PWE closed the studio and the devs were scattered to the wind. So we seemed to be done with the Torchlight story. But by the time the team got the much-delayed MacOS version of Torchlight II out the company was sick of the game, the MMO was off, and that was that.Īll those links lead to even more links about what was going on. This was all in furtherance of what was eventually supposed to be a Torchlight MMO. But for me it just wasn’t that compelling. If local multiplayer or support for modding were your most important features, it was the game to back. In the market Diablo III had story, Path of Exile had the gritty Diablo II vibe, and Torchlight II was cute and colorful and full of features and just a bit too bland. A year later it was announced that the game would be delayed and, when it came down to it its big rival, Diablo III, shipped first.Īnd when it did ship… well… it was okay. Even the music was done by the same person, which meant it was really good.Ī year later the announcement came for Torchlight II, which would give us all the things we wanted. It had some issues and it was only single player and if you bought it from the wrong online store (this was before Steam was all) you had some trouble, but it was good in a very modest way and it was done by some of the same people who did Diablo and Diablo II back in the day. I am conflicted on Roman vs Arabic numerals right nowīack in 2009 a charming little solo ARPG called Torchlight came out. It took almost a dozen years to go from Diablo II to Diablo III, and we look to be about on the same time track as we wait for Diablo IV. Now we’re about due for another Diablo title. I found it more engaging and playable than either of it rivals… and the Diablo II revival didn’t arrive until last year. I even named Diablo III my ARPG of the decade, based primarily on play time. They did a lot better by it than they did Diablo II… at least until Diablo II Resurrected. Then they did seasons and updates and a mini-expansion. That was a HUGE improvement for the game. It got the Reaper of Souls expansion, which on the PC side of the house fixed itemization and got rid of the auction houses, both gold and RMT based. Meanwhile, over the last decade Blizzard spent a lot more time with Diablo III than its predecessor. And then Blizzard gave us Diablo II Resurrected, after which nobody was really the successor because the original was alive and well again. In the end, none of them really captured all of Diablo II.ĭiablo III got story, Torchlight II got mods, and Path of Exile got atmosphere, but none were really a substitute for the original. That was, in part, because there was some rivalry between who would carry inherit the mantle of successor from Diablo II, the official next in the series, Diablo III, or something in the same spirit from a few of the same people who made Diablo II, which was the Torchlight story.Īnd then there was the dark horse, Path of Exile, the late entry in the race. A post with 38 comments is what passes for controversy around here. The most controversial post I wrote in 2012 was probably the one where I said there wasn’t much of a gap between it and Torchlight II, which raised the hackles of a few Torchlight supporters. Still, even with that, it wasn’t a bad game. If you take that out of the equation, then the team just messed up on itemization horribly because at-level drops were badly under powered for the content and the only way around it was to got to the auction house. Wyatt “don’t you guys have phones” Cheng, the principle game designer on the Diablo team, gets irked if you suggest that the itemization was designed to force players to use the auction house (I’m too lazy to find his rant from a few months ago on Twitter), but it sure seemed like the simplest explanation. Once we could all log the game wasn’t bad, but there were the problems the itemization and the auction house, both the in game money version and the RMT version. That was just the first of many issues Diablo III faced.
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