I had to make some mutually exclusive choices. I could make progress without having to back down and come back. I could hold out longer against hard-hitting monsters. Instead, like all the other skills, it was waiting for me once I’d reached a certain level, regardless of which other skills I’d unlocked.Īnd lo and behold, Torchlight II responded. Torchlight 2’s skills aren’t a traditional tree with branches and prerequisites, so I didn’t have to build my way towards Stone Pact. I put a precious point into a skill called Stone Pact that temporarily boosts armor. And most drastically, I put down one of my pistols and took up a shield. So I got rid of the gear that gave me a dexterity boost in favor of more protective attributes. How does it go again? “Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change and the courage to change the things I can”? If I can’t change my skills, I can change my gear. There’s a sense of seizing territory.īut this time, I decided to shift my perspective and adopt a little serenity.
When you clear out an area, it stays cleared as you try to reach the next objective.
Because another distinct thing in Torchlight II is the way it saves your progression geographically. Then, after another level or two, I would jump back into my veteran difficulty single-player game and push forward some more. Previously, my solution to dying repeatedly was to play in a game set to a lower difficulty level, or to hop online and tag along with other players for some wonderfully chaotic and lucrative multiplayer action. And I’d been dying repeatedly in areas the game was telling me I should be ready to beat. I’d been playing with two pistols, an emphasis on dexterity to boost my critical hits, and a handful of magic attacks. That screenshot up there is from a nearly Copernican moment for my outlander. My choices matter because they will not be undone. Yet I can’t respec my character and choose new skills. Other times the stalls are because I’ve chosen my skills a specific way. Sometimes the stalls are because I’m pushing too hard in a direction I’m not ready to go. My veteran playthrough has stalled several times, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
Cheerful is the new black.īut it can also be a punishing action RPG, and this is what I find most interesting about Torchlight II. This is as friendly as an action RPG can get, made all the more friendly by the cheerful cartoon aesthetic, in the same vein as World of Warcraft, Team Fortress 2, and Age of Empires Online. The hardcore setting means death is permanent, but the normal setting means its not very likely. I know this because I’m also playing a hardcore character at the normal difficulty level.
Torchlight II can be as forgiving as the first Torchlight if that’s what you want. I wanted to see if that was an action RPG that would push back.Īfter the jump, Torchlight did not disappoint I wasn’t really interested in just plowing through the content before the challenge started. This was partly because the first Torchlight was forgiving to a fault, and partly because I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience of Diablo III, in which the first playthrough is basically a tutorial on the way to the actual game. I set the difficulty level to veteran, which is one notch above normal. My first playthrough in Torchlight II was with an outlander, a ranged class that relies on guns.
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