Torchlight II Interview

Runic Games’ Max Schaefer has been interviewed by Gamer Living, giving him yet another chance to talk about his past at Blizzard Entertainment, his opinion of the new Diablo III, and, of course, Torchlight II. Here’s an excerpt:

WA: So, obviously you’ve played the game. What’s your favourite thing about Diablo III that they’ve changed from the original?

MS: I like the way that they’re telling the story during the course of the game. I don’t feel that it’s being forced on me, and yet it’s kind of in a compelling way that it’s being unfolded. I think they did a really great job on that. The art work is great. Especially the background, it’s super detailed. A lot of the time, I’d just stop and just explore around rather than play the game. And it’s slick, you play it and it’s like, (Oh hey, I’m playing Diablo.) (laughs)

WA: So, you know with Torchlight II, you’re almost wrapped up. I know that with developers, it’s kind of like, you get to the end of the line and everybody’s gonna start asking you for what’s the next big thing. Do you have any ideas out there?

MS: There’s 30 people in our company and we’ve got 30 different ideas of what should happen next. And we’re deliberately not trying to make a decision about that now. We want to see how it does, what people are clamoring for. Do they want an expansion of this? And if we do Diablo numbers and sell six million copies, we’re going to do an expansion we’re not idiots (laughs). So we’re gonna see how that goes. See if people are clamoring for tablet versions or console versions. And also kind of judge our mental state, you know, after doing two Torchlights in a row, you might want to do something else a little while and then come back to Torchlight. We’re going to let the dust settle. We’re going to do the Mac version after this, Mac port, new language translations, release the modding tool, fix all the problems that happened in our Error 37 (or whatever our equivalent’s gonna be), and then kind of gauge what we wanna do and what the world looks like. But yeah, there’s all sorts of ideas for expansions to new stuff altogether on MMO, consoles, tablets everyone’s got ideas.

WA: if you did decide to do an MMO, would it still be in the ARPG space?

MS: Definitely. We would not want to do a traditional at all. We’d adapt it in many ways to Torchlight. It’d be an MMO in so far as everyone’s playing in the world of Torchlight, but it may radically different. I think it would keep our creativity alive, not just to do traditional MMO.