The venerable dungeon crawler Torchlight is returning with Torchlight Frontiers , a new shared world action RPG coming to PS4, Xbox One, and PC.

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IGN sat down to chat with Max Schaefer, CEO of Echtra Games, the studio behind Torchlight Frontiers. A specialist in action RPGs, he’s a founding member of Blizzard North and a contributor to Diablo, Diablo II, Hellgate: London, and the Torchlight series. His delight at the prospect of finally revealing Torchlight Frontiers is palpable. “We’ve been toiling in anonymity for the last couple of years,” he tells us, “so it’s super-exciting and super fun to finally be able to talk about it.“Torchlight Frontiers aims to combine the fast-paced combat, procedurally-generated levels, and addictive loot loop of a dungeon crawler with the social and live-service qualities of an MMO. “It is a shared world with persistent elements and instanced elements,” says Schaefer. “We’re just always shying away from the term MMO because everytime someone says that word, everyone has a wildly different, very specific definition of what that means.”

ABOVE: The announcement trailer for Torchlight Frontiers.

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The idea for a shared world take on the Diablo formula has been incubating in Schaefer’s mind for many years. The Frontiers project is a culmination of an ambition that goes all the way back to Schaefer’s time at Flagship, where he worked on an unreleased shared world RPG, Mythos. “Unfortunately it got caught up in the closing of Flagship and never went anywhere. So it’s sort of been kind of a goal to get back to that stage ever since.”Why the shared world focus? Schaefer explains that he’s intrigued with the potential new dimensions an MMO-style approach adds. “What the first two Torchlights lacked, I think, compared to what we’re doing, is a sense of enfranchisement in the world,” says Schaefer. “You were basically just a character in Torchlight 2. You’d play through. and you could play through it again, and you could level up, but you were never really a part of the world of Torchlight. You were just kind of an actor in it, and you were really mostly on your own.”He continues: “What we wanted to do with this one [game] was two things. One is give you a piece of this world, make you a part of this developing and evolving world in a way that’s meaningful. Two is to create a service game where, after we go live and we put it out and are with people, we can continue to develop the world of Torchlight with our community.”

ABOVE: The review of Torchlight II.

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Schaefer sees a lot of creative possibilities in the games as a service approach to Torchlight. “When you’re making an MMO, you come up with a billion design ideas and when you get to about this point in the project, you start cutting things because there just isn’t enough time,” he says. “But one of the cool things about a game as a service is that you actually get to do those things. So there’s going to be a list of things that we didn’t get in that we’re going to want to be able to put in over the first months of the game. But more importantly, we want to kind of get the pulse of our community, and work with them and ask them what they want, how they want us to take the game, and fulfill that.”As for any concerns about how a games as a service model might affect the loot economy, he assures us the team is dedicated to preserving that vital classic element of the Torchlight experience. “We know, for example, we won’t have an auction house,” he says. “We’ve identified that one of the core things that makes Torchlight fun is this loot hunt. You go out on an adventure, you kill monsters, and you find loot. We don’t want to do anything that upsets that. We don't want to do anything that interferes with ‘that’s the way that you find cool loot.’”He’s also aware of the challenges unique to a shared world, and has plans to make sure players of different experience levels can have a satisfying engagement. “We’ve focused on making sure that people can always play together in a meaningful way, and we have that now and I don’t really want to go into too many details on it because it gives stuff away that we’ll talk about later...but two people of different experience levels will be able to play in the game with each other and have it be meaningful and fun.”

ABOVE: A Torchlight II Engineer gameplay video.

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Schaefer doesn’t want to reveal much else yet, but he’s willing to share a few other tidbits of good news for longtime fans of Torchlight. “We’re bringing back and expanding on the whole fun of the pet system, he says. “So one of the cool things about Torchlight was your pet would fight alongside you, and you could load him up with gear and send him to town to sell it all. That is sort of just scratching the surface of what we’re going to do with pets this time around.”The basic structure of Frontiers’ dungeon crawling will be very familiar to fans of Diablo and Torchlight. “[Stages] will still be predominantly procedurally generated,” he says. “We do obviously more of that in the private instances, so there are shared open world components, and then there are shared instanced parts of the game.“ But there will also be more persistent areas. “It’s randomization where its effective and fun,” he continues. “There’s no reason to randomize a town, because you want to know where your vendors are and your quest givers, and if they’re in a different place every time that would just be annoying, so we’re just confining it to where it’s useful and helps with the gameplay.“Getting everything right is a delicate balancing act. “An action RPG really refers to a kind of a pace and feeling of combat,” Schaefer says. “There’s more emphasis given on the feeling of throwing a fireball and the feeling of that fireball hitting a monster, and it’s less about watching your cooldown timers and timing your hits after you’ve engaged attack mode. It’s just a way of interacting with the world and the monsters that’s a little more direct and a little more visceral.”

ABOVE: Take a look at the pets of Torchlight II.

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Nailing that feeling takes a lot of work. “The feeling of walking up to a monster and hitting him with a sword and having it feel right is immensely more complex than at first glance,” he says. “Just a little tiny hitch in an animation, a little delay when something happens, or basically when you click [and] it doesn’t happen the way you expect it to, that ruins the whole immersion of it.”Schaefer sums up the ARPG development process succinctly: “A lot of what we do is set up a basic system for walking around and combat and then just iterate on it hundreds and hundreds of time until it feels right.”To execute this vision, Schaefer has assembled a team largely comprised of action RPG experts. ”It was kind of like the stars aligned. We had the right opportunity, the right people available, willing and eager and excited to do it, and it was just sort of an opportunity we couldn’t pass up. We started it up, and have been single mindedly working on Torchlight Frontiers ever since.” The Echtra team are deeply entrenched in the dungeon crawler dynamic popularized by Diablo. “We have more people that worked on Diablo here than worked on Torchlight 1,” he adds.Torchlight Frontiers is engineered with both console play and PC play in mind. “All of our interface elements and gameplay are designed for both keyboard and controller and have been since day one of the development. The game will look the same and work the same between consoles and the PC.” There are no plans for crossplay at this point.Developer Etchra and publisher Perfect World haven’t yet announced a release date, but Torchlight Frontiers will be available to play as a demo at Gamescom and PAX West later this month. Look for more on Torchlight Frontiers here soon at IGN.

Jared Petty produces Red Dead Radio: The Red Dead Redemption Podcast, Hop, Blip, and a Jump, and Pockets Full of Soup. He's a host at Kinda Funny Games and a frequent contributor to IGN. He played a fair bit of Torchlight on his netbook back in the day. Follow him on Twitter @pettycommajared and on Instagram @pettycommajared