Torchlight MMO out in two years

By Oli Welsh Published 13 November, 2009

More classes, more content.

Runic Games boss Max Schaefer has said that the MMO version of its action-RPG Torchlight will be released "in about two years".

He made the comment in an interview with German site PC Games, also pointing out that the community would be able to get involved in alpha and beta testing as soon as possible.

"The MMO will be in pre-production as soon as we finalise issues from launching the single-player," Schaefer said. "It will feature a lot of customization, an overworld, random and instanced dungeons, PVP and much more!

"It will be indeed free to play, and will be out in about 2 years. We like to get alpha and beta versions up and running as quickly as possible, though, so hopefully we'll have a lot of community interaction during the development cycle."

Schaefer stressed that Runic wanted to make a small-scale game as good as possible with the single-player release, and then expand it.

"We meant to design a tight, clean title that has polish and performance rather than build a sprawling, feature-laden RPG that would take years to develop. The MMO will have more classes, more customizable characters, and more total content, so there should be plenty for Torchlight gamers to look forward to."

Going by our 8/10 review, we'd say they succeeded on the first part.

Picture of Oli.

About Oli Welsh

Oli is Eurogamer's acting deputy editor and reviews editor and likes to take things one word at a time. He is among the best dressed people in South London.

Read more articles from Oli by visiting the Oli Welsh archive page.

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Comments (7) Latest comment 2 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • sesskie #1 2 years ago

    They should have released the game with soe sort of MP, in 2 years time Diablo will be out, and nobody will care about the torchlight MMO. Bad planning and timing, guys.

  • bionutz #2 2 years ago

    as long as the story gets better, I just hope that by MMO they mean what Diablo has for multiplayer. I would definitely not play something in the likes of wow.
    By the way I like the game: it's cheap and it smells like Diablo 1 and even on my graphically underpowered office laptop I can play it at 1280x800 pixels smoothly.

  • j-bo #3 2 years ago

    It's an awesome little game but I can't help but feel that 2 years is pushing it. It's already very retro (which is great), but with D3 on it's way and Blizzard's new MMO in the pipeline, I think there's a danger it will come way way too late to the party.

    edit:ffs spelling fail
    Edited by 4 at 13/11/09 @ 12:28

  • colicistard #4 2 years ago

    Well, where something I expected, let's see what happens next.

  • VMerken #5 2 years ago

    Two years is very, very long in the video game industry. I hope Runic has other projects in the pipeline.

  • VMerken #6 2 years ago

    @ram_300
    Not if it's an expansion to an existing game, and the game is looking dated graphically. Then two years is the time where graphics advance another generation, and other competitors have released new, similar products to the standard of then.

  • Kain201 #7 2 years ago

    The Torchlight MMO is NOT an expansion to Torchlight. Torchlight is highly moddable, do you really think they would release an MMO that could be manipulated by everyone at anytime?