Video Gamers Podcast - [Deep Dive] Torchlight 2 - Video Games Podcast

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

Video Game hosts Josh, Paul and Ryan are diving into the world of Torchlight 2. Josh was picked to play Torchlight 2 and now it’s time to see what he thought about this popular alternative to Diablo. Is it simply just a good Diablo clone, or does it stand on it’s own legs? We give our thoughts on the game, what worked, what didn’t and where it falls on the video game leaderboard!  Thanks to our LEGENDARY Supporters: Redletter, Gaius214, Nate and Kiitaclyzm Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Discord: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: instagram.com//videogamerspod Follow us on Twitter: twitter.com/videogamerspod Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU12YOMnAQwqFZEdfXv9c3Q   Visit us on the web: https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello gamers of the world, welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Today we are here to bring you a deep dive of 2012's action RPG dungeon crawler Torchlight 2. Please remember to rate our show 5 stars. You can also find us on socials everywhere at Video Gamers Pod. And we would love for you to come take a look at support options on Patreon. Our show's almost entirely funded by listeners. You can sign up starting at $5 a month, and you'll get perks like two bonus episodes every month. You can check all of it out over at MultiplayerSquad.com. I am your host, Paul, and joining me, he has been a gaming prisoner here the last couple of weeks. Our show was hijacked by a listener.

They decided that this would be the host to play Torchlight 2, the engineer himself. It's Josh. The engineer of fun, maybe. Nice. No agreements from you guys at all. Oh, man. Yeah, guys, we're covering Torchlight 2 today. Thank you to Legendary Nate for picking this game.

And it's time. We've been playing it, or I've been playing it, and it's time to break it down. It's time to find out what I thought and, you know, see how this game holds up. It is time. And joining Josh and me for a minute, he was kicking back like me, enjoying this extra free time.

Although, of course, now he's been hijacked for an episode in the future on Endless Dungeon, but that'll be for another day. It's Ryan. Man, this hijacking thing, I don't have my own control of my life anymore. It's like I'm married. Oh, wait.

You signed up for this, Ryan. That's what I am. Oh, goodness. All right, guys. Torchlight 2. Josh, I'll give you the honors. You already hinted a little bit at it, but since you're the one that got picked to play this game, why don't you tell the listeners a little bit about how we got hijacked? So you can support the show over at Multi over at multiplayer squad.com. We have different tiers of support, um, you know, anywhere from just, you know, $5 a month, which is nothing nowadays all the way up to, you know, a hundred dollars support level where if you go legendary, you get the, the privilege, the honor of hijacking one of us and making one of us play a game of your choosing,

where we will then play the game and we will come back a couple of weeks later and we will talk about our thoughts on that. Hey, there's a good chance we're not going to like every game that people pick for us. There is a good chance that we are going to find games that we'd never played before that we absolutely love. This is the beauty of the Hijack a Host and the Force of Friends episodes that we do. But we had a listener named Nate that went legendary, supporting the show, awesome member of the community. And he picked me to play Torchlight 2. We said, hey, why'd you pick this game? He said, I absolutely loved this game with my friends. I feel like it's a game that just about anybody can play. And I want you to play it and see what you think about it. So I did, and here we are. Yeah. And we recorded a pre-dive episode, if you want to hear our thoughts where we announced that

and kind of gave our initial impressions about this game. All you got to do is go back to the November 6th episode. That one also features, because I re-listened to the episode to prep for this. So I listened to it earlier today. And that pre-dive episode also features Ryan's injury during the podcast. And I don't know how I didn't hear this while we were recording, but Ryan took tissues out of the trash

to plug his cut, putting on his best Frank reynolds impersonation so if you want to go hear all that you just got to go back a couple of mondays give me give me some trash jesus christ frank are you cutting your toenails with a steak knife i suppose you have a problem with that too oh oh botched oh i botched that one oh that's a botched job that's bleeding i need some trash to plug up the cut do not plug an open wound with trash yeah i know and ryan's got another injury here today because he tried to cook his hand well listen okay i'm just you know so delectable that's not a word i ever want to

hear but describing ryan oh come on would you do ryan you poured uh some tar right on top of your hand or something just some beautiful tar just right on the hand i just wanted to see a bubble that's all oh goodness i can't even imagine all right so for anyone who does not know torchlight 2 has a reputation for being a diablo clone it's an an action RPG, isometric view. If you were to see a screenshot, you might even initially for a split second think that it's a Diablo game. And here is a description of it from Wikipedia. Torchlight 2 is an action role-playing dungeon crawler and takes place in a fantasy world where the player character can be any of four classes, each with different skills and abilities. The plot starts with the

destruction of the town of Torchlight at the hands of the alchemist from the first game. Torchlight 2 features randomly generated dungeons for the player to explore and numerous kinds of monsters to fight for experience and loot. So Josh, as the new expert of Torchlight 2, is it fair to call this game a Diablo clone? Can you give us a little bit of a compare and contrast evaluation here? This is 100% a direct Diablo clone. Okay. What makes you say that?

Guys, you get town portal scrolls, and the little blue portal pops up, and guess what it looks exactly like. I mean, somebody went into the Diablo code and straight ripped this off. You have health potions. Guess what color they are? Red.

Red. They have mana potions. Guess what color they are? Blue. Got to be blue. Yeah, yeah. I love this game. See?

Yeah. I'm so good at it. Okay, so then you get a piece of gear, and you don't know what it is. potions guess what color they are blue gotta be blue yeah yeah i love this game see yeah and then okay so then you get a piece of gear and you don't know what it is it's unidentified what do you think you need to use guys uh you gotta go find deckard cane well or an identify scroll right guess what's in this game identify scrolls uh is there a cow level i you know what they're probably honestly there probably is a cow level. I haven't come across it yet. But yeah, I mean, this game is literally a Diablo clone. It does branch a little bit and we'll get into that. But I remember booting this thing up and going like,

okay, let's see what this game's got. Let's see what it's about. And that's when I just instantly noticed like, oh man, okay, they're not even trying to hide like some of the, they're not trying to disguise it. They're just saying, listen, this is Diablo for everybody that either couldn't like play Diablo for whatever reason, or just didn't want to play Diablo. Um, so yeah, that it is absolutely a Diablo clone. It plays very similarly as well um again there are some differences but we'll get into that but yeah there is no other way that i would describe this game dude how sweet would it be instead of cow level they had like sheep level and they're just like you got me wondering now i might have to google this because i can't imagine with

