I gifted my sister a copy so we could co-op. I watched her play the single player and she mostly had the same impressions that I did. In the end (after playing a couple hours), she said it was way too easy and didn't provide any challenge.

She didn't bother with the skills and stats much at all, and for most part the loot just seemed to be a chore and she didn't really bother looking through it to find better equipment because she had no trouble just rushing right through everything, no close calls.

And she also got confused by the environment, trying to run off the map quite a few times...

Action looked rather unfocused and "loose", just randomly clicking and spamming her starting spell because the game didn't demand more than that.

I don't remember a lot about Torchlight 1 other than that it was missing something overall. It felt like a bug-free late Alpha. It felt sort of unsatisfying and cluastrophobic going down under the town floor after floor, and all the side-quests were town portals. The classes weren't as nice, and the skill tiers weren't as satisfying. I think Torchlight 2 is what they wanted to do, and Torchlight 1 was where they drew the line for engine work and proof of concept the first time around. With the engine sorted out, they were able to vary environments and enemies a lot more and a lot sooner, as well as making sure multiplayer worked well.

The main thing I remember about Torchlight 1 was that I played Vanquisher and spammed Ricochet with passive synergies, and that was literally all I did other than drink potions. Not a great class system.

TL2 feels more cohesive, though I disagreed with some of the class design enough to mod it.

btw, you have to play on Veteran to get a standard ARPG level of challenge. If you want slightly more or slightly less, you probably need a mod, since Elite is a slog (too much HP) and Normal is kind of easy.

LAN means a direct connection while internet play means you're using Runics online server browser to find games. It also uses your Runic account to connect you to people you either add to your list or if you happen to be playing through Steam it automatically adds them. No idea if it does the same for people playing via Galaxy.

I was in the friends and family beta and helped playtest it plus my guild helped by giving a ton of suggestions. All in all I feel the same way you do. I feel it's a much better game than the first in a lot of ways but in other ways they kind of missed the mark. I was hoping for a decent story but instead we got a really bland one. You do kinda drown in items and when you DO get legendary items the randomized affixes mean that most of the time they don't really do anything all that interesting. I think in Runic's effort to make it accessible, mod-friendly and group-friendly it lost a lot of the personality the first game had.

That said I think it ended up being a very fun game to play and I'm delighted to see it finally show up on GoG. I've been pestering them about it for years so it's good to know I could help make it happen (even if the odds are they would have gotten around to doing it anyways).

Oh..and the music is Diablo-like because the score was composed by Matt Uelmen. :)

I'm still trying to understand that. From the little I've read, if I'm not completely mistaken, they've gone out of the way to make a game mode that only works on.. I don't know, how do you define direct connection? Same prefix? Or does it actually look at the ARP table? And as I could imagine, a lot of people have had problems with the game being unable to make a connection in LAN mode. Also, disconnections and instability when the game isn't happy with the setup. Also, it seems to be too dumb to be able to properly use anything but the first network adapter, whatever that turns out to be.

It all sounds very nefarious to me. Why again does the game care? It should just let me type the IP address of whatever host I want to connect to and make a direct connection. As direct as the routing permits, whether that host is in the same room behind a switch, behind a router with wifi, or in somewhere in China. TCP/IP works this way, UDP works as long as any NAT & firewall are dealt with. So the game really has to go out of its way to break the functionality.

Tell me I'm wrong and just missing something?

....

So, so far, about the skills. I played with Outlander, and watched my sister play with mage. In both cases, I couldn't find any skills to feel particularly excited about. Where in D2 I always felt excited to try new skills, reading the skill descriptions in T2 just makes me feel meh. It's like there's no great damage dealer, nothing to enable some dramatically new tactics. Feels like the skills are more supportive, with the main weapon still being the more significant factor in how fast you're going to beat them baddies up.

At least so it seems to be until you get a dozen skill points or more in the most damaging skills. So the growth is in very small incremental steps. Plus most of the damage dealers seem to scale with player's level.. so again levelling up could potentially make these skills great, eventually, one small step at a time, together with the small steps from investing skill points. It everything just starts out being meh. Never something new, exciting, powerful. Never feel the power after investing into a new skill.

