RGF Exclusive PAX Coverage
Remember, these things are NOT FINALIZED and may change by release. There is always the possibility we screwed up and misunderstood something too.
* Itemization: Reduced Drop Frequency, cooler unique items, new restrictions on what modifiers can go on what item, and possibly item tiers available up to max level (100).
* Lots of new stats, and a special screen for displaying all of the statistical details of your character
* Retirement may be scrapped in favor of a Nightmare-style New Game+ mode
* Enchanting hasn't been reworked yet, but it is on the to-do list
* Actual patches for TL2, no more downloading the entire game each time
* Lots of improvements for modding - we'll cover this on a later day
* TorchED now offers "data validation spawn classes" - simulations to test how many of a monster you would have to kill for an item to drop
* An official modding wiki might be in development for documentation
* Fishing hasn't been revamped yet
* You can now switch difficulties "on the fly" if necessary
* Monster proximity scaling starts when two players are within four screens of each other
* Max number of players in an unmodded game will likely be 6
* PvP likely not to be in vanilla, but you can make mods that allow you to set PvP zones
* Multiplayer will be sectioned off between people playing vanilla and people playing with mods (even UI or skin mods)
* There are a lot more inter-monster mechanics in the game
* Chat rooms, Guilds, and Private servers are not going to be in at release, but some will or may be patched in later
* It is possible to make items with modding (and maybe in the vanilla game) that give skills, like a sword that shoots fireballs or a necklace that gives your pet new abilities
* Likely the only shared skills will be Spell scrolls, which are being revamped from the first game
* Passives are being tied more to stats
Jerich: Hello this is Jerich from Runic Games Fansite and I am here with Travis Baldree, President of Runic games. First of all Travis, I want to thank you for offering to host this interview. Let's start right with the first question.
Jerich: How has loot been improved since the original game?
Travis: We've done kind of a lot of things to improve loot. The previous game had too much loot, the loot was too much of a soup, the loot ended too quickly, we had a really boring and horrible elite item wrap-around that we did to stretch the loot out into the infinite dungeon, the uniques were generally not terribly interestingly unique, and sets were way to hard to assemble and we've tried to address all of those issues and we're still in the process of addressing them.
So in general loot, and especially when we get into things like elemental damages and elemental resistances, a lot of that has been more consolidated into different types of loot or onto a single element onto a single piece of gear. In large part we've moved things like elemental resists just to trinkets and belts. So that if your talking of going into a high fire damage area you just have a couple pieces of gear that you would conceivably worry to do a swap out.
Sets are way more prevalent in the game. Tons of things are parts of sets. Ideally we want you to be finding and assembling and being happy that you assembled sets throughout the game as opposed to, “Wow, I've found one piece of one... this is fantastic... great.”
The loot stretches much further into the game. We've got a lot more gear. Erich says there are more items than he's put in a Diablo game ever. There's a ton of loot and generally it tends to look better. We've got lots of great new art, there's a lot more wardrobe styles available. What else... when we get into unique we are trying to do much more specifically crafted uniques as opposed to just last ditch, last minute, let's just get some stuff on here. There's probably some other stuff I'm forgetting... but we're spending a great deal of time reworking the way loot works and trying to make a better loot game over all.
Jerich: You answered a lot of these loot questions already (reading through questions)... Let's see... How are you going to change enchanting? In the past game sometimes people would enchant an item so much that it made them never want to upgrade to a unique item they found. What are you going to do about that?
(Jerich's note: Honestly at this point it was hard to ask any more item questions since Travis was so verbose in the previous reply. With this question I tried to modify a question TheLurker wrote to fit more into what Travis had already mentioned)
Travis: Like you mentioned, the fundamental problem with enchanting was that it devalued the loot game completely, and we introduced post patch with Torchlight stuff that was designed to reduce that, but it was just a horrible bandaid. So we've been talking about several ways we might rework enchanting. Things on the table include just limiting enchants and requiring a wipe to re-enchant, or enchants that decay over time, so you could enchant some powerful stuff but after a certain amount of time it will dissipate. They would act as a temporary sort of thing. We may end up with a combination of those, we may end up with something completely different, but we will not ship enchanting the way it was before.
