Here's Torchlight II's Opening Cinematic

So...... Wasnt torchlight slated to come out 6 months ago?

Not caring much for the cinematic but if the sequel is anything like the original but with multiplayer then I'm sold on getting it.

huh, this game still exists. Cool. Bad timing though, what with that one other game that is similiar coming out soon. I think I might be more excited about this one though, actually.

So the cinematics are Shank?

Amazing how much they follow the D1 --> D2 progression. I liked a lot about Torchlight 1 - most of all Matt Uelmen's music, but I wasn't really a fan of the visual style. Too WoW meets kiddy cartoons for me. If they're taking that even further with the cinematics, I might have a hard time with it.

No perfect solution for me I guess. I was quite disappointed by the open beta weekend of D3. Torchlight 2 might be the lesser looting evil.

What is it about the same old hack-and-slash click-click-click games that makes them get delayed and delayed?

Hello, I'm a big black demon that refused to die in the first game for some reason.

And no, that half-naked brawny dude I just owned was not a barbarian, you silly.

Kidding, I loved Torchlight and will buy this one as well.

will be interesting to see what changes they make from one.

Really looking forward to this, but this trailer does nothing to further convince me. Very aesthetically unappealing art style. The actual games looks quite nice, however.

I will wait a year until I play Torchlight 2, if only to see what the modding community brings to the table.

that was a catchy slogon, what was it again:

"heroes may fall, heroes may rise, heroes may fall but rise too."

@BigChickenDinner said:

well said. made me hate the world this takes place in.

Release date?

Torchlight is a great game and I'm excited to see what 2 has in under wraps. Being able to send your dog back to get rid of the lousy loot was the simplest and most profound mechanic they thought of.

This damn game should of came out BEFORE Diablo III goddammit!

Cinematics were done by Klei Entertainment, so yes, the Shank comparisons are perfectly apt.

Maybe it's because I didn't play the first 2 Diablo games, but I don't know what all the Diablo 3 hate is about. Had a great time with the Diablo 3 beta. At any rate, it's hard to get excited about Torchlight 2 without actual gameplay footage. Hopefully it's great.

@TJUK said:

This trailer has a stink of 90's shockwave flash about it.

lots of...tweening and line tool...

@kickinthehead said:

Cinematics were done by Klei Entertainment, so yes, the Shank comparisons are perfectly apt.

Yeah I immediately noticed that, I thought it was either them or they were being ripped off.

Doesn't feel like Torchlight to me. At all. The art direction in the original took some heavy Blizzard inspiration but it was great because it was quirky, moody and slightly epic at the same time. This style is just...eh. I even liked Shank despite the animation priority issues and thought the art direction was great in-game, but those cutscenes were cringe-worthy. It's bordering on motion comics.

Torchlight was meant to fill the Diablo hole, but now that hole will be filled with Diablo III.

@TJUK said:

This trailer has a stink of 90's shockwave flash about it.

Or a really cheap Cartoon Network show aired at weird hours. What a bizarre video.

There was a lot of things wrong with Torchlight. Story, monster variety, Skill balance, Poor Itemization, fishing, variety of locations. VO, and (as much as it pains me cause I love his work) the Music. I think that Torchlight was some of Matt's worst work to date. The one thing that was impressive about torchlight was that they made the game with in a year.

Kind of depressed thinking about this game's success in a post-Diablo III world. Like, 3 was going to come out well after Torchlight 2 and then that... didn't happen.

Thanks Blizzard. :(

I'm kinda bummed that this game is coming out after Diablo III...I was pretty excited about it before, after playing and enjoying a lot of Torchlight, but I don't really care about Torchlight 2 now that I've already pre-ordered (pre-registered?) my copy of Diablo III for less than a month from now. Too bad. I'll probably still give Torchlight 2 a shot, but I can't imagine it surpassing my crazed want for Diablo III right now.

@xxNBxx said:

There was a lot of things wrong with Torchlight. Story, monster variety, Skill balance, Poor Itemization, fishing, variety of locations. VO, and (as much as it pains me cause I love his work) the Music. I think that Torchlight was some of Matt's worst work to date. The one thing that was impressive about torchlight was that they made the game with in a year.

I disagree a whole hell of a lot with this statement. Except the last part, that is.

Is this Shank 3?