everything else that they copied that there's not something along those lines. Just a little different, just a little bit. Well, look, in defense of Torchlight 2, Diablo 2 is without a doubt one of the best games of all time. Like, if they figured out the formula, you're not going to mess with it to make the game worse. So I think a lot of these Diablo clones said, you know what? Maybe we can tinker with the design here or there, but let's not mess with the base formula. And you kind of understand why they would go about that approach. And a lot of the dev team did come from Diablo 2 as well. So I think that's why you're naturally going to see a lot of overlap there. I think, oh, and also the game has four acts, which is kind of funny. The story kind of

mirrors a lot of Diablo 2 as well. So yeah, a lot to compare to Diablo 2, that's for certain. All right. So we talked about in the pre-dive how there are four classes to choose from, the Engineer, the Outlander, the Berserker, and the Ember Mage. Josh, I think you only played through as the Engineer, correct? Yeah. I mean, that's my MO in just about any game. I pick a character. I want that character to get as strong as possible. I want to see what skills they get and just kind of, where does this class go? So I am not one to jump around from character to character, class to class and things like that. So when I was looking through the list of classes, I saw the engineer. I said, hey, this looks like something I want to try. The engineer is kind of classified as a big, heavy

weapon, like brawler type. So you get these just monstrous two-handed maces and these cannons. And I mean an actual cannon, like a pirate ship cannon is what you were running around with shooting things with. So, yeah. And so that's what I went with. I generally will go with the zippy speedy classes in games, but in this one, I wanted to try something a little different and the engineer seemed like it was up my alley. I was actually a little surprised to find out that there's no like turrets or like mechanical stuff that the engineer is doing, which is a little weird to name it the engineer. It's basically like your tank, like you're, you know, big, tough guy, lots of vitality swings, a giant hammer. That's the engineer in this game.

So when I was reading some comments on Reddit, because I just kind of looked up like what class should I play? A lot of people said engineer also spawns spider bots that fight for you. Did you experience that? Or is that maybe like an optional build? That might be a higher level thing, to be honest with you, but I have not come across any spider bots at all. If there's spider bots in this game, either I'm an idiot and I haven't realized that I can use those. I just haven't gotten to that level. Option A. I choose option A. I mean, it's very possible.

Yeah, because when I read that, I got kind of excited because Ryan and I loved the little spider bots in the X Defiant betas. I was like, oh, I wouldn't mind running around, you know, spawning a bunch of spider bots. All right. And then I know you played a little bit ryan i played just a very little bit i only played for about an hour just to kind of understand some very basics did you play as the mage like we kind of thought you would oh of course yeah mage is typically always my go-to just spam uh spam spells and run around and run out of mana which is exactly what i did very nice in my one hour of playthrough i also played as the mage so i was you know chucking

out some fireballs you know here and there uh now josh there are four difficulties casual normal veteran and elite i was kind of curious to hear which one you played on i generally i will play a game on a the not one step down from the hardest level. That's how I like, I like the challenge and stuff like that for this game. I just played on the regular difficulty because I wanted to see what is the natural like flow of combat. I'll be honest. I'm really glad I did. Cause again, a little bit later, we'll get into some of the, the things with combat. I ran into an issue where I was drastically under leveled for like the maps and the zones that I was in. So I can't imagine playing this on a harder level from the beginning, to be honest with you. So normally I do, but in this case, I wanted to

experience as much of the game as possible and just kind of the natural flow of what they built it for. So I did just kind of stay on the normal difficulty. Now, I would imagine the longer you play and if you do new game plus and all that, I'm sure the difficulty ramps up more and more. But in your experience, Josh, was the game pretty difficult? Like, did you die a lot or was it more mindless action RPG? I was kind of curious. So it's funny because I started off just it's just mindless action RPG fun I was kind of curious. So it's funny because I started off just, it's just mindless action RPG fun. I was just tearing through stuff, wrecking things left and right. Getting that just perfect flow of new loot, new armor, new weapons, that kind of stuff. I mean, like I said, the first time I got an actual cannon,

I was like, there's no way. And then this thing fires and it wrecks like everything in front of it. And I was like, well, all right then. How do you reload it? Does it shoot cannons or is it like magic? No, it's just magic. You know, this is a fantasy realm, Paul. You don't have to reload. Hold on, guys.

Let me. I want to see him aim the cannon straight up and like arc a cannonball into it and then shoot it. But then, so I'm, you know, I'm playing the game, I'm going through the levels, I'm getting the story and all that stuff. And then it was not too, too long. I want to say maybe five, six hours into the game where I started to become underleveled a little bit. And that's when I started to kind of die a little bit more often where I am at right now. I am a legit,

like probably 12 to 15 levels under leveled for the zones I'm in. So I will die from trash mobs now. And like two hits it's, it's, it's a little ridiculous to be honest. So the, the deaths are piling up. Gotcha.

So you are like unofficially playing in hell mode just because you're so severely under Correct. Yes. Yes. So, you know, I, I challenge guys, there is nothing like slamming giant health potions as fast as you can. Well, I noticed that even on, on my, I only played like a couple hours. Um, Nate was gracious enough to send me a copy to play with you guys.

So I was playing as well. I got to level 10 or 11. And everything I got, I couldn't even use because I was underleveled a couple levels just within that small span. So I'm sure by the time I was, if I was to get to your level, you know, I would be just as underleveled, you know i would be just as underleveled you know yeah blasting through so since we're on the topic i saw this in almost every post i read every video i saw on torchlight i think that one of the unique things about this game is that when you kill mobs they never respawn so when you save

shut the game down pull it back up all those mobs are still dead. So in order to combat being underleveled, I think you're supposed to just kill everything in sight and you have to kind of go clear out every map as you go. And I think that that's not how most gamers are used to playing RPGs. You're used to just completing a quest and moving on. So did you find that to be kind of like an annoyance to be so underleveled? I feel like that would have driven me crazy. I will say when it started to happen, I actually did the same thing. I just Googled and said, I'm underleveled in Torchlight 2. What's going on? And again, I found the same thing. And I found that the answers from most people were yes, if you don't

do, if you don't clear every map and the dungeons, because there are randomly generated dungeons in some of the maps, if you don't clear the maps and do the optional dungeons, you will fall behind very quickly in the leveling system. Oh, wow. Which I'll be honest with you, I found to be a bit of detriment because I played this game the way I would want to play this game, right? I was swinging through the hordes. If I had a quest, sometimes I would just to play this game, right? Like I was swinging through the hordes. If I had a quest, sometimes I would just beeline it to the quest. I mean, this is kind of how I play Diablo, right? Nobody clears everything in Diablo.

