion. The only other solution I can think of is some kind of Hireling system for folks who’re stuck with no companions to help them take down small-group content.

So my day in Rift sucked, right?

Actually, no it did not. It didn’t take me long to slip back into the cadence of my bardic rogue and it was fun to be roaming the world of Telara again. Also there is one upside to the sparseness of the population and it’s that when you do run into someone you’re more prone to interact with them. Think about it…when you’re walking down a city street you don’t talk to strangers but when you’re on a country road and haven’t seen anyone for 20 minutes and pass someone walking the other way, you’re more apt to say “Hello” and exchange a few pleasantries. That’s how Rift feels. Also the lack of other players out there makes the world challenging in a good way.

Also the dynamic Rift scaling seems to be working as advertised. I closed a few Rifts solo while wandering deserted areas. The only tricky bit is when you push the Rift into 1 too many bonus stages and get it to where you can’t defeat that stage’s mobs. Then you can’t close the Rift and don’t get credit. That seems like a flaw to me. Why punish the players for pushing into bonus stages? I got to where I’d run around until the timer ran out after about stage 2 so things didn’t get too difficult.

So I had fun and I don’t regret spending my $15 but I don’t think there’s enough here to hold me. The solo PvE experience isn’t that compelling and is filled with very unheroic feeling chores. Last night I had to gather firewood and water plants, for goodness sake. My bard dude fights almost on auto-pilot, spamming the same 3 attacks to build combo points and restore health and then hitting a finisher, either melee or ranged depending on the mob. Over and over again. After TERA this kind of combat feels really uninspired solo; clearly you need the dynamics of a group to make all these skills meaningful. Ditto the varied Roles. When playing alone there’s no reason to change Roles.

Still, I’m sure I’ll re-up for a longer term when the expansion comes out. Trion is still enjoying it’s “Good Guy” status in the MMO Player community; they seem to have managed to avoid doing anything to really piss us off and the regular roll-out of game updates makes me want to see them succeed.

I do wish I could summon the moral fortitude to get rid of all these past World Event trinkets though. My inventory is FULL of those things!

Flock of Gamers

Posted on by Nimgimli

Wednesday afternoon I started feeling a little sick. By the time I got home from work I was feeling a lot sick. I went to bed and stayed there essentially until this morning. So I was off the social networks for about 36 hours.

When I got back online, everyone I know (not literally) was playing Rift again, or getting ready to play Rift again.

I have to tell you, that was freakin’ surreal. Made me feel like I’d been offline for 36 days, not 36 hours!!

As best I can figure it there were two factors leading to this sudden (and I expect, brief) resurgence of interest in Trion’s flagship MMO:

First, an expansion was announced and second, Raptr was giving away copies of the game to certain users.

Oddly everyone who went to PAX East got a copy of Rift but that didn’t seem to lead to anything, so I’m guessing it was the expansion news more than anything that has re-kindled player interest.

Being one of the flock, now I’m interested too. One of the reasons I grew tired of Rift was that the player population left me in the dust and so the mid-levels found me wandering the world with no one to take on rifts with. I’d be in zones with literally 3-4 people. The new expansion is supposed to add a huge amount of content; I sure hope it can also pull in player population to fill that content.

I have to wonder what MMO marketing people think about the viral-ness of an MMO’s waxing and waning. If a marketing person could figure out how to motivate the flock to come back to a game…well it seems to me they could write their own paycheck.

A little more Diablo 3

Posted on by Nimgimli

When Diablo 3 launched, I wasn’t a fan. I was hoping for a real sequel to Diablo II in more than just lore and the very broadest of brush strokes, but that’s not what Blizzard delivered and I found it hard to adjust. I was anticipating a game with endless character building possibilities but Blizzard opted to deliver a more mainstream title for today’s more casual gamer. People no longer see having to re-roll a character as part of the challenge of gameplay and learning a game; they see it as an annoyance.

Anyway while Raptr was showing people racking up 18 hours in the first 3 days of launch, I put about 5 hours in total in the first week. I just didn’t find it all that interesting so I stopped playing.

