Torchlight 3 Story Campaign | A Problem For The Game?
Torchlight 3 Story Campaign Lacking?
Torchlight 3 recently launched into Early Access on Steam, and as of this writing it currently sits on a Mixed rating, and although fans of the series have been critical of many things, the story, or lack of, stands out as a problem for the game.
Torchlight 3 is by the same creators of Diablo 2, so they are not new to the ARPG genre, or storytelling, and I think pcinvasion.com’s Jason Rodriguez puts it best when he says, “Is there a story? There might be, but I found it hard to care about the whole thing. You’re basically given a quest, then a location, then a mini-dungeon, followed by a quick boss fight. After that, you go back to town to finish your task and you get a new quest to repeat the whole process.”
It may be no surprise that the players are finding the lack of a compelling story in Torchlight 3, with the game changing much during its development. Originally developed as a free-to-play MMOARPG, feedback from fans was that the game was bad.
Speaking to eurogamer.net, Tyler Thompson, co-lead of Torchlight 3, said, “This game is not recognizably similar to the thing we had 18 months ago, and that’s largely due to our fans telling us, ‘That thing you tried is bad. You could do better over here.’ And us actually being willing to go, ‘You know what? Let’s reconsider.'”
If you stop to think about what went on during the change, from the game’s name changing to Torchlight 3 from Torchlight Frontiers to the game moving into a premium model from a free-to-play model, and a whole rework of how enemies spawned because originally they would respawn continuously to stretch the free-to-play content, it’s no wonder that a lot of the criticism of the Early Access release is that story is lacking and combat is “run here, do that, repeat”. The free-to-play model may be gone, but a lot of the mechanics are still there.
What are the developers doing about it? Well, recently a letter, from CEO and founder of Echtra, was put up on the game’s Steam page, announcing that they have heard the complaints and are looking to rectify them.
In the letter, when it comes to the feedback received, he states, “Sometimes it was a bitter pill for us to take, and sometimes we thought “well of course we should do that!”. In all cases, it will make our game better. It is at a time like this that I am thankful that we created a flexible game architecture that allows us to make profound changes in a relatively short amount of time. You’re about to get the first taste.”
The first major patch for Torchlight 3 is set to launch next week, and included in the patch is Act 3, set in the Echonok mountains. What are the Echonok mountains? pcgamesn.com’s Ian Boudreau describes it as such.
Echonok is a mountainous region that is the home to the underground ruins of an ancient dwarven civilization. They were masters of the engineering craft, and build complex stone and metal machines powered by ember. While the dwarves themselves are long gone, the steam-powered automata they created to guard their homes remain on watch. Without anyone in charge to tell them otherwise, they wander around making sure the gold-clad halls remain free of riff-raff such as you and your party members.
So, there’s not a lot to say about the game’s story, or lack of, as of yet, but rather than jump on the hate wagon that is rolling in some corners, it’s important to remember that the game is only in Early Access, and things are changing, and things are being added. There’s a long way to go before Torchlight 3 is released, and the developers are listening.
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