Over the last two weeks I’ve been moving. Really, I moved in one day. But my internet is yet to follow me. And since the bulk of my gaming is done via
Steam, along with the bulk of my job, communication and socialization, it’s
been kind of a weird week for me. But
gaming, as always, is there: a pressure release, a series of quiet moments
filled with sound and fury and signifying nothing. This world without the internet has kept me
from two separate gaming events with friends at this point, and made communicating with my students
more difficult than I’d like. I have
trouble accessing the systems that I’ve used to keep my life in order, organize
my writing and keep my classes on track.
It’s been kind of a nightmare, having to commute forty five
minutes or walk to a coffee shop and drop several dollars every time I want to
get a little work done, but it’s disciplined me in certain ways. I’ve been sewing books for a literary project
recently, I’ve been scheduling my writing time very strictly now that the lens
of internet is not present to obscure my life, and I’ve been watching a lot
less porn, since I’ve had to tap into my emergency porn stash, which is limited
and could wear out quite quickly.
Oh, I’ve also been playing Torchlight 2. Lots of Torchlight 2.
And on that note I’ve got to say that I am very glad that I
don’t have to review games for a living.
Specifically games like Torchlight 2.
I’m glad that I can do this fappery that I do without interruption or intrusion
from “the industry.” I’m glad that I
don’t have to think of this spectacular
game as a product, which it most certainly is, because to do so is to belittle
it as both an experience and an artistic construction. Because Torchlight 2, quality as it is, is far,
far more interesting as a piece of art to me than it is as a product.
What the fuck do I mean by that?
Consider another form of commoditized art: the detective
novel. Detective novels and stories were
and still are churned out ad infinity.
They’re fun, sure, but most of them are bad while being fun. They’re guilty pleasures, and part of
enjoying them is getting past or learning to embrace the guilt that comes with
reading sentences dripping with gusto, machismo and bluster. Part of learning to love them is learning to love
the terrible dialogue, the Mary Sue/Larry Stu protagonists and the lean plots
where every character is somehow involved in the mystery: even the ones who
really shouldn’t be.
Daschle Hammett is perhaps the best example of this
terrible, un-self aware mystery novel.
Within his books there are protagonists who unironically champion the
superiority of a white authority structure in a world of crime filled with
minorities before chastely dismissing the come-ons of the various female
characters in the book, most of whom are on the take, or else far too innocent
for the stalwart detective. But from
Hammett’s shit writing, terrible dialogue and poorly plotted stories emerged
Raymond Chandler, a genius of sorts who took the genre of the mystery novel to
new heights by adding to it elements of veracity, verisimilitude and
self-awareness. His protagonists got
beaten up. They went on dead leads. They found that the authorities were, more
often than not, involved in the crime at work.
They were, for the most part, profoundly flawed people living in a
flawed world, occasionally stopping to point out its flaws.
Chandler knew what mystery novels could do and, in turn,
knew where they fell short. By
incorporating this knowledge into his construction of novels he made novels
that not only worked better as mystery novels, but also promoted the growth of
the form and literature as a whole.
Torchlight 2 is the same thing, but in this case let’s
replace “mystery novel” with “hack and slash top down games.”
Diablo, of course, then takes on the role of Hammett. Diablo is a big name, big game full of stupid
plot points, blustering characters, shitty dialogue, laughable attempts at
story and character development and a world where only the most clueless
players could ever feel a sense of being or belonging. It’s a righteous, dramatic fiction filled
with loot, monsters and clicks. It
doesn’t need to be more, but it doesn’t seem to know that. Developers spend staggering amounts of money
on cutscenes. They create characters who, at best, occasionally appear in play
(and never impact it) who tell you why you’re supposed to go to the next
whatever whenever however. These moments
are almost entirely unnecessary, sure, but Diablo games take themselves so
seriously (Cow levels aside) that to omit them is to admit for a moment that
Diablo is a bad game, which it is.
It’s a lovably bad game, however, which is such an important
distinction.
Torchlight 2 is also a lovingly bad game. It’s a hack and slash genre entry through and
through, ripping many of its best qualities straight off Diablo (and Diablo 2,
right down to the outdoor environments that make up the bulk of the game’s environs). It doesn’t make any pretensions
to the contrary, casting itself in a world filled with generic fantasy
characters occasionally punctuated by an inside joke or a self-aware
aside. And, this is really important, it
doesn’t take itself seriously at all.
