Torchlight II Previews

A couple of new hands-on previews of Torchlight II have emerged from Runic Games’ recent press event, starting with this lengthy piece over at Diablo fansite Diii.net:

Torchlight 2’²s main features are much more like those of Diablo II than those of Diablo III. Which means TL2 much more like D2 than D3 is like D2. I’m reminded of those (Hellgate: London is the spiritual successor of Diablo II) comments we used to hear from Flagship Studios, but I’m not going to bring that up because um. yeah.

As for Torchlight 2, with features like health and mana potions, health and mana bulbs, skill trees, skill points, and manually-assigned attributes, all features not found in Diablo III, the comparison is pretty obvious.

This isn’t necessarily a good thing though many of us in the Diablo community initially objected to Diablo III’s removal of stat points, skill points, mana potions, etc, I think most people have since come around to accept and even appreciate these feature changes. Thus Torchlight 2’²s use of those D2-style game functions is traditional, but it might seem outdated, when (if?) we ever have the full versions of Diablo III and Torchlight 2 to compare side by side.

And then we proceed to Runic Games Fansite for another pile o’ words:

What can I say about it other than damn… It’s a LOT harder than Torchlight 1 was. You could probably compare the new Hard mode to the old Very Hard. The new Very Hard mode really likes to punish you. Travis mentioned multiple times that the main thing they didn’t want to do is just pump the monster health up and basically make you take longer to kill them. The monsters now just seem to spawn in larger groups, do a lot more damage to you (which requires a lot more kiting), possibly have additional stats and just in general are higher level. This makes some encounters really difficult.

My impressions of it with the outlander were okay at the start because of the ranged attacks, but as I went further on and didn’t find a better ranged weapon it started to get really difficult. A lot of the faster monsters were really hard to kite and killed me withing a couple of hits and I couldn’t damage them fast enough. I watched Jerich play a melee berseker which looked even more difficult, as he was always in close proximity to the monsters, getting killed in a few hits.

In general the outlander plays really well and has a variety of skill trees for both ranged skills, some magic and also the chance to summon monsters on hit. Travis emphasised that they want all stats to be useful to all characters this time around, so I guess the skill tree reflects that also. The build I went with had a few passives to boost my range and also my damage, a bolt that split into multiple parts upon hitting the enemies as well as a summon zombie after killing them spell. I had issues with this one on very hard as there was a level 21 one I wanted (I got to a max of 18) which was a chance to cast on any range kill.