Torchlight II Announced For 2011

Runic Games has announced a sequel to the popular action RPG Torchlight, planned for release in Spring 2011. One notable improvement from the first game is Torchlight II's inclusion of online co-op play, with LAN support and a matchmaking system. "The sequel will feature an updated version of the Torchlight editor, randomized overworld areas complete with weather effects, random dungeons, a selection of pets, fishing, limitless loot, and a retirement system which will allow users to retire an older character and bestow some benefits of it to a newly created character." An MMO set in the Torchlight world is still in development.

A welcome trend.

[PhasmatisApparatus]

At a time when there seems to be more defunct than active game companies, and huge gaming monstrosities such as Activision and EA are merging/acquiring left and right, it's a welcome change to see new developers like Runic spring up overnight.

Re:Nice!

[TheJokeExplainer]

Excellent point. If Diablo III will continue to be internet-only with zero LAN support, that could be how Torchlight can grab a respectable enough chunk of the Diablo market segment. That'd be a sale from me as well :)

Re:Why have I never heard of Torchlight?

[TheJokeExplainer]

In fact, it's such a good Diablo clone that all that latent muscle memory you stored from playing Diablo II all those years ago would kick in without a hitch and make you feel right at home. Great job by Runic! :)

Re:Timing

[TheJokeExplainer]

Yup! If Torchlight only had multiplayer, it wouldn't have needed much of a story at all. Fun-ness of the gameplay would have been enough.

Proof of this is the ridiculous slew and success of MMORPGs coming from Asia that have zero story and are all about level grinding and looting: I'm looking at you MU Online and Perfect World! (the parent company of which bought Runic and will be funding the Torchlight MMO).

Re:I played through Torchlight last weekend

[Omestes]

I love it because it is a casual game for people who generally hate casual games. Its like Diablo II lite, DiabloII required a decent time commitment, and was pretty hard to just play for a couple minutes while your waiting for something else to happen, Diablo II also required spreadsheets for even causal play. Torchlight can be played for 10 minutes and quickly forgotten.

Its lack of a story doesn't hurt it too much, there is enough of one to make it somewhat interesting, but not enough to make it compelling and attention grabbing. It is like Peggle: Diablo 1.5.

My install of it recently went wonky (strange graphics artifacts), so I installed Sacred 2 to scratch my Diablo itch. It somehow didn't hitt he mark. It is almost "hardcore", except it has no story whatsoever (AFAICT). I think you have a winner if you have a complex story and complex gameplay, or a simple story and simple gameplay, but completely die when you mix simple with complex. Sacred 2 is a better game on pretty much all counts, but really doesn't hold my interest. Torchlight is like taking a small hit of crack whenever the desire hits you. (As opposed to Diablo I/II's fullblown heroin addiction).

Re:Built with Ogre3D

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it HAVE to compare? They made money on it...lots of money.

It's like saying that a MMO is a failure because it doesn't make the sales of WOW, even if it did net 20 million in profits. Sometimes a comparison to the market leader doesn't really mean much.