Torchlight II Interview
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Runic has made the decision to release mod tools with Torchlight II. We don't see this happen nearly as much as we used to. Why do you think that is, and why did Runic make the decision to release them for both Torchlight and Torchlight II? Does releasing mod tools significantly add to development costs?
I think some of our competitors don't release mod tools because they want more control over the players' experience and they try to maintain real-world economies. At Runic, however, we are happy with players being able to change the rules to their liking. As sold, our game isn't going to be perfect for everyone, but mods can expand and change the game in ways that might please greater audiences. It's also great fun to watch what others do with our game, which can serve as a sandbox for systems for future games. I don't think releasing mod tools adds much to our development costs or time. Our tools programmer, Greg Brown, makes these tools for me and the team anyway, and they don't get much additional polish for a general release.
Action role-playing games tend to be paced very quickly. Does this make it difficult to include narrative elements with a lot of depth? How important is a strong narrative in an ARPG?
I'm not sure if it makes a strong narrative difficult or if it makes a strong narrative completely impossible. In my mind the storyline for Diablo is (Uh-oh, Demons!) the story on Hellgate was (Sci-fi Demons! Kill them all!) and the story on Torchlight is (Crap, more Demons!) This is a complete simplification and does a disservice to a lot of fine efforts to give these games a story, but are we successful? I have no clue. Personally I can't follow or read stories in games, even games well-known for having a great story; I have some kind of mental block. The real story, in my experience, is just my internal narrative about what I am doing now, what am I finding, where am I going, why am I unique and better than everyone else.
