torchlight - a baby diablo

anyone else play this? I have been trying the demo and it runs pretty well on my 3 yr old imac (bootcamp). very straightforward hack'n'slash rpg type, with blizzard-esque graphics. it's the kind of game that would be perfect for xbla.

note that there is a mac port coming. i'm not sure i want to jump in since there's no MP, but it's gotten a lot of positive reaction this season.

Also, this was created by the same folks who did Diablo. Worthwhile. I guess they did this as a dry run for the eventual mmorpg

I just noticed this is on sale this weekend on steam for $9.99
http://store.steampowered.com/app/41500/

thanks for the tip- loved the demo, and $10 is irresistible. I especially love that they got the dude who did Diablo's music to come back for more of the same. So nostalgic!

got this for xmas. haven't gotten it to run successfully

this is 5 bucks today

i grabbed it, will play later

ugh mac port be damned, i bit on this. 7.5 hours left, for anyone who is even remotely interested in this game

Worth getting? I'm overloaded w rpgish games but I'm a Diablo fan from way back. I see the mac port is torrentable.

twenty minutes of play suggests it's worth the trouble. this might as well be a sequel.

I'm saying that as someone who still thinks Diablo II might be his fave game of the decade.

Bought this, just b/c i enjoyed it so much.

Curiously on how it looks/plays on something other than an older, underpowered laptop

i had to turn off antialiasing and lower shadow/particle quality just to make it playable on a pc i bought last year.

i got about, oh, three hours in. it's a serious popcorn game: just one more adventure, just one more floor, just until i beat these guys and then it's two in the morning.

the amount of inventory shuffling and identifying gets annoying. They put in vendors to do just about everything except identify your shit. I have been playing as an alchemist summoner who runs from battle and makes his minions kill everything. sometimes it gets so chaotic i can't tell what I have summoned that is still alive.

are pets any good at casting spells or do they just do it randomly?

i think you have a typo in the word smells and posted to the wrong thread but yes they're very good at it

don't make me put on my wizard hat

sand in your wizard's sleeve

finally got to the point where i'm getting killed regularly. game really enforces the "okay, better slow down" boundary.

finally got around to playing this. cleared out the mines. really does satiate my diablo fix.

keep reading this as "torchlight - a baby diplo"

MIA named her kid Torchlight?

should have jumped on this for $5, huh

that's what she said

looks like she heard my wish

any idea how this handles with a trackpad? or do I have to bother with a mouse for maximal killing action?

i'm doing ok with one

cool; gonna be a few days before I try this prob as I also bought civ 4 on the steam sale but I'm looking forward to the mayhem

computer froze during this :(

this takes everything annoying about d2 and smooths it out

item drops suck in this; seems I always need to upgrade my weapons at the merchants which is very lame

I started this last night. It's lots of fun. Control with a trackpad is a little imprecise but it's mostly that when I got ganked by a big group of mobs it was hard to click on individual mobs. Fortunately my dog helped clean up the mess.

I made level 4, but I'm not sure if I want to keep playing as a tank. It's my default just b/c I tend to hack and slash even as a mage and I like the thrill of upgrading weapons and seeing an immediate crushing impact, rather having my mana go up. Well, I guess I can replay this, or just create a mage and see if I like it more that way.

Euler: shift key helps with that. it sticks you in place to attack

huh yeah that would help! cool

this is the diablo crack, alright. word of warning - those pocket dungeons you can buy out of the shop? absolutely BRUTAL. You can't warp out, and they're super hard, so stock up on potions like mad... took me ages just to do one floor, after which i gave up... nice thing at least i was super buffed for the story game and other missions at the "proper" level

Level 24 tank

ugh spending way too much time reading the torchlight forums

zero-punct'd
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/1385-Torchlight

He obviously did that one for the paycheck, as it really doesn't say anything. I mean, even for yahtzee.

