The Mapworks is the heart of Torchlight 2. In many ways it feels like the heart of so much that is great in video games in general. You spawn at the portal and then you walk out, along a narrow golden bridge, to a magical clockwork escapement suspended in the void. I can imagine what the floor feels like here: the glossiness of the crystal and polished metal, and that hum coming up through your feet that suggests vast energies twisting and churning beneath you. The Mapworks is where you get to once Torchlight 2 is all but done, but it's also where you realise that Torchlight 2 is just beginning, and that it never has to end if you don't want it to. The campaign is over, and here, in this stately firmament, you can buy an endless supply of procedurally-generated maps that will take you to an endless stretch of procedurally-generated dungeons.
Chinese free-to-play publisher Perfect World Entertainment has shut down Torchlight developer Runic Games, and laid off the majority of staff at Gigantic studio Motiga.
Torchlight is free to download and keep indefinitely on Arc, Perfect World Entertainment's digital storefront/client.
Torchlight 1 is absolutely free right now on Good Old Games and will be for 48 hours while it kicks off the site's 2013 #NoDRM Summer Sale.
How on Earth do you make money from packaging a load of indie games together and selling them for whatever people want to pay? Because Humble Indie Bundle 6 somehow managed to take $2,048,501 from 316,272 sales.
Action RPG Torchlight 2 costs £14.99 / €18.99 / $19.99, developer Runic Games has announced.
Torchlight has broken one million sales combined across PC, Mac and Xbox Live Arcade.
Runic Games released Torchlight on PC in October 2009, and on Xbox Live Arcade in March 2011.
It was the first game from the studio that formed out of Hellgate developer Flagship's ashes.
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For this week's download roundup we're going back to the future, as four-fifths of these games debuted on other formats ages ago.
Fear not, however, because chances are you either didn't bother with them the first time around, or they're so aged you'll be glad to be reminded of times when people didn't mock you for your impending mid-life crisis.
But, first up, a rarity: a third-party Move game, and proof that as far as downloadable games go, Sony's motion controller can be a creative goldmine for talented developers.
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Microsoft has pumped out a press release trumpeting a "blockbuster line-up" for this spring and beyond.
It's been an awfully long wait for Diablo fans since the second entry in the beloved action RPG series saw the light of day in 2000. But for many, the thumb-twiddling has been made easier to bear by Torchlight, Runic Games affectionate riff on Blizzard's classic beast-slaying formula.
BG&E! Torchlight! Hard Corps! Full House!
Action role-playing game Torchlight II will launch in July, developer Runic Games has confirmed.
Beyond Good & Evil HD hits Xbox Live Arcade on 2nd March, one week before action RPG Torchlight, Microsoft has announced.
Torchlight is set to arrive on Xbox Live Arcade either next month or the month after that, but when it does there will be changes, developer Runic has said.
The HD revamp of classic Ubisoft adventure Beyond Good & Evil tops the list of titles heading your way in the forthcoming Xbox Live Arcade House Party season.
Runic Games has revealed Torchlight II, a sequel to last year's acclaimed Diablo-like action RPG.
This will be available as a digital download only in spring 2011.
Co-op is the biggest new feature. This uses a peer-to-peer system to hook friends up in endless randomised outdoor and indoor areas. There's no mention of the co-op player limit.
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Runic Games boss Max Schaefer has said that the MMO version of its action-RPG Torchlight will be released "in about two years".
My cat can summon zombies. In a way, that's all I've ever wanted from a videogame - for something to come up with something absolutely, wonderfully, wilfully absurd, and let me achieve it with glorious ease. Something that only a videogame could do. Seriously, my cat summons zombies. I don't even have to tell her to. She just does it, because I've given her the spell to do it. I could summon them myself, but I just can't be bothered to add one more hotkey to my left and right mouse button repetoire. So the game does it for me, via curious cat-based necromancy.
And that's Torchlight all over - it's Diablo run through a "What If?" filter a hundred times over. All you're doing is clicking to kill things and clicking to collect things and clicking to assign stat and ability points - but what if your cat could summon zombies? What if you could fire a giant laser beam from your hands? What if you could wield two enormous wands at once? What if said cat could go sell all your unwanted loot for you? What if someone made a hackandslash RPG whose primary goal was to reward you so insanely often that you became paranoid you'd used up all your lifetime of Christmases in one fell, hyper-colourful swoop?
Torchlight's been available for just a couple of days at the time of writing, but it's been pretty much all PC gamers have wanted to talk about during that time. Understandably so - we've been teased by the bright spectre of Diablo III for so, so long now. Since, frankly, Diablo II, way back in the year 2000. In all that time, we've waited, prayed, begged for something to scratch that same overwhelmingly compulsive itch. We wanted to kill a whole lot of fantasy things very quickly, and we wanted to be given a large number of swords with complicated statistics for doing it. Pretenders have come and gone - the late Iron Lore's Titan Quest generally being considered the most successful - but nothing, really, has quite done it.
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Runic Games has released a demo for its action-RPG Torchlight on Steam.
Forthcoming PC title Torchlight is to be available via Steam when it's released later this month.
Thanks to a muddy blend of toxic cynicism and globally-ranked ignorance, I'm rarely too starstruck by the people I end up interviewing. Yet, at this year's PAX, I was embarrassingly excited about meeting Max Schaefer, headof Runic Games, the developer of forthcoming Diabloesque dungeon-crawler Torchlight. Long before that, he was a key contributor to another deeply Diabloesque dungeon-crawler - called Diablo. Schaefer's put some serious numbers on the board, in other words, yet he hasn't retreated into luxurious obscurity to live off his millions, and he hasn't grown snippy following the closure of Flagship, the company he co-founded after leaving Blizzard.
