Torchlight dev speaks about Blizzard competition, MMO plans

Anyone know if they're planning to bring this to consoles at all?

I'm pretty sure Blizzard doesn't consider them competition. They may, and this isn't certain, have noticed the release of Modern Warfare 2. Anything less than that is like the buzzing of flies; an annoyance, not worth the effort of crushing.

Does Blizzard really even have competition?

So many MMORPGs come out claiming to be the WoW killer and after a few months end up falling flat on their face.

I don't care about the MMO version, I just wish there was co-op in the current version.

Activision Blizzard probably noticed that Activision Blizzard released MW2, true. :-)

They might have noticed that someone else was finally making activision some money

Am I the only one that heard Arnold's voice in my head for the interviewer?

This is a reply to Blank-Mage, but since the comment system is retarded and throwing javascript errors over the apostrophe in his username (really guys? who coded this?), I can't *actually* reply to his post.

Anyways, I doubt Blizzard is too worried about Modern Warfare 2, given they share a stock with the company that just released it :P If anything, they are elated :)

Blizz don't care though, its Activision-Blizzard now, one company, so they haven't a worry in the world. :P

Torchlight is much more than just an unashamed ripoff of both Diablo and WoW, it's so close to an amalgamation of both games it borders on straight plagiarism. Town portal scrolls, pets, fishing, unidentified random magic items (keeping WoW's green < blue quality), yellow exclamation marks over quest givers, round minimap in top-right corner, skill names and abilities... Just tons of design elements ripped straight out of either game. There's even extremely WoW kobold-like mobs early on in Torchlight.

It's a decent game, though the skill trees seem rather disjointed and not very well organised or interesting, or at least not for the amazon ripoff class. I haven't had time to check out the others yet. There's no real 'whoah!' type skill in any of the trees, and like with WoW (and to some extent Diablo) it's hard to know exactly what stat benefits your class the most - unless you read a guide on the internet.

Should I put a lot of points into strength as an amazon ripoff? Agility seems to be my primary stat, but lots of armor and weapon items require tons of strength, forcing me to spread myself thin and limit my customization options. What about defense, how much of that do I really NEED? No idea!

Oh well, at least the game is pretty cheap, so it should be good value for money despite whatever complaints someone like me might have. :D

Torchlight is a fun game, and definitely worth the $20 price tag.

Once you've played for a few minutes though, it's pretty clear that they were -ahem- greatly inspired by Diablo and World of Warcraft.

I think they should totally skip the whole idea of having a MMO and release expansions and new character types and such for Torchlight - or just start working on Torchlight 2 once they finish fixing up the first one.

"we plead guilty to trying to perfect a style of game we've worked on since the early 90's."

Keep trying, please. Don't get me wrong. I like Torchlight a lot. Considering its short development time and 20$ price tag, it's a scarily complete product. Thing is, it fails in exactly the area you would expect these guys to excel in - the skill tree design. It's as amateurishly done as any second-rate Diablo clone, which is sad because Torchlight deserves better and these guys, if anyone, should be able to do better. Median XL, a Diablo II mod made by one guy, has better skill synergy and design.

Major props for releasing the developer toolkit, though. The community is already in the process of fixing Torchlight's balance issues and embarrassing lack of build variety.