Runic Games, Dungeon Masters: The Torchlight Interview, Part I
Runic Games first title, an action RPG called Torchlight, got a lot of buzz at the Penny Arcade Expo in Sept. and a lot of positive feedback from fans that were seeing it for the very first time. A month later the game is in its final stage of development as the team races towards its Oct. 27 release date. To understand the appeal of Torchlight, you need look no further than the gentlemen working on the game and their influences and past accomplishments. Collectively the small development team working on this game has worked on such titles as Diablo and Diablo II, the indie hit RPG FATE, and the now cancelled MMO Mythos. While that list of accomplishments might seem short, it’s also very impressive.
What I learned from talking to Runic Games co-founder and CEO Max Shaefer, Art Director Jason Beck and Runic Games co-founder Travis Baldree was that these influences are helping them to build a better game and later to build a perfect extension of that game with an MMO project. In part I of my interview with this trio I learn about the first fruits of their labors: Torchlight. Read on.
Crispy Gamer Before we start, Travis I loved your first game, FATE.
Travis: It was fun to make.
Crispy Gamer: Did you make that all by yourself?
Travis: I was the designer, programmer and art director for most of it. We had various people that helped out from time to time. Jason Beck, who is on this call now ended up coming in later and doing some art for it as well.
Crispy Gamer: It was the only Wild Tangent game I ever installed.
Travis: I think it was that way for a lot of people!
Crispy Gamer: My spyware program didn’t appreciate that I had Wild Tangent stuff on my system but I think it was worth the minor hassle.
Travis: It was an interesting yoke to labor under.
Crispy Gamer: Explain the title “Torchlight” for those out there that might not get it.
Travis: What we were basically going for is this feeling of exploration and an adventurous vibe.
Max: With just a little touch of romance as well.
Travis: Holding your flickering torch while you’re hacking your way through the dungeon.
Crispy Gamer: Interesting. So there’s a lot of talk about Ember in Torchlight. What is Ember, how does it relate to the main storyline and how do players use it tangibly in the game?
Travis: In the lore of the world, Ember is a magical substance and most of the magic of the world is derived from it. So if you get a socket-able item it’s usually Ember. Installing it in your gear gives you extra magical properties. One of the class’ magic is based on the study of Ember.
The story really centers on Ember and what’s going on in this mining town called Torchlight where they are extracting it.
Max: Basically the story in the game is Ember and this town. Torchlight is a mining town, a boomtown where people have discovered the largest vein of Ember in the world. In the early part of the game you go to these Ember mines and you find out that your people are not the people that discovered it first because there is evidence of past civilizations mining this Ember but something went wrong. It turns out that this particular Ember vein is corrupted and the people who mine it and use it eventually fall prey to the corruption and that’s why the past civilizations that found collapsed.
You find the old ruins of these civilizations while you are there exploring and you realize that this is going to happen to your people too if you can’t get to the bottom of why the Ember is corrupted. So that becomes the goal of the game; to find out why this stuff is corrupted and find a way to fix it so that your people don’t become corrupted like past civilizations have.
Crispy Gamer: Does the world where Torchlight resides have a name?
The call erupts in laughter.
Travis: We deferred that one. Let’s just say that it is still the subject of argument in the office.
Crispy Gamer: How would you describe the setting - steampunk, high fantasy, or a little bit of both?
Travis: It’s got a bit of both influences in it. We’ve added quite a few steampunk elements.. There are the alchemists, which are one of the classes you can play that use Ember to drive some mechanical devices; for instance we have rifles and pistols.. but there is also a lot of the trappings of high fantasy like swords and magic, so it’s a bit of a mix.
Crispy Gamer: Why did you decide to do an Alchemist class as opposed to a straight magic user like a Mage?
Travis: Well we really like guns. One of the abilities we liked in Mythos was using rifles and pistols and some of the summons that we ended up doing for the Alchemist ended up having kind of a steampunk flavor. We just wanted to do something slightly different. The gameplay we want to be familiar.. you can play fairly Mage-y with an Alchemist, but it’s fun to do things slightly different.
Max: We wanted to make charcters that weren’t totally typecasts in their roles. So the Alchemist can be played as magic user or as a combat focused type character if you want to. So we wanted to create character classes that don’t imply a direct and simple specialization. Because they have strengths and emphasis but you kind of want people to do whatever they want. So if you find a really cool bow and you’re a Destroyer, you should be able to use it.
Crispy Gamer: How do ranged weapons work in this game? do you lock on to enemies are do you have to aim at them and hope you hit your target?
Travis: It’s going to be pretty familiar to anyone that has played a Diablo game; for instance, if you click on something you’ll “approach to range” and then fire the weapon. We have a couple of different kinds of ranged weapons - there are bows and crossbows, wands — of course — which have different elemental properties, pistols and rifles. Some of those can be used in combination n with melee weapons, so you might hold a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other and then you’ll shoot at things until they get within range and then you’ll use the sword for a melee attack..
Crispy Gamer: Are there any group attacks for ranged weapons?
Travis: Just the magical stuff like the wands have area effects on detonation, or reflections or ricochets. Generally it’s single target for the guns and bows but there are some skills that can make them multi-target.
Crispy Gamer: One of the great things and things about FATE was that there really wasn’t a main storyline. There were a bunch of unconnected quests but no story really tying them all together. How much emphasis are you putting on the story this time around? Is it fast and loose like FATE or more deeply intertwined?
Travis: Well we wanted to have a story this time out as opposed to a random “kill the foozle” in FATE, but we didn’t want it to intrude. So there is actually a definite story in Torchlight, with a beginning middle and end and you can complete the game. there are very specific bosses, there are small, scripted cinematic sequences, etc. But if you are a casual player you can pretty much ignore them. We still want people to do the same sort of pick-up-and-play and forget-about-it that they did do with FATE.
One of the big criticisms of FATE is players wondering “Why am I doing any of this?”
Max: You kind of stumble on the story as you’re going through the dungeon, so it unfolds just in the normal course of your dungeon crawl. As Travis says, it’s nice and there’s little cinematic sequences in there that drive it along, but it is very unobtrusive and the emphasis is still on killing monsters and finding loot.
Travis: We also have charcters that are not your characters that are all fully voiced and there’s occasional points where you can take them with you that also help drive the story.
Crispy Gamer: Does the story unfold differently for each class?
Travis: Not in any enormous way; There’s some slight differences in the written dialogue and sound in a few cases, but it’s not super custom per class.
Crispy Gamer: I take it there’s a sub plot to fill in the holes - like lots of little quests like in FATE?
Travis: Exactly.
Pages: 1 2