While I enjoy the hell out of this game, but it's also kind of the epitome of the stuff we were talking about in the "envy" thread, where i know there's no substance to this at all, it's just hollow, massively time-consuming entertainment, yet so fun. I am staying far, far away from the MMO when that comes out.

haha I was thinking of that envy of gameres thread too when I was playing last night

Torchlight
65 hrs

yeaaaaa half of those are mine

I've been playing in offline mode, otherwise I'd add 20 more hours to that. haah

I bought a Heal II spell and then stupidly "accidentally" unlearned it...down 2000 gold but whatever, I have so many heal potions that it doesn't matter I guess for now.

gold was rolling in when I went into the level 1-10 pocket dungeon which was more fun than the normal dungeon b/c it was harder. I'm playing on normal so maybe that's why this seems kinda easy and thus kinda silly to me...despite that I'm still gonna play through b/c it's satisfying in the way it's satisfying to play an old-school arcade shooter like 1942, full of mechanical violence without worries about "plot".

Oh yeah that reminds me of something I wanted to mention. This is a small thing in scope, but I love the fact that when you start a new game, and they give you a description for each difficulty. Sure - maybe it seems obvious what "Easy", "Medium", "Hard" and "Very Hard" mean, but it never is, since you never know what basis a game is using that as (like what's "Normal" difficulty, and to who?). Since the description for Hard actually say it was for people who had played Action RPGs before and I think it says Very Hard is for masochists or something like that, I knew Hard was the way to go for me. Every game with difficulty settings at the start should have verbose explanations, since you usually can't change the difficulty mid-way (and even when you can - it usually feels like a cop-out, TWEWY-aside).

I felt kind of stupid about being shocked about the pocket dungeon above - I didn't realize the Level 1-10 doesn't refer to your character level but to a random floor of the main dungeon, so I think the first time I picked up one it was like 5 floors ahead of where I was. Also more lulz at that post - I was probably inches away from the portal exit, since they end shortly after you hit the second floor.

I usually pick Normal because I'm not very good at games, but here I wish I'd picked Hard. Aside from the pocket dungeons, it's not even possible to be harder on yourself (go down further, faster) because you'll just end up leveling as you clear all the mobs on the linear path.

That said, crushing things and making them go splat is pretty satisfying.

huh I didn't realize that the levels in the random dungeon were random. I'm glad I got a difficult one!

Wait, so can you change difficulties in this? Google search is just confusing me: it says you can now do it with a patch but only in "console": does that mean I can't do it in the main game and have to load some other program?

I have no problem with changing difficulties midway through, if it makes a game more fun for me. Fun's the only reason I'm playing. I think I would like to move up to Hard in this.

Ah, didn't realize that you could do that! The console is in the game, but you need to change line in the settings.txt file to enable it. See here for info on that file's location - easiest way is to run %appdata% and browse to the runic games\torchlight folder.

http://strategywiki.org/wiki/Torchlight/Console

It's not listed there but after hitting Shift+~ ingame, the command should be SETDIFFICULTY 2. Valid numbers are 0-3 for the different difficulty levels.

ok cool, I will do that!

I assume steam games get patched automatically?

Might as well use them, since you get so little money from selling gear that you're gonna upgrade out of eventually - - destroy it to get the gems back and keep transmuting. Though yeah, it does seem like a joke to get an extra 15 poison damage out of a weapon that's dealing hundreds of DPS already.

Btw, the Web spell is totally awesome. Especially as a summoner it's practically essential to surviving later on, but I imagine it's a good spell for other alchemist types as well. It's especially great to tie down minibosses while my army of minions completely eats them up. Wish I'd picked it up a lot earlier in my game!

I recommend the respec and potion stack mods (and Torchleech, why not), it's nice to not have to waste extra inventory slots on potions, identify and town scrolls.

Can I use those mods w/o becoming a cheater (whatever that means for a singer player game)?

Yeah, it doesn't turn on the cheat flag (which kills the shared stash).

Can those of us using the Mac/Cider port use mods?

Answer: yes, although finding the right spot to put them was annoying.

I installed the potion stack mod (using Steam) but it doesn't seem to work, at least not as I thought it would (letting me have 200 potions of a given type in a stack, rather than just 20). It doesn't seem to do anything. I did get the "installed a mod" achievement though.

level 22 now and it hasn't gotten too tough yet; I'm getting a little worn out with hoarding eq to transmute to gems, prob. b/c I don't have enough open sockets now to use the sweet gems I've acquired.

That's pretty much what the pot stack mod does, though it's nice that it also works for ID/TP scrolls too. One super slick thing - didn't realize Steamworks also syncs your mods! Pretty slick.

ok I got the potion stack mod to work; I think I needed a reboot maybe? Whatever; it's very nice now, though I'm hardly using potions at all now.

