When scanning over the GOTY thread I noticed that a lot of us didn't pick Diablo 3 in our top 3s including me. Leading up to the release I was expecting Diablo 3 to be one of my favorite games from playing the beta. This weekend I finally picked up Torchlight 2 from the Steam sale thinking that it would blow me away unlike Diablo 3, and I'm feeling lukewarm about it. I think Torchlight 2 is better in some ways: character customization, random world, and loot. But there are still some areas of Diablo 3 that I enjoyed more: class definition, enemy and boss design, and combat flow. I think Torchlight 2 is better then Diablo 3, but it's not so much of a grand slam but more of a slight edging out. Most of my FL who played both games is from here and I'm curious as to where everyone's preference lies. If anyone's interested, I'm going to work on a more in-depth comparison over the weekend and probably put that on my site next week and I could post a link when it's done.
I voted for Torchlight 2. Diablo 3 had a solid feeling combat & skill system for a few of the classes (I like it better that Torchlight's), and I loved the easy drop-in/drop-out online multiplayer, but the map design and forced campaign left me wanting, and the auction house negatively affected my fun factor way, way, way more than I first expected it to. I'd choose Borderlands 2 if it were an option, I love everything about it other than the save system (and the lack of a dummy light/quick-look DPS number for weapons).
I was debating putting Borderlands 2 and Path of Exile on the list. But PoE isn't officially out yet, and BL 2's design isn't as close of a comparison between D3 and TL 2.
I don't know how to vote, honestly. Torchlight 2 did so much stuff better, but I ultimately put more hours into Diablo 3.
Yea, I put way more hours into Diablo 3 too, but you know what? Once I reached Hell I wasn't having "fun", I was just grinding. I didn't get any useful drops for probably 150 of those hours. I hit max level, got to Inferno, and then just kept at it, grinding, and grinding, and grinding, and looted absolutely NOTHING I could wear (all while splattering against the brick wall that was pre-patch Inferno). It's been so long I don't remember the specific cut off, but I don't think I looted one single item after level 35 or so that I could actually wear. The trade skills were shit, the drops were shit, even Legendary items were complete shit. I was forced to use the AH to upgrade anything, and that meant merely grinding for cash so I could simply buy all my gear. Sigh. I can be a very good & thorough grinder (long time old school mmo fan), but I really wanted a better return for my efforts. I never saw any reward for that time spent. It sucked. They've since patched the game, but I haven't even started it up since June or so, and I've never played with the patches. My vote considered the game they shipped, which is the game I played. I've never seen an ARPG fuck a loot system up nearly as bad as D3 did. Torchlight might not have the same quality combat/skill system as D3, but it is serviceable (and still fun if you don't just max out the same three skills for 50 levels), but I LOVE the loot, and that (among other things) weighs very heavily in its favor.
Yeah I'm inclined to agree with you. Diablo 3 stopped being a fun and involving experience quite a while before I stopped playing. Torchlight 2 was always a button-mashingly good time that made me feel like smoking a cigarette after about an hour of play due to how much more involved the gameplay is.
I think I spent close to 100 hours playing D3 between multiple classes and I spent a lot less time actually enjoying the game. The loot system was definitely the low point and I could probably write a page or two right now about why. The most reward I got out of playing D3, was earning just enough from the RMAH to cover the cost of the collector's edition.
I liked Diablo much, much more. Diablo had much more interesting classes, and I felt that I really got to experiment with how those classes played. In Torchlight, I felt like I was only using 2 or 3 skills the whole game, which was a total snooze-fest (for me). I also felt as if Diablo was a much more involved experience, despite being much easier. In Diablo, I was constantly using 5 or 6 different skills, which was really fun and worked great with my multi-button mouse. In Torchlight 2, I was just click-click-click-clicking. I also was not crazy about the art design in Torchlight 2.
