Torchlight II Interview

Runic Games’ Max Schaefer was certainly busy answering questions about Torchlight II during last weekend’s PAX Prime, as yet another interview with the CEO and veteran designer has popped up over at Ten Ton Hammer.

Ten Ton Hammer: The overland areas being shown in this build are a lot larger than pretty much anything we saw in the first game.

Max: It really feels a lot more open in general, and really lets you do a lot more exploring than in Torchlight I where you’d clear stuff out, move to the next area and then clear that stuff out.

In Torchlight II, the storyline won’t take you to every corner of the outdoor areas. But if you explore it isn’t just wilderness there’s stuff out there. The desert being shown here isn’t even as fully populated yet as our first act outdoor areas where we have tons of events and little side quests that you can discover.

We want people to do the amount of exploring that they want to do, really. So if you feel like you’re behind the power curve a little bit you can do some more side dungeons, or some more exploring.

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Ten Ton Hammer: In terms of storyline progression between the games, what type of story connections are there for players who played through the first game that help segue into the story of Torchlight II?

Max: This one starts shortly after the first game ended. The town of Torchlight has actually been destroyed and you have to figure out why. The player character classes from the first game are NPCs in this one. I don’t want to spoil anything, but they figure prominently in the storyline.

We didn’t have a writer last time so it was just guys in the office writing things up. Now we have an actual dedicated writer, so the story in the game is a lot more clear. We’re not a story heavy game because we want the emphasis to be on killing monsters and finding loot, but there is a much more coherent and well written story this time.