Diablo 3 vs Torchlight 2

I had the best, most awesome blog post idea yesterday, but I didn't write it down. After spending the morning trying to remember it, I gave up and decided to just write a post on video games. Diablo 3 had its open beta over the weekend, so I checked it out, expecting to be amazed and left eagerly anticipating its May 15th launch. Instead, I was underwhelmed.

Mushroom is underwhelmed by my photography skills

I found Diablo 3 to be mindlessly easy. See an enemy? Click on it until it's dead. That's it, with the exception of health potions and 4 usable spells at a time. You can group with up to three other people, but each person is largely self-sufficient, and there are no group strategies required.

Llamaentity, who was a fan of Diablo 2, had a particular dislike of the lack of talent trees and automatic leveling in Diablo 3. This means that every character of the same class and level has the same unlocked skills and the same attribute points. The only customizable options are gear and which six spells you choose to keybind to 1-4 and the right and left mouse buttons. Therefore, there is no value to creating two characters of the same class with the exception of questing with a lower level friend.

Sadly, I can understand why Blizzard made the game so simplistic and limited the only true customization to gear choices. In Diablo 3, there will be a real-money auction house where players buy/sell gear to/from one another using real money, and Blizzard gets a cut of each sale. So if the only way to improve or differentiate a character is through gear... well, you get the picture.

Luckily, there is another multiplayer dungeon-crawling game coming out soon, Torchlight 2 (no official release date yet). My favorite feature of the original Torchlight was that each character, regardless of class, gets a pet that can be sent to town to sell loot while the adventurer is free to continue the dungeon. Here is a video of the pets that will be available in Torchlight 2:

Did you play the Diablo 3 open beta? What did you think?
How do you think Torchlight 2 will compare with Diablo 3?