I’m a big fan of random loot-based RPG so I thought for today’s article, I’d discuss the pros and cons of some of the major ones out there at the moment.

Diablo 3
+Great visuals.
+Even better audio.
+Interesting abilities.
+Best combat feel.
+Life-Up Power-Ups & Potion Cooldown make HP matter
+Easy to try out different builds since build choices aren’t permanent.
-Loot system is poor. At higher levels, you generally need to get most of your loot from the auction house rather than from drops or crafting to stay competitive.
-Online-only so if your connection or their server has problems, you can’t play (or have serious lag).
-Lack of permanent choices can bother some.

Path of Exile
+Excellent loot system allows for lots of crafting & customization.
+Skill system ala FF7 allows for customizing abilities with various supports.
+LV-Up system ala FF10 allows for immense customization opportunities.
+Free! And actually free unlike most freemium titles (you can’t buy gameplay advantage even if you wanted to).
+Clever potion system
-Online-only and lag & desynch are far worse & more common than they are in Diablo 3.
-Combat itself isn’t very interesting. Slow & lacks flash.
-There are too many things to take into account for the best gear (appropriate requirements, good stats, the passives you want, a high number of skill slots in the right color and all linked together) which makes it very hard to progress past a certain point.
-Skills are item-based which can make it frustrating to get all of the skills you want (and some of them can only be acquired from random drops or trading with other players).
-Can be overwhelming with all the permanent build choices that need to be made.

Torchlight 2
+Colorful art style
+High loot drop rate
+Fun combat.
+Only $15
-Feels rather unbalanced
-Even unique equipment tends to feel like just a bunch of random abilities

Grim Dawn
+Interesting multi-class skill point system (same basic setup as Titan Quest)
+High loot drop rate
+Well designed loot
+Improved Combat from Titan Quest (which was rather slow paced & bland ala Path of Exile)
-Not finished yet

Borderlands 2
+Change of Pace (FPS + RPG whereas most games like this are top-down)
+Great art style
+Humor
+Tons of weapons to choose from
+Coming to the Vita next year
-Lack of non-gun abilities
-LV-Up choices limited compared to most games of this style

Conclusion
Out of these 5 games, I’d say Grim Dawn is shaping up to be my favorite. It takes all of my favorite parts of Titan Quest & improves everything. Unfortunately, it’s still a long ways from being finished – right now, it’s in alpha with only 3 of the 5 planned classes implemented & only the first act of the game playable (which is about 5-6 hours, I’d say).

Of the games that are actually finished, I think I’m going to have to side with Diablo 3. Yes, the loot system is a mess and the always online-requirement is a pain (although apparently the console version won’t have that problem), but the actual moment-to-moment gameplay in Diablo 3 is vastly superior to its competitors. Path of Exile is a lot of fun to theorycraft but Diablo 3 is actually fun to play. Torchlight 2 was decent but never really clicked with me. Borderlands 2 is really good as well, but I’m just not that big of a FPS player. Therefore I declare Diablo 3 the winner… at least until Grim Dawn is finished.

Now if they could only port it to the Vita…

4 Responses

  1. For Torchlight 2, enemy damage seemed really off – you’d be fighting a mob and nothing seemed to be doing much of a dent and then suddenly somebody would one-hit kill you. Effectiveness of the various skills also seemed to be all over the place.

    On the other hand, I haven’t played Torchlight 2 recently and I know they regularly patch it so I should probably give it another shot sometime.

  2. Good article, but I wish you’d expanded a bit more on “feels unbalanced” for Torchlight 2. You said on twitter you don’t mean the classes, so what aspect of the game are you actually complaining about?

  3. I would of agreed with you prior to release of D3, but after playing it I was severely let down of how gutted the game felt when compared to diablo 2, and how every act save the last was just a better looking version of an act from diablo 2. I really missed the community of Diablo 2, meaning seeing a line of games currently available and seeing names of items people want to trade, seeing people who want to rush an act, and other more creative ones like fireside chat sessions. All of this atmosphere and community building disappeared with Diablo 3.

    Diablo 3 also stripped out useful abilities for gems, truly useful socketed armors, and a good bit more. Sadly, I think they did this so they could resell those tidbits in dlc for diablo 3. Due to the extreme scissor use to make Diablo 3 as barebones as possible, I couldn’t last more than a month playing it. Currently I only have one character above lv 30, a monk, who has like 12 paragon levels. I only play when my dad wants a hand with something, as he is an avid Diablo 3 player.

    I would say my main gripe is I feel, and blizzard basically proved, that they only cared about milking the player base. The auction house was horrible, and drained all the fun out of the game for me. I missed finding a good item that was worthless to me and then trading that for something useful. I miss being able to rune word up a piece of armor to make a teleport enabled suit of armor that was good for Mephisto farming sessions. I miss actually having gems that were worth a damn. Now my dad has an entire mule on his account and mine loaded with gems that serve no purpose, tradeskill items that give worse gear 99.999 percent of the time.

    Anyway, done complaining. I just wish Blizzard had never merged with Activision. All my favorite companies merged over the last decade, and their output went down drastically in quality. Examples of this are Activision Blizzard and Square Enix.

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