The Other Worlds Shrine

Your place for discussion about RPGs, gaming, music, movies, anime, computers, sports, and any other stuff we care to talk about... 

  • Torchlight 2 versus Diablo 3

  • Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
Because playing them is not enough, we have to bitch about them daily, too. We had a Gameplay forum, but it got replaced by GameFAQs.
 #157829  by Don
 Mon Sep 24, 2012 2:18 am
It's obviously hard to play Torchlight 2 without comparing it to Diablo 3. It's not so much as Torchlight 2 is great but that Diablo 3 is a bad game. Torchlight 2 really just takes the standard Diablo 2 format plus a few things that made Torchlight unique, while Diablo 3 inexplicably decided to reinvent the wheel for no apparent reason (well, actually for RMAH). On the Elite level setting the game's about as hard as Inferno on Diablo 3 if you were actually able to get loot, though then again the bosses don't regen to 100% the moment you die so that makes them a bit easier though I'd say that's just because Diablo 3 is poorly designed in general. The game's combat reminds me of Metal Gear in that the regular enemies hit extremely hard relative to your HPs and yet you can get stomped by a Metal Gear and only lose a third of your health. The regular enemies hit very hard, perhaps unreasonably hard, but they're also easily killed for the most part. For the bosses themselves you can actually tank their main attack pretty well (usually will lose 1/3 of your health but it's not a huge deal with the potions). You have to dodge the telegraphed attacks, and pretty much every boss has unlimited amount of minions they will constantly summon so you can't just stand still the whole time. There's really not much strategy to the boss battles but then the Diablo series probably was never meant to be have strategic boss battles. You basically run around in a circle like crazy trying to do as much damage as you can before you eventually die and then you run back in and keep doing it and eventually the boss's health will go to 0. Hopefully you bought a lot of potions with you, though, because some of them takes a long time to kill (at lesat on Elite).

The skill tree system is fairly standard stuff. You can take back the last 3 points you spent so at least you can see how a new skill works and of course 75% of them are pretty much useless with your starting equipment on Elite mode but then that's what new characters are for. Given that equipment can be worn with either a level or a stat rating (i.e. level 10 or strength 50 + dex 25) this means once you have collected your awesome gear you can generally wear it a lot earlier than the level requirements would allow since you can assign your stats exactly, and so far I've yet to see anything with only a stat requirement so obviously you can eventually wear anything no matter how you allocated your stats. Similar to Diablo 3, Torchlight 2 tries to make all the stats at least somewhat useful (focus = int but adds dual wield chance and elemental damage, strength is melee DPS but also crit damage modifier) though you still won't be going all strength/dex as an Embermage, but it means the points you got to put into str/dex to wear certain gear at least isn't completely wasted.

One thing I noticed is that people who are on Diablo 3's side will always talk about graphics or polish or UI or whatever even though it's either subjective or, in the case of graphics, it's really hard to see tell why Diablo 3 has better graphics. I mean yeah you paid $60 for it but I don't think the game looks better than Shining Force Neo on the PS2.

