What are you playing at the moment? - October 2017

[Baines]

Almost everything D3 totally nails, TL2 kinda fucks up.

It isn’t just that. TL2 kind of messes up everything that it tried to add/change in the Torchlight formula.

People felt the single town of TL1 was limiting, so TL2 adds multiple hubs/towns. While it does make the world of TL2 feel larger, it functionally is more of an annoyance than the single TL1 town. The issue is that the hubs of Torchlight are functionally nothing more than a menu that lets you perform shop functions and to enter the levels where you actually “play” the game. The extra hubs of TL2 (each which allow access to only a subset of areas) ultimately mean the player spends more time running around just to be able to get to where he can do what he actually wants to do.

People wanted a big overworld, so TL2 adds a big overworld, and… it is pretty pants honestly. It is kind of like the hub issue, except amplified. It makes the world of TL2 look larger, but the bulk of that “larger” is just space that you have to run through to get to the areas where you can actually do stuff. Sure, there are enemies in the overworld areas and there are a few things to find, but it is boring stuff. The only reason you travel the overworld is to get to the special locations like the dungeons, which are where the actually interesting combat as well as the potentially useful items are found.

Runic really mucked up their attempts to fight braindead min-maxing. Runic in particular didn’t like the TL1 Vanquisher, calling her out by name as a specific reason for changing physical ranged weapons from Dex-based damage to Str-based damage. Specifically, they didn’t like how TL1 Vanquishers could dump all their stat points into Dex and still excel. This was coupled by what they saw as the Vanquisher having some skills that were just too effective compared to the alternatives. TL2 was designed with the idea of avoiding “brain dead” skill choices and to discourage single stat builds. The result? All they ultimately achieved was to abnormally nerf the Outlander, which was stuck with a now useless stat for its primary. Dex isn’t a useless stat. It is, however, a useless primary stat. With the physical range damage change, the only reason to raise Dex was to raise evasion, which capped out well below the Outlander’s top gear. Outlanders, despite having Dex as their “official” primary, instead had to treat Str or Focus as their real primary. How did this work for the other classes? The changes did nothing to Focus builds, and it actually made Strength builds more effective (as Str characters now saw free range damage just from raising their melee damage). And how did that whole overpowered skill thing work out? Classes outside the Outlander still had some brain dead skill choices. (The Engineer’s Force Field in particular trumped anything the Vanquisher had for mind-numbingly obvious choices, but it was far from the only offender).

Then it’s a lot of other minor things - like actually being able to respec and try stuff out - TL2 aggressively opposes respec’ing (you can do it a tiny bit in town) and the way it’s skills work, trying them out isn’t very viable, whereas D3 lets you respec pretty much at will.

That’s been another annoying area. They know players want functional skill resets. One of the most popular, if not the most popular, mod for TL1 was respec potions. Players repeatedly asked for similar functionality to be built into TL2. The devs simply refused, saying that it would be up to players to mod respec potions into TL2 themselves, using the mod tools that the game would launch with. (Note that TL2 did not actually receive those tools at launch. I want to recall it was months before the community was supplied with even the skeleton of the promised official support, long after people had brute forced the basics. Which in turn goes back to another thing Runic messed with with TL2, their mod support.)

[alms]

About respec’ing in TL2, I warmly recommend disregarding the developer’s view and simply downloading the fan-made Save Editor.

I might have been a bit excessive, but my point wasn’t reffering to the gameplay mechanics, rather to how the opening levels seemed very similar to me. Maybe it’s just me, but the ruins and rainy plains, fighting beastmen and undead…all of that reminded me a lot of Diablo III’s first levels. That was it.

That’s what I don’t understand, actually - Torchlight 2’s beginning is set in a painterly, green, natural setting, whereas Diablo III is darkness, decay, despair.

This differences in tone and world design are frequently touched upon in comparisons - a large part of the Diablo audience apparently thinks that darkness, decay, despair is Supah Great and that Torchlight somehow disappoints by going with a far less grim-dark world.

They call it “cartoony”. Although personal preferences do play a role (grim dark is boring as hell if you ask me), personally I’m more inclined to praise Torchlight for trying something different with its Steampunk-slash-fantasy setting.

Of course, you have to factor in that a part of D3’s audience, actually found D3 “not dark enough”: guess if they can’t eat their live bats for breakfast, that actually spoils their day real bad.

Speaking of TL2, is the story as bad as in Diablo III ? Because that was an awful story. Not that I should care, it’s a hack and slash game, but still.

It’s largely a placeholder. There are some tasty bits here and there, side-quests IIRC, but mostly works as some sort of reason for the player to keep pushing forward: the Alchemist, which was a PC class in the first game, has been corrupted, and is trying to take over, so you go and beat up lots and lots, until you get to hand him his ass.

I would recommend the Shadowrun games if you haven’t tried them out. They play out a lot like Invisible Inc. and XCOM

That’s something I’ll always have problems relating to. I get the feeling some were seeing a turn-based game with cover, and little shield icons, and that suddenly makes it an “XCOM like” and that sounded good on paper, so others kept repeating it: but what about “NO?”.

