Games Of 2009: Torchlight – Diablo’s Advocate

Blizzard are one of the best developers in the world. Maybe the best developer, in my humble, vast, over-bearing opinion. They make amazing, genre changing, beautiful, addictive, peerless video games, they answer to no-one but their fans (yes, that includes Activision. They’re called Activision-Blizzard for a reason) and they have more money than god. However, one side effect of making these superb pieces of interactive entertainment is that they are the very embodiment of “when it’s ready”. No rushing shit out of the door for these folks, you get your game when they say so because it has to be as perfect as it can be. Release dates? Pure conjecture until you hear it from the horses mouth. So, it’s with more sighing and teeth gnashing that we wave goodbye to the prospect of Diablo III in 2010 with the not at all new but always worth mentioning news that Blizzard will release 2 games in 2010; World Of Warcraft: Cataclysm and Starcraft II.

Thank the Lord Almighty and the angelic host for Torchlight, then.

Once upon a time, Runic (the creators of Torchlight) were known as Blizzard North, the people behind Diablo. Then the core people behind Diablo left Blizzard North and formed Flagship Studios, makers of Hellgate: London. Now, I really liked Hellgate, it was flawed but fun for a time. Flawed is a bit of a nice way of putting it I think, because for many people the game was broken as hell. The development was troubled, they had all sorts of engine problems, the subscription model was bent; it was a mess. Anyway, while they were working on Hellgate, they created a free to play MMO which was borne from a network test code called Mythos. Mythos was the dogs danglies, as it was essentially Diablo MMO with crafting, quests, loot, the whole kit and kaboodle. Unfortunately, it died when Flagship did and never got out of closed beta. Flagship split and recuperated as Runic Games, which brings is to Torchlight.

I’ve played lots of Diablo-a-likes in my time, and for the most part they’ve been good fun. As long as they don’t try to stray too far from what Diablo did well, they worked. Titan Quest and Sacred 2, although broken in their own ways, provided many hours of clickety click, looty loot, stabby stab fun but lacked…something. Something to do with the humour, or lack of it. They were a little po-faced, and anyone that knows me knows I like a little fun and humour in my hobbies, or at least a little irreverence, which is why Torchlight is so great. Not because it’s off the wall, or ‘whacky’ (I fucking hate that word, it reminds of the times when Robin Williams is shit) or even overly humourous, but because it’s warm, and wears it’s influences on it’s sleeve. And by that I mean actually having a massive, fuck off neon sign that says “I AM DIABLO IN ALL BUT NAME AND I DON’T FUCKING CARE!” because the thing when you developed the dungeon crawler that all others are measured by, you can do exactly what you do best and hang what anyone thinks.

Yes, Torchlight is Diablo, and the best thing is it rectifies a lot of the problems Diablo II has because, let’s be honest, the bloody game has been out for the best part of a decade and aside from the expansion upping the res to a whopping 800x600 and adding classes, hasn’t had much done to it aside form some bug patching (custom res hacks don’t count, if I can’t do it officially I ain’t messing with .ini files). There’s some bits of Diablo II which are a little hard to swallow these days, like lack of bag space, lack of saving anywhere, the resolution. I mean, yeah, I’ve been spoiled over time and some would bawl me out for wanting it easy, but I’m older and don’t have time for the hardcore cobblers some people seem to revel in. It’s like that relief you get when you’ve smashed your bollocks on something, it’s exquisite, but I wouldn’t smash me spuds repeatedly just to feel that relief.

Anyway, Torchlight. The first thing I love about it is that it looks lovely. Seriously lovely. For a game set in perpetual dungeons it’s bright, bold, crisp and chunky. It’s very WoW, but also very comic book-y. The animation is lovely, there’s some wicked variety in the enemies, the armour and weapons are suitably huge and varied, the lighting is gorgeous, it’s just splendid. The sound is also wonderful and cribs massively from, yes, Diablo but is no worse for that. It’s a pretty excellent package and one that’s relatively low spec too.