Caveat: I only played TL2 to the end of the demo. I would add the following things to why I didn't spend the money to buy it, even when it went on Steam sale: In TL2 my attacks never felt like they were actually connecting with things. I'd click on monsters, and they'd die, but there was no sense of impact. This is probably a combination of sound design and animation but D3 did it so, so much better. I was instantly filled with a sinking feeling of 'what if I do this wrong' as soon as I started spending points on abilities and stats. I know you can mod in respecs, but I have a hang up about 'cheating'. I like to play games as designed, and I hated this design choice. Monster models seemed too tiny and underdetailed. Maybe they get more interesting later in the game, or maybe it was just a zoom level thing but with the little monsters, I always felt like I was too far away from my character. The abilities that I had access to just seemed totally bland and boring compared to what D3 offered me. Nothing even came close to the weird/awesome feel of the Witch Doctor. TL2 is utterly awful if you're color blind, at least through the first section. Monsters, etc., blend into the background something awful, there's not enough contrast. D3's art design, whether intentionally or unintentionally, was far more distinct and easy for me to work with. Finally, I'd add that anyone who owns D3 but gave up on it early should give it another chance if they've got the gaming bandwidth, all the patches have made a big difference in upping the fun factor - especially the Monster Power thing, which you can turn on from level 1 and actually makes the Normal-Nightmare part of the game a non-sleepwalk.
This is the big one for me in terms of liking Diablo 3. The classes themselves were better defined then in TL 2. But the end game really broke down in some areas due to the set skills and rune system. Because of them it didn't feel like you were building a totally unique character. The Tier system for improving skills in TL 2 is one of my favorite parts and I wish some kind of customization like that could have been put into D3.
Torchlight 2 is so goddamn boring. Most people on my Steam friends list have < 10 hours played, though there are a couple exceptions. Diablo's abilities and polish take it over the top for me. Battle.net is no great thing, but the TL2 online system makes it feel like heaven.
Torchlight 2 for me because it improved on everything I loved about the original while Diablo 3 opted to go hard in the other direction. Perhaps 2-3 years down the line I'll come back to D3 less irritated by release Inferno difficulty and all the poor design decisions they made, but for now I can't even bring myself to launch the game. Oh, and Jay Wilson.
I played the beta of both, and haven't bought either. I'll pick up Torchlight 2 when it goes down under €7.50 in a Steam sale, and would do the same with Diablo 3 (but it's a Blizzard game so it will take years to get that cheap anywhere). Neither quite grabbed me for some reason. I have to admit the "always online+ real money auction house" in Diablo 3 bugs me, it's not really a practice I'm willing to support in a game I'll only be playing as a Single Player. Torchlight 2 just feels slightly off. That's very vague, and I don't know how to better explain it. I tried the demo again last week and it just feels a bit generic. I still love the pet system, and the art is gorgeous, but the gameplay and classes just felt a bit stale to me. There's nothing there that made me feel excited, that I hadn't seen before. No respecs is a big turn-off as well, luckily I have no qualms about using mods. All in all I'd probably vote Torchlight 2 since I'm sure I'll get my €7.50 worth of fun out of it, but neither game would be my GOTY. If I could get Diablo 3 for the same price, without online shenanigans, I might have voted for that, I don't know. (Wow, that was a vague wishy-washy post)
That's a choice between the Scylla of Meh and the Charybdis of Bah. I did not buy Diablo 3 because of all their online bullshit. I did play an hour of the starter edition that was eventually released and thought it was okay but not good enough to make me want to pay full price. Torchlight 2 was a disappointment in terms of game design. Torchlight 1 was great, a concentrated dose of fun and way better than anyone had expected. The sequel just seems to spread out the same total amount of fun more thinly, over way too many oversized areas and way too many boring skills, with the additional problem that pumping tiers of the same couple of skills is an optimal build strategy. It's not that TL2 is terrible or anything -- it's technically very competent, very cheap, and blissfully free of DRM crap -- but I was completely done with the game after one complete run. Maybe I'm just getting tired of Diablolikes in general, in particular of their obsession to build huge games on a formula that's really only suited for small arcade games. Perhaps TL1 was such fun because it returned to the genre's Gauntlet/Rogue roots: small dungeons packed full of monsters, non-stop monster bashing with no distractions, short enough to replay a couple of times without dedicating tens or hundreds of hours.
