During Early Access we want players to get up-to-the-moment information about what's going on with the game & dev team focus. This week's State of the Game letter comes from Max Schaefer, CEO & Founder of EchtraHi everybody!
I hope they change the Torchlight 3 map. That seems like sort of a sulky, entitled thing to say, and it probably is, but I'm a massive fan of fantasy maps and maps in general, and I think Torchlight 3's current map does it no favours. When you load up the game you get a screen with a lovely map - scattered land masses and age-stained ink. But in the game the map you actually use is the linear path from a thousand free-to-play puzzlers. The line muddles along like something out of Candyland and the places you visit are separated from the surface of the map somehow - it's more like a selection of novelty cakes than a map. Nothing wrong with free-to-play puzzlers at all! But this map seems to be a glaring reminder of the journey Torchlight 3 has taken to its current paid early access release on Steam.
Torchlight 3 started as a free-to-play affair, I gather. And the map tells you that. It promises stuff to do and progression that goes on forever, content without much context. The places in the game are actually much more traditionally Torchlight than this map makes out, incidentally - they feel nicely interconnected and you can imagine them slotting in next to each other in interesting ways. But there's that map. And then there's that fort you can build. Torchlight 3 is an ARPG: it's like Diablo, you wade around clicking things to kill them and unlocking skills which allow you to click with better fireworks. Want a fort in that world? Maybe, but I suspect this fort is the vestigial tail from some energy system or free-to-play currency thing. I may be wrong! I often am. But in its current iteration I unlock things and place them and buy props and stick them in there but I haven't yet had a compelling reason to really enjoy what I'm doing.
I am sure this will change. That's how I feel about every one of Torchlight 3's annoyances at the moment. Multiplayer only. That will change. Server issues that caused disconnections? That already has changed, as far as I can tell, with a tiny update yesterday. Bugs that mean a quest won't finish even though I killed the thing that should finish it? We are early, early in early access. Some of the bugs I even quite like. For a while going to a portal would sometimes take you where you wanted to go - your fort say - but would sometimes take you somewhere else entirely. Someone else's fort? A dungeon area far later in the game where things can kill you just by smiling in your direction? You always trust the travel portals in ARPGs, I think. This glitchiness was irritating if I was trying to do something, but mainly it made me think that there's probably a place in ARPG end-game design for playfully, interestingly glitchy portals. Isn't this kind of thing where neat ideas can come from?
Any Available Debug Info
You can copy your debug info in-game by pressing Cntl + D and paste it into a Text Document or other program to save and send it along to us.
Any Available Game Logs
They will either be in your %localappdata%\Frontiers\Saved\Logs
folder or in your
<steamlibrary>\steamapps\common\<torchlight 3 install dir>\Frontiers\Saved\Logs directory.
“Over the years of iteration on the Railmaster, the Endurance resource had been used in fewer and fewer places. By the end of closed alpha, it was applied to just 5 skills, which in practice meant that builds were wise to just choose one Endurance spender since so many other skills were available that used cooldowns instead. It became apparent that the Railmaster truly favored 'time' as the resource that gated when skills could be used. Endurance, in a practical context, only served as the cooldown for whichever skill you were using as its primary spender.
It became clear that there was an opportunity to improve the Railmaster's gameplay by accepting 'time' as the primary resource, converting the few remaining Endurance spending skills to have their own independent cooldowns instead of having Endurance be the effective cooldown. In doing so, we immediately opened up new possibilities for what Endurance could do for the Railmaster. After some deliberation and discussion, we landed on a mechanic that did not restrict skills in any way, since restrictions are already imposed by cooldowns, but instead offers pure upside bonuses. The Railmaster's resource gameplay becomes about A) choosing which skill's bonus is most important to you in a given moment, and B) trying to improve gains to that resource such that you can get more and more bonuses.
Every time your resource is full, you can make a decision among the skills on your bar in the combat scenario you are in. Do you need a summoned ally, or a big burst of AoE damage, or perhaps a longer-lasting buff effect for sustained benefit? This creates a much more engaging core gameplay flow for the Railmaster than what was available before, and is more in line with the complexity of the Dusk Mage with their Dark/Light charge bars, or Forged with managing Vent skills and heat buildup.”