Max Schaefer is the CEO of Echtra Games, the company behind the new action role-playing game (ARPG) Torchlight III. He does a little of everything because there are only 40 people on the team. Schaefer has been making games for 25 years, and in addition to being one of the creators of Torchlight 1 and Torchlight 2, he also co-created Diablo 1 and Diablo 2.
Torchlight 3 is currently in early access, and the latest update adds the new endgame content: Fazeer’s Dun’Djinn (thank Max Schaefer himself for the pun). Fazeer Shah is a djinn (genie) that first appears in Torchlight 2, and now shows up in Torchlight 3 after the player finishes the main story.
Max Schaefer took the time to speak with Screen Rant about the new content and design of Torchlight 3. However, there was an important question that needed to be asked first.
Will fishing make a return?
Max Schaefer: Everyone asks that. This is something we have struggled with from day one. To do fishing, we’d want to do it in a way that was meaningful and wasn’t just a throwaway so that we could say we had fishing. It just hasn’t bubbled up to the top of the priority list. It’s still something we want to do in the long term. I can pretty confidently say we’re not going to do fishing for the shipping version of the game. We’ve one-upped the pets in general in Torchlight 3, so we’d want to do a commensurate one-upping with the fishing game as well.
You’ve had a lot of community feedback during this early access period. What is the most useful piece of feedback you have gotten that you plan to implement or that you have already implemented?
Max Schaefer: The most useful feedback that we've gotten has been how we fumbled the way that we’ve presented our skill system. When you fire up the game and just look at it, we have two skill trees. They’re smaller than they were in Torchlight 2, where you had three skill trees and they were longer. So like I said with the fishing issue, we want to one up everything.
What we did was we took our skill system and split it into three different venues. One was the skill trees. One was the skills you get from picking your relic, which each relic has its own skill tree. The last one was the over 100 different skills you can choose by breaking down your legendary items with the legendarium.
In aggregate all three of those systems make a bigger, deeper skill system than we've ever done before. The problem was that you didn't see those latter two until you were a few hours in the gameplay. So the first impression for everyone that fired up the game and played for a couple hours was “I've got these 2 meager skill trees; this is a step back.” And sure enough, people that play 8 to 10 hours say, “OK, now I'm starting to understand how these things factor into my build.” But a lot of people don’t even get that far in before they’ve rendered their judgement.
The big content dump we're doing right now is the endless dungeon. The one after that is going to be the big relic skill rework. What we're doing is we're making it so now you pick your relic when you create your character, and we're taking the relic skill tree and making it exactly like the other skill trees. So you’ll use your same skill points, and it'll just be a third tree on your character right off the bat when you start the game. You’ll say “OK I've got three skill trees to pick from and arrange my build around.”
We're also just adding skills. We realize our skill trees are 100% active skills. The Torchlight 2 skill trees look bigger in part because they all included a few passives, and we realize that we just have to make our skill trees bigger. So we're adding both active and passive skills to the basic skill tree. You will have 3 big, beefy skill trees to pick from. When you open your legendarium panel, you can see all the ones you don't have. So at least you'll be able to grasp that there’s going to be over 100 very unique handcrafted passive skills.
As Fazeer is a genie, are we going to see any crazy dungeon modes, like an inverted screen or 16-bit mode, or other 4th wall-breaking ridiculous things?
Max Schaefer: The good thing about this construct is that you can do things like that and it doesn't affect the integrity of your adventure from the story of killing the big bad. The whole thing is kind of presented to you as a game show. Fazeer, who's kind of bored with life, has come to give you bizarre and strange challenges in his endless dungeon. You're presented with three cards, and you get to pick which adventure you want to go to for each level of the challenge. Each card has a positive affix and negative affix, and right now there are 40 total variables there. Like everything in our game, it's an extensible system, so we intend to keep adding affixes positive and negative.
Right now there's 251 challenge levels in the endless dungeon. So it's long, but we can easily add to it. And in the future if we raise the level cap, we can easily extend the system out. You finish the story and that's when it unlocks the endless dungeon. You're roughly level 46 for that.
Yep, that was the level I got to, actually.
Max Schaefer: Good, so our curves are working! The level cap right now is level 60 so you have that much time to be leveling up and finding new items. But then we've reserved even more things that you can find that are unique after you've hit the level cap. There's 12 legendary weapons that don't show up until you hit the level cap which is well into the endless dungeon, four different pets are available at the level cap, and we're moving the whole enchanting system to the endgame.
I know it’s a long way in the future, but are you planning to implement anything like leagues or seasons to keep things fresh and keep players coming back?
Max Schaefer: Yeah, I think those things are important. We have not given a lot of attention and thought to it yet, because we want to have our basics in before worrying about how you compare people and give them a fresh start. So that's probably going to be more in the realm of expansion features than shipping features. But yes, we think about it, we talk about it, and we want to get that in.
