By Jim Rossignol on January 7th, 2011 at 9:24 pm.
VG247 have been having a good old chinwag with the man from Runic, Max Schaefer, and he’s spilled a few beans from the Torchlight II jar. Most interesting is that they’ve yet to set the limit for co-op party sizes: “The sweet spot, just from playing in the office, is 1-4 players… It’s an ongoing debate right now where we set the maximum number of players in the game. It’ll probably be between four and eight.” He also boasts that the game contains a lot more content, including “multiple hub cities”, and PvP. Interesting stuff. The game is due later this year… presumably before Diablo III.
Yes! I can’t wait. Sounds like everything I wanted from the Torchlight sequel that I thought would never happen because their next game was allegedly going to be an MMO.
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And nothing i wanted. Good quest generator ? Promise to have less critical failure bugs ? Loot generator that works ? Interesting and balanced skills ? Gameplay features that will keep the game interesting beyond a couple of days ? What is this “content” he speaks of ? Retexturing of everything and more particle effects ?
Or what, will it be again “modders will do everything for us and for free” ? *spit*
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I’ve been a modder, and currently I’m a mod list maintainer for New Vegas. What people like myself do, we do out of a passion for the game we love. What you’ve said there really just insults every community of modders that’s ever existed, really.
Nice to know that the passion and spirit of a modder is worth about the spittle of a stranger, though.
As it stands, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Torchlight. A lot of the mods didn’t ‘fix’ anything. In fact, I can’t actually recall even one ‘fix’ mod for Torchlight. What the mods did, instead, was take the game in new and interesting directions. And I was a part of that modding community from day one up until it pretty much died off.
Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion, but I don’t think that anyone is entitled to ignorance. Clearly you have issues with Torchlight, but you could actually make real complaints about it. There was nothing wrong with the quests or the loot in all the time I played it, and if they were so ‘broken’ then perhaps you can elucidate on what was wrong with them, and even the mods that supposedly fixed them. :P
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Well, I believe that Karry means “Let’s not pay our own employees to produce as much content or character skins &/or mechanics as possible, we can’t be arsed. I know, it’ll be easier to get modders to do all this stuff for free due to love and excitement for the framework we made. Let’s make it look like we’re throwing them a bone by releasing the tools as soon as possible.
As for my opinion, the modders “fixed” the irritating inability to respec a screwed character by creating the talent potion, Stop overreacting to everything. ;P xx
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I <3 modders!
I currently have over a gig of new vegas mods installed lol
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Aah, man. I really should get the New Vegas construction set. I’m curious what they improved over the Fallout 3 one. And yes, modding is great. Three cheers for modders!
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I’d generally regard the “let’s make it so Dark Zealots don’t one-shot players through walls, or from off screen” mod as a fix-mod, myself.
Bloody Dark Zealots :(
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Dark Zealots are arseholes.
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Torchlight was fun! My only issue is the difficulty really. Breezed through on hardest setting right until sometime after the end boss where I started getting instakilled with alarming frequency. That may be in part to playing an alchemist specced for close range combat but with very low defense -.-’
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@shitflap: Actually, the respec potion was the first mod released by the *developers*.
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@Wulf: read what he said. His beef is with developers *relying* on modders to “fix their games so the developers don’t have to”. He’s not in any way criticizing modders themselves, just a perceived attitude among game developers that “it’s ok to release a shitty game, because the modders will save our asses”
Cool down.
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Excellent. Runic Games are really saying all the right things. If Torchlight 2 is still $20 on launch, I’ll be picking it up immediately.
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i’m gonna wait til it’s 2p in a steam sale.
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You’ve built a time machine and you plan to visit 2057?
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I’m goint to smash you in the face and take all your loot. Co-operatively.
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Jar… Does this mean the game is being built in Java?! YUCK!
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Probably not.
I wanted to enjoy Torchlight, and played more than a few hours of it, but eventually stopped when it began to feel a touch too soulless. Hopefully the second one will improve things in that dimension!
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No not jar like in “Java Archive”
jar like a container, or a pot
it probably will be made with the same engine as the first one (ogre engine with their custom torchlight editor)
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The problem with dungeon crawlers is when you realise that what you were doing in the first hour of the game is what you’ll be doing in the 60th, only the numbers will be higher.
This applies to all sorts of games, of course, but this is the genre where that stark fact never fails to gall me (be it Diablo, Fate, or even, yes, Recettear) after a few (fiendishly compelling) hours.
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@BooleanBob
The difference is that with Torchlight it took me two hours to realize that, while Diablo II lasted for a couple of years.
