Torchlight 3 Early Access Thoughts

One of the interesting shadow drops to come out of last weekend was the release of Torchlight 3 to the Steam Early Access program. I’ve been a member of the Torchlight alpha program that was covered under an NDA since the game originally was Torchlight Frontiers back in November of 2018. I of course could not talk about my experiences publicly, because I was under NDA. I did however briefly describe the game to a close friend as “very free to play”, which was a bit of a damning indictment. The way the game was initially designed, it relied on creating a number of artificial barriers and segmenting the world off into frontiers with effectively their own progression path. The writing on the wall was that we would get new frontiers released through the course of the game allowing us to buy into these effectively independent areas and progress through new content on the same character.

This was not super well received by the community, but in truth I mostly focused on reporting technical bugs. Scan ahead to current times and the shift to branding the game “Torchlight III” and I once again got into the testing program. At the point in which I last played the game very much felt like Frontiers with a name change, but it seems while I have been gone the game has been rapidly changing into what is a really fun and enjoyable experience today. The core game is solid now and pending they can ever solve the infrastructure issues that are plaguing the early access release, it is going to be a really fun experience to hang out and play with your friends.

One of the things that I am blown away by is just how much better the game looks. There are subtle tweaks and polish applied that makes the entire experience feel better. I of course was under NDA and have no screenshots of my early characters to compare to, but the world feels more “real” as I explore it even though it is very much a cartoony setting. The robot now feels like a robot because it is sufficiently metallic feeling instead of what was a more flat shaded and plastic look. One of the challenges I had with this game is that it did not exactly have a class that I naturally graviated towards. I mostly play barbarian or paladin type characters in action RPGs and you are given a weird blend of classes including.

• Forged – Robot that seems a bit tanky, but also has a gun in its belly and a heat/explosion mechanic that you are regularly balancing.
• Dusk Mage – A class that alternates between darkness and light and represents the closest thing to a traditional caster.
• Railmaster – This is the strangest pet class to ever exist in a game, because you carry a massive hammer and lay down track for your rail car loaded with weapons to travel along and attack things.
• Sharpshooter – This class is a blend of the Demon Hunter and Necromancer from Diablo 3 and based on what I have seen of it is extremely potent as a result.

I’ve spent most of my time in game thusfar playing the Forged, because like I said it seems to be the tankiest of characters available to me. I would have loved to have something more akin to a sword and shield warrior type, but alas I am stuck with the odd designs presented. Torchlight has been known for having quirky class design, but I was able to more or less make the Destroyer in 1 and Engineer in 2 into the type of classes that I enjoy playing. For now I am trying to do that with the Forged, but I find it is far more effective to play this as a ranged class using the belly gun and heat mechanic to whittle down encounters.

The only negative of this entire experience is that the game itself is not quite ready for prime time. There are numerous issues that get in the way of actually playing right now. I’ve run into many situations where I could not zone into an area or teleport to either town or the player created fort. We tried to play with four players on Monday night and ran into issues where it took us multiple tries to get all of the players in the same zoned instance of a given map. Then there have often been issues just logging into the game in the first place. So for now, this is a really interesting experiment… but it is one that is not quite ready for prime time. If you are not already commited to this experience, maybe wait a bit for early access to feel not quite so “early”. Great strides have been made, and I have great faith that when this finally releases on all platforms it will be worthy of the Torchlight name. Right now however it is not for the impatient.