The playable classes from left to right: Vanquisher, Destroyer and Alchemist.
"There is power beyond imagining, but the price is so very high..."
— The Alchemist
Torchlight (2009) is an Action RPG developed and published by Runic Games (the artist formerly known as Flagship Studios, who created Hellgate London, themselves the artist formerly known as Blizzard North, who created Diablo), with help from the guy who created FATE. As such, gameplay is a mishmash of all those franchises: you move and select targets for Hack And Slash treatment with a mouse while the keyboard simply serves as shortcuts to various menus and abilities. You have a pet; there's a separate level tree for "Fame"; there's artifact equipment and sockets galore; you can retire your character and come back again as an offspring of said; and there's a bonus dungeon, with (theoretically) infinite randomly-generated levels, for you to mess around in if you'd rather keep playing after you handle the Final Boss.You can play as one of three different characters as they explore Torchlight, a mining town built near an "Ember" mine plagued by monsters. The playable character classes are:
The Destroyer: A heroic fighter who came from his home in the wilderness to Torchlight after hearing tales of it being plagued by evil. A pure melee fighter.
The Vanquisher: A female city guard who was sent to Torchlight to investigate. Mainly uses ranged weapons and traps.
The Alchemist: A spellcaster who uses Ember to gain power. He was lured to Torchlight by the promise of power and risks being overcome by it. Uses spells and summoned minions.
Torchlight was the launch title for Steam for the Mac, which may be part of why it's managed to sell over a million copies—a lot more than Runic expected. (It's also been pirated more than 5 million times in China, with Runic shrugging their shoulders and figuring there's No Such Thing as Bad Publicity.) A Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game set in the same universe with similar game mechanics has been promised for sometime in the future...But in the meantime, its direct sequel, Torchlight II, has already been released!
This game provides examples of:
Action Bomb: Enemies with the "Explosive" trait will also blow up on death.
All Deaths Final: Hardcore mode. This was one of the first aspects to be altered by Game Mods but older players still hold that doing so invalidates a HC run.
Angrish: You will never forget your first, or indeed thirty-seventh, disenchant wipe.
Anti-Frustration Feature: The game is packed full of these, mostly directing towards annoying features that...guess... has.
The ability to destroy an item to recover the gems in it, reducing the annoyance of finally socketing up an item immediately before finding a better one. Or to destroy the gems to free up the sockets.
A shared loot storage system, meaning that finding a valuable item for the wrong class or build isn't wasted.
Making most spells work via percentages or ability scores, reducing the likelihood of spells that become useless as you advance in level.
A pet that can take all your Vendor Trash back to town to sell for you, instead of having to make the trip back yourself. (There's a Penny Arcadecomic on the subject.)
The removal of the Grid Inventory. Now, your backpack(s) just have a set number of slots, and each item takes up a single slot, whether it's an entire breastplate or a single gemstone. (Healing and magic consumables can stack.)
Gold is looted automatically just by walking over it, reducing the amount of clicking needed to loot.
You can order your pet to pick up items.
You can hold the Shift key (the default setting) to stand in place and fire your weapon/spells. Great for ranged or magic-based characters, as they can just stand back and snipe away!
Apocalyptic Log: The lower you get into the main dungeon, the more unhinged and malevolent Alric's journal entries become.
Artificial Stupidity: Player summons are extremely responsive to threats but their questionable pathfinding often leaves them stuck in narrow curved passages. This is a particular problem for the high level Lore Alchemist as he will often lose about half of his huge construct army while running through a series of such passages.
Awesome Yet Practical: The Alchemist's Ember Lightning. As long as you can mouse over a target, you can shoot through walls.
The Vanquisher Explosive Shot. BOOM!
The Vanquisher Frost Pilum. It's a fairly weak shot at first, but it can pierce enemies. Once it's upgraded a level or two, one shot can rip through half of a Mook Maker's army.
The Beastmaster: All characters get a pet Dog or Cat (Or Ferret in the retail version of the game) to help them in combat or to carry off loot.
Bizarchitecture: a major complaint towards FATE was that its randomly-assembled maps consisted mostly of tunnels that went nowhere. Torchlight averts this by randomly assembling pre-existing setpieces. The downside there is that you'll inevitably start seeing the same chunk-of-rooms again, but at least you'll know where all the hidden treasures are.
Boss in Mook Clothing: Some of the monsters are only ever encountered as Champions, and most of those are very.Freaking.Tough. What immediately springs to mind are Liches, smaller versions of the Overseer who have his Flunky Boss ability and powerful magic besides.
The Corruption: Both the source of Ember's power, and its side effects.
City of Adventure: Could arguably be a subversion of this. The town of Torchlight is both the namesake of the game, as well as the only overworld location. However, it is actually a very small and cozy town. The only real action in the game takes place in it's infinitely huge dungeon, or other similar dungeons accessible through portals.