If you got to go from point A to point B, you run, you run. And sometimes if you get too many guys on you, you stop, you kill them, and then you continue on. So that's exactly how I played Torchlight. Maybe that's not the way this game is meant to be played, but the idea that I have to clear every map of every mob in every optional dungeon so that I can stay on track with leveling seems a bit weird to me.

And I know there are people that say, oh, you don't have to kill every monster. And it's like, but the game is kind of designed that way. And so I played it the way I wanted to play it. And now I'm like super far behind this leveling curve. So now it's like, do I go and grind and just go back and kill thousands of monsters for no reason? Because my level is so it is probably like you kind of hit it. It's a little frustrating. It's a little distracting in the sense that it's like, why not just let me play the way I want to play? Well, I think also playing it in 2023, the whole concept of grinding is just kind of dead.

Back in the day, you had to do this with all Japanese RPGs. You had to do this in WoW. You would inevitably hit these levels where you'd have to go grind. And I don't think it's necessarily a bad system, but if you're playing the game 12 years after release and you just don't know, and all of a sudden you're severely underleveled, I think that does the game a disservice. But I think if you go into it knowing ahead of time, that probably will serve you a lot better. So for any listeners out there who have not yet played torchlight 2 i think as long as you know that going in you'll find that to be less annoying because the game just doesn't teach that to you yeah all right now in regards to story i i did watch ign's review of this game in 2012 and i have a direct quote they said there is quote very little story and few

interesting characters in torchchlight 2. Almost all the focus is on gameplay. Would you say that's fair? Can confirm that gameplay is the highlight of this game. There is a story. Some mad alchemist guy is going through and imprisoning these creatures of mana and like these guardians of the realms and so you are on his trail and so you're trying to like track him down but of course you know as luck would have it the second you get to to the town man the alchemist was just here guys you just missed him he's moved on to the next level and then it's like oh darn it man If only I had been like two minutes sooner, I would have caught the main bad guy. So there is a story.

It's pretty weak, to be honest with you. Again, that's what I took away is, you know, mad alchemist corrupting the guardians of these zones. You have to go fight some boss guy and then that will break the spell on the guardian and then that then you can continue on trying to chase down the mad alchemist um lots of people have side quests i mean you know this game is chock full of characters in towns that would say like hey you're going into the zone can you go find my lost medallion for me and you go sure i'll do that and then i do like the fact that when you take a quest it shows you what gear you'll get to choose from oh ahead of time yeah which is kind of neat because like one guy had crap gear and i was like dude i ain't going to get in that amulet for you like

you go get your own amulet like your gear sucks maybe i was gonna say maybe if you didn't run and do these little quests then you'd been on time for the alchemist. I mean, man, that's the, that's the key of the game. Crack the code right there. So, so I, yeah,

I think this also highlights one of the differences with Diablo, because I think for most gamers, or at least for me, when I think of Diablo, I think about amazing cinematics and I think about some of the storyline elements. And so for torchlight to be missing that I think is Diablo, I think about amazing cinematics, and I think about some of the storyline elements. And so for Torchlight to be missing that, I think is a little bit of a bummer. Now, obviously, this game is a lot cheaper than Diablo, so you can't expect the same level quality. And this was made by a far smaller team than the dev teams behind all the Diablo games.

But I think that's also just, you know, one major difference that you see here between the two. All right, well, let's go ahead and take our first break, and then we'll come back and we'll talk about the loot system. This is an ad from BetterHelp Online Therapy. We always hear about the red flags to avoid in relationships, but it's just as important to focus on the green flags. If you're not quite sure what they look like, therapy can help you identify those qualities so you can embody the green flag energy and find it in others. BetterHelp offers therapy 100% online and sign up only takes a few minutes.

Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com. All right, continuing our talk here of Torchlight 2, let's talk a little bit about the loot. I'm just going to toss the ball to you here, Josh. Tell us a little bit about how inventory and loot works. I mean, this is why you play a game like this, to be honest, right? Diablo, sure, the gameplay is fun, it's action-oriented. But it is that just trail of shiny loot that's constantly popping up in the air out of monsters. It's like a piñata. You get to just scramble and scoop everything up as fast as you can.

And then when you got a second, you take a breather, you start looking through your inventory and going like, what did I get? What did I get? It follows the same color scheme as any other game that anybody's ever played. So you have your common, your rare, your epics, your legendary, stuff like that. I will say that for me, the loot in this game was one of the better parts of the game.

It has some flaws that I'll bring up here in just a second. But for the engineer, there is a plethora of weapons. I mean, you can get these claws. So you have these really fast attacking weapons that actually ignore armor, but they have no AOE, which is kind of neat. So really fast single target damage. You have the cannon, which is a cone-shaped AOE in front of you that hits like a truck you you can go two-handed weapons which the engineer kind of specializes in to where i was just these monster hammers and maces they're like two times my size they're super slow but it's like getting hit by a mac truck yeah i mean it's just so you know there's all sorts of different things you can go dual wielding i figured that

out after a few hours i had these two axes that had like vampiric abilities. So then I'm like this little whirlwind guy, just, you know, taking everything down and healing up really fast and stuff like that. There's armor, there's trinkets, there's pet stuff. So one of the neat things about this game is that you have a pet with you constantly. This is not like summon a pet in the heat of battle and it helps you out. This thing follows like summon a pet in the heat of battle and it helps you out. This thing follows you around everywhere and you can actually get gear for your pet, which is really cool. So you can get like these collars and badges that affect your pets, like strength and his abilities and stuff too. So yes, the gear system and that loop in this game

is great. It's right up there with Diablo. One of my favorite aspects of the game, to be honest. Now here's the problem with it. This is going to tie into me being under leveled. The problem with the gear system is that to use gear, you have to have the required stats. So this game uses four stats, right? It's got dexterity, focus, vitality, and strength. I was engineer. I'm this tank dude. I need strength and I need vitality. Some weapons I couldn't even use unless my strength was really, really high. But I would get half of the gear I would pick up would be for like a different class. It would say, oh, you need 50 focus and 30 dexterity if you want to use these pistols. And then I'm like, but I'm an engineer.

