The Death of a Vanquisher

Some time ago a friend of mine thought I might enjoy a game called Torchlight, an action rpg from Runic Games playable on my laptop. He was right.

Now I'll admit my time in the game has been sporadic at best, but that's actually pretty typical of my game-playing style anyway. But the first character I created, named after one of my wife's online personas (from games) Aunika, received the majority of my attention thus far. She was a vanquisher, and I decided early on that I wanted the ranged style of gameplay for her, focusing on twin pistols.

 

She sometimes carried a shield too :)

Things were going great, and I even managed to finally finish the main campaign only to discover there was more to the game than just that, and I had a whole new dungeon complex to explore and kill more masses of enemies. Until this happened:

See that NPC? He's sitting on a quest item that I needed, and he won't move. For the life of me, try as I might, I could not get the item itself to highlight so I could collect it. I even tried to find an answer on the Runic Games forums to no avail. The problem with the quest is that it's part of a chain (as are pretty  much all of the quests in Torchlight) and to continue further in the quest chain I would have to complete it.

So, being the completionist that I am, I went with the next best thing. Using an in-game feature I retired the character of Aunika and bequethed her enchanted rifle to a brand new character, Aurelia, who will carry on her legacy as Torchlight's premier vanquisher (at least in my world).

Honestly, I'm a little sad. Any rpg character I make generally carries my personal imprint on them, which I'm sure is true of most rpg players characters. It's difficult, therefore, to distance my characters actions and motivations from my own. In that regard it has always been difficult for me to play an "evil" character, even when I set out to do so just to get the full enjoyment from a game that offers such options. The characters that I used to actually complete KoTOR 1 and 2 were both "good," for example. 

Torchlight doesn't have the choice/consequence model to make any personal decisions about how a character acts carry any weight. Point in fact you can consider your character to be a soulless mercenary and your actions are pretty much going to mirror mine, you'll go forth and slaughter mass amounts of enemies, collect loot, lather rinse repeat. But I can still lose myself into the game to a certain degree, so the decision to "retire" the Aunika character and then resurrect her via Aurelia wasn't an easy one.

Thus alas, poor Aunika, may your daughter carry on your legacy with pride, and bring me much loot.