Runic Games, a Seattle-area game studio which developed the Diablo-inspired Torchlight series and its latest title Hob, has been shut down by its Chinese parent company Perfect World Entertainment:
Runic Games, the studio behind Torchlight, Torchlight II, and Hob, has been shut down. In a statement published on its official website studio head Marsh Lefler confirmed the news and thanked fans for their support.
[...] For fans of the Torchlight series, Lefler said there "will be some news coming" and he also noted that "community and multiplayer services will keep running even after the studio's lights go off."
[...] Runic is the second studio to be shuttered by its parent company, Chinese publisher Perfect World Entertainment. Motiga, the developer of Gigantic, announced its closure shortly before Runic. In a statement to Kotaku, Perfect World Entertainment said Motiga "has reduced the staff of its studio" but its game "will continue to be available on our platforms." With regards to Runic, it said the decision was part of "the company's continued strategy to focus on online games as a service."
If you like the Diablo games, I'd suggest trying out Torchlight I/II (Windows, OS X, Linux) or Path of Exile (Windows and Xbox One).
(Score: 2) by Hyper on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:36PM (2 children)
I was hoping they would make a third Torchlight. I still play Torchlight 2.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:43PM (1 child)
I'm kind of blown. But Path of Exile is another great successor to Diablo 2, if you're willing to use Windows.
Diablo 2 with the Median XL [median-xl.com] mod and PlugY [plugy.free.fr] for infinite shared stash space is also a great twist on the classic. It's amazing how much development has gone into Median XL; I thought it was going to stall out a couple of years ago.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by chromas on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:06PM
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Path of Exile runs pretty well in WINE, too.
(Score: 3, Informative) by pbnjoe on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:42PM (16 children)
That's too bad. The Torchlight games are fun, and it's always a bummer when studios are closed, especially by parent companies snapping their fingers. Here's hoping the devs find work again soon, and that multiplayer services stay up for a long time.
I just checked, and the only ways to play multiplayer on Torchlight II are by logging into a Runic account or by playing on LAN. So, when PWE snaps their fingers again, the game's online is dead. Yes, there's Hamachi/Tunngle/others to make LAN work like online, but those have their own problems.
If this game had a Direct IP connection option for multiplayer the community might have lived for decades, since it's really future-proof otherwise: DRM-free from GOG/HB, mod-friendly, unlimited resolution, etc. It still might, but it will be a major blow to the game's "life" when the account servers go down.
I suppose that was always going to be the case, but I'll bet the studio closing will accelerate the process.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 05 2017, @09:53PM (6 children)
Path of Exile is server-based and limited to Windows, but it is free to play. I found it fun with some fresh ideas and a more rugged look than the cartoonish look of the Torchlight series.
Median XL [median-xl.com] is a great mod for Diablo 2. I have heard there is a multiplayer community for it. See also PlugY [plugy.free.fr].
Finally, I heard a (coinciding with BlizzCon 2017) rumor that Blizzard might do an HD version of Diablo 2 like they did for Starcraft 1.
I haven't touched Diablo 3 but I might consider it if it goes on sale and I get a new PC.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by pbnjoe on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:12PM
Re: Diablo II mods, nice! That plays into the more optimistic comment I just wrote. Fingers crossed that TL II gets that kind of treatment at some point.
I'm sure it's better five years later, but I remember some friends of mine got Diablo III on release and were dying in single player because of terrible lag. Single player. When they could log in. Bah, I abhor that kind of stuff.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:13PM (4 children)
Not all that surprising. They made a copy of a popular game, the Blizzard went and made a new version of its game and blew them out of the water. I remember trying Torchlight but all the time thinking why I would play this when I could play D3 instead.
D3 should be fairly cheap now considering it has been out for awhile and there has been extra content released a few times. I don't think there was any Diablo news at Blizzcon17. That said you can still try and play some of it for free, same as with most of the Blizzard games. At Blizzcon17 Heroes, Hearthstone, Overwatch and WOW (next expansion & WOW Classic servers) all had a slew of news as per usual, but nothing for D3.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:25PM (1 child)
I guess this is what I meant by rumor:
https://www.reddit.com/r/diablo2/comments/7am414/no_d2_hd_announcement/dpbzfs1/ [reddit.com]
An implication that it might be done some time in the future.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by looorg on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:35PM
It will probably happen eventually. After the Starcraft remaster and SC2 going free-2-play it seems inevitable they'll remaster their other hits sooner or later.