And then it was like, well, too bad for you, man, because these pistols look really cool, don't they? And I'd be like, well, I want to see what the pistols do. And it's like, well, you can't use them. There's nothing worse than seeing loot drop that you can't use. I remember back in WoW Vanilla when there were no paladins for the horde and there were no shaman for the alliance. And I remember that the bosses did not have different loot tables.

And so sometimes you would down a boss and half the loot for our horde raid would be stuff for paladins and literally nobody could equip it and everyone would just go oh it was so disappointing and so to constantly see gear drop that you can't use would definitely be a bummer so do you end up just like vendoring it all? Yeah. I mean, that is the one benefit is for me, I was having to buy health potions like nobody's business. I mean, towards the end of the game, like I said, trash mobs are too hitting me. I am chugging health potions like I am just, you know,

some kind of crazy addict. Like, just give me more of these. Give me more. And they're expensive. So I was running out of money doing nothing but buying health potions. And there's all kinds of vendors in this game. You go to a town, you've got jewel vendors. You've got armor vendors.

You've got health potion and just your stock up vendors and all this stuff. Plus, if you die, you get the option. You get one of three options that says, hey, you can resurrect right here where you died and it'll cost you a premium amount. Or you can resurrect at the start of this level and it'll only cost you a little bit. Or you can resurrect in town and it doesn't cost you a thing. So it's like, okay, well, I'm spending a little bit of money to resurrect at the start of the zone instead of right there. But then that's taking up my money. So it's like, I'm buying tons of health potions. I'm spending my money because I'm dying. And it just got to be this kind of loop where I felt like I was always out of money,

never had enough health potions. And yet I didn't want to go back and just grind levels at the same time. So, you know, that again, part of that is my fault because I didn't take the time to just grind levels. But at the same time, I shouldn't have to. And the gear follows along with that. And so the one thing with the gear is that it would say, hey, you can't use these pistols unless you have this much focus and dexterity or unless you're level 40. So you could be a high enough level that you could use the gear at that point. But then I'm looking at the stats on the gear and I'm like, dude, I'm level 20 and these pistols really aren't all that great. You're telling me I can't use these to level 40.

They're going to be so obsolete at that point. It would be be ridiculous so a little frustrating to get all this stuff that i can't use and then the the other downside of that is a lot of the stuff is unidentified and identify scrolls are really expensive so i'm buying these scrolls i'm identifying something and then it's like oh that's meant for a wizard that's not meant for an engineer and then i'm like oh come on then man Don't be teasing me. Is there an option to identify stuff for free like a Deckard Cain in Diablo? No. So you have to buy scrolls.

Yeah. I mean, you can sell it to a vendor unidentified, but I never found a way to get like a vendor to just give me freebies and identify stuff. That's too bad. I did see that you can use a transmuter. So if you put in like four items of a certain quality, it'll spit out a new random one of the same quality. I did use that a lot, honestly, because you do get these gems. So again, rip off of Diablo, right? You get these gems that you can socket into gear. And I will say, I actually really liked the gem system because they're fairly varied in like,

oh, this gives you health per hit, or this will drain mana from monsters, or, you know, this will add armor or any kind of effects that could proc or, you know, neat stuff more than just, oh, this is plus one to strength, which I thought was cool. And one of the systems that I really liked was if you put a gem in a piece of gear, you have two options. If you want the gem back, you have to destroy the piece of gear. If you want the gem out of the gear, you can just destroy the gem, which I really like. That is such a cool convenience thing.

And just instead of saying like, oh, well, you put it in there. Too bad. So sad. Now you can't use the weapon or the gem if you want to change something out. So did like that. But the gem system was neat because you could transmute, you could put like three or four gems in there and then get a higher quality gem that would. So that was a little bit of that like fun kind of gambling with all these like little gems that I don't really need anymore and then seeing what I could get out of it. I could see how the gameplay loop would get a

little bit frustrating playing the way that you did, which is the way I think most people do. So it's a little bit on the user for being underleveled, but it's also on the game for not really telling you you have to kill everything. So if you're not having this grand epic story that you care about to keep the game going, and if all you're seeing is loot dropping that you either can't use or you can't afford to identify or it's just way beyond your level then you kind of get stuck in a place where it's like wait why am i doing this am i having fun yeah is that kind of where you were at times i kind of towards the end yes because i wanted to keep playing i knew my time with this game was limited because we're always moving on to the next game and the next thing. And I got to a point where I just went, this doesn't make sense to me anymore. Like I don't want to go grind, but I'm getting two shotted by literal trash mobs at this point,

you know, and I'm running out of money because the only way to avoid getting two shotted, like I said, is just chug health potions like it's nobody's business, and then just slowly grind my way through whatever level I was in. And again, I get it. It's my fault. I was underleveled, but that loop was not pleasant to be stuck in at that point. Because again, I'm dying. What happens when you die? Well, it costs you money. Okay, well, how do I not die? I have to spend lots of money on health potions. So now I'm chugging these health potions. Well, now I'm out of money. Oh, I died again. Well, that just took some more of my remaining money. And then it's like, well, what do I do? I don't want to go back three zones and fight trash moms for the next four hours just so I can be properly leveled and get through this zone. So I do think

that there was a big whiff in that department with this portion of the game well there there should be you know any of these games there should be a flow and as you go through the areas and and the sequences of the game to where unless you're intentionally skipping things like you shouldn't you shouldn't be underleveled like unless you're really just trying to do a mad rush through the areas, you shouldn't be underleveled. If you're going through, you miss a dungeon or two, it shouldn't be that detrimental to your leveling scale

when you go to the next act or when you go to the next dungeon or anything like that. Like I said, I got to level 10. I only played for a couple hours, and I even noticed I was killing stuff. I could kill stuff, but i went through a lot of potions on that last boss and then everything i got i was three or four levels underneath all the gear that i just got i couldn't even use so yeah yeah now i didn't play enough to where i ever died when you die do you do you have to go recover your gear because if you just respawn back at town

