The development of Torchlight Frontiers is being led by former Runic Games and Blizzard North co-founder, Max Schaefer. According to the press release from Perfect World, the team consists of many veteran developers that worked on games that redefined the action role-playing genre, like Diablo and the previous installments in the Torchlight series. Players can sign up for the Torchlight Frontiers beta here.
The Torchlight franchise builds upon what makes ARPGs stand out over other roleplaying games by creating procedural dungeons, plenty of pets, and a ton of loot to gather up. While the Diablo franchise tends to lend itself toward a darker aesthetic, Torchlight comes off as more cartoonish and jovial, creating a more light-hearted experience even when delving into deep dungeons. With the possibility of new Diablo games on the horizon, it’s no surprise that some developers wanted to get back in on the ARPG hype train.
Torchlight Frontiers seeks to break new bounds in the Torchlight franchise by making a shared-world dungeon crawling ARPG which lets players team up to tackle the unique world that Echtra Studios is creating within the Torchlight universe. While Runic Games was shuttered back in 2017, its parent company Perfect World help onto the rights of the game, and now it seems that they are cashing that in with Echtra Studios. While shared-world games are hard to pull off well, maybe Echtra Studios can take a page from Sea of Thieves’ success and make Torchlight Frontiers a huge hit in the ARPG genre.
Torchlight Frontiers launches in 2019, with beta access coming soon.
