Quote (KillingIsMyBusiness @ Oct 17 2020 10:46am)
All that being said, i'm going to repeat myself by saying that i consider Diablo 2 to be superior to all the mention games here, because, guess what? They do have their own flaws:
Torchlight 2 has a terrible take on the difficulty system. You choose between 4 difficulties when making a character and you're stuck with it. When you beat the game you start a new game+ and the monsters are up to your level, but the game is still on the difficulty you chose at the start. Thankfully you can increase the difficulty in a LAN game, but once you switch again to single player, you're back on your starting difficulty. That's maybe my only complaint about the game, because other than wanting to see your character fully built at level 100, there's nothing else to keep you going past the first playthrough... Oh, did i mention that there's no benefit whatsoever in playing on higher difficulties? So if you want to grind items, just play on casual difficulty (which is bellow normal), because you're NOT getting higher drop chances on Normal, Veteran or Elite where there's a trade of in clear speed, so why would you waste your time there? That's a ruined potential at its finest! I'm not gonna complain about the cartoonish nature of the game, because for me, once again, it's a nice change of tone and pace... i don't like everything to look like Diablo 2, especially if i'm looking to take a break from D2. That's why i love the look of the game.
Titan Quest doesn't have randomly generated areas, but that's not the problem. The problem is that the monsters are also NOT randomly generated, which is a massive drop on replayability. You only get random miniboss spawns, but that's it. For that reason, i go back to TQ a lot less often than Diablo 2 where you can get all sorts of surprising encounters and battles with unique and champion packs with random abilities and auras.
Grim Dawn does the same thing as TQ, but at least there you have different enemy factions and when you reach maximum hostility level with a certain faction, they increase the spawns of its members and even send unique bosses to hunt you down... it's actually a pretty awesome concept. What i hate about Grim Dawn though, is the Arena! It's called The Crucible, which is a rip off of Darksiders 2's arena. What makes it bad, is that they made the Crucible the best place to find epic and legendary gear, which ruins the purpose to go out and farm the world for anything other than MI's, relics and charms - you have no idea how much i despise the Crucible concept. Why doing fun things and travel the world, when you can stay in one f'n arena for hours on end, to farm your best items? And you will eventually go there and do it, because you'll want to get the best gear, when you get frustrated with bad luck and rng. F the Crucible! So yeah, i know i mentioned Grim Dawns grind as a big positive in the previous post, but that's because i played the game mainly before the expansions and the addition of the Cricible.
It's also a big minus that all these games have useless common and magic items (the equivalent of the blue items in D2)... In the Titan Quest you can get some really good resistanse magical items, but for the most part, magical items become useless once you're passed acts 3 or 4 - it's all rares, epics and uniques after that. None of these games can figure out what to do with low tier items, unlike Diablo 2 where you can find yourself looking out for specific white and grey items on Hell difficulty, not only because of runeword bases, but also because some of them sell at a maximum price. Non of this is in TQ, GD, or TL - thank god, at least they have built in item filters... :D
Well, i think that sums up my 2 cents on these games... at least that's the things i can think of right now, because i'm in a long break from all Diablo 2 clones.
A lot of information and input. Thanks!