i assume you have everything with you. Yes, you don't lose. There's no corpse runs. There's no loss of gear. And again, it gives you three options. It is literally spawn right here. And it's all percentage-based of your money. I don't know what the percentage is for respawning exactly where you were,

but I want to say it was something crazy, like, I don't know, 10, 15, 20% of your gold, you know, to like respawn right where you were. Respawn in town, completely free. I mean, you want to go back to town and run your way back to this dungeon, you can do that. It doesn't cost you a thing. Or spawn at the beginning of the dungeon,

and that's like 5% of your gold or whatever. But yeah, and you just respawn with everything. I mean, if you burn health potions during the fight that you died, those are gone. It's just the actual respawn. But yeah, you don't have to go get your gear there's no corpse runs or anything like that i hate corpse runs that's like honestly my only complaint about diablo 2 are the corpse runs so i actually would enjoy that that part yeah i i hate corpse runs but but I acknowledge that they add a certain level of fear and intensity to a game. I mean, we play a lot of Rust, right? And what's the thing? You die to a bear, and then

it's like, well, I got to run back to my corpse and find that real quick before somebody else comes across it, or something like that. So it's this weird... I hate it, and i love it at the same time yeah you have to have you have to have high stakes but i also hate like wasting time just to get back to where i was 20 minutes ago that's the part that i always recoil against shouldn't have died dude yeah what are you thinking and i love get good dude i loved it on diablo 2 because then you just camp you just camp corpses and then you just camp corpses, and then you just get so many ears. Yes. All right, sure. That's one way to do it.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about what I would say is maybe the most important part of RPGs, like skills and abilities. So Torchlight 2 does have a skill tree. Tell me a little bit about it and whether or not you think it works well. So you do get various abilities, which I love. Everybody knows I love skill trees. It is a little weird in this game. It's very unintuitive because it's like, I have the skill and I can put a point in and then I unlock the skill. But now the skill has 20 different points that I can put in it, but they don't really do a whole lot until I reach it is three tiers of the skill. So it's like you start at tier one and then you have to put like, I don't know, five points in.

Right. And then you'll unlock tier two. Well, tier two for my flaming hammer gives two more of the little like flames that shoot out and it does more damage but it's like it's not really that much cooler than tier one and so and you have to dump so many points into it to get to tier two but you only get skill points when you level up and then so but then you will unlock a new skill at level like 15 so it's like, oh, okay, well, my first skill is this big flame hammer where I hit the ground and flames shoot out and it does a ton of damage. Okay, this is really neat. And then I get to level 15 and it's like, well, now you get a stomp

where I jump up in there and I stomp down and it stuns everything around me. And it's like, okay, well, that's cool. But I'm getting these skill points and I'm putting them into these skills to level them up, but I'm not really seeing any sort of real benefit from it. And then before you know it, I've got six different skills unlocked, like three different passive skills. I'm not really sure which way I'm going on this stuff. I'm spamming stuff as fast as I can click it because again, I'm getting my butt whooped by everything. So I'm just like, ah, one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, drink a man a potion. One, two, three, four. I'm just like, I'm going through all this stuff. And it just, it wasn't that like really nice skill tree where I felt like I was actually unlocking like neat things.

Like when I would get a new ability, yes, that was cool. And for a while I was doing it in like a tactical way where I would run into a group of mobs. I would jump up and stun them all reposition myself and then flame hammer them to wipe out like a big horde of them. Right. And it was like, okay, but I didn't have to do that either. I mean, I could just click furiously and then kind of kill everything anyway for a while. So I'll be honest, I was a little underwhelmed with the skills. Like Diablo 4 being the most recent kind of same type of game, as much as we just were done with Diablo 4, the skills in Diablo 4 were pretty top-notch and the skill trees in there. And again, I get it. It's a game that's 11 years newer,

but I did feel like the skill tree for somebody that really enjoys them felt a little lacking to me in that regard. I will say that one neat thing about the game is that you can get not just your class skills, but you can find these scrolls. And when you find a scroll scroll it is like a generic skill that anybody can use so i found a scroll that was like whirlwind that just made me attack like 40 faster for an engineer that's swinging a gigantic mace that was baller dude i was like oh man this thing is great but then i found a skill that shot out like little ice shards and it would slow things, but it was like, but it used so much mana for me that I did like maybe for like the Ember Mage, like you guys

played, maybe that's much more geared up your alley, but for the engineer, it wasn't really. And so I'd like the aspect that you can get these just generic skills to add on to what you already have. But I just didn't find those to be very useful because I just was using my class skills to try to just kill things. Yeah. Well, I saw a couple other things that are kind of weird, well, not necessarily weird,

I guess unique is the better word for their skill tree. You do not have to put points into the early abilities in order to unlock late abilities. So as you level, it'll just let you go straight down into the bottom most important or the most powerful tiers, which in a way I thought was kind of neat because that's encouraging you, okay, well, I haven't focused on this tree, but I can still get some of the best stuff in it. And I thought that was kind of clever. But at the same time, this is also back in the day and age

when games do not like to let you respec easily this game has not a single option to fully respect the worst you can pay a few thousand gold and it will just let you redo your last three skill points yes which and that jeez i already struggle with paralysis on skill points. I don't know that I'd be able to put any points into anything with that kind of system. It's really tough because I got, I don't know, 12 hours into this game and I'm starting to get my feet under me. I'm starting to understand the flow. I'm kind of like, like I said, I was trying to be tactical with rotating through my skills.

