Runic Games 2011 Fansite Event: Sp3tSnAz's Write-up

Webbstre's note: This is Sp3tSnAz's (also known as Mika) write-up on the visit to Runic Games and getting hands on with Torchlight 2. You can find the other coverage by clicking here!

Intro

Hey everyone, Sp3tSnAz here, allthough I went by my actual name at the community event, Mika. This whole article is actually being written on the plane on my touchpad as I fly back home, so excuse any gramatical errors as it's 1am and I've been up for quite some time

I was invited as Webbstre's helper on Runic Games Fansite and was going to meet up Webbstre for the first time, but as he couldn't go I instead met Jerich and Hawkn.

I flew in from Australia on the Saturday (first time in the US yay!) and left on Tuesday. I got to play the game at the community event on the Monday and also due to my flight times I came in on my own on the Tuesday (Flux was actually there that morning till midday) and stayed for most of the day just levelling one character on very hard, but more of that later.

I will talk a little bit about the event itself first then go onto my impressions of both the game itself, then more specific features.

So the event was on Monday morning and Telias (from 4fansites.de) and myself showed up at their offices around 10:30. We got a little tour, met Wonder, Marsh, Travis and the others first, then Max came in a little later. Their offices are pretty small compared to a lot of gaming companies. It's one floor, with about 30-40 people on it. There is a section of artists, programmers, level designers, Q.A., as well as Travis and Marsh. Everyone has lots of cool stuff on their desks including lots of Hellgate London toys. Hopefully there will be some soft of Torchlight merchendise at some point. Wonder let me take a video of their offices which Webbstre will upload onto our website hopefully today!

Runic set up their conference room for us with 5 PCs in there so we could all play. The first thing that we did was choose who would play what class then jumped into a multiplayer game. We chose LAN, one person hosted and got to choose the difficuty level that would apply to all of us (however you also got to choose your own difficulty which you would revert to if you quit the game and loaded up single player). They could also choose the level name (can't remember what other options they had).

Jerich will have a write up of his impressions of the engineer and Hawkn his impression of the early game outlander. I myself played the Ember mage in multiplayer so onto some of my impressions of the game and class.

Gameplay Impressions - Morning

First the actual game. The menu screen is way better now with a little animated screen from the game. (Actually even earlier, the launcher for the game itself is very new, looks kind of like the Blizzard launchers, and it will auto patch through that). There is an option to choose the sex of your character which shows what they will look like, just as in Torchlight. Then you choose a pet. The options for those now consist of 6, with a new Wolf Dog, Panther, Bulldog, Lizard thing, Hawk (with it's screech turned up way too high!), Ferret and one other one I can't recall at this time. There will likely be more later though.

The settings menu is similar to TL, however there are now options to turn down the particle effect (more on reasons for this later) as well as an option to adjust the UI scale (Which will also be much easier to mod this time around apparently).

The start of the game is a little fenced off town area (very small), however as soon as you head out you hit quite a few open areas. The first area is fairly grassy, with a crypt style dungeon later similar to the ones in TL, followed by a large grassy area again and then areas that I can't talk about.

Playing with 5 people was very hectic, especially since most of us hadn't played the game before. There is a LOT of particles on screen and what didn't help was the ability to target both players and their pets. This made shooting into a mob of monsters really difficult at times as you kept clicking on someone friendly instead. This will be fixed in the later version according to Travis. There is also a lot of player collisions (even it town) which sometimes make it hard when trying to buy something from a vendor when someone is in front of you. (This is also still being looked at and may be changed if at least in town).

The level variety is much greater, even in areas that used to be similar to TL, there are now a lot more unique tile sets within them, they look a lot sharper, the multi level dungeons look really great and you can often see things in the distance below you in great detail (much better than we've seen previously). There are still a few issues with this where the pet can sometimes fall off the edge. There are also issues in some dungeons where the max zoom level is pre set so everything looks a bit too big. Another issue in some dungeons is that the cavern roofs sometimes obstruct your characters and create too much shadow. Most of these things are still being looked at though and it's just the build issue (this build was actually finished especially for us at 10pm on the night before we came).

