Torchlight II - Wrap-up

I was leery of starting a game with a new class, because in the early game, the classes are somewhat uniform. So I found a mod that boosted me up to max level at the beginning. But then the monsters weren't nearly strong enough to make playing worthwhile, because the first playthrough doesn't scale. So I found a mod that allowed me to tackle an "endless dungeon" that matched your level. But then I wound up getting quickly killed, because endgame play assumes high end equipment. So I searched for a mod that would make the merchants scale. . . and I couldn't find one. So I rushed through the game to start a new game+, so I could get level scaling merchants and then put the appropriate equipment in the shared chest so new characters could access it right away.

That took about five hours. Much as I suspected, the game's plot is not at all worth mentioning. There's a sorcerer (alchemist) that you have to kill, but then he turns out to be a pawn for some humongous demon. Once you kill it, the world is saved. Pretty standard stuff. Anyway, once I got my equipment from new game+, I tried the endless dungeon again . . . and died because I didn't have any high-end gems socketed in my equipment. So I searched for a gem merchant mod.

And . . . it turns out I'm not nearly skilled enough for endgame play. So my plan to check out the differences between the classes by checking out late game builds in action was a total bust. The most reasonable course of action is to simply play them from the beginning. By the time I get to the end of act one, I should have a fairly good idea of how they play (though I suspect, much like Borderlands the game doesn't really get started until new game+). The only problem with this plan is that it will take forever.

I don't quite want to say goodbye to Torchlight II. It definitely sunk its hooks into me, and as jaded as I am, that endless loot and xp treadmill, when combined with 30 possible classes, worked its magic on the primitive, gambling-addiction-prone part of my brain. I really do want to see it all. I just don't want to commit to a lifetime of playing nothing else.

Sigh. There are many games I've played where, at the end of my time with them, I felt a resolve to return one day, to get the most out of their unexplored potential (Recettear and Anno 2070 spring to mind), but I don't think Torchlight II is one of them. Don't get me wrong. I could easily see losing myself in this game, diving deep into its nuances and its apparently limitless mods, devoting hundreds of hours to the old loot and grind. But that is exactly the problem. There's just too much. I doubt I'd ever feel finished. And that sort of perpetual incompleteness would bug me (when I fail to complete something, it's because my attention was caught by something else and I wandered off with the intention of coming back until too much time has passed and I forgot what I was originally doing, and not because the task is too great to have been reasonably attempted by anyone - thank-you-very-much).