Damage Sponge Boss: The Big Bad is definitely not a Puzzle Boss. He has a metric assload of HP, and the only way to kill him is by whittling down said HP. Oh, and if you leave the level he's in for a long-enough period of time—say, for some Level Grinding—the whole final level will reset. That includes the Big Bad's HP, which will be restored to full upon your return.
The developers also had the gall to make him summon legions of Dragonkin (see below) and poisonous skeletons to soak up magic and ranged damage for him. Only a Squishy Wizard needs a Meat Shield, Runic!
Vapor Ware: At the release of the sequel, Runic admitted that their MMORPG plans have been abandoned.
Difficulty Spike: The Black Palace, the final area of the main quest: not only is it filled with Demonic Spiders, but enemies spawn in much greater densities. (Sometimes you'll run into rooms with like five Dragonkin and five Dark Zealots. Just one of those ten is totally enough to kill you, if you're not careful.) The whole point of the area seems to be adding as many deaths to your record as possible before you beat the game.
Dueling Games: Gaming press often called the original game "Diablo III before Diablo III" and many Diablo fans were worried that its release would affect Blizzard's work.
Dynamic Difficulty: Averted in the main storyline, where each floor of enemies is 1 level stronger than the previous. This means you'll start to open a lead as you encounter empty Boss Battle maps, which don't count towards progressing mob levels. Played straight in any side maps that you can buy as well as the Shadow Vault, where the enemies will scale to the player's level.
Averted with the Alchemist's Headband models, which are also goggles, but with an armor bonus.
If the Vanquisher equips goggles as armour, she wears them as some sort of combination hair tie/headband (with the front holding up her fringe and the strap typing her hair in a ponytail at the back). I can confirm this is possible (although not very comfortable without a lot of padding for the side of the head).
The ferret pet (Available with the retail version of the game, or a mod downloadable from Runic for Steam users) is wearing a WWI-style aviator cap, complete with goggles. They do nothing but look AWESOME.
Infinity+1 Sword: One can make such an item either through enchanting or passing down an heirloom enough times. (Be wary when enchanting, sometimes it'll strip the weapon's existing buffs instead.)
I Read That As: A constant threat, considering the game's modular naming conventions for items (and bosses; see below). Honorary mention goes to "Tribal Scutum". A scutum is the tall, rectangular body shield used by Roman soldiers. It is not a "Scrotum", unless your eyes are going.
Nor is it sputum... although you'd be more likely to make that mistake with a "Spetum" (a medieval Blade on a Stick, also present in-game).
King Mook: Some of the enemies in the dungeons act as Minibosses, known as "Champions". They are essentially a larger, much stronger version of a regular enemy (which usually appears in a group with them). They also tend to have names like "[Body Part]-[verb]er The [Adjective]."
Taken literally with the Champion version of the Spectre enemy- it wears a crown on its head!
Lethal Lava Land: The Goblin prison takes place in a lava-filled cavern.
Losing the Team Spirit: There are some mob in the game who will break and flee if a member of their species dies in their presence. It's a cute detail, but it ends up being a form of Fake Difficulty because it then takes you that much longer to hunt them down and extinguish their miserable little lives for the sake of your EXP total. (Plus, only weak enemies do this; the ones that are actually dangerous will just keep fighting.)
Ludicrous Gibs: Hit an enemy hard enough with the killing blow and it explodes into a pool of blood. Elemental weapons and spells cause other fun effects, like shattering.
If your weapon has a +Knockback effect, you can push them off ledges and into bottomless pits!
Mook Maker: A number of standard enemies, such as Watcher Geists and Dark Zealots, either spawn or resurrect other foes. This isn't even considering bosses.
One particularly nasty early foe- the Wraith- can turn zombies into others of itself. Any zombies. Including the ones that you summon.
New Game Plus: Pass an item and a fame level to your next character.
Night of the Living Mooks: The catacombs area has your character fight nothing but the undead (except for spiders). The dwarven fortress area also contains pretty much nothing but undead dwarves (the only non-undead enemy is a little Spider Tank)
Non-Indicative Name: the "Goblin Stabber" enemies, which are armed with maces and axes, which historically do not do well in the "stabbing" department. Occasionally one will be armed with a pickaxe.
Narm: While this can lead to some pretty cool names, like "Throatchewer The Fierce," it also yields up such Double Take gems as "Facethrower" (faces probably throw about as well as an unfolded sheet of paper, if you think about it) or "Axekicker" (oww!).
Given the frequency with which this occurs for bosses and weapons and the gag nature of many of the non-randomized weapons, this may well be deliberate. The ones that spring to mind are the Galactic Battlestar, and the Sword of Adam which improves many stats that don't exist in the game (like "Thinking with Logic Resistance") and randomly says "Wizzzaaaards!"
