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Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Torchlight II Faces Giant Rival Diablo III

When you think of action-RPGs, your mind is probably transported to the grimy, oozing underworld of Diablo. It is the unholy berserker of its genre. So what chance has a different top-down dungeon-exploration game, one that's releasing just a few months after the stomping, stamping arrival of Diablo III?

Well, Runic Games’ Torchlight II has a few of its own skills to take on its giant rival. First, the original Torchlight (2009) was as charming and engrossing an isometric adventure as you could hope to find. At the time of its launch IGN called it “an absolute joy”.

Second, Runic was founded by developers from Blizzard North who were instrumental in the making of Diablo and Diablo II.

Also, Torchlight II is a digital release priced at $20. At that price, assuming you enjoy top-down ARPGs, it’s going to be difficult to talk yourself out of giving this game a whirl. Responses from the beta that took place in May have been extremely positive.

Undoubtedly, Torchlight II will be on a lesser scale of grandness than Diablo III, but set against that, it has a more individualistic skills tree and attribute points, a sense of permanence about the choices made. Also, none of that always-connected nonsense that so blighted the launch of Blizzard’s game, and annoyed so many players. It's also a lot bigger than the original Torchlight, 87 percent bigger, according to Runic's stats.

I decided to ask Max Schaefer, Runic Games' CEO, if the lower price and smaller budget of Torchlight II inevitably means it will be seen as a cheap-and-cheerful version of Diablo III. He says, “Back in the day, when we would sell a $60-dollar box, by the time the money came back to us, it would be maybe $14 dollars a copy. And that's what we get nowadays on Steam, selling a digital download version for $20. So from our perspective, we're as viable and as profitable as an independent developer used to be selling $60 boxes.

“We're bypassing the publisher and box distribution and that lets us bring a $60 game to people for $20. We don't want people to look at Torchlight as a cheap game, because we think it's competitive with anything out there. But we like the idea that we're at this price. It sets us apart a little bit. We also want people to buy a Runic Games product without even thinking about it, because they know it's always a good value.”

This is the nub of gaming’s revolution right now, the shift away from Big Marketing and towards word-of-mouth releases that a lot of people in-the-know play, discuss and promote without the need for game-makers to spend dough on expensive ad campaigns. It allows teams like Runic to exist and games like Torchlight II, at $20, to be available to us.

So what does Runic think of Diablo III? Schaefer says, “First of all, I think they get a bad rap. Meeting the expectations of the Diablo community is going to be impossible. No matter what they do, it's been 10 years and the expectations have built up so much. They're going to run into criticism.

“They've actually put out a significant product there. But what I think we're offering something that some players may prefer, things like the offline single-player play. Basically, we're not trying to create a secure economy. We don't have to have these crazy protection mechanisms in place. We're giving our development tools out with the game so that the modding community can go crazy with it and make all kinds of cool new stuff.

People who are more casual and want to have a lot of fun building new crazy characters and enjoying a good hack-and-slash, those are our people

“There's two valid paths to go when making a game like this. You're either going to have a secure economy, like a quasi-MMO, or you're going to have an open game where you're going to let people have access to all the data and all the files and let them update it and mod it as they please. We've chosen the latter path, and Blizzard obviously chose the former path. I think they're both valid, but they do offer alternatives to people who are disaffected one way or another. A lot of people are very competitive. They want to play in a competitive game's economy. For them, Diablo III is the answer. For people who are more casual and want to have a lot of fun building new crazy characters and enjoying a good hack-and-slash, those are our people.”

Schaefer does offer a critique of the way Diablo III dealt with character development and skills customization. “Some of the criticism of Diablo III was about how there isn't really a lot of differentiation between builds of a character, because they all unlock the same skills at the same time. There's less of an opportunity to make a character that's truly individual for you. I think that could have the possibility of reducing longevity, because once you've played through it with a character, there's no particular reason to go through and try a different build.

"I think that we also have, maybe, a longer game at this point. More randomization. A little bit more replayability. I think that Diablo III focused a little more on super-polished mechanics and balance and look and art direction. They're on a Blizzard level. They're seriously good. But it's at the expense, a little bit, of the replayability.”

ARPGs like Diablo III pull off the trick of making ‘mouse-clicking-on-stuff-’til-it-disappears’ feel like a lot of fun. And this is down to the world such games inhabit, the creatures discovered and butchered along the way, how they look and feel and how they die. Music and sound are so important to creating an atmosphere that helps you forget the simplistic mechanics of the game.

Schaefer says, “I think that’s absolutely true, and I think that's the challenge when you're making an action-RPG. It's really all about the immersion and the tactile feel of things. The music and the sounds and the fire and the sparkly deaths. The way it all comes together and forms an experience that is visceral and that the player can really immerse themselves in. That's the challenge of making a good ARPG. And it's one of the reasons they take a long time to make. It requires iteration after iteration after iteration.”

The original Torchlight was released on console for XBL. So, is there any chance of the new game making an appearance on the wild frontier of digital downloads for Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3?

He says, “We're not currently planning a console release. We haven't ruled it out but to do a port like we did last time, would probably not be on the cards, because of the limitations of Xbox Live Arcade, and the fact that we would have to downsample all our artwork this time. With Torchlight we were able to do a direct port of pretty much all of the art assets, other than the interface that had to be redesigned. It would be a lot more work this time. It's questionable whether a business case can be made for that.

"We enjoyed making Torchlight for Xbox Live, and we think it came out really good. It didn't lose any money, certainly, it made money. But we can only do one thing at a time as a studio. We have to evaluate everything across the board and say, ‘What makes sense for us to do next?’ Right now we want to take some time off and kinda clear our heads and come back with a clearer perspective on what the community wants us to do."

Torchlight II is out on September 20th. Watch out for IGN's review later this week..

I write opinions on games pretty much every weekday. Recently I've been talking about DishonoredCounter-StrikeJourneySound ShapesWasteland 2Virtua Fighter and Project Eternity. You can follow me on Twitter to debate and argue about games. Or IGN


Source : ign[dot]com

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