It probably doesn’t need to be asked and I’m sure it goes without saying, but how does Torchlight II compare to Diablo III. What does T3 do better than D3? Is that even fair to ask?

I enjoyed Torchlight, but the game never grabbed me like I had hoped. Ten minutes into Torchlight 2 and already I could tell it’s better than the first and it’s going to be pretty darn good. I still love Diablo III, but I get the feeling I’m going to really like T2 as well.

Great review by the way.

The rampant Diablo hate is getting a bit old. Both games are very good. They each offer a different take on mechanics, with Blizzard leaning toward modern flexibility and Torchlight appealing to fans of iterative refinement. Both games do things better and worse than their counterpart.

Like Todd said on yesterday’s Rocket Jump, I expected to play Diablo 3 over and over again. I was totally hooked on it from beginning to end. But once I finished, I felt zero compulsion to keep playing. But I loved the changes they made. I’m not a huge fan of the skill trees, which are back for Torchlight II, and I hate the identity and town portal scrolls (D3 got rid of those). But at least Torchlight II lets you send your pet back to buy stuff, including the scrolls. If you’re going to keep them in, that’s the best way to do it. The less time you have to spend porting back to town to sell junk (which you still had to do in D3) and buy more potions and scrolls, the better.

I’ve only played about 20 minutes of it, but I really like it. I’m still pretty much in the “beta area”. But the game looks and plays better than the beta to me (although my character moves SO fast it’s almost disorienting). And while I loved D3′s look and art style A LOT, I’m enjoying Torchlight II’s maybe just a little better.

Jim Hunter: I’m not sure what you mean by ‘modern flexibility’ in regards to Blizzard. If anything, Diablo III proves that they’re anything but flexible.

For the record, I don’t hate Diablo III, I bored of it quickly and It didn’t hold my attention.

---

I get the flexibility thing with Diablo 3. I really enjoyed the way D3 re-did the skills and runes to a mix/match “drag and drop” style of re-specc’ing on the fly. I think TL2′s skill system is flexible as well, but still leans towards a more old-school style of dumping points into particular areas. Nothing wrong with that though!

I like the art style of Diablo 3 better. While I really enjoy the vibrant “water color” art style of TL2, I still like the dark, more traditional artwork and minute details that Diablo 3 offered.

As far as speed of gameplay, EASE of gameplay, and character progression, TL2 wins hands down. The pacing is better, the loot progression is better, the carrots on a stick are better.

Both games have great musical scores, so I can’t decide on that.

Oh, and TL2 doesn’t require a constant internet connection, and has LAN support, so it wins there too. BUT….Diablo 3 lets you play with friends no matter what level they are.

So yeah, long story short, each game has particular areas where I think they excel over one another, and I enjoy them both for what they are. Personally, I don’t hold the fact that “I thought I’d play Diablo 3 more” against it, because that is based on an internal comparison against Diablo 2, a game released over a decade ago when my life was very different and I had free time to pack up my PC in my car and go to LAN parties every weekend.

Question for more learned aRPG folks: when you have dual wielded weapons, does the DPS of those weapons stack? Example: is it better to dual-wield two 100 DPS weapons versus a one two-handed weapon that’s 125DPS?