Irbgamer Interview with Runic Games, Torchlight XBLA

ThomasN7

                        

IRBGamer: Joining me today is Max Schaefer, CEO of Runic Games.  Max, first I want to thank you for taking some time to talk to IRBGamer.com today.

Max Schaefer: “I’m happy to be here, thanks.”

IRB:  I want to start off by talking about Torchlight. This is a Dungeon Crawler that is currently out for PC, but is coming to Xbox Live Arcade in the next couple of months. Can you tell us a little about the game?

MS: Yeah, well for those who are not familiar with it, it is a random level Diablo-style dungeon crawler and it’s been out on PC for almost 15 months now and it’s been a great success for us.  It’s a hack-n-slash, action, RPG.  You find all kinds of crazy randomized loot, kill cool monster, learn skills and its in the style of a Diablo or a Fate for those action RPG’ers on the PC.  Now, the exciting thing is that it’s coming to Xbox Live and this is our first foray into console world in a long time.  It’s something we’ve wanted to do forever, and we finally got an opportunity to do it, and we’re very excited.

IRB:  Now, you’ve worked on games such as Diablo, Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction, and Hellgate: London, what makes Torchlight unique and different from those games?

MS:  Prior to Runic Games and making Torchlight, it seems that every project we were making from, basically, the mid-nineties [to now], got bigger and bigger and more elaborate.  And, like you said I worked on the “Diablos” at Blizzard [Entertainment], and was even working on Diablo 3 for a little while.  These were enormous projects with big budgets [that] took forever to make and I think the difference now is that we figured out how to do this a lot more efficiently, a lot quicker, and what that lets us do is get more ideas into games and get them out faster to people and get them out at a better price.  So, from a game makers perspective it’s a lot more satisfying because you get to just do more and do it faster.  And for the players, we get them stuff without having to wait five years or whatever to get it.  So, yeah, we’ve kind of taken a “low-tech, get it done” approach to it and that’s been the biggest difference, really.

 

Read More: http://irbgamer.com/2011/02/interview-with-runic-games%e2%80%99-max-schaefer/