By John Walker on September 9th, 2009 at 12:42 am.
Jim mentioned the rather exciting looking Torchlight last week. A new PAX trailers has appeared, and it’s bloody lovely. This is the team who made the mythological Fate, and the ill-fated Mythos. Mythos, created as a tech test for the doomed Hellgate: London (and managing to be the better game) was absolutely fantastic fun. Fate of course is loved and adored by many post-Diablo fans. So there’s plenty of reason to be excited to see the team back to developing a dungeon crawler. Especially one this pretty.
I think what I like most about the design for this is quite how absolutely and entirely it waves a bum in the face of people who thought the Diablo 3 screenshots were too colourful. Take this!
It comes out on my birthday! Thanks Runic, it looks like just what I wanted.
09/09/2009 at 00:50 Railick says:
I remember seeing Fate when it came out and thinking it looked like a bunch of crap. was I incorrect? Should I revist that game? (I was looking for a game like Diablo 2 a while back but couldn’t find one to whet my vistle. Fate looks a lot like Net Hack actually, you even get to pick a pet :P)
09/09/2009 at 00:57 Gutter says:
I quite liked Hellgate: London… I still play once in a while when I feel like playing a dungeon crawler. It’s a shame that I am alone.
09/09/2009 at 01:03 Railick says:
I liked Hellgate London too! Sadly it doesn’t like me I tried to reinstall it recently and suddenly it won’t install for some reason :( ah well It is so sad how that company went down , I really enjoyed playing that game with my friend.
09/09/2009 at 01:03 Schaulustiger says:
There’s nothing more satisfying than damage numbers going into the THOUSANDS!
Seriously, Torchlight looks like a crossbreed between Diablo and World of Warcraft. Which could be an entertaining mix in a single player game as I always found the combat in Blizzard RPGs quite fluent with instant input feedback.
09/09/2009 at 01:07 Markoff Chaney says:
You are not alone, Gutter. Ex Founder here who bought 5 other copies for friends. Hellgate was a wonderful game with even more promise. Shame mismanagement killed it and Mythos, which was great fun as well. Funnily enough, I’m probably going to give 20$ towards Torchlight as well. Those were the guys I liked the best anyway from Flagship, so it makes sense to keep rewarding them, even if I choose to never reward the likes of Mr. Roper again. Borderlands, on the other hand, can’t take my money fast enough. Come on October!
09/09/2009 at 01:24 ChaosSmurf says:
Oh man that looks pretty damn good. I loved Mythos for the short time I played it (got distracted). This looks like something to tide me over until Diablo III – and hopefully something even better than that.
09/09/2009 at 01:33 Jubaal says:
Hmm this may scratch my Diablo itch until “3″ comes out. By the way anyone else notice that the woman doing the voice of the female character sounds like she was in Diablo 2. I’d bet my first born it is the same woman (Sorry Max).
09/09/2009 at 01:49 Backov says:
Fate was awesome.
And I should point out that it’s not the TEAM that made Fate, it’s the ONE GUY that made Fate.
Sure, he had some artist support, but it was it old school one-coder indie. Travis Baldree.
With the strength of that game, he went from being a code monkey at WildTangent, to being a team lead at Flagship.
Rock on Travis.
09/09/2009 at 02:05 GuiSim says:
Is there going to be any multiplayer on Torchlight ?
09/09/2009 at 02:09 Simon says:
Why oh why do they keeping spamming us with damage numbers? BLEH! Leave those in the silly MMORPG’s!
Oh, and while I’m ranting: A two-player coop mode would be nice :)
09/09/2009 at 02:22 perilisk says:
That trailer sounded an awful lot like the backstory for the original Diablo, right down to the main characters.
09/09/2009 at 02:55 Diji says:
I’m reminded a lot of Mythos by the graphics of this, especially in the mine looking bits with the tracks and crates. By no means a bad thing, it’s such a shame Mythos died, it was a much better game than HG: London in my opinion. Although I’m a newcomer to this genre (I first played Diablo 2 this year), I love the randomness of the loot and weighing up the stats of one item versus another. Will most likely get this and I’m definitely getting Borderlands!
09/09/2009 at 04:49 ExplosiveCoot says:
I can’t express how much I wish this game was set to be released this month and not in the middle of Alpha Protocol / Borderlands / Dragon Age – as it is, it’ll likely be next year before I find time for it which is a shame, as it looks quite lovely.
