In TL2, when you finish the game, you take your character into a NG+, the enemies match your level, and you keep playing. I also feel like TL2 has a better grasp of long-term replayability than D3 did. It will be a lot harder, but it can be done. You can still brute force your way through a boss fight with sheer determination. Torchlight 2 realizes that hey, perhaps you havenвЂ™t been super lucky with loot drops and you havenвЂ™t gotten a new weapon in a few levelsвЂ¦ thatвЂ™s okay. However itвЂ™s no fun to have a game just completely stop you in your tracks. I crave challenge in my video games, itвЂ™s why I always start at the highest difficulty available. YouвЂ™ll never just hit a dead stop at a brick wall.

With enough time and patience, you can get through all of the hardest areas of the game. If you get an enemy down to half health, and you die, heвЂ™s still at half health when you get back there, and you can keep working on it. So even if youвЂ™re having trouble with an area/boss, and dying a lot, you never stop feeling like youвЂ™re making progress. Second, the enemies donвЂ™t immediately regenerate all of their health as soon as you disengage them. YouвЂ™re not going to go broke and be rendered completely useless just because you hit a tough section of the game. But it never starts to feel like a chore, and thatвЂ™s due to a couple of fundamental design choices.

There are times that Elite mode is hardвЂ¦ you die a lot, especially on some boss fights, or when you get swarmed by archers, or whatever. I donвЂ™t have to spend thirty levels breezing through the game on normal in order to unlock a harder difficulty. So right from level 1 thereвЂ™s a challenge. Both are being played on вЂEliteвЂ™, the highest available difficulty. IвЂ™ve got two characters IвЂ™m working on in TL2, an Outlander and an Engineer, each with different friends I play with. I know theyвЂ™ve made a lot of tweaks to D3 since I stopped playing, but at the time the feeling of a вЂњchallengeвЂќ wore off pretty quickly, and was replaced by the feeling of вЂњwork.вЂќ You were constantly hitting brick walls caused by gear deficiency, and the only option was to farm for hours for incremental upgrades to slowly move ahead. Inferno difficulty in Diablo 3 (at least when I played it) was often ridiculously, stupidly hard. I guess I understand why they did that, but Torchlight 2 separates difficulty and character level, the way I think it should be. In D3 you had to play up starting from normal difficulty, through harder difficulties, using the same character. The first difference, IвЂ™d say, would be the difficulty, and more importantly, the way itвЂ™s handled.

At first it was just a feeling, but now IвЂ™m noticing the actual mechanical differences. Torchlight 2 has cemented itself as better than Diablo 3 in my books, and now that IвЂ™ve had a couple of weeks to play it, I think I can start to narrow down why.

Torchlight 2 max level