I suspect that Diablo 3 is better right now, but that TL2 was better at release. As I posted in the GOTY thread release D3 made a real mess of several fundamental parts of loot piniata gameplay (the rarest most interesting gear being reasonably obtainable and actually good) and in smoothly introducing difficulty to players. The D3 difficulty curve on release went something like: Normal - too easy for average ARPG player with no way to adjust. Nightmare & Hell - a reasonable challenge, why couldn't I have had the option to play it like this the first time through? Inferno Act 1 - Fuck, spend all my money at the AH to survive. Inferno Act 2 - Can't even get past the first three wasps after thirty attempts and spending all my gold on the AH again. Way too late for most players they've fixed both of these issues. I play D3 casually ( a couple of hours) at weekends and now have a whole stash tab full of legendaries and set items and am actually actively wearing and using four of them, they are almost all found or friend traded items rather than AH gear. That would never have happened in the state the game was released in when most blue items were better than legendaries and they dropped so rarely that most players probably only saw one their entire playtime. On the difficulty side they've smoothed things out massively and moved the control over difficulty largely to the players with the monster power system where it should have been in the first time. No more walls of difficulty where the gear you needed to beat the content was practically locked away on the other side of aforementioned wall (thereby requiring the AH). I suspect that people who do return when Blizzard do their inevitable expansions will be pleasantly surprised that most of the terrible launch design decisions have been reversed. Except crafting, that still sucks.
If value-for-money matters, T2 is a third of the price of D3 as well. I personally am liking it more so far too. I wish they had managed to release it closer to the D3 launch date, as that would have probably saved me $60.
For the way I play ARPGs--rather casually, just dipping in now and again, and not caring overmuch about about the treadmill to uber gear (I've never played appreciably past Normal in any Diablo), Torchlight 2 appeals more currently. I do miss the easy drop-in multiplayer from Diablo 3 and the funkier character abilities, and Torchlight 2's respecless-without-console-respec-potion-muling irritates me as does the antiquated "dump all points into a single skill for incremental improvements" design choice in it. But I do prefer to gear up entirely from drops in the game, and enjoy doing the equipment-compare juggle more in it. So it's not winning by much overall--I'm just more likely to fire it up these days to play for an hour or so before letting more weeks of dust gather. Mind you, if Din's Curse was on the poll, I'd vote for it instead. Ideally, I'd pour the superior graphics into it and have done.
I thought I would like TL2 more, but I just sort of stopped playing it. Part of it was because my co-op buddies and my schedule didn't match up, but I wonder if it was also because of how many hours of D3 I put in. As many problems as I had with Blizzard's design philosophy of Inferno, I still enjoyed the game quite a lot and the combat to me just feels better and more solid than TL2's. I think Torchlight 2 is probably the better game overall, but I haven't gotten nearly as much enjoyment out of it as I thought I would.
This is pretty much me exactly. I had intended to skip D3 at that insane price and wait on T2. I ended up getting a Trial Code, buying it immediately and proceeded to play it more than anything else I have this year. I picked up T2 and while I played through the original, it simply has not sucked me in. I have no idea why D3 did so completely. I beat the original on normal and played D2 a fair amount, but did not complete it. I certainly never played more than one character in either of the 2 previous games. I started and made it to at least 20 on every character, to Inferno on 1 and to Hell on two others. Waaaaay more gaming than I can explain. And no, I did not feel like I was just grinding for gear even with the poor itemization. I genuinely continued to have fun with each different class. Playing through the same content got tedious at times, but I guess the combat clicked with me in ways I cannot describe. I generally hate repeating content and I NEVER stick with a game that long. I think I hit over 150 hours (more than that, but I subtracted for AFK time). I guess I have spent about 20 with T2. If D3 released an expansion with just more content tomorrow, I would buy it immediately. Again, I acknowledge all the faults in D3 and the superiority in places of T2, but damned if D3 is not near the top of my games list this year with XCOM.
Playing Torchlight 2 now would almost feel like a new game again! But we should pick it back up because my engineer had one smashy power I really liked. If I have at least one great power on a character I'm willing to overlook a lot of other things. I can't comment on D3 vs. TL2, though, as I never picked up D3, I only played the beta. I enjoyed that but not to the point that I'd drop $60 on the game (or $40, as it turns out).
