Torchlight II - Interview @ RPG Reporter

A site called RPG Reporter has an interview with Travis Baldree about Torchlight 2:

A couple of the ways you are more like Diablo 2 is you still have stat points and you still have skill points as opposed to auto-stats in Diablo 3. So what is the benefit in your opinion of having stats points?

There’s always the problem that roles will dead-end themselves with stat point investment. But I think for it to be rewarding there has to be a chance for it to be not as rewarding, sometime things should occasionally go wrong. And one of the reasons I think that worked so well in Diablo 2 in that it’s such a fast game. You get through the game relatively quickly so if you make a mistake you can try again.

We want people to make alternate characters that have a unique flavour and are thought of as unique characters and there was a set of decisions that resulted in a character. I like to have an identity for a character and it’s not something we want to steer away from.

We have attempted in this stat system to make dead-ends less perilous. We have tried to give each of these stats more utility for every class and every character you want to make and hopefully we have succeeded with that. We do like to give you choices.