Torchlight II Previews
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Rock, Paper, Shotgun starts us off:
Torchlight II is huge.
The size isn't the biggest change; that would be the addition of overworld to the underworld. The first Torchlight had you going down and down and down from the main town, through increasingly nasty randomly generated levels, as well as visiting secondary dungeons through scrolls. This version has overland areas as its main arena, with dungeon mouths scattered throughout them. We're playing through one of the two overland areas in the first of the game's four acts (only one of which isn't set outside) and it's mentally large. Even Brock at one point says, worried, (I think you made this level too big. It's seriously big. There's a lot of South.)
There's a huge variety of terrain and associated abominations across it; though not much in the way of welcoming people, save for quest givers. Moreover, the key locations, like everything else are randomly located. Like Frozen Synapse's singleplayer, the developer merely specifies how many of each element should appear on the mapThis is why it took us 30 minutes to find the first objective, the bandit slavers' camp because even the developers couldn't know where it was.
And then ROFL COPTER shares their impressions, too:
We played as a berserker in most of our hands-on time with the game and found it to be a class that seems to really need to get up close and personal when fighting monsters. Our character was equipped with what appeared to be a cestus (a short hand axe dating back to the days of Roman gladiator battles), so we found ourselves charging right into the action and doing OK for the most part. We bashed the skeletons and ghouls of the crypt into piles of bones and picked up piles of gold, potions, and other items as loot. (Conveniently enough, Torchlight II will only display items onscreen that only your character can loot. You won't see the evenly distributed loot that fell onto the ground for your buddy, which means you'll never waste time arguing about out who needs that shiny new item more.) It was only when we encountered the dungeon's boss--an enormous, pudgy zombie that clambered out of a pit to greet us--that we even bothered to chug a healing potion. Then again, we were adventuring alongside Schaefer himself, who patiently babysat us through the demo, despite the fact that all of Torchlight II's dungeons are randomly generated, so there was no neatly premade press demo.
Torchlight II already looks like a very worthy successor, and because the game is planned for release this fall, you won't have to wait long for it. After the PC version is done, the team plans to create a Mac version of the game, after which it may then turn its attention toward an Xbox 360 version of the game, but that remains to be seen. "We're a very small company of only 30 people, and we're not gettin' any bigger," Schaefer explained. "So we can only do one thing at a time."
