Torchlight: The Latest Diablo Clone?

Many gamers have not yet heard of the new action RPG in development called Torchlight. This may be due to the fact that it is being created by a very new and recently formed development studio called Runic Games. What you may not know, however, is that this new studio was founded by the co-creators of Diablo. These and other developers used to work for Flagship Studios before it collapsed, right in the middle of their second project; a highly anticipated roleplaying game that was at the time called Mythos. Now their back with a follow-up, one that impressed many of those who happened to play it at E3. It’s called Torchlight.

At first glance, Torchlight just like every other Diablo clone available. In a way, it is. As designer Travis Baldree himself admits, “If you know Diablo, then you know our game. It has the same ‘town hub with a dungeon’ structure to it.” In addition, there are also similarities to Baldree’s earlier project, Fate, as well. Like in Fate, at the beginning of the game, players are given a choice between a pet dog or cat. Your pet can not only point out enemies and help you fight them, but they can also carry items and even take them back to town and sell them for you.

There are some features, however, that Torchlight presents in a manner that seperates it from the rest of the crowd. Unlike in many past action-RPG’s, equipment in Torchlight does not lose it’s durability over use, so as a result the player does not have to spend any time on maintenance or repair of weapons and armor. Also, abilities in the game’s skill tree system are all active skills, whereas in Diablo II a great deal of them simply added percentages to your attack and defense ratings, etc.

Torchlight will ship with development tools for modifying every aspect of the game. You can even test out altered levels and tweaked them on the fly. The game is scheduled for release this Q4 2009.