09/09/2009 at 06:58 Lobotomist says:
I have complete trust in Runic games, after playing Mythos.
And since Torchlight is basically Mythos re-engineered (they had to do it since they lost rights to use their own code :( )
Its bound to be great.
09/09/2009 at 07:19 Jayt says:
Could keep me going until d3
09/09/2009 at 08:04 Optimaximal says:
Numbers flying off characters when they’re hit are an RPG staple, largely because it’s historically the only way to tell if your staff of hit-ening +4 is actually damaging that Orc’s Armour of non-bashening +3…
If you want location based damage and pain skins, go back to your first-person shooterz.
Also: Loved FATE, but can’t bring myself to reinstall it for fear of WT’s software backdoors – will follow Torchlight intently!
09/09/2009 at 08:25 Necromancer made his choice says:
WoW gayness!! ;-)
09/09/2009 at 08:26 Rinox says:
Looks fun, but not sure if I’ll be able to convince myself to fork out the cash if it doesn’t have a co-op mode. Ever since L4D and Red Alert 3 I’ve become a co-op junkie. :-(
09/09/2009 at 09:04 Ben says:
I feel your pain, Gutter
In fact, I wrote about my experiences with Hellgate london on my blog, here;
http://grandpaswag.co.uk/?p=5
09/09/2009 at 09:05 Ben says:
(Wish there was an edit function)
The images are broken, sorry. My host loves to play games with my site :)
09/09/2009 at 09:16 Ian says:
Hurragh for numbers and hooray for colours!
09/09/2009 at 10:09 alset says:
Really looking forward to this.
You should all know that it will be singleplayer only, but they intend to make an mmo in the same setting next year with the money they will get from Torchlight.
09/09/2009 at 10:28 subedii says:
No matter how good it is, I think this is a bad time to be releasing it, it’s a new IP with little-to-no advertising, there are some really huge games releasing during this period, and D3 is currently stealing all the thunder.
On the plus side, D3 isn’t coming out for around a year, maybe more, so maybe people will pick this up because they still want to get their dungeon crawl on in the meantime. I remember back when D3 was just announced, that announcement alone caused Titan Quest to temporarily jump back into the Steam top-10. Maybe there’ll be a repeat of that effect, or maybe people will just think that they want to wait for D3, who knows. It’ll be interesting to see which happens.
09/09/2009 at 10:29 Hmm-Hmm. says:
And I still hold that (some of) those who complained about what we were shown about Diablo III then had a point. A point generally relayed in a fanboyish and not too mature way, but a point nonetheless. Certainly, how the looks of a game are appreciated can be very subjective.
Regardless, they obviously liked Diablo 2 and want a game like that (just.. better? More?). Deviate too much (or just a litte, perhaps) and you’ll always rouse the ire of some fans. But, hey, they liked that game.
Personally, I think Torchlight has a more warcraft 3-like look which really changes the entire atmosphere.
09/09/2009 at 10:36 Xercies says:
I don’t mind the colourful graphics of this but I do mind it on Diablo 3. It maybe because Diablo 3 is coming from a series which had one style and this is a new IP which is making its own style. If say next Torchlight game they would make it darker I would complain about that as well.
But anyway I’ve been itching to play a Diablo like for ahile now and this looks like that it will wet my appietite.
09/09/2009 at 11:39 PHeMoX says:
Not. Dark. Enough.
I’m sorry, but even though the gameplay looks rock-solid and interesting, I don’t dig the happy colorful look that much. :S
Anyone got a recommendation to satisfy my Diablo fix?
09/09/2009 at 11:57 rocketman71 says:
@GuiSim: single only for now, and in the future it will be another damned MMO :(
09/09/2009 at 13:31 Tei says:
Mythos was good. And this one look like better than mythos. This make this automatically superb.
Problem is, … do we really need a diablo2 clone now? …
Is the diablo2 “template” a bit outdated, and on a need of maintenance to make it better or kill it?
09/09/2009 at 15:59 Dave says:
This looks better than Fate (which felt a little too childish to me).
Another HGL fan here. I was on a single-player kick again up until last weekend, when I picked up Sacred 2.
Sacred 2 is another underrated game, I think mostly because the new player experience is rocky and the random rune-finding thing is annoying until you build up enough in your shared vault to start characters as you please. It’s nicely complex, though honestly I am having the most fun with a blowgun-wielding dryad rather than getting too fancy with magic.