Voted Torchlight, but my relationship with it is... troubled. I was in the TL2 beta and I loved it. I probably played the first act too much because I wanted to try all the characters and it's all that was available in the beta. Then the official release came, I got excited, I downloaded my preorder from Steam, and... found I was burned out. I had to replay Act I again, since I couldn't use my beta characters. And then I didn't want to play anymore. I also felt it suffered from poor class balance -- some of the classes felt clearly better than others. And I had to spend too many points on marginal upgrades to existing abilities instead of getting cool new ones for too long. As for D3: I almost didn't buy it. I was pissed about the RMAH and the DRM. I foolishly allowed myself to be talked into it. All of the problems I predicted about both of those things came to pass. As it turns out, I also hated the lazy story that couldn't even wait an hour before repeating itself (MWAHAHAHA! While you were out doing (thing that needed doing) I went and did (terrible thing at your home base)!) and being able to respec too easily actually annoyed me, which I didn't expect. I was constantly in menus choosing which active abilities I wanted, and I couldn't choose enough of them. I quit a little ways into Act II feeling the game was tedious and never had much fun. I don't know how some of you folks who beat it were able to bring yourselves to start again. Maybe I just don't like ARPGs as much as I thought.
I don't like ARPGs much, myself. My combined time with TQ, TL1, D1/2 is probably under 20 hours. I played the TL2 beta and was pretty sure it'd be the same there; play and enjoy for a couple hours, put it down and never pick it back up again. So, with that in mind I have something like 150 hours in D3, and intend to go back at some point in the indeterminate future. Partly it was respeccing, partly it was ARPG combat finally being engaging, partly it's a bunch of other stuff I can't really identify.
It's a genre that could use some new life. Diablo 3's "refined take on an old formula" clearly isn't enough for some people (myself included; I would rather let you use your girly punches on my junk four or five times than go back and play it right now). Torchlight 2 is refined, "indie-style", but in that respect it and D3 are siblings. It's not merely that I just want to see radical innovation, mind you. For me, D3 and Tl2 play like lots of other ARPGs I've tried (and I've tried most of them, though not Darkstone, which I basically have failed to get to work on something like 5 computers across 3 or 4 generations of systems) at the end of the day. They both "handle" competently but not especially interestingly. I prefer TL2 right now (you can put me in the "I had long since stopped enjoying D3 by the time I actually stopped playing" camp). I like the mechanics there a little bit more than D3. But I don't love the mechanics there, and I want to at least love the mechanics if it handles in a completely familiar way. Path of Exile is doing some interesting things. However, the "handling" (which I eventually define at a time and place of my chosing; MX can't come) is also very familiar, and I wonder if that will ultimately limit my play time there. I really like some of it's mechanics (moreso than TL2 and D3), though I am a a little worried it will ultimately just feel like more of the same. Also I haven't checked in on the state of the game any time recently, but I really hope they decide to make the "materia" skill system as wacky as humanly possible, because it will get a lot more interesting if so. Last I played (months ago) it was cool that you could link a lightning damage rune with a summon skellies rune and hey, they all did extra lightning damage. But it wasn't possible to link a series of gems across multiple pieces of equipment, and the game needs to be that crazy IMO. Still looking forward to seeing how it turns out. Someone should probably give in to their inner arcade gamer and just say "hey, the fact that you can use most skills in Gw2 while moving is a surprisingly effective genre innovation. Let's make an ARPG that's a mix of Smash TV, RPG stuff, Raiden II, and unicorns!"
This is a good point. I bet a lot of us (including me) burnt themselves out playing D3 from launch to patch 1.04 . I started a new character and I'm slowly going through it again. I'm curious about how people who have played both found the loot design. My experience with D3 was that the loot scale was too narrow: that the only way you could get good gear was farming inferno elites with a full NV and hope that something drops with your primary attribute. In TL 2 however, it feels that the loot is too wide, in how you could find great loot at anytime but you're not finding that "amazing" piece of gear, just a bunch of tiny upgrades.
I can't vote since I haven't played TL2, but I found D3 to be, well...dull. I was bored of it in Act 2 and while I made it to Diablo, I really didn't want to play through the game again. The difficulty balance, loot and auction house sucked all the fun out of the game for me. I tried a different class, but the lack of random maps and such made it all uninteresting. Ultimately I walked away unsatisfied.
