Diablo III vs. Torchlight II

DrZaloski · Apr 3, 2012

I just noticed that there is no thread comparing Blizzards' Diablo III to Runic Games' Torchlight II, so I'd thought I'd go ahead myself

I'll just start by saying I'm overall more excited by Torchlight II. After playing Torchlight, the memories of Diablo II came rushing back in such a glorious way, and without Max Schaefer, I worry that Diablo 3 won't be the Diablo game Torchlight II will be. Not to mention that Torchlight II will be cheaper and has a much more computer-friendly graphics engine (although for the graphics Diablo III pulled off, its amazing I'll probably be able to run it).

I just sorta wanted to hear the KAGs communities opinions, and I wanted to avoid a bias caused by asking this on either the Diablo III forums or the Torchlight II forums.

dnmr · Apr 3, 2012

By the looks of it i'll probably end up trying both. People are really hyped up about diablo 3, and i already have it preordered (as do a few of my friends). If torchlight 2 will be affordable enough, i'll probably have to check it out too (although i was not too impressed by torchlight 1, so not 100% sure on this).

WarrFork · Apr 4, 2012

Already pre-ordered Diablo 3, never played Torchlight because I never seen that game. I'll try both too because this game seem pretty nice. But I like beautiful graphics, so I prefer Diablo.

Chayeh · Apr 4, 2012

Torchlight is good, but Diablo is a much deeper game in gameplay terms. Torchlight doesn't really lend its self to replays though torchlight 2 will probably fix this.

Jackard · Apr 4, 2012

re: torchlight - im more interested in the soundtrack than the game. Matt Uelmen~

DrZaloski · Apr 4, 2012

Torchlight didn't merit a replay? I clocked in over 100 hours into that goddamn game, playing as many different builds I could muster, and playing on all the difficulties. I played that game more vanilla Diablo II, and I think I enjoyed it more. Of course, Lord of Destruction changes all of that, seeing how that was such a stellar expansion, also the lack of multiplayer and the fact there was only on town and no over world really hurt the near perfect Torchlight. But with both of those fixed in Torchlight 2, it's really hard to resist. Also they just released the pet plans, which is something Diablo III will lack. I also don't really like that Blizzards really whoring out on Diablo III's in-game market, but hey, it's Blizzard, what did I expect?

Also Torchlight II will be $20, just like Torchlight. A lot more attractive then Diablo IIIs' $60. I'll buy both regardless, though.

dnmr · Apr 5, 2012

oh yeah, it was the Fate'ish aftertaste that made torchlight feel a bit nasty for me. Fate was kinda full of cheese, which gives me bad associations

tur1sta · Apr 7, 2012

I'm looking froward to Torchlight 2 more than Diablo 3 just because I already know that Blizzard dishes out high quality games. I'm curious on how Torchlight 2 fairs out. Torchlight was more of a modern clone for Diablo. You're just in one town and there is only one dungeon that has a massive amount of levels. You go deeper and deeper until you meet Diablo. Same concept with Torchlight.

Chayeh said: ↑

Torchlight is good, but Diablo is a much deeper game in gameplay terms.
Click to expand...

Blizzard is known for their in-game lores. They are deep and detailed. I have the Book of Cain from Diablo 3 and they have details on multiple Angels besides Tyrael. The same is for the demons.

I could say that Torchlight is heading the same direction, like Diablo 1, since the lore is there but it is focused on that specific event and on that specific area. Torchlight 2 will hopefully feed my need for lore about the world they exist in.

Note: I don't like to compare these 2 games just because after playing Torchlight, Runic Games have done justice to make it stand out as a game even though it had similar mechanics and overall feel with Diablo. I will not base my personal judgement on Torchlight 2 with Diablo 2.

tlc2011 · Apr 8, 2012

Hold on, i thought everyone thought Diablo III was shit...

Wait, TORCHLIGHT II?

Chayeh · Apr 8, 2012

Oh yeah, don't think I'm bagging on the game. I'm sure torchlight 2 will be great

tur1sta · Apr 8, 2012

tlc2011 said: ↑

Hold on, i thought everyone thought Diablo III was shit...

