Torchlight II Interviews
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On the subject of lightweight, easily digestible games, part of Torchlight's success was almost certainly down to the fact that it would basically run on anything. This is a tactic that Blizzard put to very good use with WoW back in the early days. Is it going to be a similar deal with Torchlight II?
Max Schaefer: Torchlight II runs on the same graphics engine and technology as Torchlight. Now, since there are more people on screen and there's a little bit more happening, it won't be identical in its performance, but it'll be very, very close. Like you say, it really helped World of Warcraft a lot, and I think it has an even more profound effect to a game like Torchlight, for several reasons: firstly, if it runs on old machines, then the market is bigger; also, action-RPGs really benefit from a smooth frame-rate more than other game genres do. By going low-spec, your frame-rate goes up on your good machines as well. If you have a super-high-end gaming rig, Torchlight runs smooth as silk on it, and it just feels good.
Taking a low-tech approach has benefits in performance on any machine, not just running on low-end machines.
Also, not doing bump-maps and shaders and all this sort of stuff, means that we can make stuff faster and it's easier to iterate. We actually get to spend more time polishing, and more time with the art direction, and more time iterating on the things we're designing, because the production of the art assets is just a lot easier and faster.
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Talking about the game itself, then. Obviously, it's built very closely to the Diablo II formula: were you very clear when you set out that you weren't going to deviate from click, kill, loot, sell, in any way at all?
Max Schaefer: Yeah. I think that was the one area in which we were fairly conservative in our approach. We have a bunch of people on our team that have a proven and long history of making this sort of game. We know that we can do this sort of game well. We know that we can put out a compelling, fun product in this genre. Given that we were going off-board with a lot of the other approaches we were taking, it was the one area that we did want to be conservative and make sure we got right.
And I'm glad we did. Now that we've established the Torchlight franchise, and established the development tools and our team, let's see what we can do with it now, see what other people who are making action-RPGs, who have a more labourious process and have bigger teams, can't do. We want to be able to go places that maybe Diablo III won't go. We're a brand new company, and Torchlight is our only product to date, so we want to see where we can take this now.
As you say, we are more nimble, and we can experiment more easily and get results and feedback faster than other companies.
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The second thing that really stuck out in that reveal trailer was the overland stuff. Has bringing the action out of the dungeon helped your co-op design by giving you more space? How have overland areas affected the overall project?
Max Schaefer: Technically, these are really just outdoor dungeons. They're still randomly-generated areas they'll be different every time you start a new game but they change the feeling of the game entirely.
There was some valid criticism of Torchlight that said it was a relatively claustrophobic game. You were underneath one particular town, and there clearly wasn't much of a sense of an actual world up there. There's a pretty striking difference. Just walking out across the wilderness to get to a town, it really feels more like an actual world.
The difference is a lot more than you would think. You get it within five minutes of playing. There's the promise of more. Because you're walking outdoors right at the beginning of the game, walking towards a town, you get the sense that you're going to be seeing a lot of cool different places and a lot of different terrains, and you're going to be really exploring a world instead of just a delving beneath one town. It really has changed the feel of the game substantially.
It also lets us explore different terrain types and different styles, and it breaks up the game better. There's something psychologically refreshing about coming out of a dungeon and then heading across the wilderness. Even though, technically, it's a trivial difference it just feels different.
A lot of an action-RPG is pacing. If your levels are too long, you just start to get bored, or you start to get frustrated. A lot of honing and making an action-RPG fun and compelling is the pacing of it. It really helps with pacing to be able to come indoors then outdoors, and so on.
