Torchlight Franchise Archives - Page 2 of 2

Regularly Playing: June 2020 Edition

June 22, 2020 by Belghast

I had one of those moments this morning, where I suddenly realized that it had been a really long time since I have done one of these topics. The intent is to use this opportunity to actually lock in what I have been spending my time playing and update the sidebar of my blog. The goal has traditionally been to do one of these each month, but I regularly fall short of this. The last one of these that I did was during the beginning weeks of Blapril, and prior to that… it was August of 2019. As with many things in my life I have failed to keep track of that goal.

It has been a weird few months for the world, and I think we can all agree that maybe goals deserve a little bit of slack right now. So this morning I am going to do the thing and talk about the games I am actively playing, an the ones that are getting removed from the list. Given that several months have passed I expect a significant amount of shake up.

To Those Remaining

Hello Darkness, my old friend. Destiny and I have had a long tumultuous relationship since its original launch back in 2014, but it is never very far from my list of regularly played games. I had reached a point where I was deeply disillusioned about the seasonal system, and finding it really hard to muster the drive to grind out the content each time. Then recently I have found myself back in the orbit of this game and greatly enjoying my time. What changed? Well the Darkness has finally arrived and we are seeing some significant forward momentum in the story line. Additionally we have an event going on right now that is a farming bonanza that is a mix of Gambit and a Escalation Protocol. I am active and enjoying myself but time will tell how engaging the next expansion drop in September will be.

Diablo you are so rarely very far from this list, but admittedly right now I am playing a lot more of you on the Switch than I am on the PC. A new season will be dropping very shortly, so I am sure that will change at least for a brief burst of activity. This has replaced Dragalia Lost as the thing I often play before falling asleep, because the length of time it takes to do a round of bounties or grind a handful of rifts is about how long I have before sleep claims me. My greatest wish however is that my Switch account was actually connecting to my PC account allowing me to farm real progress from the handheld. Cross play should be the rule of the land, and I am hoping as we enter this next general that it and cross save become more of a fixture.

To the New and Returning

So recently Tam has been on a Guild Wars 2 kick and trying to upsell folks hard on playing it. As a result I have been back poking my head into the game and I still am not super happy with it. This is a title that I have had an extremely long and sordid past with, as we never could quite see eye to eye and still cannot. I’ve said it before, this is the first and only alpha program that I felt the need to actively resign from. It is doing something, and a lot of people love it… but it is a struggle for me to play it. I did however spend some time on the Revenant last night and had a significantly more enjoyable time than I do generally on my Warrior… but that seems like a mountain of horizontal progression that separates those two characters. This might get removed from the list as quickly as it was added, but for now I am throwing it on there.

I came back about a month or so ago and spend a significant amount of time grinding mounts and leveling the bard the rest of the way to 80. Now I find myself languishing a bit with not really being certain what I should be doing next. I leveled my three harvester classes to 70, with one of those being fishing that I leveled completely from scratch. The challenge I have with FFXIV is that I never seem to be able to find a rhythm of repeatable interactions. I show up… grind for awhile… burn out for awhile… and then return when more story drops to repeat the cycle. I wish I could find something more favorable to use as an engagement pattern, but I struggle for whatever reason to find it.

I gotta admit, this right now is the new hotness. This is the thing that I have probably poured more time in lately than anything else. I loved the original Phantasy Star Online back during the Dreamcast era, and previously went through the hell of playing on the Japanese servers. So of course when the game released to North America and on PC I would spend time playing it. As of right now my Ranger is sitting at 71 and I expect to keep grinding it up to 75. I spent a bunch of meseta to fix my previous transgressions with my mag and it is now a perfect 200 Ranged Power. Still deeply enjoying the game, but as I have said before it takes an awful lot to actually get through some of the nonsense systems. I need to sit down and push further into the story, but it is its own kind of slog. For now real happy to have Phantasy Star Online back in my life, and pretty much I am playing it and Destiny every evening at least for a bit.

I’ve been an alpha and beta tester of this game for quite some time, since it was originally called Torchlight Frontiers. However all of that time was covered by an NDA and as a result I have not really been able to talk about the game until recently when it shadow dropped on Steam Early Access. The game is very “early access” right now, but I am playing it intermittently while dealing the various bugs that are cropping up and the issues they seem to be having with the server infrastructure. I expect great things for this game, and expect it to be on the list for awhile as I play it every so often until it officially releases.

World of Warcraft makes the list, but is kinda hanging by a thread right now. I am not actively playing it at this very moment… but I VERY actively played it since the last time I wrote about the game. WoW will always be comfort gaming, and as we adjusted to our new lives in the pandemic, I clung pretty hard to this game. It doesn’t hurt that there is a massive XP buff going on and I could abuse it as a way of catching up a bunch of characters. I started this recent run only having a Warrior and a Demon Hunter at level 120 horde side… and I closed it with having my first Alliance 120 with my Paladin, along with another Paladin, a Warlock, a Hunter, a Druid, a Death Knight, and a Mage horde side at 120. However the grinding ground to a halt and I have not been actively logging in much lately. That said I know I am never very far away from logging back in to World of Warcraft.