At first I thought the lack of respec was going to be a big deal but since you can try a boss as many times as you want, you can probably beat the game with only level 1 Magma bolt and nothing else spent on your tree (but you'll definitely die, a lot). I'm sure someone can find out a way to completely gimp your characters but it seems like you could have 1 point in an active skill and everything in passives, or vice versa, and it'd still be pretty hard to come up with a useless character.
 #157835  by Zeus
 Mon Sep 24, 2012 9:31 am
Diablo 3 ain't "bad", it's just not "great". I had fun with my 12 or so hours with it
 #157851  by Don
 Mon Sep 24, 2012 9:18 pm
Zeus wrote:Diablo 3 ain't "bad", it's just not "great". I had fun with my 12 or so hours with it
The Diablo franchise kind of has rather hefty expectations, just like Apple selling 5 million IPhones in 5 in the opening weekend is considered a failure because people expect them to sell 6 million.
 #157863  by Zeus
 Tue Sep 25, 2012 3:05 pm
Don wrote:
Zeus wrote:Diablo 3 ain't "bad", it's just not "great". I had fun with my 12 or so hours with it
The Diablo franchise kind of has rather hefty expectations, just like Apple selling 5 million IPhones in 5 in the opening weekend is considered a failure because people expect them to sell 6 million.
Apples and oranges. I don't consider those who bought Diablo to be sheeple
 #157875  by Don
 Tue Sep 25, 2012 7:31 pm
Zeus wrote:
Don wrote:
Zeus wrote:Diablo 3 ain't "bad", it's just not "great". I had fun with my 12 or so hours with it
The Diablo franchise kind of has rather hefty expectations, just like Apple selling 5 million IPhones in 5 in the opening weekend is considered a failure because people expect them to sell 6 million.
Apples and oranges. I don't consider those who bought Diablo to be sheeple
Huh? Plenty of people bought Diablo 3 because it had the word "Diablo' on it.
 #157896  by Shrinweck
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 12:21 pm
Torchlight 2 wins for me because it does not have a RMAH (and thus has no built in mechanics that encourage me to use it) and you can select your difficulty in the beginning and not have to trudge through ~10 hours of what is essentially busy work before any real fun can be had.
 #157897  by Flip
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 1:09 pm
Shrinweck wrote:Torchlight 2 wins for me because it does not have a RMAH (and thus has no built in mechanics that encourage me to use it) and you can select your difficulty in the beginning and not have to trudge through ~10 hours of what is essentially busy work before any real fun can be had.
Eh, i dont know. Part of the reward of D3 is the crawl beforehand, at least from a hardcore standpoint. If you could start in Inferno with a lvl 60 then everyone would do it, cheapening the accomplishment. In fact, skipping content and bosses i always thought was lame. There were a lot of HC players who would skip Belial in Inferno and farm A3/4 because he is such a hard boss, which is a pretty pansy way to play the game.

I retired from D3 last month after my 2nd pretty good lvl 60 died at Belial, in fact. Ugh, that really hurt, but the thought of starting all the way back at the beginning was too much to handle so i stopped playing, which is a good thing for the skilled players who are still playing. Resetting my dead WD right back into Inferno and having a few ppl power lvl me is lame-o.

All in all i lost 5 lvl 50'ish characters before i finally cracked 60 with a Demon Hunter who died in Act 2 Inferno, then a Witch Doctor easily got to 60 but died at Belial as i mentioned. I might, big might, fire up another one only because i would like to have a lvl 60 waiting in the wing for when additional content and features come out, but the problem is that as long as i have a live lvl 60 i cant seem to stop playing until i'm dead, lol.

The WD was pretty easy, though, i would probably play one of those again. Demon Hunter is fun, but far too fragile for HC. Its a very frustrating class to play, but you look like a boss when you have a live high level one. The HC community thinks you are the tits, because it is easily 10x as hard as a barb or monk, for example.
 #157899  by Shrinweck
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 2:38 pm
Not really speaking from a hardcore perspective. Also, Torchlight difficulty doesn't correspond to level. Normal is incredibly boring, just like it was in Diablo. In fact, I was ready to stop playing after three minutes before I started at a higher difficulty.

The only thing I miss in Diablo was a story told decently, even if none of the characters are meaningful or interesting... Well the one guy was before they offed him immediately. And Jennifer Hale can only pull character quality so far with good voice acting.

Torchlight 2 might as well not even have one. If it was just about some dude traveling around the world helping randomized people doing stupid shit I'd probably enjoy it more.
 #157905  by Don
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 8:22 pm
Torchlight 2 on Elite is hard at level 1 and if you play it on hardcore you might not make it out of level 10 before you die. I don't see why if someone views beating Belial at Inferno is some kind of badge of honor then why does it even matter you've to go through 3 lesser difficulty settings. Getting past Act 1 without dying on Elite is probably as hard as getting through the whole game on Veteran without dying, but you don't need to 'prove' yourself if you're actually good enough to do it.

