Diablo III Editorials
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Diablo III is certainly stupid on many levels, but its calculating heart is anything but. It's computer chess writ at lightning pace and with countless bolt-on new pieces. That is to say, it's always and forever the same thing. You can change the look of the board and you can raise the challenge of the opponenents, but the game itself is reliably unchanging no matter how far through it you play, no matter how many times you play it. What can and likely will change is you your skill. And that finally brings me to Diablo III's true failing. You can't select the difficulty until you've completed the game. You're stuck on Normal.
Normal is a piece of piss. Normal is insultingly easy. Normal is, very often, incredibly tedious when tackled solo, because it can broadly be played on auto-pilot. Finish the game and you'll unlock a harder setting. I haven't done that yet (I'm only just approaching Act III) but between web reports and studying the skills, runes and weapons carefully it's very clear to me that the game intends to be highly tactical. Death is intended to be a constant and pressing danger, and keeping it a bay requires near-absolute understanding of what does what in combination with what and what tools will best amplify it.
Except, for the 20-odd hours playing directly through the campaign on Normal apparently takes, that simply isn't the case. I can't speak for the later chapters admittedly, but I'm some ten hours in now and I've died once. That was because I took a phone call while some goat-men were bothering me, and my muscular grip upon the left mouse button was briefly interrupted.
Especially coming off the back of Legend of Grimlock's unblinking cruelty, I crave the higher difficulty settings. I want to be challenged, I want to be making agonising choices about which runes to equip and which skills to quickslot. Goddamn it, I want to die. Beat me harder master, harder! But I'll have to finish the game on the numbing Normal first. I'm enjoying myself. I feel the desperate, urgent, constant craving for better loot, the attendant transitory sense of progress and the giggly delight whenever I use a new skill or briefly overpowered weapon for the first time.
Destructoid lists six things they think Torchlight II does better than Blizzard's title:
Skills! Attributes! Points!
Before I begin: I don't particularly mind the skill system that Diablo III has put in place. It definitely allows for way more experimentation; at least once you turn on Elective Mode. However, there's just some sort of magic that's taken away once leveling up is done automatically for you. Your freedom of choice is gone. Leveling up in Diablo III is much more hands-off than its predecessor, since you don't actually do anything as you gain experience.
Torchlight II satiates that need to drop points into skills and attributes. This offers way more specialization and fine tuning of your character as you progress, something that you just can't do in Blizzard's latest hellish jaunt. Oh, and no worries -- Torchlight II has a respec option, allowing you to undo all of your points and redistribute them how you like.
For example, in Diablo II, I created a throwing Barbarian. I absolutely love trying to make "gimped" character builds work out. Diablo III has a throwing skill for the Barbarian, but it's hard to specialize in it. I can use it more often (albeit limited by my Frenzy meter), but other than that I'm just like everyone else.
And finally, GameSpy thinks the game's success could herald a PC gaming renaissance, although I personally think the argument isn't particularly strong:
Those projects Tim Schafer and Brian Fargo pitched to publishers repeatedly without success, but found gamers willing to open their wallets on Kickstarter? I predict that in light of these undeniable numbers, those types of pitches will be welcomed, and greenlit like it was the 1990s. Adventure games, isometric RPGs, tactical shooters, strategy games, and more were considered outdated and unattractive to publishers mere months ago. Now? There's a powerful reason to give them another look.
For PC gamers, that means more of the franchises and genres we love will very likely see an unprecedented resurgence. I for one would happily open my wallet to play a new Bard's Tale, a new Titan Quest, a new Unreal Tournament, a new Warcraft (that's Warcraft, not World of Warcraft), a new Grim Fandango, a new System Shock, a new Star Wars: TIE Fighter, a new Syndicate (top-down perspective, thank you very much), and many more. PC gamers are serious about this, and we've proven that you can take that to the bank.
