Torchlight III is the game that was previously known as Torchlight Frontiers. It was supposed to be a shared world ARPG (an MMO-ARPG light since the design intentionally limited the number of players in the same public space). Most of my thoughts on it are in the posts under the Torchlight Frontiers label but in a nutshell, it was something I was looking forward to since I felt that the braintrust of ARPG talent that Max Schaefer was able to assemble, would finally show how an ARPG in a larger than multiplayer environment (not necessarily a full blown MMO), would work.
Unfortunately, they found by actively designing, developing, and closed alpha testing, just how problematic it can be trying to marry the two without compromising the ARPG side. The original envisioned design had some lofty goals including eliminating character levels (and creating a sense of growth with both horizontal and vertical progression systems).
Both the Frontiers system and character skills design needed to be revamped several times (they also scrapped designs and started over from scratch the skills and itemization systems). My own play testing journey began with closed alpha 3. What was missing for me was the game world of Torchlight where you had rich and varied environments to discover and explore. The graphical aesthetics were all there such that you knew it was a Torchlight game. The issue for me was the actual environments lacking a lot of distinct variations when compared with the game world in Torchlight II. The Frontier maps had been designed for this shared open world and they ended up feeling linear. The design also would periodically randomize the map since procedurally generated maps and levels were always a hallmark of these RPG’s.
Obviously, they had figure out how to deal with this in a shared world environment where the player isn’t constantly losing their place in the world as they progress. This whole notion of the fog of war has been a key element in ARPG’s where you reveal the map as you play through it. I would say they came up with an interesting design but that also contributed to the non-hub locations feeling like these map tiles without any sense of place.
I basically cut the game a lot of slack because it was in closed alpha and going through some very live design changes and iterations. What never really changed drastically was this world environment though. And when the announcement was made that the game would be going back to it’s multiplayer ARPG roots (as Torchlight III) versus the MMO-lite ARPG, I gave the initial revamp a try and found the same Frontier maps being repurposed. And I think that was where my biggest disappointment was.
I previously was very much into these isometric camera ARPG’s but have slowly come to really enjoy the full exploration aspects of a 3rd person camera design where you can really fully be immersed in that game world. Having played through the initial Korean soft launch of Lost Ark, that entire game world would have been just a different level if it hadn’t been locked into a quarter view camera. That was a conscious design decision made by the original designers (who admitted there would be this sort of trade off with the huge game world they had created). And so you had pre-defined pathing for climbing or dealing with other forms of verticality.
With Torchlight III, that aspect felt like a step backwards to me. My own play testing time had been on a declining trend with each closed alpha update as they tried to refine the game systems for an imminent Torchlight Frontiers launch. The decision to nix that entire free to play MMO-lite plan and the way the initial Torchlight III closed testing felt, was decisive in why I haven’t bought the game at it’s official launch last week (because it was something I already wasn’t enjoying in closed alpha testing). And that’s painful for me to say because Echtra has a ton of great RPG designers. But I also understand that it might have been an expensive affair to redo the map design (which is a different part of the production process) and the need to ship (I’m not sure how many private investors might be involved).
The PC numbers (which is only available via Steam) do not look good though (to be fair, the game is also available on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One). The peak was during it’s transition from Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III (with the initial closed testing also transitioning to Steam) where it has a peak of 5.6K players. The actual launch number was even worse at around 3.6K players. Source: https://steamdb.info/app/1030210/graphs/
