Torchlight III - Announced

Couchpotato said:

For me Torchlight is a cartoon Diablo-lite.

It was even made by an ex-Blizzard employee.

Anyway glad to see the online part is optional now.

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Yep, which is why I’ll never touch it. Diablo and Diablo likes are to me as Dark Souls is to you.

sakichop said:

Yep, which is why I’ll never touch it. Diablo and Diablo likes are to me as Dark Souls is to you.

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Not really a big fan but yeah I can see why others hate the formula. I still remember all the Diablo clones from the late 90's and early 2000's. Most were mediocre at best.

Nowadays Grim Dawn is my favorite.

screeg said:

The game nobody asked for!

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Nobody?

a pibbur who will wait and see

a pibbur said:

Nobody?

a pibbur who will wait and see

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He comes from the nation of Narcissa, where “I am not interested” is translated as “Nobody is interested”.

screeg said:

I can't tell if this is serious. I never, *never* miss a chance to trash Spiderweb and that one game they've been released for the last hundred years.

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Sorry I can never remember who does hehehe it felt like a safe jab

It concerns me a little as this was never intended to be Torchlight 3 and all early access videos show a game that is somewhat streamlined and stripped-down from previous games with no significant character development other than loot. Time will tell but deciding to call it Torchlight 3 so late in the day does not bode well.

txa1265 said:

He comes from the nation of Narcissa, where “I am not interested” is translated as “Nobody is interested”.

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Everyone is from there. Have you caught a glimpse of news, media, social networks lately

Couchpotato said:

For me Torchlight is a cartoon Diablo-lite.
It was even made by an ex-Blizzard employee.

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It even gets more complicated then that. For anyone who cares:

- Diablo was developed by Condor Games
- Condor Games was comprised of The Schaefer brothers, and David Brevik
- Blizzard had an orgasm when they saw Diablo, so they bought them and they became Blizzard North
- Bill Roper later came from Blizzard to Blizzard North
- Blizzard North (formerly Condor) went on to develop Diablo 2
- Blizzard North dissolved after issues with creating Diablo 3 and the 4 above names went on to create Flagship Studios.
- Flagship Studios was then comprised of all the major Diablo developers.
- Flagship Studios then made the disaster that was Hellgate: London
- A few devs at Flagship Studios made the game Mythos originally only to internally test LAN/WAN stress limits.
- Everyone thought Mythos was a blast to play, and decided to make it their new title
- A small quiet closed beta opened for Mythos
- Development was really quick and major changes were made from very active forum users
- Mythos became a hybrid of WoW and Diablo (you could even choose 1st/3rd person or Isometric), in the best sense, not worst
- The damage had already been done by Hellgate London and Flagship Studios shut down, taking Mythos with it
- Everything was acquired by Hanbitsoft and looked nothing like it's original fun concept
- The team working on Mythos (specifically the Schaefer brothers) grabbed Travis Baldree who made Fate, and started Runic Games
- Brevik and Roper went on to other projects, and didn't join them
- Although they wanted to make Mythos, they lost all assets, so everything had to be from scratch
- The intention was to make Mythos again, but they didn't have the budget
- With a tiny budget, they grabbed the open source OGRE engine and developed a single player only version to throw out the door within months, called Torchlight, which would in theory give them the financial security to make the game they wanted after
- It was a success for the most part, and they went on to develop Torchlight 2
- Torchlight 2 was a fun game, but it wasn't Mythos. It was just (as others have said) Diablo 2 lite.
- Runic made Hob and then shutdown, with their publisher PerfectWorld keeping the rights to the Torchlight IP
- Somewhere in there, Erich Schaefer and Travis Baldree went on to make a super tiny studio called Double Damage games
- Perfectworld then funded a new dev company called Echtra with Max Schaefer
- They went on to create Torchlight Frontiers, which is now Torchlight 3

So while Diablo 1/2 was released by Blizzard, it wasn't really developed by them. Not the core of it at least. Most of it was Condor/BlizzNorth/Flagship.

Mythos, was developed by ALL the original Diablo 1/2 devs.

Torchlight (while still fun) lost it's way after loosing half the Diablo folks, and never really became Mythos

I just got the beta invite for Torchlight 3 today, so now I get to see if Max eventually was able to make it anything like Mythos was...

txa1265 said:

Then again - I have been a fan of his stuff since 'Fate' … sure it is a slow evolution from Fate through Torchlight II, but each game is better than the last, and I have fun for relatively little money.

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As in the timeline above, he never made Fate. That was Travis Baldree who joined Runic, but then left a while later.

Caddy said:

As in the timeline above, he never made Fate. That was Travis Baldree who joined Runic, but then left a while later.

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Yes, thanks for noting that - as I looked at the timeline I noted my error

txa1265 said:

Yes, thanks for noting that - as I looked at the timeline I noted my error

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In this gaming industry, everyone moves around so damn quick and all over the place, you never know what to expect anyways :lol:

Caddy said:

- Blizzard had an orgasm when they saw Diablo, so they bought them and they became Blizzard North

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I mean, no shit. I'd probably have an orgasm too if someone dumped half-a-billion dollars in my lap. Diablo was basically the first game of an incredibly popular new genre.

Thanks for the comprehensive timeline! I had no idea there were so many ins-and-outs around the IP, or that Blizzard North was a sneakily renamed company that wasn't Blizzard.

I have to say, I never played Torchlight II.

The first one put me off. Firstly, everything ranged is completely broken when determining line of sight and targeting different elevations. Secondly, the game is incredibly obscure with respect to what the skills/effects do. Which makes the non-refundable/non-respec skill system even worse. I can live with no-respec, but at least let me make informed decisions then.

And instead of patching that, they made every player go through the process of installing a mod to fix that…

Cacheperl said:

I have to say, I never played Torchlight II.

The first one put me off. Firstly, everything ranged is completely broken when determining line of sight and targeting different elevations. Secondly, the game is incredibly obscure with respect to what the skills/effects do. Which makes the non-refundable/non-respec skill system even worse. I can live with no-respec, but at least let me make informed decisions then.

And instead of patching that, they made every player go through the process of installing a mod to fix that…

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Update: I decided to check out Torchlight II. Huge improvement, actually quite enjoyable.

Some stuff that improved:
- level design (no stupid, omni-present stairs)
- I love the option to do dynamite fishing instead of this crappy fishing minigame. For TL1, it ranks highly among the most annoying minigames in RPG ever.
- Ranged combat works much better than in the first game.
- Better description of skills.

Some stuff that did not improve
- The no-respec problem persists, modding seems to be advisable.
- Pointless difficulty levels (Chosen up front, mostly increasing damage and HP).

Anyways, this gives me reasons to look forward towards Torchlight 3.