These changes needed to happen, gameplay wise, and fanbase wise. There was such an overwhelming doom and gloom over the game that it made any type of positive coverage get overshadowed by naysayers of the free to play model. Gameplay wise, resetting that frequently per frontier just didn't feel good. This change took an entirely negative reddit, and turned it around into a positive supportive force. I don't see how you can consider listening to their fan base a bad thing.
I loved when I first got in and played. I liked the frontiers and how they worked. I just heard how many complained about it was not what they wanted and saw the company try and change things to what they hoped the community would like. I think this doomed them from ever doing the original thing and just backing off. They lost me for sure as I have other choices. I loved the idea of leveling up frontiers over doing the same old thing. It was interesting and required me to do more. Now we have a boring game in my opinion.
I was in Alpha for over a year. Torchlight frontier is honestly not only the worst of 2 previous Torchlight games, but its also probably one of the worst ARPGs on the market today.
But if you strike the Open World MMO idea, the game has absolutely nothing new. Its as bland as it gets.
And even comparing it to complexity of games like POE, heck even D3, is like comparing WW Beetle to Tesla.
Unless they dont change something, I mean make it almost new game. This will probably be only good for 12$ bargain bin game.
This. There are so much ARPGs on the market and all are more unique, have more soul and provide better combat then this game. Just look at this list, each one provides a better experience then T3:
D3 Inquisitor: Martyr PoE Last Epoch Wolcen Grim Dawn Titan Quest Victor Vran T1 T2
I could go further back and include obscure titles like Harbinger or the OG Torchlight: Fate. But T3 is a huge step back even compared to the previous iterations. Torchlight has never been my favorite series but those titles at least provided meaty combat, adequate level design, proper character development through skills and visceral and visual rewarding combat. T3 has none of that, and that is a much bigger problem then on or offline and the whole Frontier system.
/Cheers, Lahnmir
'the only way he could nail it any better is if he used a cross.'
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
Im kind of lost so the game will not have any online version at all or is it only not available at launch.
It will have typical ARPG lobby multiplayer at launch. The MMOish run-into-strangers-while-playing part is dead.
"Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community ... but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It's the invasion of the idiots”
― Umberto Eco
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?” ― CD PROJEKT RED
I totally disagree with everything about this article. Having played the alpha, none of the MMO stuff added anything to the game. It actually took away from the game. Why do I need random players I don't know fighting me for mobs. The public areas where not good in any way shape or form. This game should have always just been a multiplayer game where you invite friends to play with you. The hub towns where you can see others or meet them is all it ever needed. The housing system is an OK addition, but many testers didn't do anything with it really, which is sad. I am one of the tester that asked for this, point blank. They went back to the drawing board on many different things with this game because what they had first envisioned just wasn't fun to play. They listened to the testers an the game was slowly becoming a good game. Changing the game into something that modders can work with will only make this a better game. Let's face it the synergies mod for torchlight II made the game 1000x's better than the original devs ever did. It is the modding community that make games like this one stand out. When you try an make this an MMO you lose the modding community because of not being able to make changes to the game.
As an Alpha tester, who's put in more than 80 hours. This game had some potential, and its kinda went down the drain with this change. On top of that, the four classes available so far, are honestly, very, very boring. I love T1 and T2, but they're shooting themselves in the foot at this point.
Personally, was only paying attention to this because it had an mmo vision. I wasn't much impressed with Torchlight 2, and I'm not a fan of most arpg's. Alpha testers usually aren't the majority that would buy a game at launch, but instead a minority of dedicated fans of a franchise or IP. No longer interested, best of luck though.
Haxus Council Member 21 year MMO veteran PvP Raid Leader Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
Im actually ok with this change, I got hours of fun out of modding TL2, and if it was an mmo i wouldn't be able to do that. I embrace this change from change and while I enjoyed Frontiers in the alpha i understand why they are going this direction.
I love it too. And can't wait to see what the modders come up with. I found the alpha complete garbage and was one of those testers that wanted T3 instead. So I got what I wanted.
Was psyched up for the MMO. But for yet-another-ARPG.... well, I'll probably wait for a 50-75% off sale and maybe put in a few hours then. I can't say I really care much about T3 now.
Former Blizz devs,simply rehash the same titles over and over.Square Enix does the same thing,Final Fantasy everywhere.It shows a lack of confidence to sell a new brand,a lack of confidence in your work or abilities as a developer.
They ALWAYS knew a fully fledged mmorpg takes a lot of work,to pretend otherwise,just rubbish.An upstart developer with only one option,a low budget game.They did decently well,so let's keep doing it.At one point i thought WTF,why are people buying these simple cheap games.
