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Path of Exile, Titan Quest, Grim Dawn, Torchlight 2
this is the definitive list.
path of exile is most popular but has optional mtx(?)
titan quest and Torchlight are on multiple consoles. titan quest has a sequel in production
grim dawn is by the titan quest team, has a small file size, and runs well on older pcs.
Does Last Epoch belong on this list too?
Yes it absolutely does belong! It’s officially launching on February 21, but it’s currently available in beta/early access.
I’ve only heard good things but haven’t tried it yet, probably does belong!
Ive had a ton of fun playing it!
Path of exile charges for inventory QoL and with the ludicrous amount of different stuff that drops, it’s arguably kind of mandatory if you’re trying to complete seasonal objectives
Its also free to play.
Or as some streamers say: its a $60 game with an incredibly generous free trial.
The MTX for PoE are within the “nice” ones. There’s extra stash tabs, but you don’t need to consider that until after the campaign. And then there’s cosmetics. No pay to win. And the MTX are on your account, so they will be on PoE2 as well.
How is the couch co-op for Titan Quest? My SO and I spent a ton of time on Diablo 3 together and I might consider trying that again.
No couch coop on PC, so I don’t know.
There is 2 player local coop for Playstation, XBox and Nintendo though
https://www.co-optimus.com/game/334/pc/titan-quest.html
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Torchlight 2 spoiled me for basically the whole genre. It is a classic
RoguelikeARPG dungeon crawler but has so many thoughtful player centric quality of life features. Inventory is full but don’t want to stop kicking butt? You have a pet that can run back to town for you, sell your stuff, and even buy a “shopping list” of potions and scrolls for you. It’ll even run and pick up loot for you. I have trouble playing other games in the genre because I keep running into problems Torchlight 2 solved that I didn’t even think about. It also has mods available to add even more or keep things fresh. It’s getting old but because of that you can run it on anything. It’s a damn good game.Edit: seems I didn’t know what a roguelike was
Torchlight 1-2 are decent fun for normal playthrough but plagued by bad design decisions and downright silly difficulty spikes on harder difficulties. Mods probably fix many of these issues but in vanilla the build diversity on harder difficulties is quite bad with only handful of viable builds with skill trees full of “trap skills”.
I might have lucked into some cheesey builds, I only maxed one character and have a few at 60. One mod I did get was a full respec mod, but the default reset of the last 3 levels was at least good enough for me to see if a skill was working for me or not. I agree that there seem to be too many “dud” skills, especially on embermage and engineer. My lvl 100 character I did without mods and I kind of liked how punishing it was. I get that that’s a preference though.
Prismatic bolt embermage is really strong in vanilla and cannon engineer is probably easiest class to play in the whole game. Melee engineer and many other embermage builds can be quite tough and the game has plenty of weird difficulty spikes and enemies with “shotgun” skills that can melt through player health in an instant.
In Torchlight 2 you can reset the world and grind for levels and gear but that can feel like a chore.
Lol yep prismatic bolt embermage is the character I got to max. I realized super early how great that skill was and fully invested in it. I also played sword and board engie and dual pistol Outlander. So maybe if I had invested more in other skills or wanted different builds for my embermage I’d have a more lukewarm view of the game. I had a lot of fun with the builds I did try though.
I never had to go grind for gear, I usually had enough gold to gamble and transmute a decent equipment set together for each character. I did grind for levels in the extra map zones though after finishing the New Game+.
What are your thoughts on Torchlight 3?
I haven’t played it. My impression is that it was trying very hard to cater to the mobile market. I heard it suffered from a lot of design changes and ended up being sold and then patched up and released by a new team to cut their losses. Meanwhile, Torchlight 2 may be older but it was made with love and care and a strong vision. It’s dirt cheap now too so it’s not hard to get your money’s worth out of it.
I’ve played the first one and second, they’re both great. Sad to hear about the third game.
