Torchlight: it is rather like Diablo.

“Yes, of course,” you are thinking. “It’s a game where you click your way through a dungeon, attacking hordes of randomly generated monsters with swords and fireballs. Plays a bit like WOW, except single player. That sort of thing. And I heard they actually had some of the people from Diablo 1 working on it, too.”

“No, no,” I reply. “Let me explain.”

Upon beginning the game, you choose one of three classes: a brawny close-quarters type, a ranged fighter, and a spellcaster. They are male, female, and male, respectively. You arrive in a small town, where hordes of monsters are boiling up out of the earth for no reason yet apparent. This is the only town, and the dungeon beneath it is the only dungeon, though the tileset will change every few levels. Equipment may be magical, or be made so by the socketing of gemstones. Themes of the temptation and corruption of power are quickly developed, as moody guitar music plays in the background. There is even a creepy old church, though in a fit of apparently intentional irony there’s nothing inside.

There are a few differences – but not in the style, tone, game play, controls, or mechanics. Rather, there are certain details that have been changed: the sort of things that leave game designers waking in a cold sweat, years after release, racked with guilt and the cold, sour bite of failure. In happy contrast to the actual Diablo titles to date, the inventory is capacious, with each item taking up only one square; potions and scrolls stack automatically^[1]. Spellcaster progression is not dependent on random drops as in the original Diablo (though they help,) nor does the system encourage casters to specialize in one element, then to be eaten by the first monster with matching immunity, as in the sequel. Every class can fight both with and without using mana. That sort of thing.

Basically, the people who made Diablo 1 have made it again, and it works better this time.

This is not meant as an indictment, exactly. Certainly polygonal remakes with cleaned-up gameplay have done well before^[2]. And it’s selling for only twenty bucks – I’m certainly happy to pay twenty bucks for an upgraded Diablo. But Torchlight is more like Diablo than Diablo II was, while Runic Games is pointedly not Blizzard Entertainment. I’m sure this team could have made a Diablo-like game with an original feel – they did so the first time, after all. The staggering level of similarity feels like an insult, an elaborate excuse to turn the Steam store into a billboard that reads “Fuck you, Blizzard. Fuck you in the fucking eye.” Imitation is a form of flattery only when the people you’re copying from actually came up with it in the first place.

There are vague, sanitized reports of financial difficulties and intellectual property disputes, and those events probably all occurred. But when game designers want to assert their professional dominance they do something like Rock Band: not just the same game made better, but a better game. This feels personal. I think that somewhere in the decadent West there is a man, one singular Blizzard executive, who has uniquely and profoundly pissed these men off, and Torchlight is the result. I wonder what the fuck he did.

Well, whatever. I’m going to go try out the Destroyer class now. Later.

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^[1] Specifically, there are health and mana potions, and scrolls of Identify and Town Portal. They are red and blue.

^[2] Though I’m not sure it counts if Squeenix does it. They could make a game called “Final Fantasy Shits On Your Face and Rapes Your Mother,” and it would sell. And in fact they have and it did, though the subtitle was changed to “Mystic Quest” for the American release.