First of all, the closed alpha is currently limited to two classes; the Dusk Mage and the Forged (which is an ember powered automaton). For anyone who has played either Torchlight I or II, the art style and combat remain true to the first two titles which depending on your perspective, can be either a good or bad thing.
The second thing to note is the game is still in closed alpha. With CA3, more of the game world is opened for play testing BUT most of the questing isn’t really associated with a story (so as to not spoil whatever is planned for the actual release).
The third thing as covered by the devs before is that the game world isn’t a full blown open world one where you may have hundreds of players in a channel. Instead, the public shared area of the world has up to 8 players while private instanced content is solo or party which means the game isn’t close to being like other MMO-ARPG’s that have been released. For myself, this was probably the biggest disappointment since even though I tend to solo level through most MMO’s, there was always something magical about seeing hundreds of other characters running around the game world (as background ambient “noise”). You don’t get that same impact with Torchlight Frontiers while questing through the public areas due to this decision.
Myself, the graphical aesthetics of the Torchlight franchise has never been appealing to me but the game play outweighed that. For me, that hasn’t really changed with Frontiers. As has been covered by the dev team, they’ve tried to move away from the notion of character levels and had other systems in place to provide some barometer of character progression including tying that progression to the “leveling” of your weapon (tying skill points to them). After feedback from prior tests, Echtra redid those systems; skill points acquired from combat are now simply used to unlock active and passive skills (and if you play a lot, it’s possible to acquire enough points to unlock everything you need).
Even at the starting levels, the itemization makes it feel like I am playing an ARPG (something that none of the Asian variants that has been released prior were ever able to latch onto where gear progression was pretty much linear). But I haven’t delved that far into Torchlight Frontiers yet to really get a good idea for how its gear progression feels over time. Since we’re pretty much just playing through quest chained content without a lot of the story/lore aspects in place, the adventure role playing and exploration aspects do feel lacking at this time.
The combat itself is fine but also isn’t anything that makes you go “wow, this is something new that no other isometric title has done before”. Again, this is still an alpha (that isn’t being used primarily for marketing purposes or some early monetization thing) so I’ve kept my expectations low as there may be designs they don’t want to yet show off yet. Still, a good comparison point is Lost Ark where some of the early questing content (not specifically the story but the designs of some questing objectives where twists were put into the usual fetch and gather type of quests) made you go wow (and that is normally a rarity for me because of the fact that I tend to be skeptical about things until I’ve gotten a chance to try it for myself). To be fair, Lost Ark’s content was in the beta stage whereas we’re still in the alpha phase for Torchlight Frontiers. The important takeaway is that Echtra’s designers have the base combat and movement working well (and that’s important for games like this).
With that said, Torchlight Frontiers feels like I am playing a Torchlight game which for Torchlight fans, should be welcome news. Myself, I’ve just been playing aimlessly sometimes running around and harvesting stuff rather than just heading to the next objective. With the notion of character levels downplayed (where skill points earned aren’t tied to levels but instead, acquired from killing monsters and completing objectives), I’m not as mindful of how my character is actually progressing except when I do get a better item, unlock/upgrade a skill, and then clear mobs or a dungeon/take down a boss much faster. I actually prefer feeling that progression in your characters actual abilities where it’s not tied to the usual formula of character level (and gear/skills that are gated by that level).
The game in its current state also doesn’t have that addictive feeling where I can’t stop playing (I never really had that when playing the previous titles either). That doesn’t mean the design of the game play is bad or isn’t fun; I would say the art style (not my preference) has a small part to do with that but the other has always been to do with the combat in Torchlight. As stated earlier, the combat is fine but it doesn’t have that impactful feel when it comes to what are considered ultimate skills. I realize part of it might be not wanting to go “over the top” with the effects (again, I do have a preference for how combat has been done in some Asian titles).
Finally, I can’t draw any conclusion regarding the game world itself but as of this closed alpha (3), there aren’t any memorable maps that provides that feeling of this sense of place. By this, what I mean is if I say Diablo II and I say Lut Gholein or Diablo III and Arreat Crater, those visuals are pretty clear for a Diablo fan. Same if I say Devilian and Wintergale Tundra or TERA and Seeliewood. The point is the locations and/or zones have a very distinct artwork/theme where they also provide this sense of place in the game world. Again, part of this might be due to the lack of associated story at this time for many locales in the game (or maybe that as of this writing, I haven’t progressed far enough to begin hitting those areas that we’re being allowed to see during this alpha).