The actual meat and potatoes of Torchlight is ridiculously simple, so simple it could actually be insulting but it’s nicely rounded out with some spiffy talent tree’s and an MMO style UI/hotkey bar set up that make sit all that little bit easier. There’s 3 typical fantasy RPG classes to chose from; Barbarian (he hits things), Rogue (she shoots things) and Alchemist (he throws magic at things). All have their plusses and minuses and it’s worth playing with each of them to see which fits your style. I went for Barbarian primarily because I like twatting shit in the face with big swords and hammers, and it’s mad, MAD fun. The game play is just a case of click to kill, making sure you’re potions are set to keys nearby and watching your health and mana, looting everything you can and generally cutting and apocalyptic swathe through the levels underneath the town of Torchlight. Once you’ve torn the enemies to shreds you load up on the loot they drop (ranging from ‘Meh’ to ‘OMFGWTFBBQEPICLOOTS!”), nip back to town, sell up, jump back through the portal and crack on. It’s all very simple yet utterly, utterly addictive. It truly is utterly brilliant, and there’s a couple of unique reasons why.

You get your usual Dungeon Crawler antics as I’ve described, lots of loot with marginal stat upgrades (or massive upgrades after you’ve had the same headpiece for 20 levels because it has +10 gold find on it or some shit), potions, all that stuff but then there’s the Transmutation which in itself is fairly simple, but allows for some nice customisations. You merge 4 similar rarity and types of equipment (I think it’s 4, I don’t think it works with 2) and it gives you a gem. What the gem is depends on type and rarity of items used, so something a bit rubbish gives you dull cracked ember for example, which is a crappy fire gem. Depending on where you slot it (weapon or armour) depends on whether it gives you offensive or defensive +stats. But then, aha, then you get 2 of these and merge them and it becomes the next quality up, so becomes just a dull ember. And so on and so forth. One nice touch is that you can re-socket the gear by destroying the gems or destroy the gear and keep the gems to use again (just don’t get these mixed up like I did *sob*). You can also transmute the potions up to better ones, which saves on buying them.

The next piece of awesome, and one that I’m very surprised as to why it took someone this long to think of it, is your pet. At the beginning of the game you chose a cat or a dog (mine is named Spunky. Rocko’s Modern Life springing into my head for some reason) and the pet does petty things like attack enemies, run away when hurt, things like that and so far so “that’s not that great, other games have pets!”. Well, yes, you’d be right, but the thing that is wicked is that you can load your pet up with gear you don’t want and send him back to town to sell it! That’s fucking BRILLIANT! He goes trotting off, comes back about a minute and half later and you’re a few thousand gold richer. It’s a seriously brilliant idea. You don’t need to use the portal unless you want to hoard something for later, or transmute or have a break and try the proper fucking hardcore portal from the guy in the south of town.

As I mentioned the pet also attacks things, and you can equip him to a certain degree with necklaces and rings for stat boosts, but you can also fish up, well, fish to feed to it. Lots of fish do lots of things, mainly transforming the pet into one of the enemy creatures that are in the dungeons, but he’s on your side. It’s a good little mechanic should you need him to be more resilient to certain things or just need him to hit things harder. The last use for your pet, which is also the last brilliant idea Torchlight uses, is that you can load him up with Spells that drop off enemies, or that you buy from vendors.

Now,  these spells aren’t the spells you get when you put points gained from levelling or gaining ‘fame’ (so you occasionally get 2 points to spend on the trees), they are little parchments you can assign to one of four slots on your character or one of two slots on your pet. So your pet can chuck fireballs, or summon zombies, or heal you or heal himself, or slow enemies, or one of many more similarly bonkers extra ways to deal pain on the underlings of the dungeon, and there’s also an identify spell and town portal spell, meaning no more hoarding the scrolls to find out what meagre upgrades your new weapon has, or to get back to town. Each spell falls under offensive or defensive, so not only can you get higher ranks of spells, you can make them more powerful by assigning the points you get into the talents on the trees. It doesn’t add strategy as such, but it does mean that you can start two of the same class of character and they can be utterly different in their play style.

Torchlight is, at times, painfully familiar. Many people have slated it for this, but I think they’re missing the point. It’s a game for people who know exactly what they want from a Dungeon Crawler, for people who’s sole aim is to hit things and see what falls out, pinata style while wearing out their left mouse button and having a huge grin on their face. It never pretends to be anything other than what it is and while we wait for Blizzard to stop torturing us it will fill that Diablo shaped hole quite nicely.