Maybe it’s because I was a thirteen year old with nothing better to do when I played Diablo, but I doubt it a bit since I managed to enjoy Titan Quest and the first Sacred relatively recently.
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I’m not sure how that’s a problem. If I buy a dungeon crawler, it’s cuz I want to crawl dungeons. In that respect, the only reason I’d not be doing in the sixtieth hour what I was doing in the first is because you screwed up the game so much I didn’t play past the first hour. If I wanted to do something that wasn’t dungeon crawling in the sixtieth hour, I’d be playing something else.
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There are good games built in Java, though. Like MINECRAFT, for example.
Java is also a really great first language to learn, as it’s a properly “curly-brace” language, but also it’s got a ton of training wheel-style features that let you learn some advanced techniques without suffering through compiler errors that are too confusing for a beginner to understand. Afterwards, one should learn proper C++ in a Comp Sci class or two if they’re being serious, but Java is one of the best first languages there is.
Meanwhile, I too am looking forward to Torchlight II.
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@MadTinkerer: what you say would be true if we assumed that only three programming languages existed. Yes, Java is a better beginners language than C and C++. But it’s still a deeply awful language for beginners, teaching all sorts of bad habits to budding programmers.
If you want a nice beginners language, go with Python, or SML or Scheme, perhaps.
And now, back on topic. Torchlight 2, yay!
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Sounds great, hope to see more interesting classes to be honest.
I’m giving my vote for introducing the “Scottish Ned” class.
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Modern GFX cards can’t handle that much Burberry on screen at once. Nor should they be asked to, no matter how amusing it would be to see your character using “buckie” (Buckfast) as a health tonic.
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Just thinking about the war Torchlight 2 and Diablo 3 are going to spark by coming out this year is giving me like a half-chub.
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Torchlight 2 better beat Diablo 3 to market by a healthy margin, otherwise it’s game over. It will still carve it’s own niche, but I think right now the Diablo 3 hype got people back in the mood for these games and it’s filling that void for now. I wager most people will jump ship and never pick up a Torchlight game ever again once Diablo 3 is released. Not saying Torchlight 2 will be bad, but I really doubt it’s going to be anything that can compete with a juggernaut of a game like Diablo 3.
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Well, some might have already been turned off Diablo III a bit already by the screenshots, such as myself. I absolutely love colour, and I love Torchlight’s art direction. But something about the way Blizzard handles art direction just rubs me the wrong way, with a cheese grater. I’d not be able to enjoy a game that I think looks appalling (and I’m talking purely art direction here, as graphics whoring tends to lead to poor art direction too), whereas Torchlight II looks as pretty as ever.
/shrug
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Funnily enough, I never got into the Diablo series but have happily wasted hours in everything from Sacred to Konung.
So in my case, I’m not buying DIII because the Diablo games are the worst Diablo clones I’ve ever played.
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While that may be true for the 2 of you, it doesn’t change the statement. Torchlight will be drowned by Diablo if they come out together. No matter you two unique snowflakes.
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Wulf, I’m struggling to understand that. Torchlight looks great, I agree but its art style is entirely derived from Warcraft – unsurprisingly as Runic are (partially) ex-Blizzard employees…
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I recently discovered Torchlight in the Steam sale, and I have played the living daylights out of that poor thing. You could say I have a dungeon crawler problem.
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I did that. I bin dere. If WoW was my heroin, Torchlight was my methodone. For a bit. But it was like a example of a engine that was working, fighting fit and just waiting for some content to be added. After a very brief 8 hours it became apparent that the scene would not be changing (I was wondering when I’d leave the first town and explore the world map).
It would still be hilarious fun with co-op. And I’m looking forward to Torchlight 2 quite a bit. Maybe more than Diablo 3 purely for the underdog vote. Be really nice if gear progression made a lick of sense too. I got dressed at the start and never changed. Nothing bettered my early items. What?
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You mustn’t have played for long enough. Once you start getting your first magic items you sometimes hit a bit of a brick wall of good loot drops, but as you get higher up in level the good stuff starts coming again.
It’s never exactly a flood, mind.
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Ya know, I completely forgot diablo 3 was coming out? I think thats the worst part about companies trying to build “buzz” too early, the excitement for the game wore off before it released so im ALLOT less likely to run to the store and buy it on release day. It makes it quite a bit easier to wait for other gamers to give me the skinny on it before I waste my own money, and if it sucks thats gonna cost blizzard money.
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Wow! Can you really make me feel like a warm autumn?
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Nice graphics.
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