For anyone who has played old school dungeon crawlers, ARPG’s, and RTS (real time strategy) games, one of their signature components is the fog of war concept. This is where the dungeon or map has most of its terrain, layout, and enemies cloaked in darkness. Only when the character moves/explores, is that darkness lifted to reveal smaller portions of the environment. It was also used with great effect in dungeon crawlers to create this ambiance using a light radius which illuminated a limited amount of your surroundings. This fog of war was also used in conjunction with procedurally generated levels (along with randomized tile sets in dungeon crawlers) to create a sense of endless replayability.
The persistent world environment of your typical MMO obviated the notion of having a fog of war or an open world that was procedurally generated since it would be somewhat confusing for players to suddenly find the environment they were in, change with different paths or a new layout of different tile sets. Most MMO-ARPG’s that have launched to date continued with a non-randomized persistent open world and a few utilized instances with randomized layouts and/or fog of war.
Torchlight Frontiers has come up with sort of a compromise for the open world part (aka shared areas) where it will not be constantly procedurally generated (like the private instanced content). Instead, it will be on an internal randomization cycle where it will change at some point. And players will know about this such that there won’t be any confusion when the layout changes. This is of course important for players who will be questing and need to continue to find their way around that world. These open world areas will also have their own day and night cycle where the enemy types will also be dynamic (some may appear only at night for example).
The current design also seems to eschew putting any type of level based locks on different zones mainly because the game does away with the notion of a character level (instead, favoring item level from equipment that you find and equip). That isn’t to say that monsters do not have some concept of level either; they do as each area has monsters where an approximation of their level is provided on screen. Regardless, it’s just one abstract holdover from the original dungeon crawlers that is finally being removed since that has always been one of the biggest issues with the whole experience grinding to level a character to the maximum level where the real game begins. This way, you are more focused on progressing your character through the actual content in order to acquire rewards that allow you to tackle more difficult content without filler questing content meant to artificially draw out that character leveling process behind exponential experience.
When I hear about some of these small pieces of information regarding the core concept and game systems that are being implemented, it is clear how little innovation has taken place in the design of many MMO’s period. And with the MMO-ARPG niche, the vast majority that have come out of Korean studios has only focused on the visual facade (superficially) while failing to grasp the other aspects that are more associated with the classic ARPG (randomized world, fog of war, item diversity, build diversity). Torchlight Frontiers is really looking to be a familiar but also refreshing take on melding these together.
There are still a lot of unanswered questions though regarding the sort of complexities involved with building a character (like it seems there aren’t the usual character attributes at least in the build they had for the Gamescom demo) where you allocate skill points to them. There is the pet system (a staple of the earlier games) as well as the new instanced housing system (Forts) which looks to be a deeper system (account based where it benefits all characters). The most intriguing part of that design is that your forts can appear to other players in the game world where they can be utilized its services where any currency spent goes to the owner of that fort (this is a system which I need to look into more). Basically, I am looking forward to finding out more detailed information about this next iteration of the Torchlight franchise.
