Torchlight 2

Playtime: 8.8 Hours

Originally started with an Outlander with a pretty typical gun build - similar to my Torchlight 1 Vanquisher character, but that got boring pretty quickly. Ended up rolling a 2H Engineer build which was more entertaining, though that eventually got really boring as well for other reasons which I go into below. I stopped part way into Act 2, just after defeating the Manticore - from what I know, this probably translates to roughly 35-40% of the game overall.

By all means, I don't think Torchlight 2 is a bad game at all; most of the complaints that I have with this game would also probably apply to many other ARPGs equally so it really was mostly a matter of chance that I decided to burn myself out on this one. I've played a few ARPGs in the past, including the original Torchlight, but for some reason I've found it very difficult to get into this game. It's worth noting that the 8.8 hour playtime doesn't just represent the progress I've made on my latest character that actually made it reasonably far into the game. My first attempt in the mid-2010s (for all of around 50 minutes) apparently killed my interest for almost 10 years, and the second attempt as an Outlander made it about an hour or two in before I got tired of playing a gun-based class again.

I also want to point out that this game is an example of a relatively simple, but very solid entry into the genre mechanically. Graphics have a fairly distinct style similar to the first Torchlight, and the game plays very smoothly, with responsive controls and clean animations. As an older and more basic game, I feel like there are numerous aspects of the design that aren't balanced for particular metas or in-game economies that are commonly seen in more modern ARPGs, which could be construed as a positive in a sense. With less balancing towards specific synergies, I get less of a feeling that I need to plan my build entirely in advance - even given the fact that I never even plan to play into the postgame to finish the optimizations.

While I can't say the game is really bad with any specific detail, there are just too many little things that bothered me with the gameplay that made me lost interest pretty quickly. My main issue was that the simplicity and "brainlessness" of the ARPG gameplay just felt too boring. It always feels like there is a severe lack of variety in what you're doing to actually control your character; just drag your character towards enemy mobs and spam your one or two main attacking skills until everything is dead, then repeat for 15-20 hours until you eventually win. While that is a gross oversimplification, the moment-to-moment gameplay isn't very compelling. ARPGs lack most of the strategic thinking required in many other RPG subgenres, but also don't require the reflexes and execution of shooters and action games. What's left is a bastard child of a genre built on a mind-numbing core gameplay loop, supplemented with occasional loot drops and level ups that make you feel like you're progressing meaningfully, when in reality the entire game still just involves doing the same thing over and over again. And unlike a grindy game like OSRS, there's never an end or a point to any of it - the grind purely leads to more boring grinding, never enabling more interesting or complex gameplay. That's not just a problem with TL2 simply because it's old and relatively barebones - most modern ARPGs all function this exact same way, with the endgame devolving into a never-ending loop of boring grinding rather than any actual challenging gameplay.

My experience with my TL2 Engineer character had a number of other issues I noticed, which may be less universal to ARPGs and more characteristic of this game. For one, loot quality was absolutely horrendous; you get tons of items that have nothing to do with your skills which clogs your inventory up incredibly quickly, and there is a serious lack of items actually worth using. Rather than being able to build around the items you find, I ended up basically just putting whatever random crap on because I never got anything that would make an actual difference. Items having either level or stat requirements is cool, but the stat requirements are often high enough and specific enough that I was never actually able to take advantage of them despite having a pretty specialized build. A second issue is in the skills - each class has a plurality of skills, but your character only gets one per level (and one per fame level), and each skill has FIFTEEN levels, which feels like some serious bloat for how incremental individual ranks are. Some passive skills are far too important to ignore, so realistically a character build can only barely support a few key active skills in a run up until the postgame. Unlike Diablo 3, skills don't have interesting mutations to change your playstyle, and unlike PoE there are no "interesting" passives for the same purpose (Chaos Inoculation is one that I always remember). The simple, bare-bones gameplay isn't necessarily bad from a design perspective, especially when noting that this was developed by a small studio, but it certainly didn't help alleviate the dullness of the game.

Despite my ranting, I don't think I can say that TL2 is a bad game, only that it's definitely not for me (as with most ARPGs). I'm not sure if I'll keep trying ARPGs in the future - I've attempted and failed this one 3 times now, and haven't had much interest in any others since PoE's Beta & initial release. It just doesn't fill a niche in my gameplay interests - if I wanted something more active and direct, I have a huge array of fantastic shooters and action games to run, and if I wanted a slower, more methodical experience I have no shortage of RPGs and strategy games to complete too. Even for games to mindlessly grind with something more interesting in the background, other games like OSRS, truck sims, or TF2 jumping all provide greater entertainment than these, so ARPGs will be very few and far between in my log. Ah well.