Posted by Raine Hutchens on Jul 18, 2012

Torchlight 2, a dungeon crawler in the same ranks as Diablo, was due out before the recent release of Diablo III this year. It’s now July, and well past the original release date. So, what’s taking Runic Games so long to push the title out? According to them, the game just needs a bit more polish.

Travis Baldree, Runic Games co-founder, posted on the official forums about what’s happening with the game and its development.

“Many folks are anxious to see the game released – many have preordered, and want a date! We’ve been deliberately vague on this point. My hope is that if I give you an idea of what we’re doing, what it takes to do it, and the scale of it, it will make it apparent why that is. So anyway. Immediately after the Beta we spent a good bit of time doing the last big changes that we were comfortable doing. We didn’t know how long these would take at the outset, because, well, we hadn’t done the Beta yet. Most of these changes were in response to feedback we received during the Beta and our own observations. The biggest of these had to do with our skill system.”

Baldree continues to explain through the post the changes and features that have taken place within the game. He lists a breakdown of the development process, where they’ve come from, where they’re at, and what’s left to do. The team has made the changes they ultimately feel comfortable with, and now it’s coming down to the final details.

“We finished out primary goals and moved back to polish. There are two main parts to this – skills, and Acts. Skill polish involves making all the tier bonuses interesting, and finishing up the skills that we didn’t show in the Beta, and just generally making sure that everything feels good and is reasonably balanced. A pass has already been done to give everything tier bonuses, but some of them are not as nice as we would like, so we are punching them up. Polish means taking that and making sure that the individual monsters are fun to fight, that their groupings work together, that we expose balance issues late in the game ( be they from monster leveling, or skill leveling, or what have you ) and correct them. We want the individual monsters to each have a ‘thing’ that makes them unique, and interesting to fight in the context of other monsters around them.”

In the post Baldree didn’t offer up a specific release date for the game, or how long it would take for this polish stage to be worked out. He did, however, promise to keep the community updated on what’s happening with the development as it goes down. Hopefully we won’t have to wait too long before we can jump into Torchlight 2. Many people have put off Diablo III entirely just for this game, and they don’t want to regret it.

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