Torchlight: "Schuldig! Wir haben von Diablo geklaut!" - Die Entwickler im Interview

pcgames.de: How happy are you with the release of the games and the reviews for Torchlight up to now?

Max Schaefer: "We are very happy! The reviews have been great, praising Torchlight's replaybility, addictiveness, the rich loot drops and lots of monsters.
It's been hectic as we put out the patch, the demo, and working on getting the Editor out, but reading people's responses (like user reviews on Metacritic) has been so rewarding."

pcgames.de: How many copies have you sold?

Max Schaefer: "We still don't have numbers from all over - we have about six partners and usually don't get numbers from them until the end of month. We are very pleased with the sales so far, especially given the lack of marketing we've done. Word of mouth has been great for us, and we hope the sales continue!"

pcgames.de: Some people are criticizing that there are not enough innovations in the game. That you copied too much from Diablo & co. Defend yourself!

Max Schaefer: "Haha! We plead guilty to trying to perfect a style of game we've worked on since the early 90's. Since we have two of the founders of Blizzard North, five people who worked on the series, the creator of Fate, and the whole team that worked on Mythos, it only makes sense to make an ARPG as our first title under the Runic Games banner."

pcgames.de: Another issue: There are not enough character classes in the game.
Are you planning on implementing or 4^th or 5^th class? Via DLC?

Max Schaefer: "We are confident that our modding community will be able to use our TorchEd tools to create new classes, new skills, and new balance to suit anyone's needs. We meant to design a tight, clean title that has polish and performance rather than build a sprawling, feature-laden RPG that would take years to develop. The MMO will have more classes, more customizable characters, and more total content, so there should be plenty for Torchlight gamers to look forward to."

pcgames.de: The thing that is bothering critics most is the missing multiplayer part. You are planning on F2P-MMO. Tell us more about it. Most
important: When can we play it?

Max Schaefer: "If we'd included multilpayer, Torchlight would still be in production for a while yet. We decided to take a two-pronged approach that gets Torchlight out to the public sooner rather than latter, then concentrate on a fully-featured MMO thereafter. The MMO will be in pre-production as soon as we finalize issues from launching the Single Player. It will feature a lot of customization, an overworld, random and instanced dungeons, PVP, and much more! It will be indeed free to play, and will be out in about 2 years. We like to get alpha and beta versions up and running as quickly as possible, though, so hopefully we'll have a lot of community interaction during the development cycle."

pcgames.de: How many character classes are planned for the MMO?

Max Schaefer: "We haven't decided yet!"

pcgames.de: Will the game world for the MMO be instanced like Guild Wars or open to all/most players like World of Warcraft?

Max Schaefer: "It will have a large, shared over world, and dungeons that can be either instanced or shared. It should look and play like a WoW-style world, but have plenty of instanced adventured tailored to your particular party."

pcgames.de: "What about pvp?"

Max Schaefer: "Will will certainly have PvP, hopefully in multiple forms from dueling
to more organized contests."

pcgames.de: A couple of questions on Runic Games. How many people worked on
Torchlight?

Max Schaefer: "We started with 17 people and now are up to 27 total employees. We're
quite small."

pcgames.de: Are many Blizzard or Flagship Studios veterans working at Runic Games?

Max Schaefer: "Five Blizzardians: Founders Max and Erich Schaefer and Peter Hu, QA Lead
Ian Welke, and composer Matt Uelmen. The entire starting 17 employee team was employed at Flagship working on the Mythos title at the time of Flagship's closing."

pcgames.de: Do you know what the people at Blizzard think about your baby?

Max Schaefer: "Nothing officially but we got good feedback at E3 and PAX from some
Blizzard employees, and of course we look forward to playing D3. We have very good feelings towards Blizzard, and wish them all the success in the world (not that they need our wishes!)"

pcgames.de: We wish you the best of luck for future projects. Is there anything
you want to tell all the Torchlight enthusiasts out there?

Max Schaefer: "Thank you for playing, it means a lot to us!"