Torchlight II Preview

Gaming Lives seems to have very high hopes for Torchlight II as, after a hands-on session with the game in Cologne, at GamesCom, they argue that the title is “set to raise the bar for the genre entirely”. Here’s a snippet:

Gone is the linear feel, replaced now with a much more open world for you to explore, meaning that the random generated system is no longer constrained to the dungeons, but will also be effecting the wilderness as well. While traversing the randomly generated worlds you don’t just find yourself moving around above ground, but you’ll still have ample opportunity to take in a bit of sightseeing within the recesses of the game’s many styles of dungeon, which themselves have seen an improvement within a number of areas. Not only do they also benefit from a better graphical palette but there are also little gameplay touches that bring about the extra layer of depth that was sometimes previously lacking; something as simple as monsters spawning in a variety of ways, such as spiders dropping from the ceiling or skeletons clambering out from within a hole being just two examples.

It’s not just the dungeons that have had a bit of a gameplay tweak but systems such as boss monsters have also been improved upon. Bosses themselves now have far more variety, with many resulting in specific tactics being needed to defeat them. The one I encountered was much like your standard Ogre but, while it may not have been the fastest enemy you’ll encounter, it made up for it through the small, mushroom-like creatures that it spawned, as if someone had just placed a couple of batteries within a Portobello mushroom.

Confirmation was also given regarding the modding tools that are due to ship with the game, said to be a lot more powerful and easier to use, which should result in the creation of some terrific user-generated content. If you don’t like the multiplayer limit then you’ll have the ability to mod it out, replacing it with a figure of your choosing. Do you have thirty friends that all play? If that’s the case then it would be entirely possible to create a multiplayer mode that allowed for everyone to play with each other.