and the real money REQUIRED for all auction house transactions. fuck that game!
I actually have mixed opinions about that one. This is something really worth of debating, I think. We should do it sometime. The introduction of official channels for game items transactions with real money can impact greatly what it means to be a gamer in the upcoming years. But generally speaking, I see good and bad in it. And I'm afraid this isn't exactly a push being made by the industry. It's the actual gamers that have been slowly pushing this into the gaming industry well since the MUD days in 80s and late 90s where you would already see this hidden activity and the thriving black markets it would generate on the more popular games.
I wish Torchlight 2 has a better story n characters. That way it would be sooo much cooler!
I confess the first game didn't get into me as much I would have liked. Everything is in there, sort of. But I took issue with the highly children-comics influenced art direction and some game design decisions that I felt didn't provide with Torchlight with such a rich RPG experience as Diablo did. I also felt the game items and item generation routines made them too generic and not so much appealing to the collectors.
The developers certainly wanted it to be a different game. Not exactly another Diablo clone. But the blame is probably all on me. Diablo I and especially II had such an impact on me that I probably lost any ability to objectively look at another similar game without wanting it to be a diablo look-a-like. The only other diablo-like game that got totally me hooked on was this little pearl known as Titan Quest.
So I'm not very much excited about Torchlight 2. Which may actually be a good thing. There's been a trend lately in which I've been growing utterly excited about upcoming releases and invariably end up crying on the pillow. Elemental: War of Magic was the latest sweetheart to crush my heart and throw it to the gutter. Such was my disappointment. Who knows, not expecting much from Torchlight will reveal itself as a nice surprise.