I mean there’s always Torchlight infinite; which I hear was bought up by a Korean mobile game dev and monetized to hell
Have played a few hours of infinite and there’s fun to be had with the different characters, but every character being (different build and skills) locked behind another paywall, it’s a tough sell… (And as far as I remember the publisher was Korean from the start)
I dunno about it being Rougelike, but I did love me some Torchlight 1 and 2. (Haven’t played 3.)
Path of Exile.
PoE 2 announced a couple years ago and should be launching soon, pretty much the same stuff on a new engine.
It seems like it’ll actually be radically different, and there’s no way it’s coming out until like at least 2026.
All of the promotional footage I’ve seen for it looked indiscernible from PoE 1 gameplay and graphics but maybe that’s due to ongoing development.
It’s actually an upgraded version of the same engine, and Path of Exile 1 is getting a lot of the new tech backported.
It was originally supposed to replace Path of Exile 1, but now they are going to exist together.
2 will be more refined and slower, with a brand new story and 6 new acts. Should be a fun time.
Slower? I tried to speedrun PoE once and because of a build mistake in Chapter 2 Act 3 it took me 14 hours to beat the base game before maps. Terrible time, but still.
I believe the acts themselves will be longer and more fleshed out but there’s less of them.
6 acts in Path of Exile 2 instead of the 10 acts that PoE1 has.
That might be nice, it would be cool to have coherent independent stories instead of: “There is literally only one path and this random person who means nothing to you or your mission personally is in your way, kill them! (reading their pocket journal is optional)”
I do feel like the second chapter was better than the first in that regard, though.
I spent way way way too many hours playing D2. Path of Exile is a great choice to fill that gap. Just do homework for a little bit before diving in if you give it a shot. Leveling builds and def use a guide.
Grim Dawn is goated. Not a big ARPG fan but this one just hits different for me. Simple enough for anyone to get into but can get complex enough that min-max theory crafters will have a blast messing with the games systems.
For me it was a very short experience, but it’s got online coop.
Work all the dlc? I’ve played though a couple of times and it’s always like 30-40 hours
The base game can be done in like 5-8 hours on a leisurely pace, the current speedrun WR is 57minutes but there are only 6 runners who’ve submitted to it so feasibly you could get a lot better times than that.
I’ve actually got a video on YT where I perform the “I Was Not Expecting You, Human” achievement to Slay Warden Krieg, who is the game’s midboss, in Veteran Mode with a character under level 11, and it was an hour and thirteen minutes from character creation to finish. The last 10 minutes are just the Krieg fight itself. This could be done much faster without the level requirement, though, because you could get more damage and better items.
The major problem with it is the enemy scaling. Every area has a minimum level and a maximum level, and as the character levels up so do the enemies. That means if you keep leveling in an area until you dwarf the enemies, it just keeps making it harder in the next area, so you’re incentivized to stay at the minimum level for that area and ignore the vast majority of enemies. Even farming for good loot comes at the added cost of making the mobs harder. I used to use a site that shows the level range for areas but I can’t find it anymore, sadly.
Here’s a few:
- Grim Dawn
- Titan Quest
- Sacred Series
- The incredible adventures of Van Helsing
- Warhammer 40k: Inquisitor - martyr
- Divine Divinity
- Torchlight series
Then there’s Last Epoch and Path of Exile
Grim Dawn is probably your best match. PoE is also online only so screw em.
Torchlight 1 was an amazing game. Torchlight 2 was an okay game. Torchlight 3 is nothing like the previous two and is really awful.
Spent a good chunk of my childhood playing Sacred 1. It’s aged very poorly, and I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone nowadays, but I still think that the world design and environmental storytelling were some of the best I’ve found in a videogame.
For example, at the beginning of the game, orcs are migrating from the desert and attacking human settlements. When you progress, you discover that they aren’t doing it because they want to, but because the undead army is forcing them out of their land. And when you progress in the northern part of the world, there’s a completely optional region inside the forest, where you can find a few hastily made orcish settlements - but you only find women and shamans, because the men are fighting at the front. There are no dialogues, quests, books or anything telling you that, it’s just something that you infer from the environment.
