First Impressions: Torchlight
By maryvarn on February 9th, 2010Posted In: First Impressions,NPC Blog
First Impressions is a regular feature in which Mary shares her -surprise! – first impressions of a game she’s been playing while she should have been making comics.
I recently got a windows laptop and was all excited to try Steam for the first time. On Christmas day, I gave myself a little present and downloaded Steam, along with the RPG Torchlight, which was running a special of only $4.99. Between WoW and STO and life, I haven’t had much time to play it, which is why this is just gonna be a “First Impressions” post.
The first the thing I noticed as I entered the game as a scantily clad vanquisher (kind of the marksman/hunter class) is that the visual design is slick and heavily World of Warcraft influenced. It’s cartoony and very fun to look at, and very impressive for the low sale price of $4.99. Essential things like skills, quests, inventory and the like are intuitive to find and navigate, and have a nice little interface in which they slide in on the right and left sides of the screen.
The story didn’t interest me too much. Something about Ember, blah blah blah. Good thing I was watching Glee at the time. But a quest got me quickly in a dungeon, where I discovered that this is a pretty standard fun dungeon hack ‘n’ slash romp. The enemies weren’t difficult, which made for a fast pace. Go go go, loot loot loot. Oh, and you get a pet! I chose a cat and named him Bink. Bink fought for me and did another really cool thing. He carries his own backpack worth of stuff for me, and when it gets full, I can send him to town to sell it all and come back! Pretty sweet.
I should mention that I’ve read that this game is a lot like Diablo 2. I can’t make my own judgement call on that, since I confess I’ve never played Diablo 2. Just thought you should know that a lot of people are making this comparison. The only comparison I can make is that it’s similar to Dungeon Hunter for the iPhone. Which, go figure, I’ve also heard compared to Diablo.
So the thing I really can’t stand about Torchlight and has me whining whenever I launch it, is the point and click. I target with the mouse, shoot spells with the mouse, and even move with mouse – but not in my preferred method of mouse moving. (Which is my favorite MMO way – push both buttons and steer. Or hold the ‘W’ key and steer.) I actually have to point to where I want to move. And my left hand is just laying there on the keyboard, useless and bored. I’m wondering if this is how Diablo works and how all dungeon hack ‘n’ slash games work, and you’re all wondering why I’m surprised or annoyed. But look, even Dungeon Hunter on the iPhone has me using both hands – my left thumb for movement, and my right thumb for selecting attacks. I just feel so inefficient using just the one in Torchlight. There are some actions you can use the number keys for, but none of them are essential, all-the-time actions, and either way, I automatically shoot any enemy I click on.
That being said, usually after a few minutes of playing, the fun of killing and looting drowns out the whiny voice in me. Not entirely, but mostly.
Oh, and the fishing is kinda cool. Not super fun or anything, but the fish themselves are nice little prizes – you feed them to your pet so it can gain new temporary abilities. There’s also enchanting and gemming and who knows what else I haven’t gotten to explore.
I’m excited to hear that the game’s developers, Runic Games, are already in development of an MMO version of Torchlight. If the MMO can retain the wonderful design, relative low cost, and casual-friendliness that the single player game has, I certainly would want to try it.
Torchlight is sold as a digital download for Windows for $19.99 – but keep an eye out for sales if you’re interested in it.
diablo 2 was all about the multiplayer – you could have EIGHT people all working together, which gave monsters 6x the normal hp but 8x the normal xp. so you leveled up faster, and it was a LOT more fun.
also diablo 2 was of course much, much bigger – not just in total size but in the gameplay. most of the time you weren’t inside at all – you were out in the open.
D2 almost got me fired because it was too much fun to stop playing, and even now 809 years after it came out, it’s still popular.
you should check it out – you can buy a key online for $4, it’s totally worth it
While playing Torchlight, you can use the Shift key to stand in one place and attack. If you are playing a ranged player and miss clicking on an enemy, without the shift key, you will move right near the enemy. With the shift key, you will do a ranged attack in the direction of the click.
Also, the Alt key can be used to bring up the names of stuff on the ground. Good for finding loot you may have missed picking up.
