Posted by DarkPony Saturday May 19 2012 at 2:44PM
After hoof-stomping all over the Path of Exile beta, this weekend it was Torchlight 2's turn to see whether it would bend or break.
The original Torchlight is a game that I never played but it was quite the indie success with half a million of people buying into it. (edit: make that over a million, currently!) After reading up on it to get myself acquainted with the IP, it becomes clear that Runic games has a pretty honest and likeable CEO in Max Schaefer:
"... just from a business perspective, when you make these $50 million games, it’s so hard to make your money back that publishers are very conservative about what sort of games they’ll green light. So you get a lot of sequels, copycat games and conservative plays. When you come down to a rational budget and a rational team size, you really are freed to take more risk and do more creative things. I think Minecraft is a perfect example. I’m obsessed with Minecraft. I can safely say that Minecraft will slightly delay the shipping of Torchlight 2 [laughs]." (source)
And:
"... Obviously, we have a lot of respect for Blizzard and what they’re doing with Diablo III, and we really respect the fact that they’re going to take the time to do it right. Obviously, we’ll be day one purchasers of Diablo III, and it’ll delay whatever we’re working on at the time, but at the same time we’re glad we don’t have to do it. They have incredible expectations, and there’s almost no way that they’ll be able to please everybody with what they do. It’s a scale and a level of responsibility and a situation that in some ways we’re glad we’re not in". (source)
That's cool, Max.
But without further ado, lets see how your game takes risks and is more creative than an AAA game with a truckload of funding and manpower. And also how it shaped up while you were so busy playing all kinds of other games during
...more at mmoprg
