I got a good deal on Torchlight 1+2 on GoG and thought I would play that as a Diablo substitute (since Torchlight was a better deal and, for some reason, D2 isn't on GOG, or anywhere based on a recent google search). Torchlight is definitely...weird.
In ARPGs, I tend to lean towards ranged characters. This is 100% because of
the Black Death zombies from the first Diablo game. I know, your Warrior could learn holy bolt and take care of this enemy at range, too, but still I err on the side of caution. In any event, I have tried it here. It's not bad at first, but it gets to be rather tough to play. I wouldn't say the build gets weak or the enemies get too tough in the later game, but the visuals and whatnot as you get more powerful spells kind of take over the screen. Not to mention, there's a bit of obstruction from the simulated 3d environment so your view is obstructed on two fronts.
I'm about to restart and possibly build a summoner type character (I played a similar template in Path of Exile almost exclusively). I figure, I can't see much, but an army of summons can meat shield and fight for me.
This is where it gets a little weird. In Diablo 1/2, every build needed something. Warriors needed Strength, Rogues needed Dex, Mages needed Magic, etc. and everyone needed Vitality to some extent. Not only that, depending on the build, you still needed stats outside of your "class stat" for certain gear. A build was a thing. In some cases, it still is in Torchlight, but in a lot of cases, it much less important. A summoner, for example, benefits from nearly nothing (aside from a handful of unique items and a few passive abilities. So, you can pretty much ignore "offense" for "defense", except you have a wall of meat in front of you 95% of the time so how much defense do you really need. You can get through the game with this build, but to what end? Loot is mostly useless, leveling is mostly useless.
Another thing that bothers me is this:
The first picture is how you start. The second picture is my getting close to mid-level character with much better armor. So Torchlight suffers from female-breast-plate-is-a-plate-for-serving-breasts syndrome. I'm going to guess that a maxed out character looks like she's wearing titanium pasties and a g-string. I'm not a prude or anything, it's just really low-brow. I appreciated that Diablo, while not exactly perfect, is a little more down to earth.
In general, I'm not a big fan of the cartoony look, certainly not for a grim tale of death and corruption.
Speaking of the tale, it's an ARPG, so there's probably not going to be much of a story. I'm fine with that. In fact, I think minimalist storytelling can be extremely effective. If you've seen
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, you may or may not be surprised to know that the script is only about 1/3 of the length of an average script for a three hour movie. They didn't need a lot of exposition. They established the character's easy enough and leaned towards showing over telling. This can work for ARPGs, too.
The problem Torchlight has is that it basically wants to be Diablo, but has to establish a different lore/setting to separate itself from Diablo. So, instead of the Soulstone containing Diablo's essence, you have ember which is a mineral that power magic and somehow gets corrupted in an ember mining town and there's a party of adventurers that got there before you and one of them is (for some reason) doling out main quests to you while hanging out in town, and then....the lore dump continues from there. Even for sidequesting, for example, there's a bard in town that gives you a kill quest for pretty much every floor of the mine. It's a bit of forgettable blah blah blah and then a request to kill something you were going to cross paths with and kill anyway.
In any event, the effective minimalist storytelling just isn't there. It's kind of a pity.
I'm still going to soldier on. I'm in an ARPG mood and I can't get D2 anywhere. Sadly, I have the actual discs on CD-ROM, but no way to install it on my laptop (without dropping more $$$ on a peripheral). It's like that epsiode of the Twilight Zone where the world ends and the guy gets to spend his days reading in a library, but he broke his glasses. So it goes.
