Hyper WTF is Torchlight 2? Part 1

[Imon Yourside]

Loved the 1st one, looking forward to this more than Diablo(sux) 3.

[Mr. Laz]

Originally Posted by KILLER_CLOWN

Diablo(sux) 3.

now that's just wrong

[Kraus]

Video is gone.

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by Laz

now that's just wrong

Sorry I really wanted to like it, but it's nothing like Diablo 2 which is one of the 5 best of alltime. Blizzard used to be great but I don't like their new stuff.

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by Kraus

Video is gone.

Hmmm wonder why, now it's really like Super Hyper WTF is Torchlight 2 lollercakes.

[Imon Yourside]

Heres another vid, although not done by the cynical brit.

[TrickyNicky]

Do want.

I take it this is already in beta?

[Mr. Laz]

Originally Posted by KILLER_CLOWN

Sorry I really wanted to like it, but it's nothing like Diablo 2 which is one of the 5 best of alltime. Blizzard used to be great but I don't like their new stuff.

yea, i know

usually it's a bad sign when they take too long to make the next game.

looks like they are trying to dumb down DIII which just sucks

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by Laz

yea, i know

usually it's a bad sign when they take too long to make the next game.

looks like they are trying to dumb down DIII which just sucks

Ya no stats/skills, Online Single Player, NO modding all of which helped shape the D2 community that is STILL going strong 11+ years after release.

[Imon Yourside]

Originally Posted by TrickyNicky

Do want.

I take it this is already in beta?

Supposed to be out sept/oct/nov this year, pretty sure it will be out before the end of the year.

[Imon Yourside]

OP video is working Now.

[Meanstreak]

Ill give Blizzard some benefit of the doubt due to thier resume. Also, i am not sure that taking longer than usual is really a bad sign. Historically they have always stayed away from multiple roll-outs and with the expansion to WOW and the release of StarCraft this last year, i am not terribly surprised they have pushed D3 back.

That said, i am in agreement that the "dumb it down" approach is a turn-off. I cant grind out as many hours in game like i used to, and now i have 8 year olds lapping me in levels because today's games are too damn easy. I find myself going back to the oldies but goodies pile of MMO's frequently to maintain sanity.

[Imon Yourside]

Torchlight II: Price Point, Final Class
Anticipated hack 'n' slash showing at PAX Prime in Seattle Aug 26-28

SEATTLE, Aug 26, 2011 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Runic Games, Inc. ("Runic Games"), a specialized developer of PC-based interactive entertainment software in the United States, made two announcements this morning in conjunction with the Penny Arcade Expo 2011, beginning today in Seattle.

Runic Games unveiled the price point for Torchlight II today, and as promised, the studio continues to champion the model of affordable games with great value. Torchlight II will retail for $19.99 USD, the same price as the original Torchlight

"It's always been our goal to provide exceptional value for the price," says Max Schaefer, CEO of Runic Games. "Everyone who wants to play Torchlight II will be able to comfortably afford to do so, and they'll be able to play with their friend online or via a LAN, or play single player offline, all with no further purchases.""

Runic Games also announced the fourth playable class of Torchlight II, the magic-wielding Embermage. The mysterious Embermage joins the previously announced Engineer, Outlander, and Berserker classes. This marks the culmination of a month long buildup introducing each class to players.

Torchlight II will release for PC in 2011.

About Runic Games, Inc.

Runic Games is a developer of PC-based interactive entertainment software, designing games that focus on quality, value, approachability, and fun. Runic Games is staffed by a team with experienced members, including leads on "Diablo," "Diablo II," "Diablo II: Lord of Destruction," "Fate," "Hellgate: London" and "Mythos." Torchlight for PC won the GDC Award for Best Debut in 2009. Runic Games, a subsidiary of Perfect World Co., Ltd. /quotes/zigman/107094/quotes/nls/pwrd PWRD +1.39% , is located in Seattle, Washington, United States.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/tor...ass-2011-08-26

[Imon Yourside]

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

[Imon Yourside]

Modding

Jerich: Now for another topic, modding... It's probably best to start with an open ended question. How is modding being handled this time, in the details from installation to actually playing together with other people?

Travis: We're still working through a lot of this right now, but the basic plan is to have a way to package mods from the editor. They'll have a unique GUID and you'll be able to version those things. Installation... what were planning to attempt is for the game to be able to enable or disable mods kind of at will from the mod folder, so each one would be kind of its own contained package. Then when you're going to play a game that's modded, in selecting it, it will look for the GUIDs available for the mods on that game, it will select them locally, and then either relaunch if it has to or not depending, and then join the game with only those mods enabled. That's the current operating plan, that's what were trying to work through. It's really complicated, especially when we get into things like modded classes and modded items and I've got a modded item and I'm joining a game that doesn't have that modded item... what happens to my modded item? So we're going to mess around with that quite a bit before we're satisfied with how that works I'm sure.

Jerich: That sounds good... Moja asked this... I think you kind of answered it: How friendly is the mod switch system. Is it simple to switch between mod sets on the fly, and you basically said, Yes, but you are still in process of deciding what the exact mechanics will look like.

(Jerich's note: Travis kind of already answered this question above and I asked this question while trying to sort through about six user questions he had already partially touched on.)

