![]() I'm not going to even put out a hope of that for launch, I'm sorry. "We did not build it from the beginning so adding that later has been just too big of a hill to climb. "I wish there was a little button in Unreal to turn that on but there isn't," says Thompson. Couch co-op is a no for launch and iffy for ever being included. But I still hate it."Īnd like other games, Torchlight 3 has multiplayer, online for up to four people, or an offline single-player campaign. "There's no way we could make a Torchlight game without it that is a requirement. sending your pet to town is just like fast-forwarding through the commercial." Commercial breaks are a healthy thing for people. It's one of the most famous features in the Torchlight series and one, I'm surprised to find out, Thompson hates! "I hate that feature!" he says. But more importantly they take your loot back to town. Torchlight has pets Torchlight is famed for having pets, and they fight with you and gain some power and equipment like you. (That's it for launch by the way but they hear you asking for pure melee and summoner classes.) And while the Dusk Mage and Sharpshooter look familiar, they're apparently weird underneath. "They're not in the middle of the dart board." They are Forged and Railmaster, classes which, respectively, are a steam-powered robot and an engineer who summons trains. They aren't wizard, warrior, mage, and rogue. What is Torchlight 3, then? It's an action RPG as you expect, like Torchlight, like Diablo, where you run around, whack stuff and get loot, levels, power. You could do better over here.' And us actually being willing to go, 'You know what? Let's reconsider.'" "This game is not recognisably similar to the thing we had 18 months ago," he adds, "and that's largely due to our fans telling us, 'That thing you tried is bad. This is good - I hardly notice the time going by. "It went from, 'This is painful to play - I'm having trouble doing my job and going back and playing this,' to, 'Oh this is good. They repurposed frontiers into acts and ran a linear story through them, and made all the myriad changes which came with it, and in the process, gained control, finally, of pacing. ![]() As were public areas where enemies respawned, because since when do enemies respawn in an action-RPG? Not being able to clear out an area bogged you down. It was boring and there was no variation. It was a way of stretching out content to keep free-players playing, but it wasn't fun. In the goblin area you'd get goblin armour, for example, and skills to deal with goblins, which had the unhappy side effect of when you went to a new area being totally unprepared, as if starting from scratch. Frontiers were areas themed around enemy types like goblins, and in those areas you had separate, distinct progression systems. ![]() Mainly, the game was designed around conquering frontiers rather than playing through a story. ![]() And suddenly people were like, 'Well I wasn't interested in your idea for this Torchlight Frontiers thing but now it's called Torchlight 3, I'm in!'"Ī lot has changed since the game was known as Torchlight Frontiers. 'Do we have an animated cinematic? Can we make a Torchlight 3 logo in time?' It was this mad scramble and we weren't even sure we wanted to do it. And we delayed our update and had people rush to figure out how to change all of our media and content at the last minute. "Honestly it was on a knife's edge as to whether we would change the name of the game or not. "We had no idea the name part itself meant so much to people." I'm talking to Tyler Thompson, co-founder of Echtra Games and co-lead of Torchlight 3, whose credits stretch back to being co-lead on Diablo 2 expansion Lord of Destruction, with his Torchlight 3 co-lead Max Schaefer. No longer was the game Torchlight Frontiers. No longer was the game fundamentally different to the Torchlights which came before it. It, and all its wiring, had been ripped out and replaced by a buy-once, premium design. No longer did the game have a free-to-play heart. The studio went dark and when it reemerged in January, it announced a remarkable turnaround. But the people playing the alpha didn't like it and, truth be told, the developer didn't either, so late last year, big, bold changes were made. It wasn't a codename but a name for something fundamentally different to the Torchlight games which had come before. For a long time it was known as Torchlight Frontiers. Torchlight 3 feels like it's come out of nowhere because in many ways it has. ![]()
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