@pochunki said:

I'm kinda bummed that this game is coming out after Diablo III...I was pretty excited about it before, after playing and enjoying a lot of Torchlight, but I don't really care about Torchlight 2 now that I've already pre-ordered (pre-registered?) my copy of Diablo III for less than a month from now. Too bad. I'll probably still give Torchlight 2 a shot, but I can't imagine it surpassing my crazed want for Diablo III right now.

+1

I hope this one will have more interesting loot and locations. I really enjoyed Torchlight 1, but eventually it got pretty repetitive.

@tindrum said:

well, the art direction is certainly tragic.

@PresidentOfJellybeans said:

Maybe it's because I didn't play the first 2 Diablo games, but I don't know what all the Diablo 3 hate is about. Had a great time with the Diablo 3 beta. At any rate, it's hard to get excited about Torchlight 2 without actual gameplay footage. Hopefully it's great.

Blizzard seems to have some of the bitchiest fans around. I think some people are put off by the game no longer having much of any compelling reason to create multiples of the same class, given the new swappable skill system, versus the second game's non-resettable skill trees. I think they just need to give it time. I see pros and cons to both systems, so I'm not going to just focus on the negative while ignoring the positive. I still find the 6 skill limitation a little weird, though their explanation was that when they tried even 7, it made characters too versatile. (I forget how they worded it, but it was something to that effect.) I suppose I'll just have to take their word for it.

Realistically, most Diablo II builds didn't use more skills than that at any given level anyway, but I did like to play builds with a ton of non-maxed skills at my disposal sometimes. Having to limit how many skills you could have was a tradeoff necessary to go with no longer having skill points, though. I don't know if their solution is necessarily what I'd have gone with, but considering just how many times they completely overhauled how skill assignment works in the game over the course of development, including several versions of skill trees that were more similar to Diablo II, there must be something to it. In the back of my mind, I have this nagging feeling they may have gone with this six skill thing to make a potential console port smoother, but it seems like it will work well, anyway.

A lot of people have been griping about the game being online only. I can understand how that would be a problem for some people, but the series was always developed with online in mind. Diablo II is, to my knowledge, still the only non-free-to-play ARPG where they have their own servers to run the game and store characters. To go full-on online like this back then would probably would have been foolish when most people were still on dial-up (if they even had that), though.

While I understand how it's a legitimate issue for some, I often speculate about how many of those people are just pissed that they won't be able to get the same experience pirating it (unless crackers manage to somehow get their hands on server code), because obviously that has to be at least some of the people complaining. It just amuses me to think about people who weren't going to pay for the game anyway whining about how Blizzard isn't catering to their desires, because I know those people are out there. It sucks for people with crappy internet, I guess, but so do MMOs.

@Kratch said:

I disagree a whole hell of a lot with this statement. Except the last part, that is.

I would love to see you try to make a intelligent argument as to why you thought my points were wrong.

1: The Story was extremely weak. It's made even worse due to the fact that its almost the same premiss as Diablo 1, Something really evil is at the bottom of the dungeon. With non of the cool story elements that were in D1.

2: The monster variety was very generic. The first 3 out of the first 5 monsters types in D3 ( Hungary Corps, Grotesques, and Wretched Mothers) are more interesting then almost anything in Torchlight.

3: You can ask Erich Schaefer and he will tell you himself that the loot in torchlight was what we call item soup. Meaning that one piece of gear looked just like every other piece of gear (stat wise not look wise, although there wasn't many different looks as well in TL)

4: There is almost no reason why to take more then one point in any other skill out side of the Mastery skills. Some skills didn't scale right, and they were not worth taking for later. Then there are the skills that every class has. That's not a good way to make each class different.

5: Fishing, really? It was pointless. Yeah I want to change my already useless pet into another useless pet. Not worth the time they spent coding.

6: Voice over work, were was it? Only two characters had more then one line of voice over. It drew attention to the already lifeless feeling you got when you went back to town. They might as well have been all robots because, they only ever said one thing to you when every you walked up to them. On top of the lack of voice over work, the quality was average at best, and poor in total.

7: It just seemed like Matt Uelmen took his sheet music from Diablo 1&2 and just re did it with a little more whimsy. There was nothing inspiring and nothing that really stood out. Granted its hard to compose better then what he did in Diablo.

8: Variety in locations went like this, Blue Rock, Blue Stone, Green Stone with a few plants, Blue Rock again, Red stone and rock with lava, Gold stone, Purple stone, And finally Green stone and rock...

