Few (early) thoughts on Torchlight - part 2
By ouvintes 3 Comments
This second part is to expand a bit on yesterday's post and to reply to a few comments made to the original post.
I used the word clone in the original post and it could be read as a negative comment on the game, so I'd like to be clear: I don't think it is bad to be a clone, at least not in this particular case. For two reasons:
1) it's by the same guys who worked on Diablo, so it's not like they are stealing other people's work. In fact, they are expanding on their previous work and they just don't call it Diablo because they don't own the IP.
2) I love Diablo.
The reason I call it a clone is because it's pretty obvious the guys at Runic wanted to evoke the "feel" of Diablo as much as possible. You can notice it when you open a town portal, you can hear it in the music cues, the sound you hear when you sell or buy gear. And to me, that's not a bad thing because it brings back all those good memories. And obviously, this game is made for us who love Diablo. That's the audience they are going for.
Still, Runic managed to make a bunch of little changes that give the game a more unique feel. The pet is the most obvious one. You can take a cat or dog with you during your quests and he will assist you in your fights. You don't control him directly. He has a name, can learn spells, has his own inventory. One nice detail: you can load your unwanted loot into his inventory and tell him to go to town and sell it and bring the money back to you. Since your pet is also a fighter, this will leave you to battle alone for some time (I've seen it take from 30 sec to about a minute for him to return). It's a smart little touch and it saves you from using a lot of town portals to get rid of overweight.
You will occasionally find merchants in the dungeons, so you may be able to do some trading in the middle of a quest. From what I've seen, you will also find quest-givers along the way so not everything depends on you returning to Torchlight town.
When in town, you have all kind of traders to buy and sell stuff and also enchant and mutate your gear into something new. One merchant sells only magical stuff but you never know the exact benefits of the gear until you buy it. It's risky, but sometimes very rewarding. All those little touches benefit and streamline the game a lot.
Now, about classes:
I've only used the Vanquisher, the pretty lady with guns, because I like ranged combat. You can also use The Destroyer, your traditional melee class, and the Alchemist, your steampunky mage.
As far as I know, there are no class-limited items, I can't really remember any, so please correct me if this is wrong, I have a feeling it is :). It seems to me any class can use most ranged weapons, melee or even spells.I've been using a mace as a secondary weapon, when things get too hectic, despite being a ranged fighter.
The real difference between classes is the skill tree, wich will favour the classes fighting style. Since these are only early impressions, I can't get into much detail there. Once i'm done with the game, wich should last about 8 to 10 hours according to the Giantbombcast, I will review all this and give my final impressions. As of now, so far, so good. Hope you are all anjoying it, too. Seems to be causing a nice impression.
3 Comments