And that's when I went, well, flame hammer rocks, dude. But this other skill where I can like swipe in front of me in an arc and break shields and armor, that skill kind of sucks. But I had already dumped a lot of points into it because it was a new skill, right? But it's like, but I spent three skill points in a passive ability. And now I cannot. This is not, this will cost you an arm and a leg. This is literally, you cannot respect at this point. And that was another thing where

I was kind of like, Ooh, like that's tough pill to swallow in today's day and age. I'm fine. If you want to take a hundred percent of my gold and say, Hey, are you really sure you want to respect? And I'm like yeah dude i do but it's like you can't even do that so give me the option i just want the option dude that was like back in early wow days where i was gonna say that yeah were you yeah because like the first time you respec it was pretty cheap it might have even been free but then after that it's like well it's gonna cost you one gold and then five gold and then 20 gold and then there were guys in my guild that would play all week as a shadow priest and then they would fully respect to go holy that way they

could heal on the raids which meant they had to just go grind stuff to sell and vendor for probably i don't know six seven hours a week just so they could respect back but at least it gave you the option so the fact that it's not even here at all, this is just kind of the day and age where quality of life was really severely lacking in RPGs. I feel like that's one area that's just very hard to go back and play. I don't mind old graphics. I don't mind old janky controls, but it's the missing quality of life that drives me most crazy. I'll be honest. I, you to admit that I am a graphics snob. This game follows the World of Warcraft graphics. It's colorful. It's vibrant. They're cartoony. I get zero issues with the

actual way this game looks, to be honest with you. I think those graphics are kind of timeless. So credit to, you know, Blizzard and World of Warcraft for coming up with them and then being copied by just, I mean, tons of games, but it works. Like, honestly, it works. So in that case, like the game never felt old. You hit the nail on the head, Paul, where the only thing that felt really old to me was just quality of life stuff.

Like, why can't I respec? Why do I have to grind an entire map so that I can be properly leveled? Why am I finding gear that I can never use? Those sorts of things, I think we don't realize the change over time. But when you get thrown back like 11 years in gaming, you kind of go like, you notice it then. And I don't think you ever would have noticed it if you were playing this game in the early days. But when you go back to it, that's where you go like, you notice it then. And I don't think you ever would have noticed it if you were playing this game in the early days. But when you go back to it, that's where you go like, man, something's just not right here.

I remember when high def came out for like TV and movies. I remember my wife used to say she couldn't tell the difference and I would just leave it on high def. And this is back in the day when you could actually like watch like basketball games so you could go to the hd channel or the regular channel and i would just have her watch for 15 minutes and then i'd go back and she'd be like oh okay i can't tell when it gets better but i can

definitely tell when it gets worse i really i do i remember that speaking of basketball games to watch you and be like an audience member i'm like i can see he's got glasses on he's got glasses you're like it's so good oh man all right well this time is just flying by it's time for our last break and then we'll come back and finish up this episode all right i think we pretty much covered most things by way of combat anything we we've missed out here, Josh, before moving on? There are boss fights. I found them to be... Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll be honest. You should talk about that. I found them to be enjoyable. I really did like the boss fights. What's really weird is some of the... So this game, again, just like Diablo, you get your named mobs that have the little aura under them, and maybe they affect the mobs around them and stuff like

that. Some of those suckers were harder than some of the actual boss fights. Oh, I believe it. Yeah. And so I was amazed because I'd be sitting there wailing. I mean, wailing on this just random spawn that's special. And then I get to a boss and I hit the boss and I could actually see his health just kind of chunk down while I'm hitting him. And I'm like, how is this boss easier than like the random like special mob man well that very first the general

grell or whatever yeah he would just spawn a bunch of guys my poor pet it was just like your pet is fleeing oh yeah running in terror yeah I was like oh no and I'm trying to spam and I just you know i was the ember mage so i just had those fire bolts and i was just like firebolt firebolt firebolt

yeah some of those mobs within the boss fights were were pretty gnarly yeah so there are big bosses you know when you're about to fight them. They even give you an icon on the map that's like, hey, you're going into the boss's room or dungeon or whatever. Usually you just throw up a town portal right before that. You go to town, you stock up, and then you warp back and then you take on the boss. I will say they were somewhat mindless. Just,, just, Hey, smash attack as much as you can drink a health potion. When he hits you, a few of them, I thought were pretty cool. Like one quest has you going to kill a Manticore and the Manticore will fly up and then he'll rain things down and

you have to kind of dodge and run around and do those. And then a really neat thing was I got the Manticore like halfway and I'm like, well,'s really easy and then the the wife of the manticore like gets mad and like joins the fight and now i'm fighting two manticores and i'm like oh no like how am i gonna survive this you know and so like yeah like honestly so you know i i like that there were boss fights i like that there were mechanics um so that was a nice touch in the combat portion of this game to like, be able to have those moments. And again, would have liked to have seen a little bit more of the mechanic side of

things versus just the tank and spank type thing. But I, it was, it was a nice feature that they were there. One common thing I read. I don't know if I've ever heard that. You never heard tank and spank heard that you never heard tank and spank you've never heard tank and spank oh that's been around for decades that's an mmo term man

yeah basically it just means very few mechanics you just keep your tank alive and the rest is just heal the tank and stand still you don't have to like move and and there's no telegraphed fights or anything like that guys i don't need a whole like lesson i just like the term okay gamers loved the rhyming have you heard of like sword and board for warriors yeah yeah stuff like that yeah does torchlight have like in diablo where you can just randomly come across like a cellar or a cave and just go in and clear it out is that stuff in there yeah there are random dungeons uh that you can just come across and kind of run in there and clear out mobs and stuff like that um you know i did a few of them but it's just it's all just part of the loot grind at that point like you know maybe you get a nice chest at the end of the dungeon but it's kind of a

crapshoot whether you're going to get any gear that you actually can use or need or any of that stuff too yeah i hear you uh we have to talk a little bit about fishing because i remember reading a review that talked about fishing and being best friends with a panda or something i had no idea what they were talking about i i intentionally did not read anything about fishing i'm hoping you guys can enlighten me ryan you caught a fish i caught multiple fish whoa okay all right i want to hear all about it i'm angler uh basically it pops up and it's like a little i think if i remember i had this little fishing hook and it like circles down and you click it when it's in the circle and boom you got yourself a fish i don't know if it expands too far upon that because i didn't play too many hours but uh i did go fishing yeah what

can you do with these fish that's what i want to know uh you can feed them to your pet and change your pet into something temporarily so depending on the type of fish you find you can turn your pet into a spider and now your pet does poison damage and maybe occasionally web something or you turn your pet into a crab and now your pet's super tanky because it's a crab uh or some little weird wolverine werewolf looking thing so your pet doesn't you know more damage and stuff like that and they generally last for like 5 to 15 minutes okay the pet is kind of something you forget about and let until you hear the like ryan did at the announcer going your pet is about to flee your pet is fleeing and i'm like wait i

had a pet what's he doing what like you look up his health is just pegged to zero yeah he's toast man he's toast but well i'm saving these potions for me yeah so that's kind of it like that you just feed the fish to your pet and you turn your pet into something else and it's just random like you don't choose what no the fit i mean the fish you catch is random but then you can hover over the fish and it will say this will turn your pet into a frenzied werewolf and then it's like you know oh okay so that's like it's really just changing like the skin of your pet and maybe giving it an ability. That's kind of fun. But again, you don't really pay attention to your pet.