Torchlight is 15 bucks and feels like its worth about that much. Diablo 3 is 60 bucks and feels like its worth more. I played the 1 hour and a half Diablo 3 beta for 300+ hours. I played Torchlight for about 15 hours. The last few hours was me forcing myself to beat the game just so I can say I finished it.

Damn, that kinda makes me wish the Shank guys would make a fantasy game.

Wait. Duncan died and went to Torchlight?

Meh, this intro video does nothing for this old timer. I played torchlight and like it. If torchlight two is pretty much the same, then i'll play it, it'll be good enough for me to buy it. Torchlight always did scratch my diablo itch, so much so that I may skip Blizzards.

Kind of an underwhelming trailer. Good thing I'll have D3 to play instead!

@Hass said:

Alright. So we can recap:
Torchlight wasn't the greatest incarnation of it's genre that has ever been made,
it didn't even bother in trying to sell itself as one of the greatest experiences of all times.
And, alas, it didn't hold promises it never gave, like deep story and role playing, which
have always been defining points of the hack and slash genre.

What Torchlight did, it reached the goals it set for itself. It surprised people. It had a lovely
art-style, of course that just counts just for people still able to feel love, and who are not
already refined and distilled into glittering gems of hatred, on whose touch flowers will wither.

At last, it never even tried to compare itself to games like Diablo. How dares it, not giving
free fuel for hate. So the haters must make up arguments, sell comparisons of apples
and oranges, while not trying to look like completely missing the point.

Max Schafer! Here's your true crime! Be ashamed! Be very ashamed!

You know, being melodramatic doesn't make Torchlight any better.

@xxNBxx

Nice summary. Unfortunately there's even a lot more to add like e.g. the Enchanting System, which was so broken it killed all that was left of the itemization, the lack of a heavy feeling to attacks/skills (everyone who e.g. played the Barbarian in Diablo 3 will know what I mean), potion spam that was kept in the game, bad balance (partially due to that) and so on.

I don't see why I'd support Runic. If Torchlight had some nice features and was mostly restricted due to a low budget, fine. But it's not like that. There aren't any real better game designs / gameplay improvements over even Diablo 2. In fact, in comparison almost every aspect is much worse. This to me is somewhat inexcusable. I don't expect a small dev team to come up with a beast of an engine, no, that's just feasible most of the time. In fact, the graphics are one of the better aspects of Torchlight in comparison to its whole.

But how can it be, that Runic didn't have at least a couple good game ideas for Torchlight? I mean even the pet, which isn't good to begin with, was basically from their previous project, Mythos, if I understand that right.

And then a lot folks say, "but it's the Diablo 2 guys". Well no, according to wikipedia there aren't really many people from Blizzard North within Runic - about 8. Not only that, but these guys already failed another project, Hellgate: London. Mythos also never ended up coming out due to financial issues. And well as Runic, they produced a rather bad Torchlight.

Now why exactly do they deserve so much respect again? Because over 11 years ago some of Runic was involved in Diablo 2 but failed since then? That's a rather weak argument.

And I can only agree with xxNBxx about the game cost aspect. Was Torchlight worth the 15-20$? Yes, perhaps it was to most people. But is that game (or Torchlight 2) a good product for it's price in comparison to Diablo 2 / Diablo 3? Hell no. These games are/will be played for decades, and for a good reason at that.

If Runic Games manages to create something actually good with Torchlight 2 they'll earn some respect. But nothing they've shown so far looks great (granted they don't show a lot).

Not crazy about this particular art direction, but I imagine it's just for the cutscene(s), so no harm in that. Does make me excited for this game. I just wish for its sake it would have launched before Diablo 3.

I dig this style. Reminds me of Samurai Jack.

@BiG_Weasel said:

I dig this style. Reminds me of Samurai Jack.

Or Shank

I think it was crucial for Torchlight 2 to come out before anything of Diablo 3 did..now nobody will give a fuck pretty much. It'll probably a decent game too! I hope it does well!

Looks like it was made by the Shank guys.

Hero's will rise to click on stuff a lot.

I actually like the animation in this trailer. It's like a weird cross of Samurai Jack and Shank.

That said, I'm still not interested in playing Torchlight II. I'm taking a break from action RPGs for another few years at least.

@S0ndor said:

After playing Torchlight and the Diablo III beta, and not liking either one of them, I think I can now safely say that I am done with mindless dungeon crawling.

I'm on the exact same page as you. I'm pretty much done with the genre. I just don't see the point anymore.

I can't believe that jerk saved the camera guy instead of the lady!