Torchlight Frontiers,which was first announced in August of 2018as a free-to-play MMOARPG, has been revamped and will now be released as a mainline title for series. Rebranded asTorchlight 3, the game will be moving away from the free-to-play model in favor of a “one-box” price instead.
Echtra Games CEO Max Schaefer says the decision to make the switch was brought about by feedback from their Alpha testers, as well as internal discussions at the company. Along with the business model changes, the game will be shifting distribution to Steam for the PC release instead of Arc Games. If these changes weren’t enough, the game will also be returning “to its roots” in terms of gameplay elements and narrative structure.
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Torchlight 3will return to the classic Act structure of the previous entries in the franchise and the game will feature a more vertical progression system, a turn away from the horizontal progressionFrontiershad planned to go with. The game will be playable online and offline, but any characters made offline will not be able to participate in online multiplayer games.
Schaefer says in theTorchlight 3rebranding announcement that “as you make a game, the game starts to tell you what it wants to be” withTorchlight Frontierstelling the team it wanted to be a “spiritual successor toTorchlight 1 & 2.” This would explain the move away from free-to-play and the gameplay changes announced here. It would also explainwhyTorchlight Frontierswas delayedafter hoping to launch in 2019.
TheTorchlightfranchise shares a lot of DNA with action RPG giantDiablo, a fact that should come as no surprise as Schaefer was a designer for the series before moving into the indie scene. The team working onTorchlight 3is also made up ofDiablovets. Schaefer saying in an interview, “we have more people that worked onDiablohere than worked onTorchlight 1.” This is a promising note Schaefer makes, as who better to deliver a quality action RPG than veterans of the genre itself.
The game will continue its Alpha testing with the new changes implemented, and will soon enter Beta testing. As the release date is still a vague “2020” window, players looking to dive into theTorchlightworld right away should take a look atTorchlight 2,which found its way onto Nintendo Switch(as well as PS4 and Xbox One) back in September.
Torchlight 3is in development with a scheduled release sometime in 2020 for PC.