So if my pet is now poisoning things, it's like, I couldn't really tell. Yeah. That's why you died so much. Maybe. I mean, people might be listening to this and being like, Josh is an idiot. He didn't play this game right at all.

Pet and spider bots are where this game's at. So I think I know the answer to this question, but I'm still going to ask you anyway, Josh, in the pre-dive, you said that you have not been crazy about any Diablo clones. You prefer Diablo games. The only one that you mentioned as kind of standing out in the crowd was

path of Titans because you love mythology. You kind of liked having in the crowd was path of titans because you love mythology you kind of liked having that flair just does torchlight 2 stand out at all amongst the clones or is it just another generic clone in a sea of clones i will be honest with you this is the most generic of generics in my opinion um i the vanilla cone of the ice cream world? I mean, honestly, this is the vanilla cone from the 7-Eleven, not even Dairy Queen. It's a cup of ice. It's not even a soda. I mean, honestly, it really is. I think maybe that's what they were going for. In all honesty, there's nothing wrong with just capitalizing on the Diablo craze and saying,

hey, we're a cheap, affordable option that you can run on anything, so why not give us a try? And this game was very popular back in the day. But in the sense of, is it a clone and is it generic? It is super generic, in my opinion. I mean, people will say, well, yeah, but the class is an ember mage and an engineer. And I go, yeah, but all these games had classes. And then they're going to go, yeah, but the loot. And I'm going to go, yeah, but they all have loot. And they're going to go, but the pet. And then I'll go, okay, there is a pet. I never noticed the pet in any of my play time other than that it was really annoying because the guy would just keep spamming,

your pet is fleeing, your pet is fleeing. And I'm like, I don't even know where my pet is at this point. And then the pet would just come back 20 seconds later on his own. So I'm like, why do I care about this pet? He's immortal. So I'm a little, I'm not totally surprised to hear it. I wonder how much of it is just playing it all these years later. Because this game's got a 93% rating on Steam. It's sold over 3 million copies. If you remember, Game Informer's review said they preferred

Torchlight 2 to Diablo 3. So does that make any sense to you, Josh? Or is this like they're out of their minds? I will say this because it sounds like I've been a little bit negative towards this game. But my job is to point out the good and the bad on a game so people can make their own decisions. And I mean, we're always honest about games, right? The gameplay loop in Torchlight 2 is perfectly fine. If you want mindless action of slaughtering dozens and dozens of monsters, I mean, you know what you're getting into, right? Like that part of the game is perfectly fine. There's nothing wrong with it.

I did not hate playing Torchlight 2 by any means, right? Because it is exactly what I expected it to be. It is a Diablo clone. I'm just smashing monsters. I'm getting loot. I'm going to town. I'm upgrading my guy. You know, occasional boss fight,

run this quest for this guy, you know, rinse and repeat over and over. It is 1000% what you know you are signing up for in that regard. Is it generic? Absolutely. There is very little in this game that sets it apart from any other of the same genre of this game. I mean, Diablo, Path of Titans, whatever all the other ones are, right? And so there's... Yes, it is just the bland flavor, but that doesn't mean that it's bad. Some people love vanilla. Yeah. Michael the butler included. Yeah. I mean, legitimately. And so in that case, I'm not trying to slam the game itself because I did have fun actually playing it,

but it is very, very generic. And I completely forgot what your initial question was there. Because I got out of tangent. That Game Informer preferred this to Diablo 3. I played a lot of Diablo 3. I prefer Diablo 3 to this. Again, nothing wrong with this game, but Diablo did it first and Diablo does it better. Yeah. Even though Diablo 3 was weak within the series of Diablo, you still get the cinematics. It still carries the prestige.

Everyone you know is also playing it. I remember, Josh, it was one of the very first games you and I played together. It was Diablo 3. And everyone we knew was playing it at the same time. So I was a little curious to hear, like, who do you think Torchlight 2 is for at this point? Is it just simply people who are nostalgic for RPGs from the 2010s? Because quite honestly, if you want to play an action rpg you can shell out

full price for diablo you're gonna get all the thrills the cinematics the story the top of the line voice acting everything like in diablo 4 which we all loved or if you don't want to pay full price you can go play path of exile for for free, which is another Diablo clone. So I'm just kind of wondering, like, who is this game actually for? Like, who's the audience? So for me, in 2023, the audience is somebody that does not have, like, a good computer or needs a cheap game to play. And I don't mean that in a negative way at all because we have a lot of listeners in our Discord that have said,

hey, I don't have a good computer, man. I need games that are super easy to play. I have a laptop, but I don't have a graphics card. And that's a common thing, right? Or my graphics card is nine years old, which severely limits me in what I can play in today's day and age. I 1000% understand

that. So in this case, Torchlight 2 is a perfect game because if you want a fun game that will run on just about anything that will provide you with, I mean, honestly, hours and hours and hours of content that you could probably play through again and again, if it's up your alley and that kind of thing, I think it's the perfect game for you. If you want a game that you can play with friends, because maybe your friends don't have good computers, you know, again, multiplayer option, you know, it's accessible to just about everybody. So for me, that fits a need in the gaming industry. And, and I, I, you know, that's important for people. So I would say that is the perfect fit for this game. If you want something more modern, I think there are

definitely better options out there for people that have the ability to play the better options. But I will say that I do think that there is definitely a place in 2023 for torchlight too yeah so if you're a gamer that has a lot of funds available for gaming this is probably not your best pick but if you're like a younger gamer that doesn't have a lot of money or older equipment this is a perfectly fine rpg to jump into and play i i will say this game is also rated teen so for like our younger listeners out there if you're a younger teenager maybe your parents don't want you playing diablo which can get very dark and dark you know and stuff like that torchlight 2 is a little more neutered not necessarily a bad thing but it's going to pull back on you know the violence and

the adult content so that there's maybe also a place for that. Or if you are a person that loves gaming in your living room while your kids run around, Diablo 4 might not be the best selection. Torchlight 2, I kind of sense, is probably fine to have on even in a family setting. Oh, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. All right. Well, I think the last thing we have to do here is the leaderboard. So Josh, in the pre-dive, you said that you thought this game would probably land somewhere in your late forties, which would kind of put it along the likes of ARK, GTFO, Steel Rising Territory, taking a look at your actual deep dive. And by the way, our listeners, you can can go to video gamers pod.com and under leader boards each of us have our top 10 games of all time and we also have our deep dive leader board

so anytime we do a deep dive we toss this game in there we rate it against every other game that we've done a deep dive on josh you've got 103 games this number keeps getting bigger, faster and faster. Where do you see yourself plugging in Torchlight 2? So I'm going to ding this game from the 40s because of the quality of life issues. I think that the game has good points to offer, but again, it just doesn't hold up in today's day and age. And also we have recently played Diablo 4, which is, that's a tough thing to go up against, especially as being an older clone of that kind of genre and game type.