Did you try Dungeon Siege III? It isn't that, but it's the closest to that you can currently get, AFAIK. Active blocking, active dodging. The controls aren't quite tight enough for it to work as well as it could, unfortunately. And the loot system is a chore.
I purchased it and then after 10 minutes of play time I couldn't figure out how to save the game. And I never went back. I will at some point. I did note that it was better at dungeon siege by virtue of the fact that my input was actually relevant to the gameplay. That said, it didn't quite feel like what I'm suggesting (and possibly not describing well). I remember it feeling like it played rather deliberately; moreso than TL2 or D3. Is that recollection bugged?
I've played Darkstone (at least, the PS1 version), and it's safe to say you aren't missing too much. I dunno, maybe it's better on PC, but from what I remember of my experience, the game was decidedly mediocre.
Oh, I know I'm not missing much. It was noteworthy at the time for it being holy 3d (iirc), and the fact that like 1 out of every 4 people who played it made the mistake of playing it into the late game and then leaving it paused on the computer for a couple of hours, only to come back and discover the game didn't pause per se and their characters had died of old age. DARK SOULS! I am sorry I never got to see it in action first hand, but mostly from an archeologists' perspective, you know?
Basically this. Everything about TL2's design inspired an overwhelming ambivalence. At the very least I could get angry about the RMAH or excited about building a deck of active skills in D3, but even in this thread you won't find people standing up for any particular element of TL2 as inspiring any strong emotion. It's just utterly unambitious in every way.
Beacons. People should really give DS3 a fair shake. You can't go into it thinking that you're going to control your character like a ARPG game, you have to go in controlling it like a 3rd-person action game. Then it all makes sense. It's not a clickfest. It also has awesome AoE spell aiming mechanics that require a bit of skill. I thought DS3 was pretty damn great but all the fucking mouthbreathers of the world couldn't see it as an evolution of ARPG gameplay because they just wanted Dungeon Siege 2.5. Fuck them.
Dungeon Siege 3 was really a good game, and it's indeed best seen as a brawler rather than a Diablolike. Game pads are supported and work well.
I was bored to death of the Diablo 3 trial, but ended up sinking a good amount of time into the full game. I like the character development in D3 a lot better than T2. And the combat felt better. And I made like $30 off of it. If my sister would ever give up WoW once and for all and I could steal her account back, I'd probably still be playing.
I found a beacon but still had trouble for some reason. Dark souls. I should point out that I'm totally fine with that; what I really want is lots of different types of options to sample from. As opposed to yet another clicky ARPG where precise character control doesn't exist and is occasionally needed, you know? But also, Dungeon Siege II wasn't much of an improvement over Dungeon Siege, so I fucking hope it's not Dungeon Siege 2.5. I will definitely give it another look, but I'm pretty full up on game time ATM.
Replaying some Diablo 3 today, the one thing that I really noticed about the combat between it vs. Torchlight 2 is that there is more of a flow to it. In a sense that the player can make decisions and control the pacing of the combat with skills and such. From TL2 it seems like every fight becomes a massive chaotic brawl as you're too busy watching your health to make use of multiple skills.
Unless there's an Embermage in your party and then all you see are pillars of fire the entire time. At least that was my experience. :P
I'm pretty sure I'll get $15 worth of entertainment out of TL2, and I'm 100% positive that I'll never get $60 out of D3. If they make a TL3, I'm in. But I'll probably never buy another Diablo game. I skipped SC2 and I don't regret it a bit. I'm bored of Blizzard.
Like many others have mentioned, I put way more time into Diablo 3 than Torchlight 2. I think that's for a pretty simple reason though -- 95% of my time with Diablo 3 was trying to find the fun. It was Diablo fucking 3, so how could it be this unenjoyable? Maybe it'd get better in Nightmare/Hell/Inferno, or maybe when I get this rune or that rune or this piece of gear or totally re-gem things. Then I'll have fun. Enjoyable gameplay in Diablo 3 was a carrot on a stick when I quit. On the other hand, Torchlight 2 gave me the fun pretty much right away. There's no doubt in my mind that it's the superior game.