09/09/2009 at 16:00 Jeremy says:
I will probably pick it up, not even just to bide my time until D3 comes out :)
09/09/2009 at 18:16 Serondal says:
I got the Fate expandalone last night and ended up playing it until 5:00 in the freaking morning O.o The ability to fish and change your pet with the fish you catch is really interesting and the openess of character advanment is very nice compared to Diablo 2 .Also love the ability to retire your character and hand down one item to your next character.
09/09/2009 at 18:30 amishmonster says:
I really liked Mythos, but Fate just did not do it for me. I love the pet ideas, but I never felt like I had enough to do/that there weren’t enough abilities. Was I missing something? I just felt like I either went for combat and couldn’t cast anything more complex than a Heal, or went straight spellcaster and…still didn’t have much variety.
Mythos was fantastic though, so I’ll be at least keeping an eye on Torchlight.
Oh, and another Hellgate Founder here…as much as I enjoyed the game, I must admit I’m a bit bitter about that.
09/09/2009 at 19:13 Matosh says:
You know what has me tickled about Torchlight? The graphics everyone is praising are rendered by Ogre 3D, the open source graphics engine. Not a modified version, mind you – the guys at Runic literally picked it off the website and built their game around it.
Now clearly the beauty of the game is the result of much hard work by many fine artists, but it’s nice to know that out there exists a free, open source engine that is of A-class caliber, and available to any bedroom coder who needs it. (It actually looks better than this – Runic decided to use DirectX 8 graphics to make the game accessible.)
09/09/2009 at 21:51 Serondal says:
amishmonster – I’ve found a lot of diffrent spells , diffrent attack spells and summons ect and they all scale directly to your ability so if you’ve got strong attack magic ability the spell will be stronger (so instead of geting Fire, Fira, and Firaga to us Final Fantasy as an example, you just get a fire ball that gets better as you do. There are OTHER more powerful fire attacks as well but they’re also diffrent in their mode of attack, say a fire wall that shoots out around you or a fire strike or something like that which doesn’t explode. There are also tons of diffrent things you can summon with each monster getting stronger as your charm level goes up as well as the ability to literally charm living monsters. )
Fate isn’t as serious as Diabo 2 so yah, the story is horrible but so is Net hack’s story and I love that :P This game to me combines the best of Net Hack and that sort of game with the best of Dialbo 2 and that sort of game. It leaves out all the random deaths and hardness of Net hack though (however there is a hardcore mode so you can get that level of hardness if you want. I faught a freaking shrine on level 5 for about 30 minutes before I could beat it)
09/09/2009 at 22:04 We Fly Spitfires says:
Very excited about Torchlight, in particuarly the MMO component although I kinda suspect that it will get ditched :(
09/09/2009 at 22:12 Voice of the Majority says:
After reading the hands-on at Joystiq, this looks a lot like the real Fate II. Obviously, they could not call it that. It has the random dungeons, the pet, fishing and using the fish to transform your pet. I wonder if it has the same death choices. This was all good in Fate and should still work.
Unlike most of people here seem to, I liked Fate a lot more than Mythos. I can’t really explain why. In any case, I hope it _is_ more like Fate. Go Travis.
10/09/2009 at 01:14 neoanderthal says:
It looks like a blast – a lot like Mythos before the Overworld nonsense ruined a perfectly good time waster. I’m glad to see so many FSS employees found a good home, and I’m looking forward to the release of this.
And for the record, I do not think Mythos was a better game than Hellgate. Mythos was a fun game, but I spent an inordinate amount of time playing the 2.0 HG:L on Test. While Mythos was getting worse due to the Overworld BS diluting what was otherwise a great game, Hellgate was getting better and better.
Regardless, this looks to be the answer to some late-night rumination a few weeks ago, wherein I remembered Mythos and wondered what happened to Travis and the others who were working on it.
10/09/2009 at 07:27 Saveme1510 says:
Just a little known fact…the MMO already has the funding…The Single Player Version will not determined the fate of the MMO version…In fact I think the funding for the SP version came from the MMO funding…Essentially the SP version was building tilesets, tools, music, story, concepts, and basic gameplay for the MMO anyways…These are not my words, its somewhere in their forums from their mouths.
12/09/2009 at 05:08 undead dolphin hacker says:
This game looks great. Less generic than Fate, pays pretty obvious homage to Diablo 1, slick graphics, great monster design, (for some reason the slime really impressed me, as well as the giant teleporting lich-thing), damage numbers, tasteful voice acting… can’t wait!