Torchlight 1 is better than Diablo 3 & 4

pls excuse me, i havent written anything in so long. lemme uhhh... brush the dust off a bit.

kk, let's see... im gonna set this image on the side here...

that should be ok. kk. so Torchlight 1 is a good game. it's better than Diablo 3 and 4. it might even POSSIBLY be better than Diablo 2. It's certainly better than the D2 remake.

allow me to explain.

Torchlight is pleasant-looking and comfy. that's all. that's my entire argument.

all of these games play the same. Minus Diablo 1 of course, which is somewhat unique. I'm sure there's games like it too though, but you get it. Path of Exile, Grim Dawn, all of these games are exactly the same.

The idea a selling point of Diablo IV having "larger skill trees" is baffling. What does that even mean? Really, what does "different builds" actually translate to in gameplay? You're just casting differently-colored spells at things that do damage in different ways. The end-goal is always "kill the enemy", so what exactly-- and by the way, I understand that this applies to basically all games, but it's especially uhhhh... "samey" in a game like Diablo. Think about the state of first-person shooters. I don't even like them, generally, you know I'm That Kind of Guy who only plays S.T.A.L.K.E.R., and I know they've come a long way. Well, kind of. They might have stagnated over the last decade or so, but they at least *came* a long way from say, Doom 1 to uhh... Crysis. They play vastly differently. What has Diablo 4 added to Diablo 3? An "open world"? 1- Cringe, but also 2- that doesn't change how you play the game. And what did Diablo 3 even add to Diablo 2? Let me get back to the point I was making, sorry: "varied builds" is a meme. When you aggro enemies, they start approaching you to attack you, and you have to kill them before they kill you. It's always been this way. Sure, you've got a few different ways of doing it. Something like ice to freeze them in their tracks, poison to slowly sap their health, combining them both at once is generally better. Maybe you have minions, maybe you can temporarily turn enemies against each other. But generally they're always moving towards you, and you're always trying to stop them, and it's always taking place on a screen where you can see your character, the enemy, and a little bit of space around you and nothing else. The enemies vary in strengths and weaknesses and you pretty much never know what you're going to be fighting next, so your precious elaborate build is never going to be perfectly-optimal from one encounter to the next. So if it's not, why am I supposed to care so much about it? Waow, I created a character that freezes enemies and then I go in with my whirly-twirly attack and it knocks them back and then i freeze them again it's so great. oh now I'm fighting ice enemies. well at least I can respec, I guess. Waow.

an old friend told me he was going to buy Diablo 4 and I just couldn't believe it. $70 for what? the same game we've been playing our entire lives? Why?

when we were little kids, we played Diablo 1 and 2. We had the big fat Diablo 2 Prima strategy guide. We called it the Nerd Bible. We played those games for years.

When I was older and Diablo 3 was revealed to be online-only, I had just started getting into my "No DRM" phase, which I am still in and will remain in for the rest of my life. So I was very unhappy about that. But I got it anyway to play with my classmates.

I carried hard as a wizard, and it was fun. But was it more fun than Diablo 2? Not really--it was because I was playing with a bunch of friends, but it was basically the same game. In fact at least on release, the loot/gold system was atrocious. The whole experience *without* friends was so boring that when we stopped playing it after we beat it, I just broke the disc and threw it in the trash. I wasn't even angry, I was just like "this game sucks, I'm going to throw it in the garbage and take a picture, it'll be a good facebook post" (it was)

I didn't like Diablo 3's cartoonish, WoW-y colorful visuals at the time, but compared to how revolting 2's remake and IV is, I'd Go Back in a second. They're just so ugly it's almost unbelievable.

Diablo was never supposed to be "pretty", it's a GRIM game, but at least the characters never looked like nightmares. Why does the female Necromancer of IV look like the male Necromancer of II? Why does the Paladin from Diablo 2 go from being a clean-cut mocha guy to the ugliest possible black man who ever lived in the remake? Not even a handsome black man, but a comically-ugly one that someone would make as a joke? He looks like the "Sheeeeeit" meme. The whole "replacing Whites in remake" thing is tiring enough--at least the Paladin was already kinda swarthy. But you had to make him HIDEOUS, too? Why?

Intentionally making characters uglier is something game developers have admitted to doing for female characters, but I guess they're doing it for males too.

Anyway, Torchlight LOL

this is a Torchlight review.

Torchlight is just nice to look at. You're in a well-lit little town at nighttime, there's some people to talk to, but you're mostly just dungeon-diving into a ... dungeon. And that's like the game. It's "small" and neat and tidy and perfect. It's part of why I actually like it more than Torchlight 2. Torchlight 2 GOES BIG, and tacks on a much-larger world. I don't like that, I don't want that, I don't need that. I want my nice comfy town with a few merchants, and I wanna go walking down into the 1-single-dungeon. THAT'S cool. Because since all of these games play exactly the same, I might as well be comfy.

What else do they have to offer besides clicking on enemies and collecting loot? A story?

LOL

I'm not even going to talk about Diablo's story other than to say that after 2, it started becoming very Current Year. You know, Diablo 2 had a fallen angel, fine. Diablo 3's like "huh, maybe the angels are actually bad guys, and like, Heaven could totally be invaded" and now what, there's "Lilith" lmao I'm not going to start. Some shill on /v/ was praising the story as brilliant for some ridiculous nonsense like "flipping our ideas of good and evil on its head!" and it's like nigga in 2023, that is as far away from Subverting My Expectations as possible. I'm not surprised, I'm not impressed, I hate you, I hate the antiChrist, and I'm not giving you $70 so I can worship demons. In fact, didn't they just rip off Diablo IV's story from that garbage Netflix-Castlevania? Without looking into it, I'm just going to say Yes, totally confident that it's at least partially true.

Torchlight doesn't suffer this problem. There's magic ore underground that made a magic guy crazy and monsters are being monsters and ya gotta kill em and find the magic guy. The end. Based.

Anyway, maybe I'll have more to write about this later. So I'll consider this article unfinished for now.

I bet Diablo IV doesn't even have fishing. Torchlight does. (Edit: I checked, it doesn't. Torchlight wins.)

in conclusion, I don't care. Torchlight is fun and pleasant-looking and all of these games play the same.