Torchlight III

Torchlight III (formerly Torchlight Frontiers) is the third installment of the Torchlight games series.

It is being developed by Echtra Games and published by Perfect World. It is scheduled to be released in 2020 for Steam, with console ports to follow.

Gameplay

The game will feature a shared world, where players can cooperatively explore dungeons and slay monsters. It 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." The pet system will be expanded, and a crafting system will be implemented. Stages will predominately be procedurally generated. Naturally there will also be towns, however these will remain static (so that players will always know where key-npcs are located). There will be three area types where larger groups of players can mingle, towns, public spaces and dungeons, where players can fight a never ending supply of enemies, group up, and work together to clear dungeons. Each dungeon is assigned a "challenge level," to give an indication of its difficulty. The challenge level is cross-referenced with a character's item level to give a player an indication as to whether it is feasible to clear the dungeon. Dungeons can host up to four players at a time, while world pve zones can host up to eight players at a time.

The game has a day-night cycle, the presence of enemies will vary in numbers and type in accordance with said cycle. For instance, goblins can be encountered during the day, while zombies will replace them at night.

Gold returns from previous games, however, rather than players being awarded skill points and character attribute points; monsters will drop skill points which in turn can be exchanged for a variety of active and passive abilities which enable us to personalize a character's unique skill-loadout. In contrast with previous games, character levels have been replaced by item levels; an aggregate value is determined by the quality of the equipment of a player. When playing as member of a group, and a dungeon of a lower difficulty level is entered by the player, then any higher item level items are scaled down to a level thst is proportional to the dungeon's challenge rating. The character's unique skills and abilities remain available, even if they are not normally available if the player would have been the appropriate character level for the content.

It will not have an auction house.

Classes

Players will be able to customize the look and feel of their characters. Each class has a unique resource balancing. Confirmed classes include:

• Dusk Mage
• Forge
• Railmaster
• Sharpshooter

Forts

The Fort is the players' home base. Here, they can use materials they collect in the world to build, upgrade, and customize the fort to their liking. This is where new skills can be learned or existing ones get upgraded.

Development

Work on the game commenced in 2016. However, the idea of a shared world ARPG in Schaefer's mind stems as far back as his work on Mythos. Mythos was never released due to the closure of Flagship Games, but the idea remained.

It is intended that the game be updated over time. The game's interface is designed with both console and PC play in mind. The game is based on a "games as a service" model.

A first playable demo version was available at Gamescom 2018 and PAX West 2018. A beta for the PC version will launch in late 2018.

In 2020 it was announced that the game had been renamed from "Torchlight Frontiers" to "Torchlight 3."

Trailer

Torchlight Frontiers - Official Announcement Trailer-0

Links

• torchlightfrontiers.com – the game's website where you can sign up for the beta.