Playing the closed alpha of Torchlight Frontiers gave me this feeling of wanting to go and play Torchlight II again so I decided to load up a low level character (Engineer) that I hadn’t played in quite a long time.
As I began playing it again, my old ARPG self became immersed in the game where even my ARPG OCD kicked in (that is, the need to explore every part of the map in order to lift the fog of war). The old school progression mechanics (stat and skill points) while simple, felt like a nice (and nostalgic) change considering the type of games I’ve been playing in recent times. Oh, and the whole offline play (more so with the GOG version where it is DRM free) is nice since I could leave loot on the ground (if both my character and pet inventory became filled) and knew it would be there in my next resumed play session.
The completeness of Torchlight II reminded me how they were starting from scratch with Torchlight Frontiers; well I was reminded of that when the next day, I resumed playing in Torchlight Frontiers, and wondered where the tabs on the side of the screen went since I wanted to check was in my pet inventory (screen below).
I ended up wasting several minutes looking through the settings to see if I had inadvertently hit some key that toggled them off and kept trying to click my pets icon at the top right; I ended up going back to town and my fort to figure out why I couldn’t view my pet inventory. I ended up giving up. It was only later when I resumed playing my Engineer in Torchlight II that it hit me that I was getting that part of the UI mixed up. In Frontiers, the pet inventory is a tab in the characters (I)nventory as opposed to the Pet Panel tab that is on the left side of the screen in TL2.
The point that I realized after the fact is that Echtra has managed to really keep the feel of the franchise the same (to where the older version messed with my mind this way) even though we’re seeing only a small part of what Frontiers has to actually offer during this alpha test phase. Movement and combat are two critical aspects in ARPG type games and Echtra has that part down (what needs to be worked on is impact especially for the better skills including ultimates). Hopefully the actual world environment will follow since the frontiers aspect doesn’t have the same feel of the massive zones in TL2. I’ve seen the public areas refresh with a new layout but generally speaking, the map has this linear sort of feel to it (plus it lacks a fog of war component). Again, this is still in closed alpha and we’re not seeing a lot of things they’ve designed but haven’t pushed out for play testing yet.