Then i realized simple cheap games are popular,i guess less thinking,easy to play and no care if your earning anything or even if there is any immersion.
All the popular trends from arpg's,to moba's to BR's are very cheap offerings and offer very limited game play choices.Somehow people seem to support LESS,less gaming,less effort,idk are consumers suckers or is this the mindset of consumers?
Final comment.NEVER believe what the teams PR are telling you,it holds NO weight at all.Ideas like WE LISTEN....we did this because our supporters asked for it...bla bla bla..BS.Is there a problem with gaining NEW supporters,perhaps even more than you currently have,no confidence to attract new players that you would claim you do it for your supporters/testers?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
I've been in the alpha since the very first wave, and Frontiers felt bland. Had a lot of interesting features, but they all missed their mark imo. It didn't feel like a Torchlight game to me. I'm excited for this change, and glad they actually used the feedback we gave them.
I totally disagree with the OP. They are making the right call here. For one, they never made an MMO before, so there is that. The biggest problem would have been monetization and I am SO happy they are scrapping that as a result. Perfect World is NOTORIOUS for having nothing but p2w non-sense in cash shops. I don't want any of that in my ARPGs. If you were looking forward to an MMO in the first place, you weren't really looking at the right things. This was not going to be an MMO. At best it would have been Destiny like, but it looked more like an online arpg similar to POE.
With all these changes we get a game. An actual game you pay for and you don't have to buy a hat or w/e in. They are not compromising the design of the game to facilitate a cash shop. Every single game with a cash shop --cosmetic or not-- has to change fundamental designs of the game to facilitate it. You can play the game offline or online and on top of that online characters can't go offline and vice versa. This means the game is effectively Diablo 2 in it's structure, which is awesome!
The only concern here is ongoing content and all we can go by is what they said in this regard: There will still be content updates. I don't believe they specified if they will have DLC or expansions, but one could assume. I have a feeling it will be similar to Grim Dawn, where they don't have as many content updates but have big expansions every year or so. This is fine with me! I don't need to play every game forever and quite frankly ARPGS aren't really effective at grabbing players for more then a couple of months at a time without seasons. Pretty much every ARPG of any recognizeable value tends to keep people for a few months at a time at most and then they come back when a big patch / expansion hits. Just having tons of people around, MMO style, without a reset every few months for progression (the main reason you play ARPGs) is not going to keep people around as long as MMOs do. Even Marvel Heroes, an ARPG with raid content, didn't grab people that long at a time.
We asked the testers their opinion. The testers that were there because they liked the previous (single player) Torchlight games. We didn't ask those who wanted a mmoarpg because those were not alpha testers. The evidence was clear and scientific, nothing to question here.. Move on.. Oh btw we also realized that it takes a lot more effort to make mmoarpg than we thought, a .. Lot .. More..but obviously that is not the reason we change now, no nop nopers not at all no.
The fact that the testers weren't MMO players is all the evidence that I need to know the game would have failed as an MMO. I have seen many alphas and betas in my day and one thing is for sure, if you can't attract a core group of players that like your game pre-launch your chance of attracting a large enough group to support the game after launch is slim to none, and I gave up on slim a while ago.
And one of a handful of MMOs I was interested in gives up entirely and decides to rehash more of the same old. The MMO genre truly is dead as far as new content goes.
Frontiers wasn't really all that "open world" anyways. Sure you ran into a few peeps that were in the same map as you, but they were no more interactive than an NPC. It was hub based with some people added to your instance. It tried to hard to straddle the fence between old TL and something new/not TL, without real commitment to either. Unfortunately the fence was barbed wire and that shit hurts.
Am I excited about a t3 after loving the first two? kinda? Was I excited about frontiers after playing it a good bit? not at all.
I truly feel for those involved as I am sure there was a lot of heart and hard work put into Frontiers.
I played the alpha and it was a terrible game. I even told a Perfect World employee in person how bad the game is. That was in June of 2019. I'm very glad they are changing it. It cant be any worse than what it was before.
Another situation just like New World where the developers are avoiding blame by claiming they are doing "what the players wanted". If people testing an MMORPG ask for a single player game and the devs agree to change it then there was never any heart in the project at all and it was a cash grab from day one.
The problem with Frontiers and how they worked could have been solved with a simple fix of allowing rewards to be used from every zone anywhere but the devs obviously instead are now using the player complaints as an escape ticket from failure. Now they can just release the game, sell it for 19.99 and never have to update or add content to it ever again.