Wait, TORCHLIGHT II?
Click to expand...

Diablo 3 is the shit. From what I've seen in the beta videos, it can only get better. I'm curious on how the auction house pans out for the public.

Yep, Torchlight 2 might come out shortly after Diablo 3

dnmr · Nov 12, 2012

NECROPOST.
Just wanted to say that i'm enjoying TL2 right now. Preordered it in a 4-pack back in summer, so each copy cost about 14€.

That game is much less "serious" than D3 and quite a bit more fun imo. It allows for pretty ridiculous stuff, but still punishes you if you play stupid. With some luck and proper skill selection you can get on blasting shit like no tomorrow. I managed to put a lv14 cannon on my level 4 engineer, and it was mad sick Then we found a stats enchanter somewhere around level 13 and i managed to equip a lv53 cannon i bought on a higher level character... Add a lucky enchant on it and this is what you get (char level ~20): https://dl.dropbox.com/u/22586400/screens/TL2/2012-11-11_00002.jpg

OP things aside though, the hit detection is much less insane than in D3, and i like it a whole lot. You won't get hit if you are five meters away from the enemy or a projectile. That stuff was just irritating in D3 :/

PS: i stopped playing D3 around act2 inferno when i was playing it in summer. Playing TL2 on elite

Fate · Nov 12, 2012

There's a nice comparison of Torchlight 2 vs Diablo 3 done from the standpoint of TL2:

Tim Buckley said:

Torchlight 2 has cemented itself as better than Diablo 3 in my books, and now that I've had a couple of weeks to play it, I think I can start to narrow down why. At first it was just a feeling, but now I'm noticing the actual mechanical differences.
The first difference, I'd say, would be the difficulty, and more importantly, the way it's handled. In D3 you had to play up starting from normal difficulty, through harder difficulties, using the same character. I guess I understand why they did that, but Torchlight 2 separates difficulty and character level, the way I think it should be.
Inferno difficulty in Diablo 3 (at least when I played it) was often ridiculously, stupidly hard. You were constantly hitting brick walls caused by gear deficiency, and the only option was to farm for hours for incremental upgrades to slowly move ahead. I know they've made a lot of tweaks to D3 since I stopped playing, but at the time the feeling of a "challenge" wore off pretty quickly, and was replaced by the feeling of "work."

I've got two characters I'm working on in TL2, an Outlander and an Engineer, each with different friends I play with. Both are being played on 'Elite', the highest available difficulty. So right from level 1 there's a challenge. I don't have to spend thirty levels breezing through the game on normal in order to unlock a harder difficulty.

There are times that Elite mode is hard... you die a lot, especially on some boss fights, or when you get swarmed by archers, or whatever. But it never starts to feel like a chore, and that's due to a couple of fundamental design choices. First of all, there are no repair costs. You're not going to go broke and be rendered completely useless just because you hit a tough section of the game.

Second, the enemies don't immediately regenerate all of their health as soon as you disengage them. So even if you're having trouble with an area/boss, and dying a lot, you never stop feeling like you're making progress. If you get an enemy down to half health, and you die, he's still at half health when you get back there, and you can keep working on it. With enough time and patience, you can get through all of the hardest areas of the game. You'll never just hit a dead stop at a brick wall.

I crave challenge in my video games, it's why I always start at the highest difficulty available. However it's no fun to have a game just completely stop you in your tracks. Torchlight 2 realizes that hey, perhaps you haven't been super lucky with loot drops and you haven't gotten a new weapon in a few levels... that's okay. You can still brute force your way through a boss fight with sheer determination. It will be a lot harder, but it can be done.
I also feel like TL2 has a better grasp of long-term replayability than D3 did. In TL2, when you finish the game, you take your character into a NG+, the enemies match your level, and you keep playing. All the way up to level 100. And even when you hit the cap at level 100, you can still continue to make NG+, to the point where enemies could be twenty levels above you.

I'm not sure why Blizzard decided that you would only finally unlock the toughest challenge at max level, when you could no longer advance your character (something they clearly want to backpedal on with their Paragon system), but TL2 just feels more natural, and more encouraging in regards to leveling.