So I've actually thought about this a good bit. I am going to put this at 76. Okay, 76. I gotta keep scrolling. I'm gonna bump Valorant down, but that's where i have valorant currently um okay it's it is a fun game but it feels dated at this point you know and so it's one of those things where you know we saw a lot of very positive things from listeners

when we did the pre-dive and they were like, oh my goodness, I loved Torchlight 2. This game was so much fun with me and buddies. We spent countless hours playing it together and all that. And it's like, the nostalgia factor is real. People know that we have ranked games higher because of nostalgia and things like that. But if you never played the original and you play a nostalgia game in modern day, you're going to feel the dated parts of it and again while the gameplay part perfectly fine there's just a lot of little things that kind of build up for me that say it's not a perfect game um and so it's gonna rank a little bit lower on my leaderboard just because of that stuff you're you going to put Deathloop ahead of this? Yeah.

Oh, dude. Josh and I did not like Deathloop. Deathloop had some neat parts. It just was a big disappointment on what we were expecting out of Deathloop. Yeah, I am, Ryan. I'm sorry. Disagree. I know Ryan's a big Deathloop guy.

Get out of here. Josh and I were campaigning hard for Resident Evil Village that year to win all the awards. That was our game of the year a few years back. But yeah, Deathloop and It Takes Two have a lot of fans. So yeah, looking at your leaderboard, Josh, just taking a look at the other Diablo clones, you've got some other games like Lost Ark and V Rising ahead of this one. I would say those are very Diablo-esque, but you do have this above Minecraft Dungeons. So you're not saying it's the worst action RPG. Even though Minecraft Dungeons

is only a couple of years old, you would still rather play Torchlight 2 over Minecraft Dungeons, for sure. That's decent praise praise and despite us covering 103 games honestly how many of these games would you say are actually terrible oh maybe like 15 to 20 at the most yeah at the most and you don't you don't have it in that range at the despite it being so yeah this is i am not saying that this is a bad game just because it's in the 70s. I'm just saying it feels dated to me in 2023. You know what you're getting. That's the thing. This is not a game that is going to surprise you in a lot of ways.

And because of that, it just doesn't have that flair or that surprise factor that would cause me to rank it higher. It's good at what it does you know what it does and if that's what you want then it's a perfectly acceptable game for that makes perfect sense uh ryan got any last minute questions for josh i don't think i have any i think i think we did a pretty good job covering this one yeah i you know from the little bit i got in into the game um i kind of got the gist of it, and Josh covered it pretty well. So yeah, I don't think, other than him just not knowing what to do with his pet, I think we're good to go.

If there was a Torchlight 4 announced and it looked pretty good, would you pay attention to it? I would pay attention. I would need to see more out of it, to be honest. It would need to be Diablo 4 levels of like, that looks really cool. It's got to have some kind of angle, right? If it's just more just, hey, you can slaughter hundreds and thousands of mobs and get gear. I can do that. I can do that modernly with Diablo 4. I can do it for free with other games. So it would have to have some kind of hook at this point for me to go like, I want to play Tor Diablo 4. I can do it for free with other games. So it would have to have some kind of hook at this point for me to go like, I want to play Torchlight 4. Not an auto buy, not an auto

ignore. They would have to win you over. Yeah. My eyes have been opened, so I would at least look at it and say, ooh, what are they doing with this? But we did that big breakdown on Path of Exile 2 that was coming out. They had that big video that caught my attention because they went into a lot of depth on different things and the switching your elements right away and stuff like that. Torchlight four would have to have something along those lines to really put its hooks in me and say, like, I care about this game, but I'm also super thankful to like have now played you know this this game and know a little bit more about this series and that kind of stuff and i see why people

loved it like i said i can understand why 11 years ago people were like this is all the rage like i understand that it's just hard to feel that way in 2023 i hear you agreed agreed and it's one too like we said earlier for um younger audience i mean i mean not yet he's only about seven and a half but when he gets a little older maybe i'll start him on that before diablo because he's not quite ready for diablo yeah my son i'm get on torchlight we already got it uh compliments innate so uh maybe maybe he'll get on that. And then he can just deal with the old lack of quality of life that we had to deal with when we were younger days. One of my favorite parts of gaming lately is when Yumi and Josh will game.

And we can hear every word Jackson is saying because he's watching behind you. And we can hear him loud as day. Dad, dad, can I say hi to them? And you're like, no, no, we're playing. And then I'm like, just tell Jackson we say hi. them and you're like no no we're playing and then i'm like just tell jackson we say hi you know and then we can hear him oh it's so great you can tell how much that kid loves games i love that he plays bopple battle he'll play all this stuff with us when we got a lot of this stuff too at seven he's not bad he was kicking my butt in bopple battle man well i'm gonna i'm gonna have him listen to that he's

gonna be very excited he always calls us gamer bros so well i'm your dad but all right oh i love it all right well we want to say thank you once again to nate for going legendary and picking this game we really appreciate the support if any of our listeners out there want to hijack a host in the future go take a look at the legendary tier on Patreon at MultiplayerSquad.com. You can also sign up on a lower tier. We'd love everyone to go check that out. And also make sure to hit the follow button on the pod to get all

our episodes. You can find us on socials at VideoGamersPod. And also make sure to rate the show five stars. We'd really appreciate that as well. We hope that you'll come back and listen to another episode. And until then, happy gaming episode and until then happy gaming see ya all right see everybody