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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.
Torchlight was built using Ogre3D, an open source graphics rendering engine. I hope that the sequel uses it too.
Ogre3D is written in C++ and is compatible with PC, Linux, Mac, iPhone, Android and other platforms. If you're into programming 3D games or simulations, you should definitely check it out. www.ogre3d.org
(I'm a long time user of Ogre3D but otherwise unaffiliated)
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.
And it was thoroughly enjoyable, especially for what was essentially a game where I ran around mashing mouse 1 and mouse 2 until I could make my mashing of said buttons more effective. Oh, and tab occasionally.
Brilliant little RPG, though one of my main issues with the game was the lack of multiplayer - it's perfectly suited for it. Given the planned MMO, and now Torchlight II's co-op, it looks like this will be a must-have game indeed.
To much anime is bad for the brain...desu.
Sorry. Couldn't help it.
I'm excited to find out what will happen to this game when Diablo 3 is announced, or if it will effect the casual market share much or at all.
Torchlight is very fun to play using Nvidia's 3D Vision. Game looks great, and very few things get in the way of the 3D experience.
One of the games I enjoy with mine. Titan's Quest is another similar game that looks great in 3D also.
Be seeing you...
But Blizzard said it was dead and we all know that if Blizzard says it, it must be true!!!!
Torchlight was a slam dunk because it was on sale for $10 when it first came out. I bough two copies: one for myself and one for a friend. Honestly, I only played so much of it before I got bored. But it's still a good game.
Make it at the same price point, and I'll gladly buy the next copy again.
...Torchlight was a testgame they did prior to beginning developing the MMO version?
Shouldn't they focus on that instead?
I'm actually more excited about Torchlight 2 then Diablo 3.
"LAN support"
*Cha-ching* There's a sale for me. To hell with Diablo 3. Hell I may even buy a new laptop and buy two copies. One for home and on the go.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I got this game for the Mac on Steam for $10 when it first came out. I was pretty psyched, because the graphics were very cool. I was disappointed to find out there was no multiplayer, which seemed like a very big oversight. I had hoped to play it co-op with my stepson. I enjoyed playing it for a while, but it did get a little boring. It's pretty easy on all the difficulty levels except for the extreme, and you can pretty much kill everything by simply pumping up the first skills you get. I only played about the first five levels or so, then got bored with it. It's been moved to the back of the queue behind StarCraft 2 for the time being.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
Why have I never heard of Torchlight, and why is there no link to it in the summary? Why is the Torchlight II logo a bad ripoff of the Warcraft logo?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
At first I was hesitant about Torchlight. But, it ['s boxed version] having no DRM swayed me to get it. I've had a lot of fun with it since. It's not the greatest "Diablo clone", but it's still good fun. LAN multiplayer, however, will breathe a LOT of life into it for me and, quite possibly, cause it to replace Diablo II as the game I play most with my roommates.
Runic really *really* needs to be able to release this way before Diablo III comes out.
Torchlight 1 was excellent for scratching the Diablo itch except that it painfully lacked multiplayer/coop -> that was what made the Diablo series really really fun and was very sorely missed. All in all that was my only Torchlight gripe, and was why I stopped playing it after a while. Collecting randomized bling ain't as fun if you can't show 'em off and trade 'em with others.
If this comes out at roughly the same time as Diablo III, it'll not only be a problem of gaining wallets+mindshare, but also the big one of timeshare.
People playing other games means less time playing your game, and with multi-player games, critical mass of players is very very important. It's really frustrating at how there aren't enough players to play with who have decent pings if you're in Asia, like with Streetfighter IV on PC and Borderlands.
If there aren't enough players online to play with, it'll make the game a little less attractive.
Anyway, Runic did a good job with Torchlight. The modest system requirements were a big plus too as it allowed you to run it on netbooks with less horsepower. Hope they're able to push the sequel out the window in time to avoid being slaughtered by Diablo III.
visit my pal the xkcd explainer!