Jerich: Are there any changes to item tiers and itemization along the entire game. You just mentioned there won't be an item wrap-around like in Torchlight 1. How many item tiers do you anticipate their being... for instance leather, to chain to plate?
Travis: Ohh... I can't remember this off the top of my head... this would be something I would have to ask Erich as to how tightly the level bands are on those. I just don't know off the top of my head and it's likely to shuffle around quite a bit as we get closer to launch.
(Jerich's note: I stumbled a little bit with this question. I was hoping to get clarification that the game would be fully itemized up to level 100 through the new game+ mode, but it didn't come across clearly. Talking to Travis both yesterday and afterward confirms that that is indeed their plan.)
Jerich: I noticed some of the uniques had class requirements and they had an additional requirement which was either a level or a stat requirement. Is that pretty typical now?
Travis: Most things that have requirements have an either or requirement. I think the exception to that is class gear which always has a level requirement only. We do have a limited set of class only gear: weapons and armor I believe. In general we didn't want to force you to invest in stats to get gear, however we wanted there to be an advantage to investing in stats to get gear so there's simply an either or requirement. You'll eventually be able to equip anything as long as it's not class specific as long as you meet the level, but if you want to get access a little earlier, you can pump a few points into stats that are used for that type of gear.
(Jerich's note: I think Travis was slightly incorrect with this answer since I found a piece of Engineer only armor that had an either or stat / level requirement. I am really excited about the either/or feature because it should allow people to experiment highly with the stats. I will be addressing the stat and skill changes in an upcoming analysis article)
Game Performance
Jerich: That sounds great... So let's talk a little bit about game performance. Has there been more testing this time to ensure that there are no surprises with load times like there were last time.
Travis: Load times are a lot better than Torchlight. Some of that we actually got out of the the 360 build suprisingly, but we continue to improve the load times. We actually have a big change that Marsh is working on now that will go in immediately after PAX that should further reduce them. Overall, everything loads faster than Torchlight. Torchlight was a little bit chuggy that way.
As far as just plain old game performance, I'm not sure if were going to do a straight up Netbook mode this time out because of of the fact that it's multiplayer now and the amount of things that are going to be happening at once and the fact that we introduce much much larger regions, I think it's quite likely that some of the newer Netbooks will run it okay, but I'm sure some of the older clunkers are certainly not going to, so we may just not brand it a “Netbook” mode anymore.
Jerich: Compared to the first game, how many things are on the screen at once?
Travis: We definitely have more polygons and more stuff going on. We've have numerous performance improvements kind of across the board. I couldn't give you some specific count, but still scads and scads and scads of things is the aim. We have been trying to tone down the particles... not so much in their quantity, but in their on screen density so that we don't have so much blowout and so much overlap and I think we've been successful in a large part of that but we still have more to do.
(Jerich's note: In playthrough, the particle effects in multiplayer didn't occlude the action as much as I feared. I was able to track what was going on well. There were also no noticeable slowdowns.)
Jerich: System Specs you are saying would be similar, but no Netbook Mode?
Travis: It's probably going to be a little higher than last time which was pretty darn low, but ideally not significantly higher. We're still aiming to have it working on as many things as humanly possible.
Jerich: Laharl9999 from the forums asks: “Even with the pet, players often return to town. Is it possible to make at least the loading time for town nearly instant, Make an option to keep a specific fixed area in the cache for instance.”
Travis: The town load times are so much faster than they were before, I think he'll hopefully be pleasantly surprised.
(Jerich's note: I used waypoints and town portals several times in my playthroughs and going back to town seemed much faster than Torchlight 1.)
http://www.runicgamesfansite.com/new...iew-1-2-a.html