Travis: It's not easy for me to give you a definitive answer, but we're definitely planning on making this a more streamlined process than this was in the first game.

Jerich: Drivehappy, the guy who was trying to do the multiplayer mod for Torchlight 1, asked this: “Will you condone or allow reverse engineering and open sourcing work like you did with Torchlight 1. This would be for projects such as adding additional features unavailable through TorchED.”

Travis: We have no problem with you messing with the game. You bought the binary, muck around with it.

(Jerich's note: Wow... I wasn't expecting this clear of an answer here. In my opinion, Travis's response here is worth of being slashdotted. Happy modding, you crazy reverse engineers!)

Jerich: Dusho asks: “How many character based meshes are there? Still two?”

Travis: There's a human male and a human female. We do have the ability for you to alter the bone scale on the characters, so if you actually look at some of the shots from the Beserker versus the Embermage, they're proportionally different. So in the unit data file for any character actually, if it's wardrobed... you can push and pull the size on individual bones. So if you want someone to have a big head or large biceps or muck around that way you can, and we will dynamically adjust all the wardrobes to fit to that character.

(Jerich's note: It looks like it is going to be much easier to add class mods this time around. It does make multiplayer somewhat problematic (since you can't actually player your new character without the mod), but I think we should eventually see some standard class compilations that people commonly use. While it will be easier to make and wardrobe human classes, Greg told me it may be more challenging to make completely different classes like the Robot class that one guy was making.

Also... I didn't ask a ton of the modding questions to Travis since I already talked a lot to Greg, Matt and some to Marsh. I will put more modding information in a future system's analysis post. (Bear in mind I am not a modding expert though.))

General Systems

Jerich: Nice! Let's move on to revamped systems, there's been a lot of talk about revamping enchanting, which we've already talked about, fishing, crafting, retirement, the skills system, even how pets work. What do you think is going to be touched in general, what hasn't been touched and what's still on the drawing board?

Travis: I'm not sure if anything will be untouched. Pretty much everything... the combat models different, the stats are different, the damage soak is different, damage dealt is different, fumbles work differently, armor absorption works differently. There's a lot of changes even as to how were approaching development of skill trees. I don't think much of anything is going to be identical.

(Jerich's note: While the game looked incredibly polished even now, a lot of minor systems haven't been touched yet. It will be interesting to see what they have time for and what happens to them in the next two or three months. Most of the large parts seem to be done and they are starting to work on the smaller pieces).

Jerich: k4llus asks: “Will there be any type of runeword crafting system.”

Travis: We don't have immediate plans to do so. We will be doing some kind of item combination, but I'm not sure were going to mess with runewords right now.

(Jerich's note: This seems like it would be more of an expansion type thing like it was in D2 if they decide to put an expansion out.)

Jerich: mAv asks: “How is the skill system going to work? Will we see Diablo type skill trees or is Runic developing something entirely new?”

Travis: We're still doing skill trees, were still doing three panes, some skills may have dependencies although we tend to try and stay away from dependencies for the most part. We've talked a lot about how fame might or might not figure into those. It's still not fully decided yet. I can say we're trying to go away from shared passives for classes at all and we're trying to have unique passives for each class. And as far as spells go, we're going to try and pack a lot of party support kind of stuff in there so that it doesn't act as dead weight in the single player skill trees.

(Jerich's note: I learned a lot about skills and will go into what I learned in a future skills analysis post. Watch for it.)

Jerich: You kind of answered this... So each class is then going to have a unique skill set, around 30 skills and there is most likely not going to be any shared passives?

Travis: That's right, that's the goal.

Jerich: k4llus asks, “Can we get some more information about your New Game + mode? For people that played Diablo II, is Nightmare a good analogy of what it would look like or do you anticipate it playing differently?”

Travis: It might be, it's hard for me to say yet. We want you to be able to continue playing from the end of the game, starting over, with a character you had previously. The world has to level up. It should be more difficult, but the exact parameters of that are not set in stone yet.

(Jerich's note: I am really excited to hear more about this later. I don't think they have balanced the first playthrough completely yet, once they do that they can work on balancing new game+. Oh, and Travis said the day before that the new game+ would probably replace retirement.)

Jerich: Okay... Omnifas asks: “Are there any other end-game features you can reveal with us at this time?”

Travis: So the current plan is to attempt almost a combination of the map system and the endless dungeon system, so at the end of the game there's a mechanism for you to basically do a small adventure and then complete it. So instead of going back to the beginning of the game to do a boss run, we might take a boss from elsewhere in the game and make a special dungeon for them that you can repeatedly do running through multiple depths that will auto level, so that you can actually accomplish something in the end game instead of just trolling endlessly downward.

(Jerich's note: This makes sense. An endless dungeon doesn't really work in the context of multiplayer because it would fragment players too much. Doing bite-size adventures with your friends seems like a fun end game activity)

Back to your friendly neighbor editor, Webbstre! That's it for today! Tomorrow we're going to hit on the topics of Multiplayer (which is quite long), Story/General Questions, and Future Plans. After that I'm not sure in what order we'll be putting things out, but you can expect more Class breakdowns, skill analysis, Modding, the compilations of your Questions and Answers, and more in the following days. Check back tomorrow for the second half of the interview!

http://www.runicgamesfansite.com/new...iew-1-2-a.html