I’ve found the same thing to be true with the health potions – whenever I got to a floor where a higher tier of potion dropped, I didn’t have to use them until 1-2 floors into that level of potions, and by that time I usually had a stack or two of them, so I could sell my remaining lower level potions.

I usually have a feeling of invincibility as well. Actually, I’m on the last floor or so before the end (I assume) and I’ve yet to die. I’ve had a few close calls, but with no time-delay penalty between drinking potions, it’s easy to just spam them and live through what would otherwise be deadly encounters.

The identity scroll issue is similar, but by the time I fill up my inventory, I almost always seem to have picked up enough of those to identify all the new items I’ve got. Most of the time, I don’t use them though – I found a spell scroll pretty early in the game for identifying items, so I usually just use that and sell all my ID scrolls. As with the healing spell, the mana regen makes time the only limitation in how much I can use this ability – and I usually have so many mana potions available, I don’t need to worry about that either.

My perception of games has changed over the years as I’ve spent more time considering the development / design side of things. Years ago, I might have looked at random deaths in games as just a mistake made by me – I should have heeded more caution. But now I find myself getting angry at developers whenever something like this happens. It’s a flaw in the game’s design when the player isn’t given a fair warning before death becomes imminent.

For the most part, this doesn’t happen in dungeon crawlers except for when you plunge into a group of enemies without being careful about how many you draw. But it does happen occasionally in Torchlight, when you press the heal button and your character doesn’t react, or you get hit with an unexpectedly large amount of damage by one character in a horde of others, with no prior warning that you might get into trouble.

I’m not sure how Torchlight could be fixed in this regard – but it is a problem that should be addressed somehow by the developer. It could be especially frustrating when the Torchlight MMO is introduced, and these issues result in bad blood between dungeon-crawling party members.

The first time you fire up TorchEd, it forces you to create a new project. This “mod” is automatically installed with no simple or obvious way of removing it. The problem is, the game will accuse you of cheating because you’ve installed a mod, regardless of whether you’ve changed anything or not. Simply not saving won’t help here. From what I’ve read, the main problem with getting the “cheater bit” set for your character is that you can’t use the shared loot chest. They don’t make fixing it easy.

What you say about health is too true. The heal spell is pretty useless in battle, yet it’s too powerful when you’re at rest because it doesn’t cost anything but time. For the most part time is an unlimited resource in this game.

As for potions, I’ve never run out of them and I feel more or less invincible at all times. In fact I collect so many potions during a quest that it usually becomes burden to carry them all, even when stacked 20 high (I wish I could say the same about Identify scrolls).

Nevertheless I have died a few times because I wasn’t paying attention to my health meter. That’s another one of those dangerous interface problems. Dying in a game should never come as a surprise. It’s a bit unfair and it takes the tension right out of the game. A game like Left 4 Dead always makes your player status clear and the limited opportunities for healing keep the tension up.

I had the same problems keeping track of my mouse in really large fights. I found myself having to moving it around the screen or in small concentric circles to get my eyes back on it, and often I had to eat a potion or two in the meantime just to prevent myself from dying. Which brings me to two other complaints I have – that often, the game just boils down to having enough potions to heal yourself through fights, and that unlike WoW, you can’t just press the button for your heal spell and expect it to work; your character seems to have to be in between other actions to cast spells, which makes logical sense, but makes it almost impossible to depend on spells for anything important.

Haven’t touched TorchEd yet, but I probably will once I get through the whole game. I took a break from Torchlight to play through Plants vs. Zombies (another fantastic game, by the way), and I’ve yet to really get back into it. It’s a good dungeon crawler though, and for $10, you really can’t go wrong.

Normal difficulty is far too easy and I’m not sure I want to start over at this point. This is why games should allow the changing of difficulty on the fly.

I’m also having some problems keeping track of my mouse pointer during big fights. That’s very annoying. I really dislike it in games when player characters do incredibly dangerous things because of an interface problem.

I’ve installed the TorchEd editor. It looks pretty deep. You can change everything and test your changes quickly, which is nice. Not that I’ve managed to create a single thing yet. I can’t seem to find any sort of help guide and TorchEd is not exactly intuitive. I haven’t hit the modding sites yet.

Currently, I’ve made it to somewhere around level 35, and I haven’t used that feature yet – it’s a neat idea in theory, but after playing through the game for many more hours, my pet has been reduced to a loot mule, occasional distraction for enemies, and that’s about it. I’ve got a few fish to give him too, but since the actions of my pet seem so inconsequential, I just haven’t thought to try it yet.

The editor is actually available, but I haven’t installed it yet. I’ve been too busy with the actual game, and it’s a pretty hefty download (1.26gb) so I’m holding off for now. Once I beat the main quest I’ll probably give it a shot.

I have to agree on the clickety-clickety gameplay; Torchlight is pretty similar in that regard. You can actually hold shift and hold the left mouse button to stand in place and continually attack, but fights usually involve a tiny bit more strategy than just standing there, so it’s hard to make use of this too much.

I’ll report back once I’ve beaten the game and played with the editor – and I’m looking forward to that game of yours Xot… especially after you showed me that light engine you were working on some months ago!

There is a lot to like. I’m not a WoW player and I’ve only watched Diablo being played a handful of times. Even with my limited exposure I instantly thought of Diablo when I saw this game. One thing I was surprised I liked is the absurd pet system. Pets are something I was planning to use as well. I was imagining doing something a lot more realistic but this idea of sending you pet back to cash in your loot neatly handles a problem that plagues most RPGs. Something you didn’t talk about is that you can feed your pet a fish to temporarily transform them into another creature. That’s a really interesting strategic feature.

The main thing I didn’t like, which is a Diablo trademark as far as I can tell, is the click-clickity-click-click-click gameplay. I wish this game could be played with a gamepad.

When I saw on Steam that you had bought the game it also said something about you getting a level editor. That got my attention. I’d love to hear something about it as it is not part of the demo as far as I can tell.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2009/11/4/