The truth is that they abandoned a lot of fun systems very early in development without giving them much polish. This is just the latest change that removed something that made the game unique and replaced it with something that a few very vocal people in the community felt familiar with. So while the changes were driven by community feedback that doesn't mean they weren't a mistake in the long run. Those kind of changes do not necessarily make the game better or worse but too many of them would make it a very generic one. The game has real potential but it also has some real problems and those systems are just the scapegoat for failing to admit that by some of the community members - blame the unfamiliar. I just hope the designers would stop listening to that kind of feedback and start addressing the real issues and insert unique and more fun systems into the game again.
Comments
@Scot you're slacking.
D3
Inquisitor: Martyr
PoE
Last Epoch
Wolcen
Grim Dawn
Titan Quest
Victor Vran
T1
T2
I could go further back and include obscure titles like Harbinger or the OG Torchlight: Fate. But T3 is a huge step back even compared to the previous iterations. Torchlight has never been my favorite series but those titles at least provided meaty combat, adequate level design, proper character development through skills and visceral and visual rewarding combat. T3 has none of that, and that is a much bigger problem then on or offline and the whole Frontier system.
/Cheers,
Lahnmir
Kyleran on yours sincerely
'But there are many. You can play them entirely solo, and even offline. Also, you are wrong by default.'
Ikcin in response to yours sincerely debating whether or not single-player offline MMOs exist...
'This does not apply just to ED but SC or any other game. What they will get is Rebirth/X4, likely prettier but equally underwhelming and pointless.
It is incredibly difficult to design some meaningfull leg content that would fit a space ship game - simply because it is not a leg game.
It is just huge resource waste....'
Gdemami absolutely not being an armchair developer
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
21 year MMO veteran
PvP Raid Leader
Lover of The Witcher & CD Projekt Red
They ALWAYS knew a fully fledged mmorpg takes a lot of work,to pretend otherwise,just rubbish.An upstart developer with only one option,a low budget game.They did decently well,so let's keep doing it.At one point i thought WTF,why are people buying these simple cheap games.
Then i realized simple cheap games are popular,i guess less thinking,easy to play and no care if your earning anything or even if there is any immersion.
All the popular trends from arpg's,to moba's to BR's are very cheap offerings and offer very limited game play choices.Somehow people seem to support LESS,less gaming,less effort,idk are consumers suckers or is this the mindset of consumers?
Final comment.NEVER believe what the teams PR are telling you,it holds NO weight at all.Ideas like WE LISTEN....we did this because our supporters asked for it...bla bla bla..BS.Is there a problem with gaining NEW supporters,perhaps even more than you currently have,no confidence to attract new players that you would claim you do it for your supporters/testers?
Never forget 3 mile Island and never trust a government official or company spokesman.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/With all these changes we get a game. An actual game you pay for and you don't have to buy a hat or w/e in. They are not compromising the design of the game to facilitate a cash shop. Every single game with a cash shop --cosmetic or not-- has to change fundamental designs of the game to facilitate it. You can play the game offline or online and on top of that online characters can't go offline and vice versa. This means the game is effectively Diablo 2 in it's structure, which is awesome!
The only concern here is ongoing content and all we can go by is what they said in this regard: There will still be content updates. I don't believe they specified if they will have DLC or expansions, but one could assume. I have a feeling it will be similar to Grim Dawn, where they don't have as many content updates but have big expansions every year or so. This is fine with me! I don't need to play every game forever and quite frankly ARPGS aren't really effective at grabbing players for more then a couple of months at a time without seasons. Pretty much every ARPG of any recognizeable value tends to keep people for a few months at a time at most and then they come back when a big patch / expansion hits. Just having tons of people around, MMO style, without a reset every few months for progression (the main reason you play ARPGs) is not going to keep people around as long as MMOs do. Even Marvel Heroes, an ARPG with raid content, didn't grab people that long at a time.
"classification of games into MMOs is not by rational reasoning" - nariusseldon
Love Minecraft. And check out my Youtube channel OhCanadaGamer
Try a MUD today at http://www.mudconnect.com/The fact that the testers weren't MMO players is all the evidence that I need to know the game would have failed as an MMO. I have seen many alphas and betas in my day and one thing is for sure, if you can't attract a core group of players that like your game pre-launch your chance of attracting a large enough group to support the game after launch is slim to none, and I gave up on slim a while ago.
Proud MMORPG.com member since March 2004! Make PvE GREAT Again!
Echtra made the correct decision.
Am I excited about a t3 after loving the first two? kinda? Was I excited about frontiers after playing it a good bit? not at all.
I truly feel for those involved as I am sure there was a lot of heart and hard work put into Frontiers.
The problem with Frontiers and how they worked could have been solved with a simple fix of allowing rewards to be used from every zone anywhere but the devs obviously instead are now using the player complaints as an escape ticket from failure. Now they can just release the game, sell it for 19.99 and never have to update or add content to it ever again.