Oh, and, it can also assemble names from a list of vaguely-fantastical syllables and a dash of Punctuation Shaker. This can result in things like Al'az or Ran'dum.
Power Crystal: Ember; the lowest levels of the main dungeon are also crystal themed.
Quest Giver: Several NPCs will assign Side Quests to you: Vasman the wizard wants samples of Ember, Trill the bard has a list of Mini Bosses he wants killed (so he can write heroic songs about you), and an antique collector named Hatch sends you to side instances for moreFetch Questing. (He's actually the best Level Grinding option in the game because the mobs in his instances scale to your level, which is not true in the main dungeon. If his quest chain runs dry, there are Maps that can be bought from vendors which accomplish the same.)
Rainbow Speak: When quest givers ask you to slay a specific monster or find an particular item, the monster/item's will always be marked in orange.
Scratch Damage: An attack that deals less damage than the target's armor absorbs results in a "glancing blow" that still does 1 point of damage.
Set Bonus: Some bits of EQ are mentioned as being part of a set, and you get extra bonuses if you have two or more items from the set equipped. There's 22 sets, though, so finding matching pieces before you hit the final boss is pretty unlikely. (Fortunately, some EQ comes with boosts to "Likelihood of Finding Magical EQ". With enough of them, sets become more feasible. And the Bonus Dungeon can up your playtime enormously...)
Also, Torchlight has a shared inventory chest, so you can keep the pieces in a box for as long and through as many characters as you like if that's what it takes to get a full set.
Rotted Chanters re-raise fallen Skeletons, Pygmy Shamans re-raise Stabber Pygmies from the dead, Tu'Tara Oathmasters can heal their fellow lizardmen, Goblin Chanters revive dead Goblins, Watcher Geists resurrect defeated Dwarven Wights, and Dark Zealots spawn those accursed Enslaved. Unsurprisingly, these guys need to be taken out first whenever they appear.
The boss of the Goblin-infested prison, Krag, a huge goblin king, would not have been that much of a fight. Trouble is, he came with five or so Giant Mooks that constantly healed him AND buffed him with a damage-absorbing shield, all the while firing homing poison balls at the player. Guess what had to die first?
Steampunk: Shades of this, occasionally mixed with Magitek. The Vanquisher can use guns, dwarf enemies often use robots and vehicles, the Alchemist's golems move and look like robots with smokestacks, and many of the Alchemist's higher-level gear options look like steampunk power-armor. The Engineer of the sequel is essentially a Steampunk Knight.
Stripperiffic: Almost anything worn by the Vanquisher, although some visual themes such as the "Gunslinger" and the "Assassin" avoid this entirely.
This was lampshaded in video about the sequel: "Torchlight II: Now with 100% more pants!"
Summon Magic: Half of the Alchemist's arsenal. Some of the all-class magical spells do this as well.
Most of the skills for the modded Demonologist class are Summon Magic. It's currently a little overpowered.
Sword and Gun: And there's a good reason to go that route as well. Melee weapons tend to hit a little harder than guns and hit a lot faster, and you automatically switch between them based on whether you can hit with the melee weapon.
The Dog Was the Mastermind: The player can pull this with the non-class spell scrolls (which can be taught to the pet). Considering the summons have a very respectable damage output, your dog or cat could raise their own little undead army and start clearing dungeons by themselves.
Brink, an NPC who joins the player near the start of the game. He gets turned into the first boss by the antagonist via The Corruption and the player is forced to kill him. Somewhat averted as the player character only knows him for a rather short amount of time.
Also, Alric. Based on Syl's dialogue, he was a genuinely kind and caring man before The Corruption warped him into Ordrak's dragon. Made worse when you realize that the writings shown at the beginning of each new area are actually excrepts from Alric's journal that show him falling more and more under Ordrak's control.
Narrowly averted with Syl. After you reach and start using the Ember Forge, Alric waltzes in and kidnaps her, stating he plans to turn her to Ordrak's side. The next boss you face, Medea, is a female demon with a similar build to Syl, and even uses a very similar looking polearm. All signs point to it being Syl. Then a few floors later, you find her still intact, albeit in a magical cage under the watch of one of Alric's henchmen. After you free her, she indicates that she was in the process of being brainwashed, and that you got to her in the nick of time.
Underboobs: Some of the Vanquisher armor displays this prominently.
Walking Shirtless Scene: The Destroyer starts out with little more than a tattered pair of trousers. How quickly he covers up depends on his player's luck.
With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: A side effect of using too much Ember and the constant fear of the Alchemist as the page quote shows. This happens most prominently to Master Alric, as demonstrated through his journal entries. The Alchemist ultimately falls to this between games.
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