We absolutely enjoyed our time with Torchlight III, and only hope for the best for the future of the franchise. As a result of this transition, we are moving on to new (and exciting) things, and we will be passing the baton back to our partners at Perfect World. As you may have heard in the news, we were acquired by Zynga back on March 2nd. In short, we feel like this puts Torchlight III in a good place.īut this is also a sad message because it marks the end of Echtra Games’ work on Torchlight III. And very significantly, we’ve improved performance to a meaningful degree on every platform. We’ve killed countless bugs, made several UI fixes and enhancements, and added lots of quality of life improvements. There’s a new contract to play through, new wardrobes and fort props, and significant improvements to every character class.
We’ve also added a ton of new pets, including ferrets, two new types of dogs, stags, glittersprites, and more. The Cursed Captain is an amazing new character class with awesome summoning skills, giant cannons salvaged from ships to blast enemies in the way, and a salty, ghostly personality to match.
We are very excited about the Cursed Captain update, and everything it comes with. It’s $20 and still a steal at twice the price.This message is a bittersweet one. The annoyances it has are small enough to tolerate, or can surely be modded away. Somebody held its hand, taught it right from wrong, and it shows. Every now and then you get games like this one, where it’s easy to tell they were loved. And you can tell it was made with a lot of love. It does by far most important things right, and better than the games before it. – Wish there was more sidequests available, even if they’re short, to break the feeling of constantly being “on track”. It certainly feels more on rails than D2. In Torchlight you get the visual changes in scenery as you go deeper into the mountain, but it’s not the same feel. – I miss the feeling of open world and sideways exploration D2 had, with the roaming around the countryside, visiting new lands and towns and so on. Again, I’m sure this will be modded in short order. – Ditto with xp gain, a bit too much and fast for my liking. I’m sure this will be modded within hours of the tools being available, because as it is now it’s rather silly. Good equipment drops waaaay too much and often for my taste. + Combat is fast, violent, bloody and pyrotechnic. + I hear it’s very easy to mod, which is always a great plus. Voice acting is good, which in this day and age it’s as miraculous as Led Zeppelin getting back together, with John Bonham back from the grave and all. The town is Tristram all over again (heard it was composed by the same person, so there you go). + Other than a healer, you’ll find pretty much everything you need in town, including NPCs for side quests, item enchanters, a guy to transmute your equipment into something else (think Horadric Cube), the option to remove gems from your socketed items to use them into a new one, sellers with a good selection of items and so on. The skill trees are visually short, but lean – some skills are more useful than others, but I couldn’t find any terrible ones. That keeps it interesting and opens up a layer of customization via pure itemization to jitter things a bit and keep them fresh. + If your character meets the stats requirement of the item, you can equip it. + Mapping actions, skills and spells to your KB/Mouse layout takes a minute to learn and after that is smooth usage all the way. Found something you don’t want but would be nice for another character? Stick it in the shared vault. + When you are in town you can access your own character vault, or another vault which is shared between all your characters. If you find a fishing spot you can catch fishies that when fed to your pet they can temporarily transform it into something else, with different strengths and weaknesses.
Make it a healer, a summoner, a caster – whatever rings and pendants you can equip, it can too. You can teach it spells and it has a few equipment slots, so you can customize your companion like that. It takes longer to come back the deeper you are.
After a while it joins you again in the dungeon. When your space is full, you can pass stuff to the pet and send it back to town to sell it so you can keep going. + It’s pure, unadulterated, 100% raw cane fun, and that should be the zeroth law and mandate of any game of this ilk. Wouldn’t be surprised if D3 ends up lifting some of this stuff from Torchlight. It’s got tons of little things, some more little than others, that make it utterly impossible to go back to Diablo II (or any other dungeon crawl isometricky cRPG) with any sense of satisfaction. (yes, the Lesdanaday -is- a unit of measurement)