I also like that TL2 enforces the more old school character building ideology, in that your decisions are (mostly) permanent. You can undo your last three skill points, but anything before that is stuck in place. There are (currently) no ways to respec your character, so the decisions you make are permanent. I did like the ability in Diablo 3 to try out different builds on a regular basis, but the sacrifice was that you didn't feel quite as connected to your character. Your character was skin you slapped on an ever-changing combination of skills, as opposed to something that you slowly built and cultivated over many hours of play.

Torchlight 2's art style also appeals to me more, though this is entirely subjective. D3 was a gorgeous game too, but I think where Blizzard tried to straddle a line between the gritty realism of the earlier Diablo games, and a stylized "WoW" appearance, Torchlight 2 just completely invested in their stylized look. It feels more cohesive, and I just enjoy it more overall.

To sum up my feelings on Torchlight 2, I'd have to draw on a debate I had with a friend while trying to compare TL2 to D3. Where he pointed out that they were both attempting different things, with different goals, and thus not suitable to direct comparison, I reshaped my argument to the following:
Torchlight 2 is the sequel that Diablo 2 should have gotten.
Click to expand...

dnmr · Nov 26, 2012

Fate said: ↑

There's a nice comparison of Torchlight 2 vs Diablo 3 done from the standpoint of TL2
Click to expand...

agreed on all points except for the permanent skill/stat point assignment.

First of all the skill selection is pretty dam weak. Taking my last attempt at playing engineer as an example, you don't really need anything but the blast cannon skill. It has knockback from the cannon itself, stun from cannon and heavy lifting skill, tons of damage and blind from the blast skill. You can pick up another cannon skill later on, but i can't see why anyone would do that. You will have invested a lot of points into blast cannon by the time you unlock the rockets, so it seems completely pointless. If someone got far enough in the game to test it out, feel free to correct me. But even if you do realize that it's better than blast cannon, it will mean that your skill points have gone to waste. Maybe it's better for single enemies, but there are almost no situations where you'd want to deal lots of damage to a single target. Maybe in boss fights, but bosses always summon craploads of minions, and you want to take them out to avoid getting swarmed, so AOE damage is always welcome. I also briefly tried out spider mines, and they were actually pretty good. But they are slow to cast and again, i can't see a situation where they would be preferred to cannons.

I also have a level 42 outlander who has been doing fine all the way up to act 3 sawmill boss. I get surrounded and utterly annihilated by the werewolves. Guess i should have invested into blade pact or whatever, but it's too late to reassign points now. The character is pretty much botched. Of course i could farm me some more skill points and pick a few defensive skills, but that's tedious grind all over again.

All in all, the biggest problem is that you have no idea how your build will fare later on in the game. Once the game starts throwing different enemy combinations at you, your build might become completely obsolete. It's usually not as bad when you play with other people, because optimally you will have different characters playing different roles, but very often you'll have to start a new character to fix your build. It's just more frustration.

All in all, i must say i liked D3's skill system a whole lot, but it's quite bad otherwise :p Sure, they added a new monster power system, and made mobs not reset their HP if you leave the location, but it still feels very wrong.
--- merged: Nov 26, 2012 10:08 AM ---
a little update since we have played a few four player games in torchlight 2. The game has some very annoying bugs caused presumably by desync. Be prepared for constant crashes, insane loading times, invisible somethings killing you out of nowhere and bosses reanimating after death and also killing you ._.
Oh, and bugged quests because of arsewangfuck retarded quest system.
--- merged: Nov 26, 2012 11:23 AM ---
aaaalso, TL2 is now on sale. -50% on steam

Noburu · Nov 26, 2012

dnmr said: ↑

agreed on all points except for the permanent skill/stat point assignment.

