What Are You Playing (Winter 2012-2013 / Postapocalypse)?

Diablo III - Fired it back up to get a better idea how it compares with Torchlight II now that I've had a good amount of experience with that game, and they really nerfed something in inferno hard. I'm not exactly sure what, but I spent (in D3 economy terms) the tiniest amount of gold, respecced since a bunch of stuff has changed, and am in the middle of facerolling act III when it used to be a complete brick wall. I've got a feeling this somehow ties into the monster power thing they added a while ago, but at least it looks like I'll finally finish inferno.

Yea they basically made inferno easy and then added monster power.

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Originally Posted by A Robot Bit Me

I started playing Vanguard Bandits. It's the first game I bought with my Real Money back in 2000. I never finished it, which speaks to how deep my pile of shame is.

What a weird game.

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I love Vanguard Bandits. I don't recall it being weird, except maybe for the usual over the top Working Designs translation, which I recall being a bit more restrained than usual (except for the goofy shit defeated enemies would say, such as "Calgon, take me away!"). The game itself played like a standard SRPG, the story was good, and the fact that you could play as different characters from different sides of the conflict added a lot of replayability. Good game, overall...it helped soothe the sting of having beaten the awesome Vandal Hearts back in the day by giving me more SRPG goodness.

Picked up the Uncharted 2 pack. Playing Uncharted 1 now, on Chapter 18. Man, where'd they get all these pirates from?! Hertz Rent-A-Thug? Suckers never stop coming at me.

Hotline Miami! This game is so awesome!

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Originally Posted by Dolemite

The game itself played like a standard SRPG

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I don't think so at all. There are surprisingly few effective ranged attacks and hitting someone from the front is suicide, so battles get jammed up with characters jockeying for back attacks while protecting the backs their allies. It isn't uncommon to see a unit surrounded by enemies on all eight adjacent tiles. That never happens in something like FFT. Fatigue points and the array of counter attack options are unusual, too.

So, is D3 or Torchlight2 the better game? I have time for one only.

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Originally Posted by Joust Williams

So, is D3 or Torchlight2 the better game? I have time for one only.

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It depends on what you're looking for, really. TLDR incoming:

Torchlight II

Pros:

• Supports player mods, which add new abilities, a new class, complete rebalancing, and is pretty much what makes the game worth playing.
• Colorful look that's easy on the eyes.
• Generates tons of random maps for endgame bite-size grinding that doesn't get boring like D3 grinding can.
• Can be played offline.
• Can pick whatever difficulty you want from the beginning and new game+ scales up levels on all difficulties.
• The game feels like it has a little more room to breathe. I don't think the maps are actually bigger than D3's but they feel like it.
• The sidequests usually have their own dungeon so they feel more substantial than D3's.

Cons:

• There is no difficulty until mods get installed and even then it's still not much. I still don't know what the monster enchants do because they're such faceroll it's not worth learning.
• Playing without mods means that screwing up a character requires re-rolling from scratch as there is no provided way to redo stats or skills. Thankfully there's a player program that can fix this.
• There is no balance in anything in this game. The classes are only comparable while using certain types of builds and using other setups will generally result in being pathetic instead of overpowered (again, with no developer provided way to fix this). The outlander just flat out doesn't work in any way remotely intended, you literally have to turn it into a mage to have better than shit output.
• Gear has wacky stats that makes everything past a certain point either the best thing that has ever existed or absolute trash. +15% or +20% to all damage is not an uncommon enchant on various items, almost like a patch to cover up for anyone who picks one of the useless skills and also makes good builds into even more faceroll.
• Loot is the same on all difficulties, so while you'll get more loot on harder difficulties it'll even out by the end of the game and everyone will have roughly the same great stuff.
• A couple achievements are unobtainable because they require a game feature that doesn't exist.

Diablo III

Pros:

• Has a much better difficulty that goes up to ridiculous levels, and some elites can actually be frightening to fight.
• Good balance that's constantly being tweaked and improved, with a huge amount of worthwhile meta game planning if you're into that sort of thing.
• Lots of enemies to fight at once which gives a more interesting constant onslaught.
• The skills layout is designed explicitly for the players to experiment with to find out what works well, and allows adjustment on the fly to tweak playstyle all the time.
• Online auction house means it can very easy to patch holes in gear farming aside from the expensive stuff for getting ridiculously powerful.

Cons:

• Has to be played online, and having the connection drop will destroy stacks that are a big deal for endgame farming.
• The levels are random but not hugely so, and so repeated play can very quickly lead to fatigue.
• No mod support, what you see is what you get.
• Have to play through the game to get to harder difficulties, you can't just select harder ones from the outset. The game is designed for this since the character levels with the difficulties, but this is part of what can lead to fatigue.
• Sidequests are usually just killing a couple things right next to the quest giver.

Of course there's also the price difference, and you may be willing to overlook the lack of support in TL2 since Runic is a small company and Blizzard has crazy money and staff. Factoring in mod support is what makes it hard for me to say one or the other, as I like them both for different reasons.

I've been playing a lot of Garou MOTW lately, probably more than I've played at any one time. I'm actually getting really good with Terry and Butt/Rodriguez, too bad I have nobody to play against but the computer.

http://www.dedoimedo.com/images/life...ever-alone.jpg

Get Torchlight. It's cheaper and the DLC will be free.