It’s been almost a year and a half since
“Torchlight” looted gamers’ hearts on the PC.
And now, the game will be available Tuesday on
the Xbox 360 for 1200 points ($15).
Earlier this week, I spoke with Runic Games
President Travis Baldree about the porting process, the effects of
the “Torchlight II” delay and the challenges of an action-RPG
MMO.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">First of all, could you give a
brief introduction of who you are and what you do at Runic
Games?
My name is Travis Baldree. I’m the president,
one of the co-founders, project director and one of the
engineers.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">You’ve been in the gaming industry
for some time, and you’ve been a part of several successful games
like “Fate” and “Torchlight.” What are some of the moments that you
look back on and take pride in?
Getting done with something as a team is
pretty rewarding. That’s pretty much the best part of it, honestly.
Working with people you like working with.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">How long has the Xbox version of
Torchlight been in development?
I think the port was started … right around
PAX last year, whenever that was.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">How many people worked on
it?
For the first three months or so, it was just
the group that we had porting it. And then we hopped on — Marsh
Lefler, Greg Brown and I — in, I want to say, early October. Toward
the end, mostly it was just Marsh and I wrapping it up. We finished
right after Christmas, more or less.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Why did you guys decide to make a
console version?
We’ve always been interested in trying it out
on the console. In theory, it was just going to be a port project
that would go on in parallel [to "Torchlight II,"] but I don’t
think it ever really works out that way. We ended up hopping on to
help get it out the door.
Mostly, we wanted to play it on the
console.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What was the hardest part of the
game to port?
Cramming it into the memory limits of the 360
was a bit of a challenge. Since it’s a randomly generated game,
it’s kind of hard to get around the bounds of all that.
The other really large challenge was
converting UI into something that is useable on a controller and on
a television. We tend to have a lot of text, and making that
readable and navigable was kind of a big pain. [laughs]
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Did you guys think about adding in
some of the new content, like co-op or new character classes, into
the 360 version?
Not really. In general, we try and only take
on one or two new challenges at a time. It was a big enough
challenge for us shipping something on console for the first time
without having done so, without adding on multiplayer and a Live
service and rebalancing all the content for the newer classes.
We figured we would use it as our first
project to get our toehold before we went more ambitious on the
console.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">When you guys announced that
“Torchlight” was coming to the consoles, you said that it was
hopefully coming out to both Xbox Live Arcade and the PlayStation
Network. What happened there?
It was early on, and we were considering both.
But honestly, given as much work as it took to get on the 360, I
don’t think there’s any way we could’ve done both consoles in that
timeline.
We finished our discussions and signed a deal
with Microsoft first. Actually, it was a real pleasure to ship it
with them. They were actually incredibly helpful, and it just
happens to be the way that it worked out.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Even though the release date for
“Torchlight II” wasn’t sent in stone, the delay led to engine
optimizations, like memory management and better load times for the
game. Would that make it easier to port “Torchlight II” to the
360?
All of the work that we did would make it
easier, and we have a functional engine on the 360 that actually
works, which is something we didn’t have a few months ago.
“Torchlight II” is built on the back of
“Torchlight,” so the systems are pretty similar. That was kind of
the point of doing the smaller-scale console project first, so that
if wanted to do something more ambitious, we have the groundwork
laid.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Would you guys port “Torchlight II”
in the future if the console “Torchlight” is
successful?
If it does well on the console, I think we all
have got a lot of interest in doing a game specifically for the
consoles. We don’t know,
if and when we port “Torchlight II” to the 360, if it will be
identical to the PC version, or if we’ll make more departures to
cater more to the specific limits of a console.
There’s a lot of things that I think we
would’ve rather redone from scratch than ported over when we were
bringing “Torchlight” to the console, because we think that it
would be more interesting to cater to that control scheme.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">What would you have added to
“Torchlight” had you specifically designed it for the
console?
I think if you look at things like skills, we
probably would’ve built the skills differently. A lot of the basics
of the design of “Torchlight” were generally around a
point-and-click interface where your target could be anywhere on
screen at anytime.
We definitely tried to adapt the control
scheme to the 360 to still give you a high degree of control. But
knowing that you have an analog control scheme, where you can
actually varying your speed and where you’re driving as opposed to
point and clicking, I think you can build your skills and abilities
more specifically for that.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Have you ever considered branching
out to the handhelds? I think a save-anywhere action-RPG would be
amazing on a handheld.
We definitely thought about it. We considered
an iPad port of “Torchlight,” possibly iPhone. I think in general
we need to do a real redesign specifically for those devices.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Since Runic Games was founded,
there’s been a plan to create an action-RPG similar to “Mythos.”
Which action-RPG genre conventions transfer well to an MMO, and
which ones do not?
Honestly, after playing around with “Mythos,”
a lot of them transfer pretty well.
Especially if you stick with an isometric
perspective, there’s a lot of limitations on what you can see, so
it’s a lot easier to do high unit counts.
There’s certainly difficulties in doing it.
Most of them have to do with having an active collision system
where you have missiles that are in flight and can collide with
anything at anytime, as opposed to kind of a more deferred … combat
model that’s typical with MMOs.
For us, the biggest challenge is keeping
randomization and still having a sense of place. We like randomized
games, but if you want randomized games for an MMO, you generally
have to do a lot of instances. Striking a balance between how much
is instance and how much is shared is kind of one of the biggest
things … we have to worry about.
"mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Can we expect to hear more about
the MMO this year?
Probably more as we get closer to the ship of
“Torchlight II,” and we can pull our heads after that.
Please follow The Alligamer on
"http://twitter.com/TheAlligamer" target="_blank">Twitter
like us on
"http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Alligamer/185149128172583?sk=wall" target="_blank">Facebook
