Torchlight II Preview

It’s been a while since this year’s edition of PAX Prime, but apparently previews from the event are still coming out, like this Torchlight II preview from the folks at Gaming Angels. Here’s a sampling:

One of the many things that brought me into playing Torchlight is that at the time I was playing the larger MMORPG types and I disliked having to spend one or two hrs just setting up my character, checking auctions, looking for a group in order to finish a quest or finding that one item that would make me +0.5 awesomeness. I just wanted to pick up and play. Torchlight has an extremely friendly interface, nice graphics and all of the RPG plus action that one person would want. Jason agreed with me and said, (Back on the first Torchlight it wasn’t a done deal that we had an audience. We basically had to sort of do what we wanted to do, but also do it in a way that would set us apart about the things that were out there or the things we knew were coming . I think a lot of us as gamers, sort of had that ‘˜I am free for forty five minutes to play a game’ and Torchlight is something that you can get into for the moment , get whatever level of enjoyment you want out of it and get out without having to worry about anything else.)

Another thing I loved about Tochlight was the pets. The pets in this game are useful, they carry loot and you can send them back to town to sell the loot without leaving the dungeon. Once PAX was over, Runic went back to work on pets in particular, trying to get a couple a new ones in, trying to bring more options as far as skins and other things. Pet’s might become specifically good at certain things, like the dog might have more room to carry things, the cat would be faster, but that has not been set in stone.

The User Interface has been changed and moved to a friendlier tab system. Since Torchlight 2 is multiplayer, pausing is not an option, so the User Interface had to be made in a way that you could get in and out as fast as possible, since you can get attacked when you are in inventory mode. Spell scrolls are still part of the inventory and you can activate and fine tune your character that way. They have separated your consumables so they don’t take up space in your inventory . The pet inventory will be modelled the same way. So you can still give your pet a zombie spell and have a ferret necromancer, which is fun and silly, but it works.

Since the game is so portable and easy to pick up, I wondered if Runic Games had any plans to make Torchlight or any other games for the massive amount of portable devices. Apparently Travis, the lead coder flirted with the idea to port Torchlight to the iPad but at the time they were working on the Xbox Live Arcade version of the game and it never saw the light of day. Still, Runic Games is looking to see where this journey will take them as they are trying to find a second game to build and perhaps Torchlight MMO once Torchlight 2 is released.