Friday night, after almost a full week away, I picked it up again. I spent some time tweaking the controls (I have Move on W and Stop on E & D) so it controls a little like a direct control game (downside is I keep hitting S meaning to backup but instead pop up the Skill window in mid fight) and I have easy access to the few hotkeys the game gives you. I think these adjustments helped me let go of the dream of a sequel to Diablo II since the game now played so differently. I also turned off the stupid, stupid system that makes you bind certain skills to certain buttons and only lets you have 1 skill in every category active at a time. Now at least I have some tactical customization options.

You can probably tell by the tone of this post that I still harbor some ill-will towards the game, but at least I’m finding it fun in small doses now. Mostly I’m just soaking up the lore and the random chat going on around me. My Templar companion makes me chuckle fairly often and the things the villagers say can be amusing as well. The gameplay still seems awfully simple and there are some very odd decisions that seem to have been made as a result of yanking features. For instance they’ve gotten rid of Town Portal and Identify scrolls. Casting Town Portal takes a few seconds and I understand that…you don’t want it to be an escape mechanism from a tough fight. But Identify takes a few seconds, too. Why? Why have Unidentified items at all if you just have to right click them to identify them?

I do miss those scrolls though. I miss having a full inventory and having to decide if it’s worth the cost of a Town Portal to go back and sell, or if I should just discard some low value objects and press on. On the other hand, not requiring them keeps casual players clicking away, which is what Diablo 3 is all about. Click click and click some more! It could almost be a Zynga game.

Another thing that’s a bit disappointing was finding out that my rate of fire while holding down the left mouse button is much slower than the rate of fire I can obtain by rapidly clicking it. On the one hand, the ‘hold down’ rate of fire is sufficient to kill most enemies before they get near me. On the other hand, if the game ever does ramp up the challenge spamming that button is going to play hell with my RSI issues on my mousing hand.

I’m a bit baffled by the loot system, too. I’ve had a few Rare items drop but they’ve tended to be no better than Blue items I already had equipped, even though they both have the same level requirements. Nor do they salvage into anything interesting. I guess they’re meant to be vendored? Or maybe I’ve just been unlucky. I did find one rare Quiver that is pretty interesting..it has a bunch of stat boosts on it. Most of my Rare stuff has been dull, though.

So far gold has been kind of irrelevant. I’ve been spending all mine to level up the Blacksmith since the merchants never have anything worth buying, I’ve never had need of potions, and scrolls have been removed from the game. Essentially there seems to be a lack of gold sinks in the Normal Difficulty game. I understand this all changes a lot on higher difficulties though. I don’t want to use the AH because honestly the game is providing absolutely no challenge at this point (still in Act 1, remember) and I certainly don’t want to make it any easier.

My goal for now is to chip away at my first play-through, enjoying the story and the lore. Then when I have the higher difficulty levels unlocked I’m hoping the gameplay gets more interesting (or maybe even before then…perhaps later Acts get more exciting). Or perhaps I should re-roll as a barbarian (I’m playing a demon hunter) since I hear in general the game is much more challenging for melee characters. Or maybe Blizzard will put a $9.95 “unlock” item up for sale that lets me jump to higher difficulty levels before finishing normal.

Still, I’m at the point where I can jump in and spend an hour having fun just making monsters go “Blammo!” and listening to my Templar pal hoot and holler and ask for more fights like that one. This is way beyond where I was during launch week when I was just pissed off that I’d flushed $60 down the toilet for a game I really didn’t like.

I really wish players could just pick a difficulty level from the start. I think that would’ve changed my experience considerably.

TGIF Gaming Wrap-up for 5/25/2012

Posted on by Nimgimli

This will probably be my last TGIF post for a while. I do these mostly for myself and at this point, week after week of nothing much to report is just boring me. I can’t begin to imagine how dull the posts are for others! I might start ’em up again when I find myself juggling a bunch of games.

Purchases This Week
Aside from some extra Hero Academy armies, no new purchases this week.

Played This Week
Raptr says 1 hour of TERA and about half an hour of Diablo 3. I’ve also been playing a lot of Hero Academy and Ascension on the iPad.

Plans for the Week to Come
Hope to fit some TERA into the weekend. I also feel kind of obligated to give Diablo 3 another try in order to understand what all the fuss is about. At this point I’ve only put in 5 hours, which means I’ve paid $12/hour to play. That burns me up! But I just am not feeling any compulsion to continue playing.

