It figures. Eighteen hours in, and I finally get addicted to the game. Despite what I said in my last post, I found that I couldn't abandon the Luminous Arena. It simply felt too cowardly to start a new game the second I reached a genuine challenge. So I fiddled with my equipment in order to squeeze out every last bit of defense, and it turned out to be enough. It wasn't easy, but I was able to do it.
Yet my expressed desire to experience the other classes was not (entirely) a disingenuous ploy to avoid facing a difficult level. I really did genuinely want to see what else the game offered. As soon as my conscience was clear, and I knew for certain that my motives were pure, I fired up a hardcore game (where you only get one life, and if you die, your save is deleted).
It turns out, I should have been playing the Berserker all along. This is one of those things that seems obvious in retrospect, but when I was selecting my initial class, the Outlander's twin pistols so enchanted me that I had to see what it was all about. And while there's nothing wrong with the Outlander's focus on ranged weapons and enemy debuffs, for me at least, getting up in the face of a monster and whaling on it while in a berserk frenzy is so much more satisfying. There's nothing I love more in an action game than throwing caution to the wind and just going for an all-out attack.
But it wasn't simply the Berserker that triggered this sudden increase in interest. I was also intrigued by the fact that Torchlight II allows for mods, so I downloaded one that added twenty-six classes to the game. New Game+ and Hardcore mode notwithstanding, I reckon you could easily play thirty hours with a single class. Multiply that by thirty, and you've got 900 hours. And that's without ever touching the endgame. It is difficult to overstate how much I want to see what all these alternate classes can do. It simply amazes me that fans of the game, uncompensated by anything but their own love of the material and the gratitude of their fellow fans, can put in so much work to expand the scope of their hobby. I feel like I should pay tribute to the creativity and dedication of these people by witnessing all the incredible diversity (as untested and unbalanced as much of it is sure to be) that they have added to the game.
Except that if you add up all the time I've spent with all the games on this blog, you'd still get nowhere close to 900 hours. There's no way I can fully explore the potential of this mod without dropping everything and making Torchlight II my new exclusive hobby. And I'm much too fickle for that. The same intellectual wanderlust that makes having thirty available classes into such a penetrating temptation for me also ensures that I'll want to move on to a new, entirely different game sooner rather than later.
That's not to say I'm done with Torchlight II just yet, but I probably won't spend too much time with alternate classes. It takes too long to grind up to a level where they begin to seriously distinguish themselves (early game, weapon choice has a far more immediate impact on how your character plays). Now, if there were a mod that let you start at level 30 . . .
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