Yeah Torchlight 2 is such a good value for your money I almost feel guilty paying $20 for it, they could have easily sold this for $30-$40 and it's better then most games that charge $60. The way that is was designed for easy modding is just going to expand what you get for your money as well as it should be even bigger then the first game.
Yes I got that was what you were saying after I read it and was going to remove the whole thing but unfortunately Gamespot removed your ability to edit comments when they upgraded (I use that term loosely) to livefyre comments.
Yes that's the same problem I have, it takes you out of the world and is a constant reminder that you're in a videogame, videogames are supposed to immerse you in the world, being popped out of it every minute sucks. It sucks becuase the first game was not like that and I felt immersed in the world. Having to accept this negative/downgrade that was not in the first game is frustrating. 3 years, more experience, you name it and they actually do a far worse job then the first time around. Even when textures do load many of them are very low res and muddy.
I haven't played the game in co-op yet but I think you're saying that it is even worse in co-op? That would make sense as it's putting even more strain on the engine.
Why do no reviewers mention this and gloss over it? They don't want to damage their relationship with 2K that's why. 2K was caught threatening reviewers with sanctions through a PR firm they hired for negative reviews of Duke Nukem.
Reviewers know their place, they have them on a tight leash and you learn how long that leash is with experience and your editors, Jeff Gerstmann challenged the length of that leash and got fired. You're only allowed to say so much negative things and you are strongly encouraged to gloss over and minimize those things, this is like x3 for the more bigger budget the release. Little companies with no clout they will criticize severely if they deserve it becuase they're not intimidated. If they were responsible they would have had a picture showing the texture streaming issues. It's too embarrassing for 2K so instead reviews gloss over or in this case outright misrepresent the truth.
I give the game a 7.5 (me personally) 8 (for everyone else) Maya is just a badly designed and balanced character which makes the game seem worse and more unbalanced then it is for the other characters. Some of the new enemies are good like the new bandits and stuff and the robots are fun, I like how they can lose limbs and stuff.
The shooting feels off compared to the tight clean combat of the first game. The hitboxes seem ill-defined. The bullets are much slower in this game making the combat less satisfying, your character is slower too and generally everything just seems more "floaty". There is so much crap in the environment to get stuck on in this game, everything has something sticking out of it to get hooked on. There are deadly pits everywhere not in the first game and "blue lava" I.e killer water, and tons of invisible walls that were rare in the first game now they are everywhere. A lazy map builder uses invisible walls to cover for the deficiencies of their design, it's also a result of wanting form over function. They cared more about how it looked and stubbornly stuck to their design even though it did not work for the gameplay so they had to add a bunch of invisible walls over it to make sure the characters stayed on the path they wanted them to be on. This was extremely limited in the first game and this is another thing that breaks your immersion and takes you out of the games world. Can't go on that roof, exactly like the one beside it you can climb on, nope, invisible wall. Can't travel over that rock, invisible wall. Can't jump that fence just like the one you jumped a second ago, invisible wall.
The review only mentions the texture streaming issues in passing also saying it is "sometimes". Lies. It's ever present on every gun you see, ammo on the ground, every box you open, new enemies on the screen area you enter, etc. It is the single worst game for texture streaming issues in the history of the Xbox 360. How can that not at least be mentioned? The texture streaming issues are not "sometimes' Chris, they are *all the time* and *ever present* and worse of all they were not in the first game so they went way backwards in that regard. Is this what a bigger budget and "AAA" get you? Bargain bin $20 games don't have the dodgy programming and lazily implemented optimizations this game does. If you have to play the game play it on the PC as it is far superior, they did a shoddy job on the consoles.
So it's glossing over, minimizing, and outright lying (saying it's sometimes) about how the game performs to make it look better in this regard and you're complaining about it being "too harsh"?
@NeoCrimsonCloud Yes it did now that you reminded me but it was not anywhere near as bad as this game is. I played Gears 1 and passed it on insane difficulty solo and co-op more times then I can count.
What happened in Gears was one object used to be like that like a trash can, it would take maybe twice as long to load, sometimes, as every single ammo box in this game takes to load or tons of other textures. Peopele noticed it becuase it was the first game to have that problem but it was minor. In this game you open a chest ...the guns are a soupy mess. Enemies spawn out of a black hole in the wall, soupy mess. The first game was not like this, what kind of unpaid interns did they get working on this game, seriously.
Also Gears was released November 7, 2006 <-----read that again, and on a much earlier version of Unreal Engine and it didn't have a fraction of the streaming issues this game has. This game has constant, ever present texture streaming issues and has the dubious honor of being the worst game in the history of the Xbox 360 for texture streaming issues that I know of. This is supposed to be a "AAA" release but we get the bottom of the gutter programming and utilization? We get a *downgrade* from the first game? How is such incompetency possible? 2012 is almost over and they've made tons and tons of games for the 360 and they actually become more and more incompetent as time rolls on?