I use my left hand on the keyboard for the Shift and Alt keys and for casting spells (spells other than my main right-click spell). You can also use the Tab key to swap between the primary and secondary spells assigned to your right-click button and use ‘W’ to swap between two weapon configurations (ranged vs melee for example).
There’s a pretty active mod community for Torchlight. I got a couple of mod bundles that added specialized merchants (maps, spells, fish, ember (gems), even individual merchants for the various kinds of weapons) as well as mods for resetting your skills and stats. I found that these added a great deal of life to the game, and are pretty easy to install. Resetting your skills specifically allows you to try different builds that can really mix up the gameplay. I switched up my vanquisher from using primarily her rifle to getting the vast amount of dps from minions.
See, this is why I write these – I get great tips in the comments! Thanks all.
I actually can’t believe that someone that into games, specially a Blizzard dependent, never played Diablo 2!
)! Different threes of abilities! And the story was just AWESOME! There were angels battling the old great demons. There were fallen angels traitors to the light. There were 3x more ancient evil for you to worry about, and the best of it, (spoil alert) your hero of Diablo 1 had become Diablo himself!
I actually can’t even imagine never playing Diablo at all.
So far as I can remember, for a period of time, Diablo + BattleNet was almost as a dream come true for the fathers of MMO (MUD players). Being able to play a 3D dungeon game online with your friends was awesome! I was in high school at the time, and I’ve manage to learn english (I’m brazilian) playing, for the necessity to communicate with my fellow demon slayers companions.
When Diablo 2 came out, it was a blast! 4 different ‘continents’! 5 character options, including a freakin’ NECROMANCER (
I love the story arc of warcraft (although there are a lot of stuff that the writers did that just don’t fit), but Diablo’s story arc its just a masterpiece.
The ‘point to move’ is a legacy from Diablo 1, and when battling in PvP, you had to use a LOT of your left hand to drink potions, and cast abilities and stuff like that (hotkeys were from F1 to F4 (D1, D2 up to F8 I think), and potions from 1 – 4).
Diablo 3 is coming out soon, so I suggest you to maybe read the story and watch the CG movies of the game on youtube. So you can enjoy Diablo’s story too.
It’s never enough to say. Awesome blog!
The movement thing bugs me too. I’m a leftie & generally use the arrow keys to move & the mouse to click on spells & stuff, so using the mouse for everything is very counter intuitive to me. But the game is fun and fills in for a temporary Diablo fix now & again. I just can’t play it for long stretches. It would be nice if you could customize the key bindings.
“Also, the Alt key can be used to bring up the names of stuff on the ground.”
there’s also the magnifying glass icon on the toolbar; click it once and item labels are always on
I like Torchlight. I bought it pretty much the day it appeared, and played it more or less non-stop for some days. But I agree the controls are sort of lacking. You make some sacrifices for a game that delivers quality at low cost, and one of those was apparently control customization.
I never did finish the game. It doesn’t really have a plot and the action does get repetitive after a while. On the other hand, if I ever decide I need a dungeon crawl break, it’s still around for me to finish, because there’s no story to get heavily invested in or forget (which, for example, is why I probably won’t go back to Dragon Age, because I stopped so long that now I can’t remember what my chars were trying to do and why!)
Diablo is what really got me started in gaming.
yeah, there’s a lot of mousework, because you are holding Shift, or hitting your potion buttons, or selecting spells with the keyboard. The repetitive clicking was annoying but the general setup worked in that game.
It sounds like Torchlight just didn’t balance the keyboard work well but an MMO would msot likely be better.
“And my left hand is just laying there on the keyboard, useless and bored. ”
While I also don’t like the point and click movement very much, I do use the keyboard quite a bit. I set up my main casts for the first 3 buttons (left click the icons to change them up), a heal for 4, and moved the potions to 5 and 6. All you have to do is move the mouse in the direction you want your cast to go, and hit one of your casting buttons. My left hand now gets to feel involved in the game too
I’ve wanted to try Torchlight, and now maybe I will. I’m with you Mary, on the “never played Diablo or Diablo 2, even tho I played tons of similar games like Dungeon Seige, Neverwinter Knights, etc. By the way, if you want another great cheap game, I LOVED Trine