Why I Decided to Play Counter-Strike Instead Of Torchlight II In NG+ Mode

This is going to be a bit of rant. I’ve been playing Torchlight II on a Windows 7 Virtual Machine running off my MacBook Pro and I’ve being playing so much that I recently attained Elite status for the game on Raptr. The MBP has a Core i5 processor and the VM itself is allocated 2 GB of RAM with 384 MB worth of video memory. I actually played through the entire game on this setup without having the game crash on me.

In fact, it tickled me pink that the game performed way better than the Mac version of Diablo III that I have installed on the OS X portion of my MacBook Pro. However, I began experiencing problems with Torchlight II after I restarted the game in the NG+ mode. For those who are not aware, NG+ allows you to restart the game with your current level and the monsters you encounter will scale with your level as well. There will also be even better loot and stronger, harder hitting mobs.

The game started crashing on me in Act 2, specifically at the Salt Barrens. I almost cleared out the entire map with my Outlander, wiping out the Tu’tara (which can be found en masse in two locations), and destroyed a whole bunch of gigantic tar slim in a Phase Beast challenge  but not before sweeping through the Ancient Vaults of Chaos (lvl 70 and above using a lvl 68 character). Just as I was about to send my pet back to town with an inventory filled with phat loot, the game crashed with an out-of-memory error.

I restarted the game, only to find that the last save point was upon my exit from the Ancient Vaults of Chaos. I went around again pawning everything (it was really frustrating), and just as I was about to enter a portal for a Phase Beast Challenge, it crashed again! I got pretty fed up and after restarting the game for the 2nd time, it took its own sweet time to load the game, and there was I again in front of the Ancient Vaults of Chaos, but everything just seems so stuttered at this point.

I’m not really a betting man, but I think that the NG+ mode makes things difficult for the player, not by just upping monster stats, but also their numbers as well, and this results in an increase in loot. Having so much stuff in the game (monsters, items, etc) is bound to overload the measly 2GB of RAM that I allocated to the VM.

I’ve actually put up the problem on Raptr, with some folks replying that the game crashes all the time, with one advising me to use the recently introduced Save and Continue function to save progress while playing the game. I must have gotten used to Diablo 3’s constant save feature but admittedly, Torchlight 2 is better off without that crazy stuff.

The VM will get its RAM allocation upgraded to 4GB, but in the mean time I still feel rather crushed by the crashes, so I’ll just stick to Counter-Strike: GO for the time being.