Interviews

The Path Marked by Torchlight

WC: Is your plan to release the level editor & development tool to the public a way to compensate for no new official singleplayer content?

Travis: We want to be involved with it. We want to work with people in the community to help them do stuff - inject assets in there, for instance - but we don't have any plans for a full-scale expansion. The MMO is the expansion.

WC: It's only been a week, but what have you learned from consumer feedback that you are going to keep in mind and do differently in the MMO?

Travis: We've gotten lots of feedback so far. People want lots more late-game content, for instance. There are tons of threads on forums about game mechanics, how they should be tuned, and stuff like that. We're reading all of it, and we're going to incorporate it moving forward into the MMO.

Max: We can probably say people were upset about not being able to respec their characters *laughs*. So we released a mod that allows respecs - we'd actually created something like that before release. The way that the skill trees were set up, it wasn't our intent to allow respecs, but we wanted to make sure it would be easy to add. It's kind of like the Extended Edition of Lord of the Rings - you weren't going to put that sort of stuff in the movies, but you liked it anyway.

WC: Are you guys working on any other games right now?

Travis: Nope, just the MMO!

WC: Max, you did Diablo and Diablo II, so you obviously have a lot of experience with this style of game. Is there any one thing you think makes this genre "work"? The secret sauce, so to speak.

Max: Man, that's tough. If I had to try to distill it... you need to spend tons and tons of time on making it feel right - everything: clicking monsters, all the skills, hitting buttons, even moving potions around in your inventory. It has to feel right. There's no way around it other than just spending days, weeks and months working on it.

WC: You've previously said that the controversy over the Diablo III art style was something that helped shape the visual aesthetic for Torchlight. Can you elaborate?

Jason: It was all in the timing of it - Mythos had fallen, and you had the D3 announcement. Once they put out what they were doing, we knew it was off the table. We were aware from the beginning that we'd have comparisons to that game no matter what we did. So we factored that in, and went to the casual, stylized look the game has now - we didn't want to out-Diablo Diablo. It's their look, and it's what they do.

Max: I feel for those guys a lot. There is a world of expectations on their shoulders, and they not only have to make a world that's good and unique and different, but also like all the other Diablo games. I played what they were showing at PAX, and I don't doubt it'll be fantastic. They won't release it if it isn't a first-class game, and I'll be a day-one purchaser.

WC: Do you think that the hype and anticipation for Diablo was a factor in how well Torchlight has been received?

Max: I think that the hunger really made it easy for us to do this style of game. Obviously, it was very advantageous for us to get out before Diablo III.

John: Actually, I've seen at least one person who said that they'd be buying Diablo after playing Torchlight - they'd thought the genre wasn't for them! So it'll help both games, I think.

WC: You get an extra two months to work on the game. What do you change, improve, or polish?

Max: Ooh, we might have lost our lead programmer then. I don't think Travis would have made it.

Travis: Lots of little things that we wanted to do that didn't quite make the cut. Other kinds of shrines, minigames that went along with them... the pet could dig up bait, finishing would be more robust - things that just add flavor.

Max: It would take a lot longer than two months to put in decent multiplayer.

WC: Will the MMO be called Torchlight Online? It's a great name, "Torchlight," so I'd imagine you don't want to throw it away.

Max: We have to tie it together somehow - maybe not Torchlight Online, since it's just the name of one town in this big world, but it'll have to be incorporated somehow. It's a conundrum we'll be grinding over for a while.

Travis: Torchlight Online: The Burninating!

WC: Anything else you'd like to talk about that I didn't touch on?

Max: I think you'll see that the MMO and Torchlight will complement each other both ways. We'll look at our six-month sales figures and know for sure!

Travis: I appreciate singleplayer games - I have a copy of Dragon Age sitting on my desk right now that I can't wait to go home and play. When we were making Mythos, we had a lot of people who wanted to play a singleplayer game, and so we talked about making a singleplayer Mythos that we'd sell for $20 for people who wanted that sort of thing. So we made a singleplayer game while we were laying the ground for our MMO, without extending the MMO timeline. It's kind of like developing it for free, but ... not exactly.

Jason: I think a lot of people who spend a great amount of time playing MMOs start getting burned out on the social dependency, on the stress of having unpleasant guildmates and all that. Sometimes you want to take a break, a less stressful exercise.

Travis: One of the nice things about developing a game like Torchlight is that you make sure it's fun as a solo gameplay experience. A lot of MMOs, if there weren't other people ... the mechanics of those games aren't very fun if there's no social element, if there's no one else involved.

I think that there are a lot of MMOs that, if they were changed into a singleplayer game, you couldn't get people to play them. So what we've done is create a singleplayer experience that we think is terrific fun, and with other people should hopefully be more fun.