Thread by @AlexandraErin

So, Torchlight 3... I have mixed feelings about it and a lot of them I think can be chalked up to its early development cycle being focused on MMO functionality.

One thing I really liked about Torchlight 2 was that they expanded the functionality of pets, from basically being a walking bag of holding you can temporarily dismiss to sell excess goods to also being able to take a shopping list back to town from any location.

The pet system is one of the highlights of the Torchlight series compared to other Diablikes, and I felt like leaning into it was a good move.

3 seems to have gotten rid of the shopping list functionality.

Which kind of sucks since your potion capacity is now sharply capped at 4 stacks of 5 potions each.

Plus side: you can now collect/cultivate multiple pets and switch between them? Something I wanted in the earlier games.

But I miss being able to send my pet to pick up items and gold.

Also, doesn't seem to be a way to pause the game when you have inventory or skill screens open, which again feels very Online Only Play to me.

The earlier games also had a way to switch between two weapon loadouts at the touch of a button, and a functionality for toggling between two skills as your right-click attack. Sorely missing that now.

The early game at least doesn't have the gem socketing or enchantment, though I've seen references to an enchantment table and recipes so that's apparently not completely gone. But its absence at the start makes it feel less Torchlighty.

There also doesn't seem to be a "vanilla spell system" shared among all the classes, which again, less Torchlighty.

The decision to get rid of the vendor trash scrolls for town portals and make it an inherent ability was solid, though.

One positive change: replacing the inappropriately appropriative term "mana" with a class-specific resource like Ammo for the Sharpshooter. Haven't tried the mage class so I don't know if they ditched it entirely or just deprecated it from the previous games.

So here's my big MMO related gripe: random luck-based drops for mission completion. Story mission: prove the netherim are back. Story text says to bring back "skulls, teeth, whatever you can find." Actual goal: 1 netherim hide and 3 netherim jawbones.

I go to the designated map and kill like a dozen assorted netherim. Get 1 hide and 1 jawbone. Map is cleared. Quest unfinished, and when I try to leave the area it prompts me if I'm sure, even though there's no more monsters to kill for the drops.

Storywise the prompt was "bring back anything you can find to prove it's really netherim" and I feel like 1 jawbone does that the same as 3 jawbones? Also some of them were small enough I could have brought back a whole corpse.

The goodnews is that saving and quitting the game seems to reset all the maps you're not on. Which is bad news if you drop a portal, go back to town or your fort (which I like!) and then quit, because that seems to wipe out your portal in the course of resetting the map you left

So if you don't know about that, you have to traipse back from the last closest waypoint you found through a bunch of refreshed maps and encounters to get back to the dungeon you'd left a return portal in. Very unintuitive.

I do appreciate that it seems like the classes get an inherent version of their iconic weapons for skill use which feels like it makes you more free to try different weapons (e.g., the sharpshooter can pull out a bow to use a rain of arrows type attack)...

...but you also choose a poorly-explained "Elemental Relic" subclass in character creation that is keyed to specific weapons, which kind of undercuts that.

And I really miss the weapon swapping key because for instance I have a rifle that buffs the sharpshooter's goblin-ghost summoning skill and I'm basically stuck using that even as I find more interesting weapons, because the buff is too good.

I *do* like the new mechanic where you can sacrifice equipment to a magic tree in your home that grows more the rarer the items it eats, which increases your rare-gear-finding luck.

Anyway, it's fun and all. And it feels like more Torchlight, but not as much like more Torchlight as I'd hoped for.

I'm just lucky that the rangery class is also a summoner, because that's the main thing I did with the spell system in the first two games.

Also, the PCs seem a little underdeveloped personality-wise compared to previous games, which again might spring from its genesis as a scrapped MMO.

I guess I'm glad it came out at all and isn't an always-online/multiplayer only game. I do remember fearing the series was dead when Runic shuttered.

Also, I killed a phasebeast and it just took me to a level'd-up reprise of a boss battle I'd already done? I hope there's some more innovative phasebeast/portal dungeons and it's not just rehashed boss arenas.