Oh, the passive skills provide more "meh" little increments one step at a time. Although the outlander's ranged weapon mastery would be a lot less meh if it also increased the range for shotgun & cannon. Did I tell you I like shotguns? Shadowlings are interesting, but I'd rather have a hard hitting damage dealer to have blast fun with, than watch minions slowly peck at the monsters to reduce their health.

And so, me and my sister both pretty much just ended up spamming whatever we started with, and maybe trying to pick up a few of the less meh (but still meh) skills to try out.

Maybe the the last three tiers of skill provide something cool. Maybe. From the description, I don't feel like they do.

Is it just me?

And then if your main weapon is the big factor, finding cool new loot should be interesting? No, like I said before, there's new stuff dropping all the time so it looks like you're just constantly getting minor increments in weapon quality. Nothing like staring in awe at that new rare/unique/set item in D2 and going on to feel a tremendous increase in power...

I *really* hope it gets better than this later on.

It's like they took the basic formula of a D2-like action game but dulled it down by making loot too frequent, rares and uniques not outstanding enough, skills not enabling enough.. you're just constantly getting minor increments.. which you don't really even need on that normal difficulty. Very bland.

Try playing at the highest difficulty level and you'll appreciate loot drops of good armor!

Um...it's not nefarious at all. You're just choosing between a direct TCP/IP connection either between computers in your house or someone else's computer far away, or the internet. Same as LAN has worked in every other game that has it. If you want to connect to the internet you go through Runics authentication server. This is so you can see the matchmaking list showing games other people are hosting. Connections are handled peer to peer. Whoever has the strongest connection becomes the host.

Syncing problems are an issue for some but that should be expected in a game that has lots of AI monsters and lots of physical objects objects in it. NAT issues are a rarer issue people have faced but then that should be expected, too. Some people have router NAT's that are too strict or crappy ISP's.

That's what I wish I could do. It doesn't let me. It doesn't ask for an IP address so I could connect to someone else's computer far away. It just somehow magically tries to figure out what's "LAN", and then see if it can find any games on "LAN". If it can't, too bad. In a lot of cases, it can't.

Well, I finally got my S to Torchlight(s). And I see there are many good old diableros around! :)

I decided to 'start from the start' and play T1. So what can I say?

It's definitely more lightweight than Diablos in any part of gameplay, it seems. Aimed more to pure light-hearted fun than to suspence or something. And it's not that bad at all. But this approach makes everything lightweighted too.

Visuals and interface - slightly annoying, gravitating to rather awkward and uncomfortable, I'd say. OK, I got used to cartoonish style already, though it makes things forgettable, IMHO. I just don't get enough 'Wow!' energy to memorize monster types, names, traits and such. Moreover, action is fast, and all of these ugly-fonted giant up-popping info inscriptions about critical hits, spell effects and such, combining with tiny letters under monster names, describing their abilities... I just feel no interest to watch this bacchanalia carefully what hurts the immersion obviously.
Inventory and items? What is it? I just don't want to break my eyes scouring through these endless swarms of identical cells with items of identical size in them.

Skill system and mechanics - I can't say much about it right now (I'm not so deep in dungeons now) but I think it tends to be also rather undistinguished, as other parts of gameplay.

Music and sound - nothing outstanding again. And these Diablo-tunes playing in town seem to get quite the opposite effect they were planned to - they don't match with overall steampunkish-humoristic feel of the game.

Well, I think that T2 should be much better but now I start to doubt that I would try it more than once :)

Alas, I can't play Grim Dawn at my present gaming PC (it has WinXP on board, purposefully for Good Old Gaming:) ), but I look at Van Helsing Adventures with some hope really.

It's a big pity that GOG has no Loki Heroes of Mythology, buggy and orphaned game but I feel strange love for it:). I have it on GamersGate but I'll buy it here with no hesitation.