That’s it. I’m getting this tonight - work, chili preparation, wall sanding/painting be damned.
Is there multipartying?
Single player only.
Yah, and this is a big contention among the forum there. I wish there is an identify all generic knowledge dispensing NPC
I missed the discussion on the forums. The ‘identify all’ NPC wouldn’t be much use when you send your pet back to town though (unless it stopped there automatically). My warrior has the identify spell in one of his spell slots. I use it to identify all the items that I pick up and I don’t even think it uses mana to cast. It is more convenient than collecting scrolls, but I doubt I will want to waste a spell slot when I am playing as a spell-caster.
One of the things I like about this game is that they eliminated or de-emphasized a lot of the drudgery in D2.
- Everything in town is centrally located; you don’t have to run all over town to get to the right vendor.
- Your pet can automate selling items.
- The transmute gives you ‘change’.
- The stamina attribute is eliminated, so no more waiting in an empty dungeon for it to recharge just so you can get to the next stairs down.
- Health and mana potions in your inventory are ‘chained’.
- All items in the inventory take the same space.
- Gold is automatically picked up when you run near it.
But with all these usablity improvements, you still have to identify your magic items. Which means you need to keep a spell or collect scrolls and then you have to manually click on each item. This doesn’t really seem to add anything to the game play. In the very early levels of D2, you can’t identify everything you have. You need to tradeoff between spending gold on identify scrolls or using it to buy equipment. After you get the ‘identify all’ NPC, the identify dynamic becomes useless (and time consuming). But I don’t even remember a point during Torchlight where I could not identify an item. This makes the identify concept even more useless. I wonder why they kept it in after all of the other improvements they added.
Travis Baldree (the inventor of Fate, and a dev on Torchlight), is pretty active on the Torchlight forums. Post a suggestion about this, I’m sure it will be seen, and perhaps they’ll give it some consideration. FWIW, I agree with you, and find identify mechanics as annoying as repair mechanics; sure, it’s more “realistic” and adds a bit of a money sink, but the only time that’s really a factor is early in the game when characters are struggling with cash.
I poked around on the forums to see if this suggestion/question was raised. It seems that the Identify scroll is rare (or at least rare for some people). I found it right away, so I assumed it was common. I guess this changes the dynamic a bit.
I’ll take your suggestion and ask on the TL forums. I might wait until the patch comes out first though.
As a side note: It seems to be the consensus that Normal difficulty is too easy. In fact, the FAQ suggests players of similar games start on Hard difficulty.
I played about an hour of the demo tonight. The controls seem very “floaty” to me. Could be I have a slow computer - what do I need to check?
There aren’t any computers too slow for Torchlight. It must be something else.
So are the controls naturally floaty? What’s the response time when you’re the Arbiter (the female character) when you tell her to fire at something (with her beginner bow)?
Note that weapons have short range in Torchlight, no more than half a screen when zoomed out, so if you are pressing Shift plus mouse click, and it appears that you are not hitting, you may be out of range. Try clicking on the mob itself.
There’s not likely to be a lawsuit, since Travis Baldree pretty much single-handedly did Fate, and is the lead designer on Torchlight. I think he’s okay with re-using his own ideas. 
We spent $60 on Torchlight the week it came out - I picked up the demo off Steam on release day and bought it the next day, and then Dangerosa and our son bought it over the next couple of days. It’s a really fun game.
For the Mac side, be aware that it does not run in Parallels. There is a Mac OS port planned for 2010, which will no doubt cause me to spend another $20 on the game.
It does, however, run in VMWare Fusion Desktop 3 - the framerate is a little choppy, but it’s quite playable. (Admittedly, I’ve only tested this on a Mac Pro with a fairly beefy set of settings on the VM). I turned on the “netbook mode” and that helped a lot. But I’d still say it’s a much better experience in Bootcamp.
I actually think my PC is a little wimpy for it. I often hit a hotkey to activate a spell and nothing will happen - and not one with a cooldown, either. The missed button presses and mouseclicks are a little annoying.
I don’t think it’s the PC that’s the problem. I have that issue as well, and my computers are well able to handle the game. I think that sometimes the button presses just don’t register for some reason. Mouse clicks don’t seem to have problems, but the hot keys do.
Well, I also get a lot of herky-jerky performance out of the game, especially on the lava levels. I could probably turn down the graphics…
That’s exactly what I’m getting. It makes being a ranged fighter a pain - “No, I don’t want you to wade into battle! I want you to rain death from above on them!” I dropped my resolution down a little, which helped slightly.
I started playing Torchlight on an old computer (one from around 2000, but with a newer graphics card) and I noticed this issue as well. I even got it when pressing ‘i’ or ‘p’ for the inventories – I would have to hold them down to get the screens to open. When I would first start playing, I would not have this problem, but it would build over time.
That said, these issues occurred with the first released version and I have not used that computer since the patches were released. I know they have many performance improvements since then and the issue could be resolved by now. The fixes for the slow loading times should help with performance in general, I think. If you haven’t already, make sure you have the latest version.
I wonder if the demo is the first version, and they haven’t upgraded it. That would explain a lot. The load screens are painful.
Oh, you did say the demo version. Did you get the demo through Steam? Or Runic? Steam has had a demo since the first version, but Runic didn’t release a demo until the patch. That implies that the Runic demo is not the first version. You should be able to see the version in the lower-right corner of the screen at startup.
I think the load screens got a lot better with the patched version though. If they are still painful for you, then who knows…
Yeah, I know what you mean. It’s also sometimes hard to click on fast moving mobs. If you want to stay in one place you can hold the shift key and the toon will do whatever it is you tell them to do, but they won’t move from where they’re standing.