The level balance with multiple people is still being worked on as sometimes it seemed fairly easy. There was also so many particles on screen at times that it was hard to see if you were actually doing damage to anything or everyone else was. Overall it felt really solid thought and there were no dropouts on LAN which was great to see.

The embermage was a fairly decent class which I initially thought might be my favourite. The issue is the limited content we had which made it hard to judge late game content. On top of this none of the characters had their highest level skills shown to us, and the embermage especially didn't really have any skills past level 14. I went with a lightning tree, pumping all my points into focus which really boosted my damange and mana. The initial skill was pretty fun, cast a few little lightning bolts which targeted multiple enemies. Did great damage to most monsters and was fun to use with lots of people on the screen. The character was definitely a glass cannon as getting near monsters destroyed me. The issue was the second lightning skill which was basically a large lightning bolt that came from right above your character and then did a small radius damage around you. This made you need to be way too close to the various enemies which basically made the whole glass cannon aspect not work too well. I watched Hawkn play the fire skill tree and that seemed to be much better. My understanding from Travis is that they are still working on many of the skills and how they are arranged in the trees which is a positive.

We played pretty quickly and did only the main sort of quests and dungeons. By the time we got to the final boss wich we were allowed to do (about 1/3 of the way through act 1) we were all around level 10 fighting level 14-15 content. Solo it would be very difficult, however with 5 of us it became quite easy. We defeated the boss quite quickly because of this (and also as it was only normal difficulty).

Some more things about multiplayer I guess is in order. If anyone cast a town portal (and you did too), you would only see one in town, but clicking on it brought up a list of all the portals in your party and you could go to them. If you went to any waypoint, a portrait of your party characters popped up and clicking on one would directly take you to that character. Levels reset within 6 minutes, so even if you miss a quest with your friends, if you wait a little while you can still do it (it technically lets you even do it straight away if you didn't go into say a dungeon with them and just went in after every one of them walked out). In solo though, it should be around 6 minutes so no more remaking games to do magic runs! Yay!

The initial town you come across hasn't got a healer in it, but since we all suggested it, on Tuesday Travis had already coded it so you would heal and get all your mana back automatically just by entering the town.

Gold drops were still a bit limited. Potions were okay on healing, but less mana drops. The item drops in general have been re-balanced with a lot less items dropping (especially pointless whites). There are also a lot more unique, uniques, which now actually feel useful and powerful. This will be the aim for the end game to have those as the best items

Enchanting has been changed (you first have to find your initial enchanter for act 1 in the wilderness which we couldn't yet do), then you can enchant a maximum of 3 times with a random positive improvement, then you could reset it where you would ONLY lose the enchanted attributes you gave it and you could start enchanting again.

Chatting with Travis at lunch also revealed that they took quite a few good ideas from the X-Box version. For example there are now 2 hotkeys for using the best potion you have in your inventory (based on the amount of health or mana you need) which means not having to really even hold any potions on your belt anymore! Yay! This works really well in practice. A great thing is that these hotkeys can be remapped which makes it that much more convenient (as you can put them onto say 1 and 2 which many people use for potions anyway). They also took a lot of optimisation lessons from the platform. Don't worry by the way, they aren't consolising the game, they are merely taking features that worked quite well on it and adapting it and further improving it for a PC environment.

Some more info on the classes, there is now a charge system for all of them where by damaging more monsters does different bonuses. I didn't take note of the embermage ones, but I did see the Berserker and Outlander. Berseker levels up his bar by hitting enemies, then once full it makes him go berserk which makes him be way faster and do way more damage for about 10 seconds. The outlander on the other hand always had a zero bar, which would only go up when he was hitting enemies within a few seconds of each other then drain back when not hitting any. His one pumped up attack speed, crit chance and a few other things to a max of 10% on each stat.

Some information on the monsters would probably be interesting to you guys so I'll mention as much as I can recall. Mainly there is a lot more variety in them with much better AI. Monsters now try and swarm you, there are packs of monsters of different types (some ranged, some fast, some high damage) which try to attack you at the same time from their ideal locations which makes dealing with them a lot more difficult. The champions are much tougher now with stats that are quite interesting. There are some really hard ones like teleport, but also one called divide where the monster divides into 2 smaller version of itself the first time you kill it. This is especially annoying if it has another stat like raise dead, as each of the 2 new copies get that too and things can get really hectic really quickly!

