Max Schaefer Talks Torchlight Page 2

19 Nov 2009 at 13:04:39 by Tim McDonald

Okay. I have some questions about the MMO, but we'll get to that in a second. Since you mentioned it, is there going to be a Torchlight expansion pack? Are we going to see more stuff, or are you just gonna hope for the fans to make cool mod tools?

I think that we'll make some mods ourselves, just because the guys in the office have fun doing it. We're going to be making this MMO which means we're going to be generating a lot of content, and we hope that we can get some of that content and just filter it down, via some free little goodies, into the community. But yeah, we do expect the modding community to supply quite a bit.

One other question about the very rapid pace of development. You got the art, you got the character design, you got everything you wanted. Do you feel like you had enough time for balancing and levelling, or do you think there are going to be some big imbalances, like overpowered items?

Well, of course, there were a few things that, upon release, we realised were a little unbalanced and they should be addressed in the patch that I think is out today. But I think it's a lot more forgiving in a single-player game to have minor imbalances, and it's kinda fun to find something that's a little overpowered once in awhile – you know, when you're cruising through the dungeon you find a cool sword and you can kick ass for a little while. That kinda feels good. So no, I think we got it just about right, and I give a lot of credit for that to my brother Eric, who did the bulk of the item balancing.

And it's not as if AAA-titles that have five years of development don't come out with lots of imbalances. There were Diablo 2 things that had to be patched, and World of Warcraft, and I'm sure that in Diablo III we'll see more of the same. I wasn't paying that close attention, but was there a public beta, or a demo? Or was it in-house?

We did all of the testing in-house. We have a little QA team in-house that plays the game from day one, and they were there the whole time. We ramped up a little bit for the end, and we did a very, very short little friends-and-family thing just with literally less than fifty people. But that was extremely short, and extremely quick, so it was all just in-house testing.

A couple more about the current Torchlight. Is there plans for a boxed version? Some people on dial-up say they want to buy it, and they can't download 500 megs.

Yeah, there's going to be a boxed version coming out in January, so it'll be in a Wal-Mart near you. *laughs*

A Wal-Mart near you, okay then! So distribution is under control, I take it. This is where I keep talking while I look at questions because I'm doing a podcast and not a typed interview. Funny how that works, right?

Yeah, live is always exciting, huh? *laughs*

A couple of questions about the Torchlight MMO, if you don't mind. It's definitely in the works?

Yeah, the MMO has been in production – at least from a technical perspective – for the last year. Now we're working on the patch, we're going to get the editing tools out, and we'regoing to get a demo version of Torchlight out on our site. Those are all imminent. As soon as those are all done and we can take a breath and relax for a couple of days, then the whole team launches, full-bore, into the MMO.

How is your MMO planned? Mythos was going to be a kind of casual MMO with a little bit of RMT [Real Money Trading] to keep it floating. Are you looking at that kind of thing, or some huge World of Warcraft style?

I think we have to be much more efficient than that. It's impossible to compete with the level of content and the depth of World of Warcraft. So we do carve out, definitely, a slightly more casual style of gameplay, but just through the tools we make and the efficiency of our process, we hope to have a big, vibrant world in which the MMO takes place. But it'll be a touch more casual than World of Warcraft, and right now we are looking at the item transaction model, although that's something that you'd never want to chisel in stone because we're talking about two years for the MMO, and two years is an eternity in the industry, and maybe no-one likes item sales anymore at that point! *laughs* You do have to do a lot more design with item sales, too. But that is the plan right now.

Interesting to hear that. At least you're not taking on another super World of Warcraft-killer that's going to flop on development and release like most of them seem to. Is the MMO the same as Torchlight? Will it be the same characters, the same world, or is this just sort of a demo and you're going to expand vastly and no-one would recognise the MMO from Torchlight?

A little of both. It's going to be in the same world, it's going to have the same gameplay style, same camera, same controls, the same pacing of combat, but Torchlight is just one town and one dungeon. We're going to make a big overland world and different towns to go to, and all kinds of new things.

Now, with the characters – for an MMO, you have to have much more customisable characters. In Torchlight, there's one gender and one look for each character, and you just look different based on what you find. MMO, you're in with a lot of people. You've got to stand out, you've got to customise your character a lot more, so we're going to start from scratch on the characters. We'll take inspiration from the ones that are there and we'll respect the fact that there are Destroyers, Vanquisher, and Alchemists in the world, but the player characters will basically be starting from scratch.

Are these building on ideas that you guys had right from the start, or did you just say “Let's do what we can with Torchlight, and then if that goes well, then we'll brainstorm and think everything up for the MMO?”

We figured right from the start that the things that would transfer over directly to the MMO would be the dungeons, tools, and the lore in the world, and the look and feel, but we knew right from the get-go that we were going to be doing new characters for the MMO and having to build a big overland world. So the first task that we do is going to be making a nice terrain editor!

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