At least, every time I attempted to equip an item, the delay would be so unbearable that I wouldn’t notice the change until much later. There was no way to complete the quest so I had to restart.Īnother issue manifested itself while I was attempting to swap items - I simply wasn’t able to.

Either it just never spawned, or a random high-level player killed it while I was watching the cutscene (remember, it’s still a purely online game). When the cutscene ended, the enemy was nowhere to be found. My character, a Sharpshooter, encountered a Goblin miniboss via a cutscene. The first one happened within the first 10 minutes of starting Torchlight III. There were even a couple of instances that stuck out like a sore thumb.

your character disappears when attempting to customize your fort this happens without the game opening the fort customization panel so, in effect, you’re just moving around with an invisible character.

using a melee character (Railmaster) feels like an exercise in futility due to laggy gameplay.

teleporters in town won’t work or portals won’t appear when they’re supposed to.

enemies are sometimes immune to all damage.

enemies or your character moving aimlessly due to lag.

long loading times when transitioning between areas can lead you to Alt+F4 to close the game and relaunch especially if load screens take more than a few minutes.

What I ended up experiencing were the woes that plague poorly conceived MMOs out there, such as: announced that Torchlight III would eventually have an offline mode, that’s currently unavailable at this stage of the early access period. It was still going to be a small-scale ARPG, so where did the missteps start happening? Well, there are bits and pieces - those that would make you realize that there’s been a rough transition from conceptualized MMO to actualized ARPG gameplay.Īlthough Echtra Inc.

Again, plans changed, and, rather than going with an MMO, Torchlight Frontiers became Torchlight III. This sets the stage for Torchlight Frontiers, the aforementioned MMO title which was announced back in August 2018. to continue “bearing the torch, so to speak. The focus also shifted to developing a free-to-play MMO set in the same universe.Įrich left Runic, and Max ended up forming Echtra Inc. It was during the development of Torchlight II when Perfect World Entertainment purchased a majority stake in the company. The video you see above is a dev diary introducing Echtra Inc., a company helmed by Max Schaefer - one of Diablo‘s “big four.” Max and his brother Erich - another member of the “big four” - co-founded Runic Games after leaving Blizzard, eventually creating the first two Torchlight titles. From Torchlight Frontiers to Torchlight III

Torchlight 3 2018