#Torchlight 3 multiplayer skin#
#Torchlight 3 multiplayer full#

According to a 2018 interview with IGN, an MMO twist on the genre’s been on his mind since his Flagship days. Schaefer’s been in the slash n’ loot game longer than I’ve been alive, co-founding Blizzard North back in 1993 with his brother Erich Schaefer and David Brevik to create Diablo. This isn’t the first time Schaefer has reformed a team, as Runic itself started out by taking on all 14 former employees at his previous firm, Mythos developer Flagship Games. It’s not clear how many-if any-Runic staff found new jobs at Echtra after the studio’s closure.

Runic, however, would shut down a few months after Hob’s launch in 2017. The studio was formed by the Runic founder and CEO in 2016 to create a multiplayer reimagining of Torchlight, while Runic itself branched out to develop clockwork action-adventure Hob. It’s a tricky situation Echtra’s found itself in, though.

#Torchlight 3 multiplayer skin#

Are Echtra and Perfect World reeling in a larger online game to get it out the door? Or does Schaefer’s quote hold weight, and had a solid solo dungeon-crawler been lurking under Frontiers’ skin since the start? Whether Torchlight 3 feels like a true Torchlight successor will probably come down to how late in development this change really came. Running a massive multiplayer service game is a very different thing to shipping solo action romps. That’s pretty last-minute for a total structural turnaround, mind. Torchlight 3 is set to release on Steam this summer, dropping inside Perfect Worlds’ Arc Games launcher. But, ideally, you’ll be able to bash through Torchlight 3 without ever seeing another human being.

There’ll even still be social spots to hang out with fellow travellers.

#Torchlight 3 multiplayer full#

Torchlight 3’s steam-powered roles break from the typical cast of barbarians and wizards, and will each get their own Forts to build up, customise and cram full of loot. An in-game store selling items for real-world money has also been scrapped. Likewise, Frontier’s once dynamic, persistent shared open world is now more akin to the “familiar, linear world structure” of past Torchlight games. “During development, you often discover what type of product a game was meant to be and we found Torchlight Frontiers was meant to be a true successor to Torchlight I & 2.Ī horizontal progression system with “Frontier-specific levels, gear stats, and scaling” has been traded out for a more straight-forward power climb. “When we started developing Torchlight Frontiers, we were focused on creating a shared-world experience,” Echtra CEO Max Schaefer, one of the founders of Runic, explained in a press release.