To Those Departing

Animal Crossing New Horizons was effectively my first Animal Crossing game, having only ever played the mobile title before. It was an interesting ride, and one that helped me to get through those first few covid tinged days. However the grind reached a point where I decided I just didn’t want to keep up with it anymore. Were I to play this again I would absolutely join team cheater and start time travelling, because the engagement pattern of ACNH is such that after awhile I felt chained to it. I felt like I had to log in every day because I was wasting potential progress time. Were it the sort of thing that I could play hard for a weekend and then walk away for another couple of weeks, it would probably still be in the rotation. I realize this is exactly how you can play if you time jump, so I might dust this off and figure out how exactly that works at some point soon. For now however I am going to be honest and remove it from the list.

You were a really cool game Atom but I never quite got around to finishing you off, and I am not exactly sure why I added you to the list of games I was actively playing and not just the “ships passing in the night” thing that I tend to do for more single player experiences. In the time since adding it to the list, they have released a sequel so I figure at some point I will return and finish this off. For now however it is getting bumped from the list.

I can’t honestly tell you why I stopped playing, but it happened. I’ve heard there are a lot of issues going on with the game, and that in itself has kept me from returning. I had a lot of fun, but there were some issues that I had, namely that group play felt less valuable than single player play. The few times that Grace and I attempted to group up, it felt miserable. I hope they sort some of this out, and I am absolutely down with returning at some point in the future. However for now, it gets removed from the list.

Summary

During the time since the last post I have shifted further back into my MMORPG roots and away from the Single Player game sequence that I was on over the holidays. Destiny 2 and Phantasy Star Online 2 have more or less become my primary games, with occasional jaunts off into other titles. I will be curious to see if I find my roots again in Guild Wars 2 or not, but the external pressure isn’t exactly helping that desire. I have a few side projects that I am working on, and I hope to get to the stage of being able to unveil them soon… which might completely change the mix of titles. For now however we are back up to date, and hopefully I can get back in the habit of doing these as a monthly thing.

Torchlight 3 Early Access Thoughts

June 17, 2020 by Belghast

One of the interesting shadow drops to come out of last weekend was the release of Torchlight 3 to the Steam Early Access program. I’ve been a member of the Torchlight alpha program that was covered under an NDA since the game originally was Torchlight Frontiers back in November of 2018. I of course could not talk about my experiences publicly, because I was under NDA. I did however briefly describe the game to a close friend as “very free to play”, which was a bit of a damning indictment. The way the game was initially designed, it relied on creating a number of artificial barriers and segmenting the world off into frontiers with effectively their own progression path. The writing on the wall was that we would get new frontiers released through the course of the game allowing us to buy into these effectively independent areas and progress through new content on the same character.

This was not super well received by the community, but in truth I mostly focused on reporting technical bugs. Scan ahead to current times and the shift to branding the game “Torchlight III” and I once again got into the testing program. At the point in which I last played the game very much felt like Frontiers with a name change, but it seems while I have been gone the game has been rapidly changing into what is a really fun and enjoyable experience today. The core game is solid now and pending they can ever solve the infrastructure issues that are plaguing the early access release, it is going to be a really fun experience to hang out and play with your friends.

One of the things that I am blown away by is just how much better the game looks. There are subtle tweaks and polish applied that makes the entire experience feel better. I of course was under NDA and have no screenshots of my early characters to compare to, but the world feels more “real” as I explore it even though it is very much a cartoony setting. The robot now feels like a robot because it is sufficiently metallic feeling instead of what was a more flat shaded and plastic look. One of the challenges I had with this game is that it did not exactly have a class that I naturally graviated towards. I mostly play barbarian or paladin type characters in action RPGs and you are given a weird blend of classes including.

Forged – Robot that seems a bit tanky, but also has a gun in its belly and a heat/explosion mechanic that you are regularly balancing.
Dusk Mage – A class that alternates between darkness and light and represents the closest thing to a traditional caster.
Railmaster – This is the strangest pet class to ever exist in a game, because you carry a massive hammer and lay down track for your rail car loaded with weapons to travel along and attack things.
Sharpshooter – This class is a blend of the Demon Hunter and Necromancer from Diablo 3 and based on what I have seen of it is extremely potent as a result.

I’ve spent most of my time in game thusfar playing the Forged, because like I said it seems to be the tankiest of characters available to me. I would have loved to have something more akin to a sword and shield warrior type, but alas I am stuck with the odd designs presented. Torchlight has been known for having quirky class design, but I was able to more or less make the Destroyer in 1 and Engineer in 2 into the type of classes that I enjoy playing. For now I am trying to do that with the Forged, but I find it is far more effective to play this as a ranged class using the belly gun and heat mechanic to whittle down encounters.