@Lazerith91 It's "you're". You're is a contraction of "you are" so when you said "your an idiot" you actually meant "you are an idiot", hence you're supposed to say "you're".
I said she is bad for the first 20 hours of the game, and mightily boring to play, then when you get her last 4 or so abilities she becomes a beast, which is really unbalanced. She's also tooled as a support character and for co-op so she's good for that but it' makes her poor and boring to play in single player until you're like level 30+. Her tree is very unbalanced. Her special ability sucks and does no damage and no crowd control for the first 20 hours, then when you get one or 2 certain abilities it becomes amazing, that = majorly unbalanced and poorly designed. Lilith's ability was useful and balanced throughout the entire game.
You have a little damage buff in one tree then in another tree you have an elemental chance buff to work with for damage until you get your final abilities then she owns like crazy. If you go for the elemental it limits your gun choices even more which you can use since that's the thing you have to rely on for damage so it makes the getting guns part of the game a slow generally boring slog.
She's unbalanced period and when playing in single player she's doubly unbalanced as she was made for co-op play and support so it makes it even worse. They took and put on her all the lamest boring group buff abilities the soldier had in the first game, making a ton of her abilities useless unless you're playing co-op games.
@stan_boyd I can see how Maya can be good, but you have to play till close to the end of the game before she is useful becuase the only good skills she has, and the ones that finally make her main ability useful are the very last and second to last ones.
This game doesn't just have texture streaming issues. This game has the worst texture streaming issues I have* ever seen* on the 360 and probably the only worse example I know of in history was Rage on PC when it was released.
Is this what you get from an experienced developer, on a console at the end of its life so they should know it in and out and it was not in the first game? What were they doing for the last 3 years, learning how to be completely incompetent? Blows my mind.
This game is much more buggy then the first, I'm getting weird quest errors like enemies not coming out so I have to redo a whole area and items picked up not registering. You get stuck on environmental things all the time, never used to happen in the first game. The gunplay feels off, floaty and imprecise compared to the first game. Significant ever present texture load problems that were not in the first game. The combat is unbalanced and extremely spammy especially the varkids which seem to have been designed with only co-op in mind. They just spit acid at you so fast it's not skill based at all like in the first game where if you got hit it was your fault. In this game you cannot avoid the spam becuase they are faster then you and you cannot escape, they just shoot so fast and run ou down till you die with the siren (with the siren while in the first game you COULD escape due to the increased speed of your special ability, now with this junky ability you can stop one enemy out of the 6 that are chasing you, hooray!) The Siren now sucks and the abilities are weak and inconsequential until more then halfway through the game. I used to feel every skill point in the first game now I'm so bored with them that I forget and am not even motivated to use them because they do so little until you reach a new tier but even then they don't do much ...ooh a useless tiny acid low damage acid cloud 75% through the skill tree! Fantastic! Ooohh 5 points into Helios to do what is the equivalent of a kitten scratch in damage. Worse all the skills that increase your use of phaselock are on a another tree, being able to use that kitten scratch a bit more would have made it almost tolerable and worth mentioning.
I had absolutely no complaints about the skills in the first game, all of them were great and felt balanced, usable and fun to use. Now in this game they completely screwed the game up. Kinda like a person obsessed with plastic surgery, they keep on screwing with their face thinking they are making it better but they just make their face a garbled mess.
they added so much negatives that were not in the first game to this "improvement" it's amazing. If you want to have fun do not play the siren, the awesome class in the first game, because it sucks in this game. I should have listened to my gut, I looked at the skills and saw they were garbage but I trusted Gearbox ...big mistake. I also should have listened to others who are also saying the siren really sucks and is a garbled mess of a character compared to the first game. Now I have 15 or so hours invested in this useless character.
Oh yeah another things the guns are much more boring this time around then the first game, I find myself not enjoying the guns at all and finding less usable ones, so many of them have ridiculously long load times and they made ammo 2-3X more scarce in this game so you have to constantly look in every box, toilet whatever you come across, it's ridiculous. That was an annoying thing about the first game, also a thing people complained about in Dead Island ...did they fix it, Oh course not! They have to follow the trend with this game, make everything worse. They made it so you have to look through every dam thing there is. They even put another incentive to looking in every pile of refuse being iridium which you need to upgrade your storage etc. This game should be called reloader lands cause that's what you spend half your time doing now, was not like that in the first game. If I want to improve my reload time I have to choose a skill tree that is not based on damage dealing, which my weakling siren needs badly.
Game is probably a lot more fun in co-op but I wanted to breathe in the world, enjoy everything on my own time but I can see the siren is a broken weak support character now for co-op. Now you get to respec to be a crappy low damage no ability boring nurse to heal the party ....yay!
Thanks Gearbox you geniuses. Like a scab you couldn't stop picking at, you picked at Borderlands until you broke or made less fun everything that was done at least acceptable in the first game.
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