Torchlight 2 Release Date: 20 September 61
Cheeze ball writes "Due to the level of support provided by their forums community, Runic Games has released the Torchlight 2 release date early. Torchlight 2 will be available on 20 September 2012. The 'official' announcement is tomorrow at PAX, where the game is available for play. The forums have been very supportive of the dev team, primarily because of the team's responsiveness in posting weekly updates and the way the beta test was conducted. This support prompted Runic to inform its forum community first."
If you're curious how the game is shaping up, Eurogamer has a thorough preview from a few months ago.
To save anyone else the trouble... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'll give it a go. (Score:5, Informative)
They get extra credit for being the next Diablo like game from the actual Diablo creators [wikipedia.org].
Re:Price drop? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm hoping the price for TL1 will drop. I don't mind being a gen behind, especially if I can get it at a great price.
If you pre-order TL2 on Steam, you get TL1 for free. Unless of course, this was some short-term deal when I pre-ordered. I'm not at home now so I can't check.
Definitely looks like a sequel (Score:4, Informative)
I've been playing Torchlight a lot lately since I got it on the Steam Summer Sale not too long ago. It was fun for a while, but then got to be really repetitive. Playing through as the mage, I ended up getting spells that healed me, pushed enemies backwards, and dropped massive fireballs on their heads. Because many of the enemies only had melee attacks, I could just put my cursor over them and hold down "3" until they died. Or I would get to a section of the map where enemies were physically obstructed by a geographical feature and drop fireballs on them until they died; they couldn't avoid the attacks because they wanted to attack me, but once the enemies are out of your viewport, they vanish, which means that they don't move until you run over to where they last were seen.
The gem system was a bit tedious for no seriously noticeable gain, too. You can get gems that give you different abilities once you slot them into a piece of your equipment, such as the Fire Ember, which will make you hit enemies with fire damage if you slot it into a weapon, or will grant you some degree of fire resistance if you put it into your armor or an accessory item. These items can be refined if you have two or more matching types. For example, if you have two Cracked Fire Embers, you can have someone in town make those into a stronger Dull Ember. Two of those make a Discolored Ember. Two of those make a Fire Ember, and those make a Cut Fire Ember, and so on. One problem is that these aren't easy to come across. You can buy weak gems from two merchants in the game, one of which appears randomly in the dungeons. These merchants always have randomized inventories, too, so there's no guarantee that you'll get something you're looking for. You can also find gems in dungeons, but those are often limited to secret areas of the map, and again, those are uncommon there as well.
Finally, the boss battles were all ridiculously easy. Even the final boss, which could summon hordes of fire-breathing dragons and fast skeletons to attack you, was really easy. It's not because they had simple attack patterns, either (which they did). It was that they were often physically weak with really strong defenses. Most of the battles with these bosses consist of holding down the left mouse button until they die (unless they had a really strong melee attack and you're better off using magic, in which case you can hold down the right mouse button until they die).
Maybe it's my fault for playing on a Medium difficulty setting, but really, there were only a few enemies that ever posed a serious threat throughout the whole dungeon crawl experience.
That said, I did enjoy the game. The levels were visually detailed and very interesting. The environmental interactivity was better than in a lot of games I've played (you can blow horns in the molten fire prison levels to make bridges spin to uncover secret areas, go fishing in ponds for fish that grant you special powers, run over booby traps that you can time to hurt your enemies instead, and so on). The enemies were imaginative and had their own personalities; rarely would you see two enemies with the same special powers, and unless they were the same type of monster, they do not look alike. It was also very helpful to be able to give your inventory items to your pet and have them run to town, selling them for you, so you don't have to stop fighting through the dungeon.
After looking at the video linked in the article, it's hard to tell for sure if anything I didn't enjoy was fixed. However, it looks a lot like the first one with an increased level of detail; the player in the video has a light around him to more clearly indicate his field of view, the HUD is simplified and easier to understand, and the gameplay tips are off to the side rather than popping up right in the middle of the screen. Meanwhile, the gameplay itself looks identical to the first. Even some of the sound effects are the same. This seems like a good indication that they just took what they already had and refined the entire experience.
Torchlight II may not be on the top of my To-Buy list, but it's in there. I'm interested to see just what else the developers can offer with this dungeon crawler.