For one thing, I haven’t been following Torchlight 2 that closely, so I don’t have the encyclopedic level of knowledge about the game to write such a detailed analysis. This is not one of my typical mega-reports, for a variety of reasons. I haven’t played enough of it to say if it’s vastly better than its predecessor, but all signs point to yes, from what I’ve seen so far. Torchlight 2 is a vastly bigger, more complicated, more varied, more interesting game than TL1. So my comparison is lazy, but at least it’s comprehensible. (Just to complete the analogy, Diablo III seems to be basically the same as Diablo II, in terms of scale and scope and depth of story, though obviously the game mechanics have received a huge overhaul.)
In terms of the general scale of the games though, and the progression in types of levels and overall design, TL2’s expansion on the world and size and style of TL1 is quite similar to D2’s, all those years ago. I’m not saying TL1 = D1: TL1 had skill trees with much variety between the classes, rather than D1’s simple spellbook system, and on the other hand D1’s item system and especially the story and the tone and theme were much better than TL1’s. All that pretty well applies to TL1 as well. The dungeon completely changed layout and largely changed monsters every four levels, and there was no exploration and no surface level combat.
The first Diablo game was set in a series of dungeon below a single small town. TL1 to TL2 is very much like the progression from Diablo I to Diablo II. The most obvious comparison that comes to mind is equally-lazy. But that seems such a cop out “It’s like TL1, but much better in every way.” Surely I can do better than that? I enjoyed playing it, and I was impressed by the quality and the numerous, evident improvements over TL1. To my chagrin, I still don’t have a good answer. While at Runic Games, and in the days since then, I’ve had dozens of people ask me what I thought of Torchlight 2.