I might be on the lookout for some new strategy games to play, too. Real, turn-based strategy games, not “RTS” strategy games that depend on APM or whatever the measurement is. But I need to find something that’s not too complex because I don’t have hours and hours to devote to learning to play. We’ll see.

For my US readers, happy 3 day weekend! To everyone else, happy 2 day weekend!

Taking a break, and turning to tablet gaming?

Posted on by Nimgimli

I’ve been doing “TGIF” gaming summaries here at Dragonchasers for a few weeks now, and I often rough them out on Thursdays since not much is going to change between Thursday night and Friday evening. So I was checking my Raptr profile and it shows that in the last week I’ve played 1 hour of TERA and 30 minutes of Diablo 3.

Apparently, I’m taking a break from gaming. I was wondering why I was feeling so relaxed.

See, with sunset so late in the evening now, I’ve been getting in from walks with Lola at about 9 pm. Trying to then compress catching up on RSS feeds, catching up on emails and writing a blog post and leaving enough time to get into a ‘real’ game like TERA was really starting to stress me out, and I kept staying up much too late to try and fit everything in. I was tired and grumpy at work, where I was trying to juggle keeping up with G+, getting in some RSS tracking and, y’know, doing my actual work, all while feeling like I could put my head down on the desk and go right to sleep.

So this week, I just stopped gaming. At least, I stopped playing TERA which is the only ‘real’ game I’m interested in right now. Instead I’ve been gaming on the iPad.

WTF? What have I become? I’m the guy who is always ranting and raving about how we need true handheld systems and true consoles because “mobile gaming” just doesn’t cut it. So have I switched teams?

No, actually I haven’t. I’m not playing action-based games on the iPad and I still think the lack of physical controls makes action-y games not great on a tablet. Instead I’m doing a bunch of asynchronous multiplayer strategy gaming (back in ye olden tymes we’d call that “Play by Email”) with friends. Friends who, like me, were hardcore gamers at one point (and possibly still are) but who (and I’m doing a bit of assuming here) find it hard to squeeze gaming in during the week these days. But grabbing the iPad to play a turn of Ascension or Hero Academy? That, they have time for.

So I chill on the couch, send off a turn and do some work until I get the notification that one of my buddies has taken his turn. Then I bounce over, make my move and go back to working. It’s a great way to fit some fun into the evening without making it into a stressful thing. And it’s been a great way to re-connect with my gaming friends, who’re scattered all over the world.

I’m Dragonchasers in GameCenter and pasmith in Hero Academy. I still suck at both games so if you want some easy wins send me an invite.

I’ve been really happy with the 3rd generation iPad even though I really still prefer Android over iOS. For multiplayer gaming, iPad vs Android is like Xbox vs PS3. What matters isn’t the actual platform so much as being where all your friends are. When I had an iPad 1 I was kind of on the bleeding edge and not many friends had tablets (nor were there many MP games out there). But now, iPad ownership is common among my old friends and, while we’re focusing on just two games right now, there are plenty of others for us to move onto if we get bored.

Angela and I are planning on moving in a few months and we need to start planning and packing for that. The days are still getting longer and Lola is showing no signs of losing her ‘puppy energy’ any time soon. Packing and long walks aren’t going to leave much time, so I’m not sure I’ll be getting back to doing much ‘real’ gaming before the fall. I do plan to keep Saturday nights as my big ‘gaming’ night though (Sunday is the 1 day of the week I can sleep in so I can stay up late gaming…when I don’t fall asleep by accident!)

I’m actually kind of looking forward to coming back to gaming reinvigorated after taking a semi-forced semi-break.

First look at Torchlight 2 (and how it differs from Diablo 3)

Posted on by Nimgimli

Runic Games is running a Torchlight 2 stress test this weekend and I was lucky enough to get an invite. I already have TL2 pre-ordered, mind you. I’ve been waiting for this game with the same kind of anticipation many of my friends have been waiting for Diablo 3.

The two games share an awful lot of similarities. Both are action-RPGs that are focused on looting and leveling and both are pretty casual-friendly. Both are mouse driven and played from a 3/4 view 3rd person perspective.