So I'm level 26 on hard, and the game is starting to get boring again: waaaay easy but yet annoying as the difficulty seems to have become a function of having tons of goblins thrown at me plus those annoying phasing dogs. None of them pose any serious threat to me so I can just stand there and blast, but I also can't really see what's going on (too many explosions, and I just mash mash mash blast blast blast). I'm at maybe level 27 of the dungeon: will the mobs soon get bigger, like in terms of screen real estate? I'd love to fight more of the big trolls or (way better yet) dragons or something huge. I can tell that I'm getting close to the end of the main quest but I'm kinda losing steam (haha). Is there cause for hope in finding bigger mobs soon?

the final battle(s) are pretty tough and mobbish iirc. there's also a monster in the last few levels who will devestate you if your deflect missile rates aren't up

ok I can look forward to that then! My deflect missile rates are probably not very up. Though I have two golums who soak up lots of damage. In any case I look forward to a tough battle.

New patch today! New challenge rooms or some such! I have no idea what they are but yay!

This game suddenly became a real drag. My character is level 31 and I'm on level 32 of the dungeon, the Black Palace. I don't think I'm underpowered and that grinding up to level 32 would help much, because there are these bastard Dark Zealots who occasionally get critical hits on me and then poof I'm dead. But the levels are so long that backtracking takes a long fucking time. It's not fun anymore. Is there something I should do to make it fun again? Like, some gear that will stop the Dark Zealots? I know I'm close to the end of the game and I'd like to see it through, but really I'm starting to feel bad about myself after wasting an hour or two on this. Maybe it's just not my style and I should start Dragon Quest V or something.

the dark zealots and the dark acolytes are the ones you need to watch for! you need good missile reflect gear. but yeah it gets to be kind of a drag at this point.

My belt is 50% missile reflect but I guess I can look for more. Between this, and the annoyingness of hoarding gems that are actually pretty useless relative to the strengths of good eq, I'm not sure what my overall assessment of this game is. There's definitely lots of room for improvement. The sucky plot is finally working to its disadvantage, because I don't feel like if I were to quit the game that I'd lose anything wrt the narrative.

I am happy that I finally got to fight dragons, though.

X% chance to 50% missile reflect is the lower end of reflect gear, so keep a lookout for better stuff. I suspect you're having similar problems I had with my alchemist, since I'm guessing you put all your points into attack spells and summons, instead of focusing more on one build or ignoring the Armor perk (key for summoner... actually, everyone). Definitely hit a wall in the last part of the game but I eventually trudged my way through the end - for the post-game I respec'd and enjoyed it a lot more.

This was after 120-odd deaths, though - I wasn't too smart about the build, and I kept taking the exp hit for dying instead of gold/restart. I think I had less than a dozen for my Destroyer game and my Vanquisher hasn't died yet, since I did smarter builds for them. For the Alchemist your spell scrolls are key, look for the rare late game spells Web and Blood Skeleton. If you're going heavy on the summoner build get some zombies, skeletons and archers. If not, get Elemental Protection or maybe Frost.

I also didn't realize the strategy of using a town portal scroll in the dungeon every few minutes. If you open the portal but don't enter it, and die, it'll be up in town so you can re-enter the dungeon where you opened it. So you lose nothing for choosing the "resurrect in town" option, then you can just enter the portal back. Portal scrolls are cheap, so do this if you're not already doing so!

In all of my games I was always at least a few character levels above the floor number, usually more, so you might want to do a Hatch quest or purchase a map dungeon - you'll level up easily since the monsters are matched to your level.

Yeah, I guess I need to grind and pick up better eq. I did a Hatch quest last night and it was pretty brutal, full of Dark Zealots. But I got 3/4 of a level too.

I'm an Alchemist and I focused on summons + ember bolt (now at level 10). My first golum is at 10 too, and my second golum is at maybe 4? I put a little into armor. My cat is getting cut up right away so I'm having to soak more damage myself. My armor is really high, it's just the Dark Zealots and those little skeletons that get shot out, and that I can't really see b/c of all the ember bolts I constantly shoot out, that cut me up. My cat summons VI zombies and skeleton warriors. I could do that with my extra spell slots: all I really cast from my slots is heal all. I haven't found Web or Blood Skeleton for sale or on drop yet. I have elemental protection IV I think. It's a pain to keep casting buffs, though.

