I spent a lot of last week zooming around in Disintegration, which is a fascinating and pretty lovely game. It’s lovely because everything in it feels so good, and because – not an insult – there is a warming, comforting Double-A-ness to it in its sparsity and its obvious desire to get the most out of absolutely everything. And it’s fascinating because… well.
Disintegration feels a bit like Halo 2 to me, or rather the Halo 2 that might have been. It takes the lovely tree-scattered setting of Halo, the flat metallic heft of the classic Spartan weaponry and the precision staging of the encounters, and it then throws in a big new idea: you scoot around and direct troops in a sort of blend of FPS and RTS. Halo 2’s big idea was dual-wielding (and dual leads). Disintegration feels like the Halo 2 we might have gotten if everyone had been more able to explore new ideas – which, given Bungie’s background, would also have been old ideas.
Disintegration is made by ex-Bungie people, and in this respect it sort of seems to parallel the work of the team at Runic Games. In Torchlight 2 – the numbers are about to get confusing – we got both another version of Diablo 2, which some of the core team had helped make, and also a glimpse of an alternate version of Diablo 3. Torchlight 2 felt like the Diablo 3 these veterans might have made, the same way that Disintegration reminds me of a mirror-world Halo 2.
Anyway, what’s interesting me today is that before all that, the people at Runic made the first Torchlight. And the first Torchlight is Double-A royalty.
I had never thought of it as Double-A before, but what do you know? A small team with experience in big budget development coming together to get the most of their more limited resources. Torchlight is an action RPG, and with the loot and tiles and leveling that means it’s as expansive as you could hope for. But it’s also very focused. Like the first Diablo there’s one town, and one dungeon. You just go deeper and deeper and deeper.