Gameplay Impressions - Afternoon

Once we finished all that content we all got taken out to lunch then came back to do a podcast with the dev team. This can be heard on the official website and should cover quite a lot of information (some of which I have also summaried above).

We then got to play more of the game until dinner. This time however we all decided to play single player and I personally switched to the outlander class. I decided to try Very Hard mode, which apparently hasn't been tested too much, and others quickly followed trying hard mode too.

What can I say about it other than damn... It's a LOT harder than Torchlight 1 was. You could probably compare the new Hard mode to the old Very Hard. The new Very Hard mode really likes to punish you. Travis mentioned multiple times that the main thing they didn't want to do is just pump the monster health up and basically make you take longer to kill them. The monsters now just seem to spawn in larger groups, do a lot more damage to you (which requires a lot more kiting), possibly have additional stats and just in general are higher level. This makes some encounters really difficult.

My impressions of it with the outlander were okay at the start because of the ranged attacks, but as I went further on and didn't find a better ranged weapon it started to get really difficult. A lot of the faster monsters were really hard to kite and killed me withing a couple of hits and I couldn't damage them fast enough. I watched Jerich play a melee berseker which looked even more difficult, as he was always in close proximity to the monsters, getting killed in a few hits.

In general the outlander plays really well and has a variety of skill trees for both ranged skills, some magic and also the chance to summon monsters on hit. Travis emphasised that they want all stats to be useful to all characters this time around, so I guess the skill tree reflects that also. The build I went with had a few passives to boost my range and also my damage, a bolt that split into multiple parts upon hitting the enemies as well as a summon zombie after killing them spell. I had issues with this one on very hard as there was a level 21 one I wanted (I got to a max of 18) which was a chance to cast on any range kill.

The one I could get at level 6 or so was a poison breath spell with a very short range that also could cast a zombie, but only if killed with the spell. The zombies didn't last for long enough and also in order to cast the spell you had to be quite close to the action, which a glass cannon build like the outlander just isn't made for on Very Hard mode. Travis did say that the skill works better in normal especially around lots of little monsters, however they would likely rebalance it too as they hadn't really tested Very Hard mode that much.

Just before we went to dinner I was about half way though exploring the first large open area and ran across a really fast mob pack with a champion which took me a good 20 minutes to kill. Eventually I had no cash for potions, sold some of my items I was wearing for a better bow, and eventually led the monsters to a waypoint where I just kept dying, and spawning back in town to just come right back without using potions as it got way too expensive.

We then got taken out to dinner, after which Jerich left to drive home for the night. Hawkn left the next morning as did Telias. Flux however cameback the morning after from about 10 till midday. He interviewed Travis for their podcast and played a bit so hopefully there will be some additional write ups on their website for us to link to. As my flight was booked for 7pm that night, I also decided to come in, but I got there around midday and stayed until 4pm with 1 hour for lunch in the middle. I was thinking of doing some interviews, but decided instead that it would be more beneficial (and fun for me!) to keep playing the game as the PCs were still all set up there.

Gameplay Impressions - Day 2

I jumped straight back into my outlander so I can add further comments about him.

My first issue was that loading still takes you to the exact same save state as you left the game. As I left mine in a hurry the night before it was in the middle of a champion pack and luckily I was watching the screen so I didn't die as the game isn't even paused when it loads. This might make it a bit hard on the hardcore characters. Secondly as I was exploring every single area and corner of the map, I was actually outpacing the monsters by about 4 levels in the open area and by about 1-2 in the dungeons. It was still pretty hard though with the base levelled skills. My main turning point was finding a unique bow which had fairly large damage (about 20 more than my previous weapon) and also knockback (which made boss fights really easy). Once I got this I basically did not die anymore and killed most things very quickly.

