Except for the ocean maze. <shudder>

D2 is still my favorite. D1 was also great, but very different, hard to even compare directly.

D3 started out pay-to-win, and really set the wrong tone with online-only. People gave up before the initial lag spikes were even cleared up all the way. Later on they added enemy level scaling, and the Prestige nonsense basically means that life begins at 60. The skillbar is also extremely limited, with no leveling differentiation and set number of slots for a set number of widgets. By comparison, Torchlight 2 had some nice refinements on the D2 system instead of scrapping skillpoint allocation altogether.

D3 is too much about getting to 60 and farming prestige and items. There's never any reason to have more than one of any class. You never really build a character.

Torchlight 2 is a little double-edged. Moddability is nice, but I think it provides a disincentive for the publisher to make expansions. If you can mod a character class or a campaign, then you can host it on a download site (possibly not even on purpose, because maybe your mod consists of tweaks and balance changes but happens to contain the entire expansion 98% unchanged). Since it isn't good to police mods, the publisher can't really sell more things to extend or improve the game. But then the lack of expansions causes the game to drift out of sight altogether. So maybe they'll do a sequel eventually, but the studio is working on an entirely different game at the moment.

It should also be noted that T2 has a lot of D2 developers who weren't involved with D3. D3 was mostly a matter of an oversized company iterating on a brand after the creators had jumped ship to do something else.

People matter. Companies and brand names don't.

For me, D3 was kind of failure at start, but D3's expansion changed a lot of things in a positive way and now the game is really playable.

that's interesting. I didn't know that,but it makes sense.

Very true.

Also worth noting that two of those people also left Runic after Torchlight 2 to form Double Damage, and produced Rebel Galaxy. I still haven't played it so I can't speak from experience, but I saw fairly mixed reviews.

An expansion pack would at very minimum include new art assets, assets which in turn could be used by modders whose mods would then require the expansion pack.

I guess the argument could be made that mods hurt the market for cheap uninspired DLC, like costumes and stuff where modders can create non-identical content that's of similar quality. However, a proper expansion with real content complements rather than competes with mods. Look at the Baldurs Gate Enhanced Editions as an example. There's an example of a game that's been modded every which way, and the a re-release was still financially successful. I got a whiff of executive meddling there. I'm also a bit uneasy about Blizzard's senior creative staff; I get a real "George Lucas" vibe from them in that they have reached a point in their careers where they have no editorial oversight and half of what they spew out is crap that no one is allowed to challenge. I remember playing Wings of Liberty and really liking half the campaign, but finding the other half absolutely cringeworthy. And often times it's people you've never heard of. The little guy in a cubicle may not have as much influence on the overall game as the guy in the corner office, but collectively there are a lot of little guys on any game production.

I got to agree. Diablo 3 failed me miserably, as an old and forever departed, Blizzard customer and fan. From the always online DRM to the no truly single-player session, from the real money Auction House (yeah, they removed it, but not before making a sh*t-ton of "black" money in the process) to the unnervingly low drop chances and crappy looting system, all the way to the cartoonification of graphics and the changing of the old, creepy, macabre, gothic, bad-lit grey/white/black environment (1's atmosphere had been the best), diablo 3 was a disgrace, a game that accidentally has the name diablo in it's title and besides that, nothing in common with predecessors.

1 and 2 are my favorites to this day, especially 2. But games like Grim Dawn, Victor Vran and now newly arrived here, Torchlight 2, put Diablo 3 to shame quite EFFORTLESSLY and substitute for it masterfully and more than adequately enough! Am going to stick with them and completely forget diablo 3 ever happened, for me it's an eyesore. Kudos to the people who had the stomach and patience to play that cr@p.

Honestly, i can't wait for Torchlight 2 to go to discounted sale! Am grabbing it INSTANTLY!

To be fair, that was true of Diablo 2 as well. Level-appropriate gear was only really common in acts 1 and 2 in normal difficulty; as you got further into the game, it got increasingly rare and merchants had absolute garbage. Moreover, farming didn't become a practical option until act 3 hell, since that rare item drop you spent an hour searching for would be obsolete in one or two acts anyways. The post-game was better since once you had decent gear drop you were good for the rest of your career, but if you were legitimately playing through normal/nightmare/hell on your own without getting rushed the game's loot was painfully insufficient to keep up with the constantly increasing enemy strength.

In 1.09? Hmm, i really don't think so... Tresh Socket as well as couple of other guys, especially the corpse in Nilhathak's entrance, was an exceptional customer, normal difficulty yielded nightmare quality stuff in act 5 (especially worldstone keep), nightmare mephisto runs was da sh*t as well as council members and last but not least, cow level was a real party, even in normal!

1.10 and synergies onwards, game really went downhill (in drop chances and loot system).