Staying Off the Scag

Torchlight – Runic Games

Addiction is not a pretty thing – it’s life-consuming, it’s a burden and a distraction when you’re away from it. It keeps you awake at night either doing it or thinking about it. What’s even worse is when I have trouble explaining why I’m even addicted to it in the first place. Torchlight is one such addiction where I became hooked on what essentially seems to consist of clicking on stuff to see if anything good comes out. Sounds great huh? I’ve managed to kick the habit now, but I was main-lining that dirty stuff for quite some time. What was it that I was addicted to? Simple: loot. Why was I addicted to it? …not so simple.

The plot is almost non-existent and intentionally so as the designers didn’t want it to distract from the gameplay. I had little to no idea why I was in the dungeons and what quest I was actually doing, I was only aware that there was loot at the end of the quest. The game itself has extremely simple controls (though they gradually ramp up) that are basically just left-clicking on things. You don’t even control your movement directly, you just click where you want to go, click what you want to attack, click what you want to pick up and click what you want to sell. These almost childishly simple controls, a placeholder plot and a statistical barrage from the loot transpire to send you into a powerful loot-trance which can last for hours at a time.

To say the addiction is only about loot is probably inaccurate I suppose. There’s much to be said for incrementally levelling up your character, acquiring new skills or bumping up old ones, and mapping out where you’ll be spending the next points, but it’s important for there to be more skills than you can reasonably master without having so many as to be bewildering. Mix these thoroughly with graduated loot that’s only marginally better than what you currently have, being careful that it never quite satisfies all your needs, lightly sprinkle in some armour sets that are nigh-on impossible to finish, and round it off nicely with increasingly tough enemies to make your old loot redundant and you’ve got a time-honoured recipe for Gamer’s Crack.

Rarity is crucial of course – sorting through huge piles of items is made worthwhile by the rare-but-good shit. However, is sifting through mountains of worthless junk actually necessary though? What would happen if you were to simply remove the so-so generic loot leaving items to spawn infrequently but be consistently good? Certainly this would ease that tedious feeling of perpetually panning for gold, but I think really that the enjoyment of quality loot would suffer without mundane items to compare them to. It’s not only that the item is powerful that makes it highly prized, but that it’s superior and this bestows infrequent but beautiful moments: the widening of the eyes and the sharp intake of breath as you find a diamond in the rough. So unfortunately it would seem that using the loot-hoover and wearing your loot-goggles is an essential part of it all.

Overlapping mini-goals are what’s really at the core of this addiction though, in much the same way as a game like Civilisation I think. There’s always one piece of armour that you’re not satisfied with, one weapon that you really like but doesn’t quite cut it (or vice versa), one skill that you’d like to put just one more point in…These goals never align and resolve at the same time, as soon as you’ve managed to tick one off another rises to the surface, just when you think you can put it down you realise you can’t because you’ve very nearly achieved the next goal already, and as a result there’s a crucial absence of closure for the player. A careful balance of the toughness of enemies against the potency of weapons is a nice bonus to actually give the goals some urgency (for which you need to turn Torchlight up to Very Hard), and the net result of all these factors? Just… one… more… dungeon…