This tells me a few things. Uniques are actually very good. A lot of classes are still a bit too weapon dependant. The outlander starting skills need a bit of a boost. I finished all the content we did the previous night in multiplayer and was about level 15 this time instead of 10 by doing every little thing. The end boss of that section was also a bit easy to exploit as he had a moat near him which you got taken to if you died, you could then just ranged attack him over it. We pointed this out to Travis who said he should be able to fix it pretty easily.

I actually had about another hour after that where I played the game further, however these are areas that we are not allowed to talk about so I'll do the mean thing of mentioning how awesome they are then not talking about them!

Conclusion

This probably covers most of my play experience and I think the best thing to do if you haven't already is listen to the podcast as that answers quite a few of the questions the forum goers had which we tried to ask. Also read Hawkn's and Jerich's reports as those will be very thorough I'm sure.

I will give some conclusions of the game below as a little summary as I have a few things to add which don't really fit anywhere else!

Bugs wise, I was honestly expecting a lot more going into it, especially on a build that was still edited the night before. I was very pleasantly surprised though as the game didn't really have any major bugs that any of us noticed (at least in the sections that we were allowed to play). The worst I had was falling through the scenery once down a hill, but I could just slowly walk back up it and into the normal scenery.

There are still a number of things I think need to be improved before shipping. The minimap is a bit punishing on the new user and needs more directions. There needs to be quite a bit of balance done on lower level skills. Particles need to be worked on somehow (Webbstre actually had a great suggestion on Skype, which is potentially hard to code, but have the game auto drop it for you based on the number of players in the game). The balance of the various game modes needs a little bit of working, especially because it'll be annoying if only 1-2 builds are viable on Hardcore Very Hard mode. From what we were told the later acts need to be polished off a little more than the earlier ones, which obviously means more work. Before you ask, no there was no release date, it will be once the game is done.

The story seemed more polished and talking to various characters showed off a lot more interesting text, all of the ones I saw being voiced, which adds quite a bit of additional content into the game for those that are interested in the lore. There is a lot of references to the previous game and also some cool easter eggs.

While we know that there will be cinematics in the game we weren't shown any, so can't really comment on that, however the level transitions and loading screens all have cool new concept art with quite a few different pieces being randomly rotated through which is quite cool. I was talking to one of the artists who said that from even the concept art direction they had a lot more variety and polish which is great to hear.

On the editor, I actually could have been shown it, but I wasn't really the best person for it as I never did any modding in the game so I wouldn't know what features are new or not. There is a little exclusive in our office video which your should watch, which shows a new "paint brush" mode where you can basically paint with a mouse and whatever you selected will spawn where you paint (eg painting a row of trees). This makes making new levels much easier so hopefully we see a lot more cool level mods.

My final conclusion of the game is that it's heaps better than Torchlight 1. This actually feels like a proper finished game now instead of what felt more like an indie release with the first one. There still needs to be a bit of polish and balancing added into the game, but even now, the first section that we played looks like it could be shipped as is because it doesn't really have that many issues.

Multiplayer is great fun and makes you really want to keep playing the game. It's hard to imagine the game now without it. The music is again amazing (I'm biased as I really like Matt Uelmen's music). A lot of it sounds quite like Diablo 2 did (one level I was playing, I could have sworn had music that sounded just like Act 3 of D2. There was some music later on though which had a lot more electric guitars and sounded very different and much cooler I think.

As a very final impression (yes I know I keep saying this!) I want to quickly mention the staff at Runic Games. I was suprised by how welcoming they all were and was greatly suprirsed at how genuinely interested they were in our opinions in the game. At one point near the start there was close to 15 of them gathered in the one room watching us play the game for the first time. They were open to criticism and wrote down a lot of the suggestions on the board (which I actually saw them applying and crossing off the board one by one when I came in on Tuesday).

While I have always had this stance that it's going to be hard for any ARPG to compete with the elephant in the room (D3), I think that playing the game has convinced me that a lot more people than I originally thought will buy both games and play them for different reasons at different times. I think they could quite easily work side by side, especially with the great price that TL2 offers.

I again thank Runic on behalf on RGF for inviting us out there and I hope they got at least something out of it with our impressions and suggestions. Hopefully you fans reading this found the write up above somewhat useful and not too rambly. Let me know if you have any further questions in our forums and I will try and answer as many as I can.