We want to target those things towards what people are doing though. If people are focusing on one area of endgame, let's make a ladder for that instead of trying to force them into comparisons in something they're not actually using a lot. So we kind of want to see what players are digging and getting into before we figure out how to make competitive modes and comparison stuff in seasons and leagues. A lot of it is based on the emergent play habits of your players. We’re holding off on that, but yes, it is in the long-term plans.
Do you have a general quarter for release, or are you taking the position that it will be ready when its ready?
Max Schaefer: Ultimately that is true, it'll be ready when it's ready. We're aiming in the September range, but there's mystery steps here. It's hard to nail down a launch date if we have no clarity on what happens between now and launch. We're penciling it in but it's going to come down to: Did we get everything in and polished up the way we wanted it to be before we launch?
That’s a positive thing. I think at this point, enough players have experience with early access that it’s like: “we’d rather wait to have a quality product then have stuff be rushed and things not working.”
Max Schaefer: We have very detailed and extensive bug lists on what’s pending, what's in progress, and what we have to deal with still. Our internal builds are always maybe three weeks ahead of what goes up on the test realm. There's still quite a bit to do to finish, and it's all mapped out, scheduled, and we see how we get from here to there. But there's mystery steps and that's why release dates are always hard.
How will trading items between players in Torchlight 3 work?
Max Schaefer: We don't have any trade right now and that's been a deliberate decision. The problem is that anytime you have trade in a game like this, unless there is a commensurate item sink, you're just going to develop a glut of all the best items in the game. It kind of hurts the new experience, even if you're just playing with your friends. Your friend says, “here, just give yourself all the legendary items that I've collected over the last six months and start there.” It kind of ruins the experience.
We realized there are also legitimate reasons to trade, but we wanted to start with the assumption that there is no trade. So what we're looking at now is potentially introducing very limited trade. None of this is in yet, but something like: in your party during your adventure, you can trade with the people in your game.
It is inherently more satisfying to get an item because you kill the boss and he dropped it than it is to get an item because someone handed it to you. We realize that people want to trade but we also know that people want there to be a healthy economy in the game where there isn’t just a million of everything.
You have some major competition in the ARPG market like Path of Exile and the Diablo Series, both of which are going to be coming out with new games sometime in the near future. What unique things are going to make Torchlight 3 competitive to those games?
Max Schaefer: So this is one of the legacies of the whole Torchlight franchise: we're always coming out when there is something else coming out that has a bigger budget, timeframe, and marketing. Torchlight 1 and 2 were both coming out in the shadow of Diablo 3. People said, “you're insane for wanting to compete with Diablo 3.”
We look at this in two ways. One is there's always something coming out, so you just have to ignore it. Two, we actually benefited from Diablo 3 with Torchlight 1 and 2 for two reasons. One, Diablo 3 had a relatively rocky launch with the auction house and things like that, and it was good to be an alternative during that time. People were like, “I don't want to play this, what else is there? Oh look, Torchlight!” The second was there were a lot of articles in media: Torchlight 2 versus Diablo 3. We win based on the fact that there was an article! It doesn't even matter if the conclusion was Diablo 3 is the obvious choice, just the fact that that was the competition and that was the comparison.
It’s name recognition. Free Advertising.
Max Schaefer: Yeah! It's like we piggyback on all of their marketing and all their publicity and popularity just by the fact the choice being presented was: which do you do? Torchlight 2 or Diablo 3? So it works in our favor in a lot of ways to have big things coming down the pipe.
Path of Exile (PoE), that's been out for a while, so they have their audience. We share market there, and a lot of people, even if they play PoE and are going to play PoE 2, think “yeah, I could just pay $30 and I'll have Torchlight 3.” Why wouldn't they do that? Sometimes they're waiting for the new update for PoE and play some Torchlight while they’re waiting.
Having that market with big, good, quality competition just helps us. If PoE 2 came out and it was a dud, and Diablo 4 came out and it was a dud, people are going to start to associate ARPGs as a has-been genre. With things coming out that are big and good, people go, “what else is there?” So we don't really worry too much about the big competition that's coming out.
Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Max Schaefer: Check out the end game system, give us feedback quickly because time is running out. We listen all day every day to player feedback whether it's on Discord, on Reddit, or through our Nolt system, (which is a very cool feedback system where players vote what the most important things are that we should be working on).
Come check out our early access. Give us feedback on the big three patches we have planned. Play act 3. It’s the last one we made, so in many ways it's the best because we're good at making it, but it's had the least amount of play. Give us feedback on our end game system. And give us feedback, when it comes out, on the relic and skill redo, because that one is going to have the least amount of time to fix before we actually have to ship.
Give us input, give us feedback. You will change the game, and it will make it better for everybody. Thank you to all the people who have done that so far. It's one thing to buy our early access but when you take the time to write down feedback and give us actionable stuff, you don't have to do that, and we appreciate that you do.
The last patch we did had 18 pages of single-spaced patch notes of all the things that we fixed. A lot of them are just routine dumb little bugs. Others are preferences and suggestions and tunings that people had.
If you're interested in the dirty, gritty, ugly process of making games, join our early access because our books are open and we’re showing you exactly how it works for better and for worse.
Torchlight 3 is available now in early access on PC.