The big difference? Torchlight 2 is the sequel to Diablo 2 and Diablo 3 isn’t. 🙂

My biggest disappointment with Diablo 3 is that there’re no strategic decisions to be made when it comes to growing your character. For a given class, everyone unlocks the same skills/runes at the same level. There are certainly tactical decisions to be made (Which skill/rune combo is right for this area of the dungeon I’m in?) but everything is easily reversible and at a given level everyone has the exact same skills to pick from (disclaimer: I’m still in Act 1 so maybe this changes).

Compare this to Torchlight 2 where every time you level you get 5 points to put into stats. Here’s a strategic decision: do you want to focus on one stat or spread things out? If one stat, which one? With the dude I’ve been leveling I’ve been putting a ton of points into Dexterity and relying on increased critical hits for causing damage, and my dodge stat for avoiding damage. Is this smart? Not sure yet, but it’s the strategy I’m using with this character. Later I could roll the same class and put a ton of points into strength and have a different kind of character.

Diablo 3 also has stat increases each level but the game decides what they are and most players probably don’t even notice them. Fans of the game like that they’ve got one less thing to worry about and tell me that they’d probably spend the points the way the game is auto-spending them anyway, so it’s just more convenient this way. That may be true for your first character in a given class but I think Torchlight 2 will have a lot more replayability.

But it isn’t just stats, there are skills too. Each level you also get a skill point, and each class has 3 skill trees. You can specialize in one tree or spread things out. You can also craft a character that fits your playstyle. Spend a lot of points in passive skills and your actual playing experience will be fairly simple. Or spend point unlocking a ton of active skills and your fingers will be dancing on the keyboard hitting different skills constantly. It’s all up to you.

Diablo 3 has some of this on a tactical level, but in Torchlight 2 you won’t be able to get everything on a single character. That’s going to encourage multiple play-throughs with variants of the same class and should help keep the game interesting long after folks have squeezed all the goodness out of D3. (Let’s face it, this style of game is all about the journey and leveling up characters after you’ve experienced the story once.)

It all boils down to more choice. Diablo 3 is about cool loot and tactical choices, while Torchlight 2 is about cool loot, tactical choices and strategic character building. Torchlight 2 also gives you two sets of weapon slots and lets you toggle between them, which makes combat more interesting. Add in the pet you have right from level 1; a companion who’ll run back to town to sell excess loot and buy you some more pots, as well as helping out in battle. Oh yeah, and you can fish for treats that’ll turn your pet into some other creature for a while.

I’ve been playing an Outlander, a class described as “a gunslinger with some secret weapons!” He was ‘born’ with a pair of pistols but soon enough I found a nice bow and I was playing him as an archer for a while. But then I found a nice magical ‘claw’ weapon, so now when things get into melee range I switch over to a pair of claw weapons. Plus he has a ‘glaive’ that he can throw and that bounces around hitting more than one enemy (that’s his first magic spell) and I’ve been leveling that up. He also has a kind of rage mechanic where the more things he kills quickly the more powerful he becomes, and I’ve been spending points on a passive skill that slows down the ‘draining’ of rage between fights. Basically I’ve ignored his ‘gunslinger’ side and he’s still very playable. I could roll a new Outlander and put all his points into ranged attacks and that would be a very different character.

Now, let’s give Diablo 3 its due: in terms of sheer spectacle, D3 beats Torchlight 2 hands down. The artwork is better, the lore is better, the NPCs are more interesting, the sound design is better. And D3 has the ‘bonus’ that everyone and his brother is playing, so if you’re looking for a multi-player game, someone is probably ready to join you.

Torchlight 2 just has more interesting gameplay, more replayability, and costs $20 instead of $60 and probably runs better on older computers. If you find yourself enjoying Diablo 3 gameplay but are hankering for something a bit more meaty to sink your teeth into, then consider dropping a Jackson on Torchlight 2 when it comes out in (I’m guessing) a month or two.

Here’s a gameplay video. This isn’t an epic fight or anything; I just fired up a game and started recording. It’s a little hard to make out but about a minute in I switch from bow to claws, and later back again, and you can see the blue glaive flying around now and then. The wolf is my pet; her health is at the top left corner of the screen. Middle center bottom of the screen is my rage meter.