- Forged – Robot that seems a bit tanky, but also has a gun in its belly and a heat/explosion mechanic that you are regularly balancing.
- Dusk Mage – A class that alternates between darkness and light and represents the closest thing to a traditional caster.
- Railmaster – This is the strangest pet class to ever exist in a game, because you carry a massive hammer and lay down track for your rail car loaded with weapons to travel along and attack things.
- Sharpshooter – This class is a blend of the Demon Hunter and Necromancer from Diablo 3 and based on what I have seen of it is extremely potent as a result.
Torchlight 3 Early Access Thoughts
One of the interesting shadow drops to come out of last weekend was the release of Torchlight 3 to the Steam Early Access program. I’ve been a member of the Torchlight alpha program that was covered under an NDA since the game originally was Torchlight Frontiers back in November of 2018. I of course could not talk about my experiences publicly, because I was under NDA. I did however briefly describe the game to a close friend as “very free to play”, which was a bit of a damning indictment. The way the game was initially designed, it relied on creating a number of artificial barriers and segmenting the world off into frontiers with effectively their own progression path. The writing on the wall was that we would get new frontiers released through the course of the game allowing us to buy into these effectively independent areas and progress through new content on the same character.
This was not super well received by the community, but in truth I mostly focused on reporting technical bugs. Scan ahead to current times and the shift to branding the game “Torchlight III” and I once again got into the testing program. At the point in which I last played the game very much felt like Frontiers with a name change, but it seems while I have been gone the game has been rapidly changing into what is a really fun and enjoyable experience today. The core game is solid now and pending they can ever solve the infrastructure issues that are plaguing the early access release, it is going to be a really fun experience to hang out and play with your friends.
One of the things that I am blown away by is just how much better the game looks. There are subtle tweaks and polish applied that makes the entire experience feel better. I of course was under NDA and have no screenshots of my early characters to compare to, but the world feels more “real” as I explore it even though it is very much a cartoony setting. The robot now feels like a robot because it is sufficiently metallic feeling instead of what was a more flat shaded and plastic look. One of the challenges I had with this game is that it did not exactly have a class that I naturally graviated towards. I mostly play barbarian or paladin type characters in action RPGs and you are given a weird blend of classes including.