One of the great things about Torchlight and Torchlight II is the fact that, every time you play, it’s a different experience because of the randomly generated levels. Since the announcement, I’ve been daydreaming about what I want to see from this title. After all, when it first came out, I was excited about Marvel Heroes less because of the Marvel license (I credit that game with making me care about that particular franchise, because prior to playing it I had seen maybe half of the MCU movies, if that) and more because it looked like an online version of Torchlight II. It seems like Torchlight Frontiers will be exactly that thing. I really miss Marvel Heroes, which you’re probably tired of hearing about by now (and if not, you’re in luck, because I’m going to talk about it some more today!), and there isn’t really anything to fill that gap. This past week Perfect World Entertainment announced Torchlight Frontiers, an MMO based on the “it’s like Diablo but with color” Torchlight franchise, and I can’t wait to try it. ![]() It will, at best, be the same game with different classes.Īnd it certainly won’t be the massively multiplayer Torchlight game I’ve been wishing for for years. But I also have no reason to believe it will be better. After all, I had a lot of fun in the first two games, and I have no real reason to believe this one will be drastically worse. Will I still buy Torchlight III? Probably, once it’s on sale for $10 or so. ![]() It’s better than a complete scrapping of the entire project, but it’s losing all of the unique, innovative things that made me excited. There’s still going to be crafting and housing, which is cool, but no word that I’ve seen about auction house and player trading, which is a major make-or-break point for MMO-ness in my mind. But zones will be devoid of any players not in your party, and story and character progression sounds linear and bland. Some would say that this makes it as much an MMO as the original Guild Wars (that’s a whole different debate). Yes, at least it has some social features, like the ability to interact with and group up with others in town if you want to play in online mode. Regardless, we aren’t getting a Torchlight MMO anymore. Why would anyone want to play an MMO that’s half broken and guaranteed to get wiped periodically? Most of all, though, I think they just caved to the MMO haters, who irrationally campaign against anything that involves online persistence.īut the reason doesn’t matter anymore. Maybe they viewed the low player numbers in their weird, year-plus-long, permanent open alpha as a sign that nobody wanted to play it. Part of me cynically wonders if publisher Perfect World Entertainment, who recently reworked Magic: Legends from an MMORPG into an online ARPG, thought the two games were too similar and forced Torchlight change course to more of a traditional ARPG formula. So many quality ARPGs have come out since Torchlight - games like Grim Dawn, Path of Exile, Victor Vran, Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing, and, of course, soon to be two actual Diablo games - that the world doesn’t really need another straight-up Diablo clone. Perhaps more frustrating than the fact that we’re not getting the Torchlight MMO I’ve always wanted is the fact that they’re also stripping away all of the things that made this entry unique. But instead, we’re getting Torchlight III. Since that game shut down, there really hasn’t been anything to fill the void (the closest thing is Path of Exile, but that’s back to the aforementioned oppressively depressing atmosphere), and I thought Torchlight Frontiers was going to be just that. I played it because I was obsessed with Torchlight II and was wishing there was an MMO version. When I discovered Marvel Heroes, I wasn’t even a Marvel fan. Better yet, the Steam game I have the most playtime in is still Marvel Heroes (and I used the standalone client for years before switching to the Steam client). This is why Torchlight II is one of my most played games on Steam it’s Diablo, but colorful and not too serious. ![]() I think that Diablo-like gameplay can be a lot of fun, but I’ve always found the atmosphere that Diablo and most of its various clones portray to be so oppressively depressing that it sucks all of the fun out of the game for me. But it makes me even more grumpy when it was one that I was actually excited about. You know I’m a big MMO fan, so any time an MMO goes offline or fails to launch, I’m sad, even if it’s not one I was personally invested in. I was already having a bad Monday when the extremely disappointing announcement came that Torchlight Frontiers was becoming Torchlight III and gutting its MMO systems.
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