I'd say Torchlight 2's lack of a story is a plus relative to Diablo 3 because Diablo 3's story is actually insulting whereas Torchlight 2's story is merely nonexistent.

As it stands right now Elitist (complete the game on Elite) has 0.4% achievement rate and you don't have to go through the other 3 difficulty if you can grind it out on Elite (and Elite is seriously hard, even in light of the fact that enemies never regen), and that's a good thing.
 #157909  by Shrinweck
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 9:15 pm
Those Ice King blobs regen. Those bastards. Not really a problem unless they're spitting out adds and they're next to a boss. Which happened to me. So much gold lost before I learned when to drop a waypoint portal :(

I'm gonna try my hand at elite soon.. maybe go with a defensive engineer. Those shield skills sound neat. And that bot that follows you around healing is pretty useful since it's basically invulnerable.
 #157913  by Don
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 11:08 pm
Pretty sure nothing regens health in this game unless they have the health regen attribute or it specifically says they do. King blobs can be pretty hard to hit because they're surrounded by a ton of other blobs.

Elite you either need a ton of DPS or some really good armor, otherwise everything past act 2 will kill you in one hit, though that's not a big deal if you can kill them in one hit too.
 #157914  by Shrinweck
 Thu Sep 27, 2012 11:25 pm
Well.. elite was an exercise in monotony. Going to stick with veteran. Trash mobs taking 8-10 swings isn't so much harder as much as it's incredibly tedious. Champion/boss kills made me flood with relief rather than accomplishment. After an hour my clicking finger is literally numb. And this was getting lucky and getting to use an 86 dps weapon at level 5. I can see this going differently with a purely offensive character but I'm going to take a pass on this particular challenge for now.
 #157915  by Don
 Fri Sep 28, 2012 12:14 am
Some skills just do way more damage than others so if you've the right skills the HPs isn't that bad. It's only a problem on the major bosses and the fact that everything can one hit kill you. I'm doing the level 60 dungeons right now instead of going to New Game + trying to get some more loot. For fun I loaded up a level 105 dungeon on Elite and the generic 'big guy' hit me for 8000 damage. I've 4000 HP at level 55 but I believe you're not going to have much more than about 8K even at level 100.

That said you can always change the difficulty in a multiplayer game.
 #157921  by Flip
 Fri Sep 28, 2012 10:37 am
Don wrote:I don't see why if someone views beating Belial at Inferno is some kind of badge of honor then why does it even matter you've to go through 3 lesser difficulty settings.

Well, i think the point is that only the dedicated get to the good parts of the game since you are required to slog through the first 3 difficulties. It reminds me of the old school days where you get all the way to end of a NES game, die at the last stage, and then have to start alllll the way back over. You always lust to get back to that last stage, but you have to crawl through 8 previous stages AGAIN to get there. Its a sense of accomplishment, punishment, and perseverance!
 #157939  by Don
 Fri Sep 28, 2012 9:58 pm
Flip wrote:
Don wrote:I don't see why if someone views beating Belial at Inferno is some kind of badge of honor then why does it even matter you've to go through 3 lesser difficulty settings.

Well, i think the point is that only the dedicated get to the good parts of the game since you are required to slog through the first 3 difficulties. It reminds me of the old school days where you get all the way to end of a NES game, die at the last stage, and then have to start alllll the way back over. You always lust to get back to that last stage, but you have to crawl through 8 previous stages AGAIN to get there. Its a sense of accomplishment, punishment, and perseverance!
But not dying on Belial in Inferno is an order of magnitude harder than getting to him without dying, so if you're at all in a position to try this, what does your ability to slog through Normal Act 1 to Inferno Act 2 prior to Belial even matter? You're not talking about a game where it's a matter of attrition, like you got to the last boss with only 2 lives left or a RPG where you crawled through this huge maze and only have half of your MP left for the final guy. In Diablo you're either dead or you're not when it comes to Hardcore. You don't get 'worn down' so to speak by the journey.