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It's similar for me. The game just didn't have much depth. I didn't need to force myself to finish the main quest with my first character, but I got tired of it a few levels into the main dungeon. Maybe some day I'll try it with a different class, for at the moment there are too many other games vying for my time.
The graphics are very pleasing though, wish more games looked like that. Except for all the explosions/spell effects which make it really hard to see where you need to click....
Torchlight has come up in many conversations I've had in varied groups of gamer friends. But not once has anyone ever tied it to Fate. Am I the only one who remembers that little game? Diablo-esque in a way, but Torchlight is WAY more of a knock-off of that than of Diablo. Weapons, upgrades, the PET. There was no pet in Diablo that I recall. There was in Fate. And guess what, you could fish for special fish you could feed your pet to change him into other creatures to help you fight. Sound familiar? Yes, that's right, that's just like Torchlight... except Fate came out YEARS ago. The brighter colors and more-"cartoony"-than-Diablo artwork featured in Torchlight? Yes, a LOT like Fate. I played the Torchlight demo and I could not stop thinking how much more similar it was to Fate than to Diablo.
The "It's just like Diablo so it sucks!" attitude is getting really old. It's like saying Doom, Unreal, or any other FPS is just like Wolfenstein 3D. Try the game, try to enjoy it for it's own merit. Few things are truly original these days, but in the end, you have to ask yourself, "Did you enjoy playing it?" If you didn't, and the only reason you didn't, is because you felt it was a "ripoff" of a prior game, then I feel very sad for you. You must hate 99% of all music, movies, and games that are produced these days. I would kill myself if I were that cynical, 'cause life would be really boring.
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Here is one page...granted, Linux is only 5%, but it's not the 0.05% that some people will claim.
Here is another. The percentages here are much more impressive, with Linux share at just about 25%.
Here is a blog post by Hemisphere games about the viability of supporting Linux.
I'd say it's worth it. I may be a little biased, of course (I don't have any windows machines)...but whenever I hear about an upcoming game with Linux support I preorder it immediately.
I've played Torchlight a bit, and it was interesting, but I thought the control scheme was awful. Then again, I'd say the same of almost every PC RPG or action-RPG: you have a cursor, click on the ground to have your character walk there, and click an enemy to attack it. FUCK THIS SHIT! It makes me feel I'm not really in control. I want direct, cursor-less control. Like pretty much any console action-RPG, such as - obvious example here - the Zelda series, the very definition of the damn genre!
I've commented the same in Runic's forums, and fans were quite defensive, "the controls you want wouldn't work in a Diablo-like game". Which is quite silly, frankly.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I downloaded Torchlight, and so far my observation WRT it being a Diablo clone is that Diablo runs under Wine. My Windows machine is busy playing Netflix on the TV and I cannot regain control of it at this time.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I am SO happy that this game is getting this much attention. The designers of this game are genuine. Even before Runic was created, back in the Hellgate: London days when Mythos (Torchlight's predecessor) was a work in progress, they were always driven by the community. I have NEVER seen a dev team that was in-touch with their fans/playerbase as these guys are. If you get a chance, check out some of the interviews they've done on various projects. You can tell they really love what they are doing. I'm so glad Torchlight has done as well at it has. These guys really deserve it.
They need to fix enchanting, it was fun but poorly balanced. You could find level 0 items, give them 50 enchants for the price of 3 on a unique, and then blaze through the entire game.
Also, the possibility of having your item randomly destroyed while enchanting needs to go. One of my favorite items broke while enchanting it, I was so pissed I googled a cheat mod to fix this 'feature', but the mod was overpowered in other ways so I lost interest and stopped playing.
Overall I really liked TL, I just hope TL2's unique and set items are more powerful than uber enchanted low-level blues.
The government has a defect: it's potentially democratic. Corporations have no defect: they're pure tyrannies. -Chomsky