Torchlight 2 is like Diablo if someone ripped all of the
terrible story parts out of Diablo. It’s
Diablo with just the Diablo play in it, where the focus really is just on the
gear and the things you can do with it.
The cutscenes have only the barest elements of voice acting within them,
and they’re mostly there to just let you know that you’re changing locations
again. The NPCs that give you quests
barely talk to you, and if you’d like to you can skip their dialogue
completely without missing anything important. In fact, the game sometimes
encourages you to do so by pressing you onward with green checkmarks and
presenting you with quests in the middle of combat areas and encounters. The story can go in one ear and out the other without interruption. I'm level 41 now and I'm not entirely sure what the plot is.
Even the act of acquiring a quest is decoupled from the
“town” as Diablo defines it. Towns are
recast as places where you have to go to drop off loot sometimes when you’re not
up for letting your pet do it for you.
They’re places where the main story gets advanced and where you can
tinker with your items. But they’re not
places where story happens, and indeed even as story happens within and without
towns, it’s so ancillary to the play that it’s absurd. Because the play really is what Torchlight is
concerned with: the delightfully colorful and absurd play.
And there’s a lot of it.
Skills upon skills upon skills you can’t hope to use all of. Skills that you can tinker with to your
heart’s content, skills that are almost always useful in a given scenario, but
only if you understand how to use them.
Testing them out is encouraged by a “take back one of your last three
skill points” respect system, which seems like it’s essentially made for people
who test skills and decide they’re not for them.
Of course, after those three skills, it’s all cemented. And stat points? Once they’re spent, they’re spent
forever. That means that the choices you
make are meaningful, and, honestly, you’re going to be bombarded with a lot of
choices that aren’t worth picking up based on your style of play. But that style of play is wonderful,
customizable, and the real focus of the game.
See, in Diablo, your clickfest is mostly the same regardless
of who you’re playing. You’re gonna be
clicking uncontrollably and dumping mana into enemies to try and mow them
down. There’s more strategy to it than
that, sure, but the fundamental mechanisms of play are inelastic.
Not so in Torchlight 2.
Torchlight 2 introduces a combo system that impacts each
character differently and plays off of each character’s skills
differently. If you want to play a
careful, calm defensive engineer you’ll be spending your charges in a way very
similar to the way a high damage hack and slash and smash berserker will spend
his charges to get to frenzy, but you’ll be working towards totally different
ends and playing the game in totally different ways. You’ll be in distinct roles that require
distinct kinds of attention. And you
won’t have to deal with long, overwrought cutscenes (with exception to
Torchlight 2’s woefully lengthy introductory cutscene which is, despite its
length, good fun to watch) or characters asking you
to stay a while and listen. They’ll want
to get you the fuck out of there and back into the wilderness so you can bash
some baddies, which you’ll do in environments that really do possess distinct
personalities and art styles, more so than any other hack and slasher I’ve
played. Even Diablo 2’s environs seem blasé
compared to the shifting locales Torchlight 2 guides you through, and the
enemies, despite very similar behavioral patterns, are actually pretty
distinct. The brutal giants you'll fight in
fungus caves in the desert are not the brutal giants you'll fight in troll forests in
the Hansel and Gretel woods, even though they’ve ostensibly got the same role.
This nuance is really what sets Torchlight 2 aside from
other titles, because it allows each class to have a distinct flavor while
fulfilling a general role of tank, DPS, or support. And there's tremendous enmeshing between these roles. It’ll be pretty easy to blend
your engineer DPS with a tank to make a tough engineer who can charge up and
pop a shield that allows him to endure hostile conditions at will. It’ll also be pretty easy to make your
supportive engineer a fast moving whoopass factory with a cannon in hand and
his boots screaming along the terrain using a very similar cross-section of
skills.
All of this draws off of a fundamental awareness within
Torchlight 2’s design aesthetic: an awareness of both the draw and
functionality of a hack and slash lootfest.
Paired with a magic item system which is far more generous with the need
to identify artifacts (in that it rarely asks you to) and a streamlined pet
system that allows you to get gold for your loot without ever returning to
town, there’s just a lot going on that is both specific to the genre and
revolutionary in recognition of the genre’s shortcomings. It is forgiving and punishing, it is generous
and parsimonious. It encourages you to
thoroughly explore one class and to have multiple playthroughs with each of
them.
It is, in a sense, an act of revolution within genre, a
beautiful conceit that we all too often do not acknowledge.
It’s also well worth the price of admission. I’d say that if I was writing a review which,
of course, I’m not.
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