I don’t actually hate Torghast that much, but my standard little game design tests reveal a lot about Torghast that might be a problem, to put it mildly.
- There is literally no sense of the world. I don’t even get a physical entrance into the tower from the maw! I just get this little portal as if it’s a million miles away.
- The corridors repeat forever. It’s very rare that I get this sense of “Wow, that’s really cool”, because actually it’s just the same rooms copy-pasted a million times.
- It doesn’t embrace its own randomness. You can always count on the boss being at floor 6 and that floor 3 has an NPC and nothing else. You can always count on 1-2 quests during your run.
- You grow incredibly powerful in it - in fact yesterday I got powered up so much that I crit the last boss for 800k, and I know the next attack will hit as hard, so at least 400k hit. So up to around 1.6 million damage 2 seconds.
- When I leave, I feel this tremendous amount of power flow out of me. There’s this sense of deflation. It’s like a burrowed power system except it’s way more extreme and it happens a couple times an hour.
- It’s distinctly anti-social. When inside there’s not a feeling of danger as such, but rather a feeling or torment and endless loneliness. You will never find another player character in Torghast who’s lost alongside you. Given this is an MMORPG, this is a huge mistake.
- If I try to invite more people into my group, Torghast not only gets harder in absolute terms, it gets harder per player. Making a Torghast group is literally counter-productive.
So we return to our triad: Sense of world, sense of community, and sense of danger with good combat. Torghast fail 2 of 3, but it’s only a matter of time before you get the traits that kills that as well.
I’m not gonna lie, I was excited about Torghast. Points 5 and 6 were my original concerns with it, but Torghast has fulfilled many of my worst aversions to such a system.
I’m not finding it boring per see, but I am not terribly amused about it, either. It’s just… okay. It’s okay.
But if asking me for reasons not to like it, that’s my reply.
EDIT: And I didn’t actually spot these problems during my beta test. I just… didn’t say anything at all. As you might imagine, it’s unusual for me to not give some negative pushback against new systems, but it happened this time. I just didn’t know or understand the problems with Torghast, but I think I do now.