Diablo III is Blatantly Better Than Torchlight II

In what has to be the most chuckle-worthy article I’ve read on Destructoid to date, Jim Sterling tells us why he believes that “Diablo III is blatantly better than Torchlight II”. Cue the thick, thick sarcasm:

With Diablo III, you don’t have to worry about allocating skill points, creating your own characters, or tailoring a play style to suit your talents. All of that has been taken care of for you, allowing you more time to actually play the game rather than slave over talent trees and menus.

It’s a streamlined and elegant approach to gaming. First of all, leveling up works out all those fiddly stats for you, upgrading your character as it sees fit. Secondly, you only ever need to find loot with your character’s primary stat and/or Vitality, allowing you to quickly select the right tools for the job and play eBay with the rest of it. Thirdly, the game’s higher difficulty levels bottleneck you into one particular playstyle so you eventually stop wasting time experimenting with garbage. The game even hides the option to fully customize your character’s abilities in a sub-menu, removing the easy temptation to do anything other than just have fun!

Runic Games isn’t about fun. Runic Games would rather force you to agonize over skill point allocation and make tough choices about how you want to play. It takes its overwhelmingly exhausting choices so far that you even have to choose a hair color for your character! Hair colors! Sorry, but in the real world, we’re stuck with the hair color we’re born with and we have to all live with it! We neither get to, nor want to, start messing around with what The Lord Jesus Christ in Heaven gave us at birth.

…

Why the Hell are people bitching about there being no LAN play in Diablo III? Do you know when people played games via LAN? 1963, probably! Diablo III doesn’t need LAN play because it is on the cutting edge of the technological wave, surfing into tomorrow on a board made of science and wearing the Bermuda shorts of discovery. Diablo III doesn’t support LAN because it doesn’t need to support LAN.

What the Hell are you thinking, Torchlight II? Yeah, sure, yeah, let’s all play Torchlight II locally like a couple of geekatrons from the History Channel. While we’re at it, why not play on our zoetropes and spin a hula hoop across the street with a fucking stick? Oh hey, Runic Games, do you guys need your pills and your wheelchairs, you bunch of stupid granddads?

Face facts, readers. Nobody plays LAN anymore. No games have supported LAN since about 1992. Torchlight II is a crusty old fart compared to the sleek and polished Diablo III, which uses real Internet like a real game.

You know, I thought Torchlight II would be in real trouble if it launched after Diablo III. But I doubt I’m the only one who shelved D3 about halfway through Inferno and is currently waiting to throw money at Torchlight II when it’s finally released. It’s almost as if Runic Games knew something we didn’t months ago.