Torchlight II Interviews
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Aside from the idea that you need co-op in the sequel, what did you learn from the first game, either distribution and business-wise or design-wise?
First, distribution and business-wise, we expected that things had moved to digital downloads from boxes since the last time we published and put [out a game]. But we were kind of struck by just how far that's gone now. The vast majority of our sales are through digital download, either through our site, Steam, GamersGate, or through any of the sellers out there. We didn't expect it to be so biased towards that. I mean, it's good for us, we do better on a download than we do on a boxed sale. But that's something we have to realize, that that's where the market is for this type of game, and we should really be playing towards that.
With respect towards design, a lot of what drove Torchlight I's design was necessity, and the need, want and desire to get something out quickly. People felt a little claustrophobic with the structure Torchlight is just one town and a series of dungeons underneath. So the obvious remedy for that is to make big overworlds and different cities, so we're doing that.
The other thing that people wanted was more character customization, so in Torchlight II people will have the ability to select hair styles, basically customize your character a lot more than you could in Torchlight I.
And then PC Gamer doles out a massive four-page Q&A with both Max Schaefer and Travis Baldree to go along with some exclusive artwork:
PC Gamer: Is there anything else you want to add about Torchlight 2?
Max Schaefer: You'll be able to buy the box and play for free, so there will be no item sales or subscriptions or any nonsense.
Travis Baldree: We're going to continue supporting mods. We've been talking a lot about how we're going to handle that in multiplayer, so it's not finalised yet. Maybe some horrible difficulties will arise that I'm not anticipating, but it's something that we'd like to do. Ideally, what I'd like to see happen is one of the cool things we had with Torchlight was the class mods that people did. We had lots of different class mods that people put together interesting abilities or really weird alternate takes on an existing class, and I think it'd be really fun to go and play with your friends and play really strange classes that somebody cooked up and do that together.
Max Schaefer: I think it's probably important to mention here that we're not aiming with our multiplayer to provide the perfectly secure, cheat free MMO multiplayer experience. The idea here is that you can play Torchlight with your friends, and you can modify that if you want to make the game with your friends all the better. It probably means that it will be somewhat cheatable, but the point of this is not to have a world wide competitive community, the point of this is to have a fun Torchlight experience that you can play with your friends.
Travis Baldree: The aim is basically to provide you with some tools when you're in the lobby environment to play games only with the people you actually want to play with. You can have an established set of friends and set up a game that's only available to them. We've talked a bit about almost a limited TiVo style rating system for players, too, so that you can thumb down people who are absolute hacks.