First of all the skill selection is pretty dam weak. Taking my last attempt at playing engineer as an example, you don't really need anything but the blast cannon skill. It has knockback from the cannon itself, stun from cannon and heavy lifting skill, tons of damage and blind from the blast skill. You can pick up another cannon skill later on, but i can't see why anyone would do that. You will have invested a lot of points into blast cannon by the time you unlock the rockets, so it seems completely pointless. If someone got far enough in the game to test it out, feel free to correct me. But even if you do realize that it's better than blast cannon, it will mean that your skill points have gone to waste. Maybe it's better for single enemies, but there are almost no situations where you'd want to deal lots of damage to a single target. Maybe in boss fights, but bosses always summon craploads of minions, and you want to take them out to avoid getting swarmed, so AOE damage is always welcome. I also briefly tried out spider mines, and they were actually pretty good. But they are slow to cast and again, i can't see a situation where they would be preferred to cannons.

I also have a level 42 outlander who has been doing fine all the way up to act 3 sawmill boss. I get surrounded and utterly annihilated by the werewolves. Guess i should have invested into blade pact or whatever, but it's too late to reassign points now. The character is pretty much botched. Of course i could farm me some more skill points and pick a few defensive skills, but that's tedious grind all over again.

All in all, the biggest problem is that you have no idea how your build will fare later on in the game. Once the game starts throwing different enemy combinations at you, your build might become completely obsolete. It's usually not as bad when you play with other people, because optimally you will have different characters playing different roles, but very often you'll have to start a new character to fix your build. It's just more frustration.

All in all, i must say i liked D3's skill system a whole lot, but it's quite bad otherwise :p Sure, they added a new monster power system, and made mobs not reset their HP if you leave the location, but it still feels very wrong.
--- merged: Nov 26, 2012 10:08 AM ---
a little update since we have played a few four player games in torchlight 2. The game has some very annoying bugs caused presumably by desync. Be prepared for constant crashes, insane loading times, invisible somethings killing you out of nowhere and bosses reanimating after death and also killing you ._.
Oh, and bugged quests because of arsewangfuck retarded quest system.
--- merged: Nov 26, 2012 11:23 AM ---
aaaalso, TL2 is now on sale. -50% on steam
Click to expand...

Yes a lot of us largely gave up on playing the game mostly due to this. We never managed more than two people connected together stable for any meaningful length of time.
--- merged: Nov 26, 2012 5:10 PM ---

Also at this point after having played too many multiplayer games, I almost exclusively prefer multiplayer games to single player ones. I know sometimes you get the fuckwads you have to play with but I like the dynamics of non computer controlled people. I find most singleplayer games somewhat taxing to play anymore. I dare say FTL and Hotline Miami are the ONLY two singleplayer games I actually finished in the last year (maybe even two years).

aroh · Nov 27, 2012

Let's not forget the ridiculous "always online" crap Blizzard is implementing in every game they make nowadays...
There's times when my ISP decides to be a jerk and I can spend a whole week with no internet or dialup speed internet... When that happens I won't be able to play my $60 dollar game... :argh:
I for one skipped on D3 and got Torchlight 2, cheaper and more efficient for my personal use.

Also all of my friends that went with the D3 hype and got it on release date stopped playing after 3-4 months...

dnmr · Nov 27, 2012

aroh said: ↑

Let's not forget the ridiculous "always online" crap Blizzard is implementing in every game they make nowadays...
There's times when my ISP decides to be a jerk and I can spend a whole week with no internet or dialup speed internet... When that happens I won't be able to play my $60 dollar game... :argh:
I for one skipped on D3 and got Torchlight 2, cheaper and more efficient for my personal use.
Click to expand...

true, TL2 wins teh single player aspect. But the multiplayer is horrendous...

aroh said: ↑

Also all of my friends that went with the D3 hype and got it on release date stopped playing after 3-4 months...
Click to expand...

same here.. ): Looks like i'll need to go back to tribes to start having fun again

Yihka · Nov 27, 2012

I don't see why anyone should replay a campaign more than X times, thus it's only logical you stop playing after X months.

I have played Diablo 3 myself and I've heard they made it better since it first came out. (I played from the start). Yes, I stopped after 1-2 months but I do feel the urge to play again, since it's quite fun actually, especially if you play with friends.

I don't know about Torchlight 2 since I've not played it but I guess you can say both have their own strengths and weaknesses.

aroh · Nov 27, 2012

The duels and the item hunting gave Diablo 2 huge replay value I played that game for 5 years...

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