Huh, that's a brilliant idea re. town portal. I've been picking the resurrect at the start of the level choice, which costs er 2000 or so gold; but I'm constantly sitting on about 20K gold so w/e. Still, it's good to save money in case really good gear ever happens to be on sale.

Blow the money on enchantments! Well, on stuff you know you're not gonna give up for a while.

Heal All is all right, but generally it doesn't heal yourself enough, and you're going to be chugging potions when those mobs hit you. I'd rather stick it on the pet for occasional use and give the spell slot to something else. And it's just easier to resummon golems and shift-click potions to feed to pet.

If you're gonna keep going the summon route, I'd recommend doing Pet/Minion Mastery, Burning Bind, and Charm Mastery for the summon spells if you keep up with that. If you get Summon Skeleton or Blood Skeleton, you can have up to 5 of each at a time, but you do have to pump them out constantly since they expire after a set time, unlike your Golem skills. But as an Alchemist, I think unless you go for a weird Strength attack build you're going to have to do a lot of continuous skill key mashing. Even with my Destroyer, casting Frost Shield every 30 seconds was essential.

My strength is pretty low; I have a wand that's actually quite buff but I rarely use it; it's just ember bolt ember bolt ember bolt. I have Burning Bind at level 2 maybe. I'm not committed to any particular build, which is probably part of the problem; although actually I'm not sure there is a problem, just more my frustration with doing fine and then dying in one shot once in a while with those damned Dark Zealots. O/w I'm doing fine, even with Dragonkins up close they rarely get a hit on me.

You guys must be playing VH, right? I found a Summoner guide and Hard has been, as you said, not that much ...

"torchlight - a baby's dildo"

this is $5 on steam again if anyone hasn't played it yet

Mac port arrives with the debut of Steam on Mac tomorrow!

(and it's got Steam Play, so no need to pay for it twice, hooray)

Sweet. I will totally get this tomorrow.

any word on whether you can transfer your PC save games to Mac? I've been playing on XP on my Mac through Fusion/Boot Camp and though I lost interest in the game a few months ago (got too damn hard) I'd play more often if I didn't have to go into XP to play.

it has Steam Cloud support so everything should load cleanly on both OSs

nice!

So excited for this tomorrow! Way more than the Valve stuff.

It's Wednesday - where's my Mac Steam?

you are now introduced to Valve Time

I don't like Valve Time.

46% d/l'ed!

I just got the client - Torchlight, here I come!

I don't suppose there's a way to transfer savegames from my, um, unofficial Mac port to Steam.

you can probably just copy the savegame files from the runic games folder (though I don't know where they are yet in the steam mac version or the unofficial version - on windows they were in %appdata%/runic games/torchlight/save), just do it when Steam isn't on

Dang - it turns out it won't do Windows to Mac or vice versa cloud syncing for character saves (though oddly the mods did sync. Bummer. Fortunately, copying over my Windows saves manually did the trick, and the mods seemed to work as well.

good info, i will now give runic the $10 they more than deserve

Nhex, to where did you copy the Windows saves? And did they work? The forums suggest that you can't play your Windows saves in Torchlight Mac.

They worked for me, though I only tried one of my 3 characters, they all appeared on the load screen intact with play times, only error message was the mod mismatch warning. The Mac saves go in the same relative place as the Windows version, "%appdata%\runic games\torchlight" being "~\Library\Application Support\runic games\torchlight".

huh, yes, you're right, it works! It's funny, on the TL forum their staff was saying you can't do this b/c of some binary incompatibilities. Obv. that's false!

yep, weird developer excuses at play! especially weird since my mods synced fine

Love it!

so i guess now that this out for mac im getting it huh?

just in time for nice weather and lots of work that needs to be done!

Sequel announced - NOT the MMO, but a new single player game with online co-op modes! New classes, more MMO-style customization, outdoor environs...

http://www.pcgamer.com/2010/08/04/torchlight-2-interview-with-runic-games/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejqCZw4Mua4

Not Torchlight, but another Diablo-alike, Path of Exile, is having a public stress test this weekend. Not many New Zealand-made games around, so I'm curious to see how it holds up.

it's out. get hype.

no hype for me. Gotta wait for the Mac version.

hey guys, you know what's a good game? 2012's Torchlight II.