The only negative of this entire experience is that the game itself is not quite ready for prime time. There are numerous issues that get in the way of actually playing right now. I’ve run into many situations where I could not zone into an area or teleport to either town or the player created fort. We tried to play with four players on Monday night and ran into issues where it took us multiple tries to get all of the players in the same zoned instance of a given map. Then there have often been issues just logging into the game in the first place. So for now, this is a really interesting experiment… but it is one that is not quite ready for prime time. If you are not already commited to this experience, maybe wait a bit for early access to feel not quite so “early”. Great strides have been made, and I have great faith that when this finally releases on all platforms it will be worthy of the Torchlight name. Right now however it is not for the impatient.

Kulve Farming

November 7, 2018 by Belghast

This morning we return you to your regularly scheduled posts, instead of whatever yesterday’s post happened to be. I started typing in Google Docs… and it just sort of kept going on and on. Yesterday was of course election day, and a lot of my staging a post ahead of time was due to the fact that I was trying to get in and out of the polls in the morning quickly. As far as gaming goes I am still very much all over the place. Right now as it stands Destiny 2 and Monster Hunter World tend to be the staples that I play at least some of every single night. Over in Monster Hunter this largely involves getting into a Kulve Taroth group and trying to farm weapons and tickets for the layered armor set. At this point I still have a ton of pieces left to collect but this is way more of a goal for me than collecting gear, given that I already have enough glimstones for a full set of crafted gear. I am simply missing the various elder dragon gems needed to craft most of the pieces. That however can be done after the event.

As far as weapons go… I have been nowhere near as lucky as I was on the Playstation 4 version. I have literal pages of blue weapons which are fine… and can provide a specific element if I need one. However the above image shows off some of the weapons I thought were generally worth keeping around for the long haul. Probably the weapon that interests me the most right now is the Taroth Blaze “Numb” because it has nonsense Affinity, plus a Defense bonus… plus 450 Paralysis… and from the look of it it might have some white sharpness if I equip handicraft items. The other item that I am probably going to wind up using is the Taroth Sword “Mire” just because there are occasionally fights where decent water elemental damage are useful. I think the Sleep daggers might be useful to play with given how fast you can build up elements with that weapon type. The Water damage Lance is decent, especially with the level three gem on it. One positive is it does give me a Charge blade to play with… which is not a weapon type I have crafted any or messed with on the PC.

Another game that I have been poking my head into is The Division, largely because I wanted to see what it looked like on the new graphics card. However I noticed that I am really damned close to level 30 which I believe is the level cap. I really want to see what the game becomes when I finally reach that plateau and somewhere along the line I picked up a handful of set pieces ready to be equipped at that level. For now I am casually roaming around and killing stuff out in the world, and I find that relaxing and enjoyable. Previously I was focused on TRYING to level… and getting frustrated that it was going so slowly. Now I am just sort of running amok in the town and not paying attention to anything past that. It seems to be working and I have been spending a few hours here and there on it.

With the Diablo kerfuffle, I have also been exploring some other ARPGs just in case Diablo 4 really isn’t in the cards… or at least to have options to tide me over until it releases in a few years. The most obvious game directly competing with the Diablo franchise is Path of Exile, but I have never really been able to get into it. Coming back however it does feel considerably better, apart from the fact that you are given showers of loot… most of it not useful… and nowhere near enough inventory space to ferry it back to town. As such the loot itself feels a little frustrating, as does combat at time since it seems to vacillate back and forth between “nothing is attacking me” and “an entire screen of things is overwhelming me”. Right now however the biggest problem with the game… happens to be its community. In trying to settle in I started looking up the answers to a handful of questions and for the most part the community answer seems to be some derivation of “go back to diablo noob”. That is not helpful, nor is it making people want to stick around for very long. It has really interesting mechanics but a much slower pace, which can be both positive and negative. The lack of a forward walk button without giving up an ability slot… is also a little frustrating.

The game that appears to be more my speed when it comes to methadone for Diablo 4… is Torchlight II which admittedly is an aging game at this point. However it is also serving to prepare me for Torchlight Frontiers which looks extremely interesting and fun. Hey Perfect World folks… if any of you happen to be reading my blog… hook me up with a key? I love the setting of Torchlight, for example last night I was going through this awesome clockwork dungeon and since I play an engineer it felt really cool to be busting up mechs with a giant hammer. This also has the shower you with loot, most of it useless problem… but at the very least you can keep sending your pet back to town to sell it. This is another high point for this game is it allows me to run around with a Ferret friend. Super glad I installed it and definitely enjoying poking around in it again… even though I am largely confused as to where I left off in the story the last time I was playing.