It made exploring the world and finding its secrets fun, even if there wasn’t always a reward.
(There were also a metric ton of easter eggs, from tombstones mentioning LotR characters to receiving sunglasses as a reward for chasing rude orc visitors from a tourist island… it was a wild game)
Yeah both Sacred games have their fair share of jank on you’ll need to apply community patches and possibly mods to even make them work on todays systems. However what they do not lack is soul as both games are clearly made with love and feel very unique compared to many modern games.
If you can forgive the jank and don’t mind to play older games with somewhat dated graphics I feel these games can still provide a lot of enjoyment. Would love to see remasters for these games or eveb a spiritual sequel.
Currently playing Sacred 2 with community patch, enchanted edition mod , more enemies mod and music mod and having a blast. The EE is tough as nails though and I am frequently getting my ass handed to my by elite enemies and bosses even on silver difficulty.
Torchlight is Torchlight. You might like it because not Diablo, but Torchlight.
I loved Diablo 2 the most, and Torchlight scratches the same itch.
Grim Dawn
Grim Dawn is “What if a sequel to Diablo 2, but not Diablo 3?”
Oh? I’ve only actually played 3 so I have no reference to 2 and what the differences are
Old timer here… Diablo 2 has a story with an atmosphere that sucks you in. In that sense Diablo 3 was a real disappointment.
Now, if you’re going for Diablo 2 it’s the remastered version you want. The game is like 20 years old and not made for widescreen so it really feels dated on a modern screen. Also, prepare for isometric pixel graphics.
Grim dawn looks cool aesthetically and I’m liking the UI and how big the skill tree looks. Are any of the expansions any good?
Last Epoch seems to be the most popular recent one. It’s currently in early access but it’s releasing in a week or so.
Okay I’m liking the current class selection, still a little sparse but I mean it’s early access so whatever. But the reason this game is going in my wishlist is this one image
That looks so fucking cool
Those fifteen classes are all we’re getting for last epoch. Two of them won’t be live until launch on February 21 (falconer and warlock), but there’s a ton of diversity between those classes.
Yes.
Truly a man of the people
Here’s an RPG that I haven’t seen listed yet- Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura. I spent a LOT of hours on this one back in the day (circa 2001, by Sierra-Online and Troika Games)
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Ehhhh… I’d classify that one as more Steampunk Fallout (1 or 2) or Baldur’s Gate. Not that that makes it bad - it’s great fun! Just maybe not what OP is looking for.
Torchlight 2 if you like the gear gathering and optimization.
Last epoch, path of exile, grim dawn, Torchlight 1,2 and if you want to suffer 3, if you can suffer through Korean p2w nonsense then lost ark, and also titan quest. All of these games are on multiple platforms.
Last Epoch. It has the best crafting and best skill system of any ARPG IMO.
Absolutely this, the crafting system is a great balance of getting what you want but also giving you something to try again and again for.
Basically that and the talent trees inside skills sold me on this game.
And it has an actual endgame, leaderboards, and it’s half the price of Diablo 4. It’s a no-brainer IMO.
Last Epoch scratches that itch real good for me and it’s hitting release in a few days.
I love the title of this post. The only arpgs that I don’t see mentioned already are Victor Vran, which I think is a lot of fun, and the Warhammer arpgs, I haven’t played yet, Chaosbane and Inquisitor Martyr. Inquisitor Martyr is supposed to get a fully offline mode soon and they’ve patched it to have all the seasons available to play through.
Victor Vran was surprisingly good. I bought Inquisitor Martyr and have never made it more than an hour or two. I think you need to be a diehard fan of the IP because the gameplay is generic af.
I enjoy inquisitor Martyr, it’s definitely more basic than Diablo. It scratches the kill everything and get loot itch though.
