As you may have noticed from listening to the NGCast or from yesterday’s contest announcement, we are more than a little excited about Runic Games’ Torchlight which is coming out later this week.
Torchlight is in many ways a spiritual successor to the original Diablo, containing the familiar action RPG gameplay along with gorgeous, randomly generated dungeons to crawl through. The adventure is set in the mining settlement of Torchlight, a town founded on the discovery of rich veins of a magical ore called Ember that seems to corrupt everything it comes into contact with. It’s up to you to discover the full extent of the influence that Ember has had on not only the town of Torchlight, but the civilisations that came before it.
There are three character classes to choose from: Destroyer, Vanquisher and Alchemist, representing stylised versions of the classic Warrior, Rogue, Mage trio that is common to almost every fantasy RPG out there. You also get to choose the species for your four-legged companion, be it a wolf-like dog or a lynx cat. That, I’m afraid is where the visual customisation ends, until you start drowning in loot anyway.
Second to the actual gameplay itself the most important part of any dungeon crawler is the loot. Which from my short playtime so far (around 5 hours) I can tell you there is plenty of. As with other dungeon crawlers a lot of the loot ends up being totally worthless, so it’s a good thing you can send your pet off to town to vacate your bags. Otherwise half of my time so far would have been spent ferrying things back to sell in town rather than getting stuck into the combat
Speaking of the combat, I’m currently playing as an Alchemist. The Alchemist is the magical powerhouse of the Torchlight world and I’ve decided to go the summoning route rather than offensive spell casting. The combat is quite simple whilst still remaining interesting thanks to the large variety of skills and spells. Left click performs a normal attack based on the weapon you are holding and right click casts one of the multitude of spells at your disposal. Unfortunately, the mouse controls have so far proven to be inaccurate at times, meaning I waste a large attack on a small enemy instead of a boss creature.
With the variation in the three different skill trees it looks like each class can be played in quite a number of different ways. Along with the class specific skills you learn as you level there are also spell scrolls that can be acquired. These scrolls contain a variety of spells you can learn yourself or teach to your pet to add even further customisation.
I’ve managed to get far enough in the story to reach level 21 and see three or four of the different tilesets that the game uses. Unfortunately some of the set pieces, such as areas with secret doors and some boss encounters have been repeated on enough occasions for me to learn the exact layout / location of any secret areas. I understand that with time and a healthy modding community this sort of thing will be remedied but it’s still a bit of a disappointment that there isn’t more variety on launch.
I know that there are perfectly valid reasons for this game being a single player title yet I cant shake the feeling that It should have some semblance of multiplayer. I feel like I should be competing with friends for the loot, fighting together to beat whatever threats arise yet I cant. I think an that a trading system could have added a little more to the game, a sort of perpetual auction house available to everyone playing the game. It would give interactivity between players and allowed you to put all that sub-optimally itemised loot to good use without restarting the game with a new character.
Despite these few problems I’ve experienced so far this is the most fun I have had with a game in a long time, especially a single player game. Keep your eye on Negative Gamer over the next few days for a full review and the Torchlight NGCast special. Don’t forget you could win yourself a copy of the game by asking an interesting question.
Sounds awesome, but I think I’ll hold off on buying it before I see some reviews. Great write-up, got me all informed and whatnot.
“Unfortunately some of the set pieces, such as areas with secret doors and some boss encounters have been repeated on enough occasions for me to learn the exact layout / location of any secret areas. ”
are you sure about this ?
the game has randomized dungeon levels, so each floor and level should be different. The dungeon is also randomized for each new char.
the full game is free to download on Oct 27th from runic’s site and can be played for 2 hours if anyone wants to try it
I am definitely sure, I haven’t been able to stop playing the damn thing! The random dungeon generation isn’t entirely random. It takes rooms / collections of rooms and places them in different orientations and layouts rather than individual tiles.
Yup, that’s a design decision from the developers. They put together “sets” of rooms to form a random dungeon, so that there is some sense to the dungeon design.
Yeah, the secret openings get easier to pick out as you go on. They show up randomly in dungeons, but the “flip the switch on this side, run over, flip the switch on the other side, then run to the midway point for a new door” tactic is pretty common.
Actually, that was probably a good decision on the designers part. In the question thread I posted a question about what influenced the design of Torchlight as it relates to Fate (a fully randomized game) and it seems that they have taken the randomization game mechanic and put it to good use. Fate had nice random dungeons, but nothing in them made any sense whatsoever. If it is the case that the designers combined random sections of dungeon, then it should provide for more flowing gameplay, because Fate was so randomized that the random didn’t work.
Personally I would gladly give up the random rooms for more flowing gameplay.