Torchlight Preview
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There's the depth here that you might expect - the inventory and character pages are bafflingly, temptingly vast - but it's a game that's been designed to fit in around your life, too. "One of the focuses for the game has been to be really respectful of people's time," says Travis Baldree, Torchlight's lead designer. "I've got a four-year-old, and I don't have time for all the usual nonsense. So when you save, Torchlight saves exactly where you stand, and on top of that, we give players a pet, which will level with you and has its own inventory. That means you can get it to go back to town and sell items for you while you stay in the dungeons. We've tried to remove all the obstructions that could make a game annoying. I want to make a game I can just sit down and play."
Make that two games, actually. While the Torchlight that Runic's currently putting the finishing touches to is a no-nonsense single-player experience, it's also the calling card for an MMO, which the developer plans to kick off production on immediately after the first game is safely out the door.
Let's start with the single-player game. Torchlight is a ramshackle mining town, where prospectors have hit a mother-lode of the magical resource Ember. As unlikely characters flood in from everywhere, hoping to make their fortunes with picks and shovels or steal them at gunpoint, events take an unusual turn. A discovery is made beneath Torchlight's mines when the ruins of a handful of ancient cultures who had stumbled across this particular seam of Ember in the past are unearthed. All appear to have died out while trying to harvest it. "It's a windfall, but there's something wrong with the set-up," says Schaefer. "There's something corrupting down there that likes to finish off civilisations, and the player has to uncover the truth."
