Torchlight



""There is power beyond imagining, but the price is so very high...""

- The Alchemist

Torchlight 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 a direct sequel was announced in August 2010. Originally meant to be out in Spring of 2011, it faced some delays, but if everything goes well it will finally be out on Summer of 2012. It will add Co-Op Multiplayer to the franchise (a lack of which was a near-universal criticism of the original, especially since Diablo2 was doing it a decade ago) and serve as a stepping-stone towards the MMO architecture. The playable classes include:


 * The Engineer: A Genius Bruiser who wears Steampunk Powered Armor and wields giant wrenches like hammers.
 * The Embermage: The resident Squishy Wizard who has a more mage-like look compared to the Magitek-styled Alchemist.
 * The Outlander: Mysterious vagabonds and nomads who are proficient with both ranged weapons and magic.
 * The Berserker: A Proud Warrior Race Guy specializing in hand-to-hand combat.


 * Action Girl: The Vanquisher
 * 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.
 * An Adventurer Is You
 * Anticlimax Boss: Sometimes the Alchemist's imps/golem/pet will go charging into the Boss Room before the pre-boss cutscene is triggered, causing the boss to explode at the beginning of the fight from all the damage dealt before the cutscene even started. Kind of makes them skippable bosses.
 * 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 sell for you, instead of having to make the trip back yourself.
 * 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.
 * 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 but Impractical: The Destroyer's Doomquake ability has a gigantic area of effect and the potential to hit enemies multiple times. However, damage is dealt over randomly spreading lines so it's very possible to trigger the ability more than once without hitting anything.
 * The summons in the Alchemist's Lore tree have phenomenal combined DPS and will often seek out and destroy enemies the player can't see. Their pathfinding is also terrible and in maps with lots of staircases many will get stuck on the wrong floor and will need to be resummoned. This is an especially serious problem with the Imp spell that needs corpses as raw material.
 * 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 Beast Master: 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.
 * Bonus Dungeon: The Shadow Vault
 * Chest Monster: Aside from the standard mimic you fight, you can turn your own pet into a one!
 * Convection Schmonvection
 * 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.
 * Critical Existence Failure
 * 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!
 * Department of Redundancy Department: The name generator for champions and equipment may end up doing this from time to time. Special mention goes to "Cleave's Cloven Cleaver of Cleaving".
 * Difficulty Spike: the Black Palace, the final area of the main quest: not only is it filled with the Demonic Spiders listed above, 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.
 * Dual-Wielding: Any character can dual-wield one handed weapons. Since firearms are available, this includes Guns Akimbo. And since wands are available...
 * They even have an achievement for that last one.
 * 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. The sequel is a more direct competitor to D3 as it also supports multiplayer and despite Runic's insistence that any rivalry is unintentional, some friction is sure to arise with some fans of each series switching over due to certain design decisions on each side.
 * Dungeon Crawling
 * 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.
 * Edwardian Adventuress: The Vanquisher has that look about her.
 * Fallen Hero: The first boss you fight is.
 * Fantasy Gun Control: Averted entirely, since anyone can use a pistols and rifles.
 * Thankfully, they haven't discovered auto-fire yet. Attack speed enchantments work just as well especially on a weapon with 'Fastest' attack speed.
 * Fighter Mage Thief: Destroyer, Alchemist, Vanquisher.
 * Fire, Ice, Lightning and poison.
 * Fetch Quest: Optional, thankfully.
 * Flunky Boss: Practically all of them EXCEPT for.
 * Game Mod: plenty are available, as they were for Fate. (In fact, there's a Steam Achievement for having 10 mods running at once.)
 * Gameplay and Story Segregation: if you start a New Game Plus using the descendent of a previous character, they deal with the same NPCs you did. (Including ones who died over the course of the game.)
 * Gatling Good: The mechanical constructs (piloted by an undead dwarf) fire at the player with gatling guns.
 * Geo Effects: With range attacks, you can snipe monsters below without having to worry about them retaliating.
 * Goggles Do Nothing: But they sure look cool on the Alchemist.
 * 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.
 * Green Rocks: Ember
 * He Was Right There All Along:, who jumps down from a stalagmite after its introduction.
 * Hot Wind: Vanquisher, in the title screen art. See above.
 * Impossible Item Drop: Because gear Randomly Drops too, you'll occasionally have moments where a mushroom's corpse yields up, say, a Whirling Geargun.
 * 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!
 * Kneel Before Zod:
 * 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.
 * Magic Wand: The ranged magical weapons.
 * Magitek: The Alchemical and Beam Golems (they're more like robots, actually) summoned by the Alchemist are powered by magical Ember.
 * Mecha Mooks: Two enemies in the game are mechanical: the mechanical constructs piloted by an undead dwarf, and a little spider-like sentry bot.
 * Metal Slime: Phase Beasts are cowardly ghost-like imps that, upon death, explode into a portal that takes you to a bonus level.
 * The Minion Master: If you focus on Charm.
 * Money Multiplier: One of the possible enchantments.
 * 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.
 * If you shatter an enemy, the resurrecting Mook Maker variant can't resurrect it.
 * 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.
 * "Noun Verber The Butcher": This game re-uses the randomized boss naming conventions from Fate.
 * 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!"
 * Of Corsets Sexy: The Vanquisher.
 * Our Dwarves Are All the Same: averted, for once: all the dwarves you run into in this game are undead zombies.
 * Some of them are also huge.
 * Previous Player Character Cameo: The player characters of the first game show up as questgivers in the sequel.
 * Pinball Projectile: The Vanquisher's "Ricochet" and "Flechette Trap" abilities.
 * Power Equals Rarity: the "Artifact Equipment" idea from Fate shows up here. See also [Set Bonus] below.
 * 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 more Fetch 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.
 * Randomly Drops
 * Real Time Weapon Change
 * Run, Don't Walk
 * Schedule Slip: Torchlight II, originally to be released in late 2011, has been pushed back to 2012; and the MMO has been put on indefinite hiatus.
 * Schrodinger's Player Character
 * 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.
 * Shoot the Medic First:
 * 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?
 * The player.
 * Shout Out: Plenty of references in the game, like a Unique Mace called the Galactic Battlestar. Seriously.
 * Not to mention a Technicolor Nightmare Coat, as seen here.
 * Steam achievement Shout Outs include Only A Master Of Evil, Fisher King, and Sir-Mixes-A-Lot.
 * You can catch a Gruefish.
 * Socketed Equipment: natch; Diablolike, remember?
 * 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.
 * Lampshaded in a recent Torchlight 2 video: "Torchlight 2: 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.
 * Sword and Wand is also possible.
 * Teleport Spam
 * Tragic Monster:
 * 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,
 * Underboobs: Some of the Vanquisher armor displays this prominently.
 * Universal Poison. Notable as even zombies, skeletons, specters and the alchemist's Mechanical Golems can be poisoned.
 * 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.
 * 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.