Couldn’t be farther from reality for me. Shadowrun games, to the extent that I’ve played them, have literally nothing in the way of story and anecdote generation that XCOM has, nor the tension.

It doesn’t help that the way they’re balanced, Shadowrun tends to alternate between being piece of cake, or hard min-maxing, and that is only possible because the RPG side of the game is far bigger and more prominent than anything that is in XCOM, and, as far as I can tell, in Invisible, Inc.

D3’s “lead world designer”, who was responsible for the lore, story and some of the dialogue and so on, is Leonard Boyarsky

I’ve read somewhere that the original plan was to implement a branching story, but the requirements of co-op ultimately made that too hard, so the idea was scrapped. Big “FWIW” there.

[Viral_Frog]

That’s something I’ll always have problems relating to. I get the feeling some were seeing a turn-based game with cover, and little shield icons, and that suddenly makes it an “XCOM like” and that sounded good on paper, so others kept repeating it: but what about “NO?”.

Couldn’t be farther from reality for me. Shadowrun games, to the extent that I’ve played them, have literally nothing in the way of story and anecdote generation that XCOM has, nor the tension.

It doesn’t help that the way they’re balanced, Shadowrun tends to alternate between being piece of cake, or hard min-maxing, and that is only possible because the RPG side of the game is far bigger and more prominent than anything that is in XCOM, and, as far as I can tell, in Invisible, Inc.

I probably should have been more specific. Really the only similarity between Shadowrun and Invisible Inc and XCOM is the user interface (ish, they’re different enough in each game) and the way they handle when in turn-based encounters. They all have the same sort of mechanics for controlling your units/characters. Beyond that, there’s not much similarity…

Where XCOM is an anecdote generator, Shadowrun (IMO) has a strong plotline that is absent from XCOM. XCOM’s stories come from your own gameplay when you and/or the game reacts to whatever variety of situations you come across, where Shadowrun’s stories are delivered through interactions with NPCs, your teammates, and the before and after bits of the story mission encounters, not so much on what happens when you’re fighting through the encounters themselves.

I agree that Shadowrun can go anywhere from too easy to insanely difficult and fully agree it’s due to the RPG aspects of the game. You can make a viable build with any class/race combination, but for some of those, you have to min/max or you could quite possibly not be able to finish the game.

I think calling Shadowrun an “XCOM-like” in anyway would be doing a disservice to both games.

[EPICTHEFAIL]

Still plinking away at Warframe.

I’ve progressed up to the end of The Second Dream (including the world’s most delayed character creation screen), but I’m still in two minds about whether I actually like Warframe. On the one hand, the combat is fun. No two ways about it, really, shooting, hacking and slashing your way through hordes of faceless mooks in a manner half way between Equilibrium and Metal Gear Rising is a laugh, especially now that I’ve made a few more weapons (the Twin Grakatas are amazing fun, even if their ammo economy and damage output are questionable). The story is getting quite interesting, too, with its half-anime half-Warhammer 40k styling and soap opera levels of NO, I AM YOUR FATHER moments, even if it does occasionally lean a bit too hard on standard SF tropes for its own good.

That said, the multitude of problems the game has are getting increasingly hard to ignore. For a start, the checklist problems are showing no sign of going away and indeed are getting worse. For another, the RNG-based grind really ramps up as you reach higher levels, which I wouldn’t normally have a problem with, except it’s basically mandatory due to the worst of the issues the late game has, namely its idiotic idea of a difficulty curve. Basically, Digital Extremes seem to have no idea how to ramp up challenge except by making all of the numbers bigger. So enemies do more damage, have more health and higher damage resistances, but do not in any way fundamentally differ from the ones fought at the very beginning of the game. Instead it just grinds you down with tedious attrition warfare. It ends up turning into Running Past Things Simulator since any attempt to actually engage just wears down your ammo supply, and melee is basically “press E to die” at the higher levels. It’s just horribly tedious and unsatisfying. It doesn’t help that the readability goes to shit with all the particle effects getting thrown around, and with enemies mostly just being background-coloured blobs with very little in the way of distinctive design or recognisable silhouettes to help differentiate them, any sort of tactical decision-making takes a back seat to just spraying into a crowd and hoping they vanish faster than your ammo does.

And I’ve finally checked out Plains of Eidolon, and it’s really just more of the same, except since it’s a (tiny) open world it’s at least harder to get lost.

[MantisTobogganM.D.4]

No two ways about it, really, shooting, hacking and slashing your way through hordes of faceless mooks in a manner half way between Equilibrium and Metal Gear Rising is a laugh,

That’s why I played for so long, the gameplay is just so fun and satisfying. It just doesn’t really end up going anywhere though because as you mentioned, “harder” just means enemies do stupid damage and have stupid health. I’ve tried to go back a few times, and never got very far. The gameplay is still fun, but they need some challenging but fun end game stuff badly, and have for a few years.

[alms]