Virtual 100 Game 41: Torchlight II
Man, I’m glad to get Torchlight II out of the backlog. This one has been on the shelf for a long, long time. Long enough for there to be another sequel and some shitty live-service gotcha game. And the worst part is, I was playing this occasionally on the Switch, mostly during vacations while sitting on planes and in airports, and it wasn’t until I re-played it on my Xbox when I realized just how close to the end I was.
Had I known I was well into Act III on the Switch version, I might have just finished it up on there. But alas, I started all over, from the beginning, and hacked my way through the game all over again.
The great thing about Torchlight II is that the cartoon-y art style and stylized graphics are relatively timeless. This game will look the same whether you played it day one, or— like I did— thirteen years after it released. The added benefit is that it runs insanely well on anything you’re going to play it on now. It ran alright on the Switch, and on the Xbox it ran at what seemed like a locked 60 fps. Of course on the PC it should do even better. Only once or twice did I run into a weird little framerate hitch, but I’m not even sure what that was about, because after that it didn’t do it anymore.
For those of you not in the know, Torchlight was a series that began as a spiritual sequel to Diablo. The co-designers of FATE (which I am still playing, by the way) and Diablo I & II joined together to form Runic games, which then cranked out the first Torchlight. If you really look at it, you can see the bones they all share; the first Diablo was a multi-floored dungeon that took place under the town of Tristram. FATE consisted of a multi-floored dungeon that took place under the town of Grove. And Torchlight takes place under the town of… you guessed it. Torchlight.
That was the first game, anyway. And like Diablo II, the Torchlight sequel kicks the single town setup to the curb and goes with the large open maps and multiple biomes that we’re pretty familiar with in these types of games.
I’m not sure how long this write-up will be; the game is pretty old by now and the setup has been the basis for many, many ARPG’s that have come and gone since then. This ain’t the O.G., but it’s the descendant of it, and the DNA hasn’t changed much.
As such, the setup is pretty similar. Each biome has a “hub” town that the player can teleport back to in order to refine gems, buy and sell stuff, enchant items, etc. Not that you need to. In the default difficulty, I never really needed to go back to town for anything. I loaded up my pet and sent it off to sell my shit, and the only time I really needed to go back to town was when I screwed the pooch against a boss or two and drank down all my potions. As long as the player takes the time to explore the map, and does a decent number of side quests, the game really isn’t that difficult.
As far as loot goes, TLII falls into the same trappings as do a lot of these types of games. There will be one or two good, usable pieces of gear amidst a veritable mountain of garbage. You’ll find a weapon with some decent stats, you’ll socket some gems into it, and then you’ll stick with that for the next ten levels before you find another weapon that’s even close in terms of stats. There are set pieces of gear, but they’re stretched so few and far between, that by the time you find another item in the same set, the level difference between the two is so vast, the perks they offer by having two or more equipped is off-set by higher level, normal gear. One thing that I do appreciate in this game, however, are the green and red arrow indicators under each item that not only summarize whether the item is generally better than what you have equipped, but how much better. If you see a single red arrow (or any red arrows) you know you can basically ignore it. But if you see a single green arrow, maybe you’ll need to examine the pro’s and con’s of swapping it out. FOUR green arrows, on the other hand, and it shouldn’t even be a question.
In addition to character levels, the game also has the “fame” system, where the character will gain fame, independent of their xp, and level up their notoriety in the game. You’ll see your character go from a relative nobody to a celebrated hero over the course of the game. Well, at least it will say that in your inventory screen. Nowhere else in the game does anyone recognize your fame. Not that I saw, anyway. It’s definitely not like Fable, where your character was either feared or cheered when you walked through town. Here, nobody seems to give a shit either way if your character has done some mighty deeds or not. There are no citizens or peasants in these hubs, they’re all either merchants or soldiers from… somewhere. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t know where any of these people are from. Did I miss that part? I might have to go back and watch the intro. It was so long ago.
If there is one thing that Torchlight II lacks from the first game, it’s that sense of place. At least in the first game, the town of Torchlight was almost a character in itself. It’s not that it was overly large or anything, but it was the main hub for which your character returned for supplies, and to push the story forward. And over the course of the game, the events that took place had a visible effect on the town, if I remember correctly. In Torchlight II, your character and the traveling caravan of people move from biome to biome, and nothing really ever reacts or changes. The game world as a whole is pretty static.
Not that it’s a “bad” thing. But Torchlight II came out in 2012, and by this time, we had games like the Baldur’s Gate Dark Alliance series, Champions of Norrath, Sacred and Sacred 2, and so on. It plays it pretty safe, though it may be a fair assessment that the game probably didn’t have a huge budget, and they might not have been trying to re-invent the wheel, either. Just be prepared, if you want to play this game, you’re not going to be experiencing anything ground-breaking.
That being said, it’s still pretty fun. Unfortunately, I can only speak for the single player portion of the game, as nobody I know has this game or is willing to take time away to pair up and dungeon crawl. All my friends that are into these types of games are into Path of Exile 2 or Diablo 4 right now.
I will be getting to Torchlight III here at some point. I did play that one with some friends for a little bit, just because we were all itching for something like that at the time, but we fell off it pretty quick. One of the hiccups we always run into with loot-driven games is that the gameplay seems to come to a screeching halt every ten minutes or so as everyone digs through all the shit they just picked up to make sure they are current on all the best gear. This unfortunately is just the nature of the beast when it comes to games like this, but it did force us to coordinate a “loot pause” or else we’d all just constantly be digging through our inventories at multiple different times, and we’d have three guys running ahead while one dude is sitting in his menu. And the Torchlight series is one of the biggest offenders of the loot mountain, and if you have even one guy in your party with sticky fingers, the inventory fills up pretty damn quick. This is all a long way of saying that we got tired of the constant inventory management and the fact it would take four times as long to get through one map as it should.
This is usually why I recommend playing through story campaigns solo, so you can do all that crap on your own time. We can all get together when it comes time to do endgame raids or elite dungeon runs and whatnot.
At least Torchlight II is finally done, after like, 12 years. So there’s that at least, and one more notch carved into the Virtual 100 belt. Closing in on the big 5-0.