(Score: 3, Informative) by chromas on Monday November 06 2017, @01:52AM (1 child)
Torchlight was made by some of the Diablo devs from Blizzard North, while D3 was made by some random other guys who went out of their way to change game mechanics because the way people played D2 "wasn't fun".
While D3 has the graphics and story, when it first came out, it had no random dungeons and barely any loot drops. Oh, and almost any decent item is account-bound now so you can't trade with friends.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @09:44AM
It was buggy as hell at release, but it really turned out to be a sick game. If only the weapons had had more variety to them stock...
Also D1/D2 Alum.
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:00PM (2 children)
Re: future-proofing, it's also on Linux, so you're not reliant on the Wine project or other such things when it's not compatible with the latest version/patch/whatever of Win or Mac at some point.
Thinking about it more, with all the crap players do to keep playing old games already, with this account thing being the only issue with playing in the foreseeable future, someone may make a patch/program to get Direct IP and the game's community could survive for a long time.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:55AM (1 child)
Yes and if you bought from them they're giving away keys to the copies on GOG or Humble depending upon when people bought their copies. Which is super nice of them to do. At least that way people will at bare minimum get to play the single player part of the game, even if they don't make longer term arrangements for the multiplayer servers.
Unlike D3 which is completely dead if the servers ever go down.
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Monday November 06 2017, @04:24AM
Ah, that's great! More people with safe copies playing for longer.
Good point about D3.
(Score: 2) by stretch611 on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:14PM (5 children)
This truly is a bummer. I owned Torchlight and Torchlight II as both ran on linux natively. (Although native linux for the original was only available through Humble Bundle.)
I did not know that PWE owned them (I thought Runic was completely indie, so I assume at some point they were bought by PWE.)
PWE also owns Star Trek Online and Neverwinter Online (the latter I used to play through WINE.) They would add more and more grind to their MMOs just to make a buck. I ended up leaving Neverwinter because of the added grind and constant nerfs. They had a reputation for keeping MMOs going forever after letting support drop off, but seeing how they are not making money off of Torchlight past the initial game purchase, I doubt they will keep it going for long.
Now with 5 covid vaccine shots/boosters altering my DNA :P
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Monday November 06 2017, @12:58AM (3 children)
I thought they were totally indie as well. Wikipedia says they were bought in 2010 after Torchlight released.
I'm not surprised to hear that, and that's totally the behavior I'm expecting in this case: once this is older news and sales drop off a certain amount, the servers will be quietly put on the chopping block.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @02:42AM (2 children)
Probably, but let's wait for the announcement. They might do something cool like open source the servers or just grant a license for people to run their own servers.
But, since they didn't go the Blizzard route and force everything to be multiplayer, we should be able to run the game forever.
(Score: 2) by pbnjoe on Monday November 06 2017, @04:48AM (1 child)
That would be nice, but would require work from a now defunct studio: at minimum a patch to remove the (I'm assuming) hardcoded Runic IP, plus a big code dump.
But how would the accounts get handled? There's web servers and everything behind that system. They wouldn't dump account info, so hosts have to run a secure public web page for sign-ups and everyone has to create new accounts for each server they connect to, or someone has to take it upon themselves to gain trust (considering it involves emails and passwords) and attention in an attempt to centralize? Doable, but a massive pain in the butt I'd imagine.
Or, with way more (free) work, they patch out the hardcoded IP, account system, and implement a direct IP setup? Complicated business.
Also, the way it's written, it reads as though there's something new on the horizon, not that they're going to do work on/for the games. Who knows if PWE would even let 'em touch the source anymore.
On a positive note, perhaps this is hinting at a bunch of people from the studio planning to band together and make a spiritual successor?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @10:06AM
Torchlight 1 or 2 source code was leaked.
Hellgate: London
Star Trek Online (2012 data+src, 2013 src only)
Neverwinter Online (2012 data+src, Win 7+ due to stack errors on XP)
Dozens of others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 06 2017, @10:03AM
Cryptic is AFAIK a dead company. They now have a different website all the games are linked through.
They actually bought the Champions universe from the RPG company that created it, then licensed it back.
Also NWO and STO both had source code leaked in 2013 from the 2012-2013 period. The games are literally play-balanced/generated from xls spreadsheets to precisely calculate out your rate of advancement so endgame is ~80 hours of grinding later. Most of the art assets are ripped off from Champions Online, music reused between games, etc.
Compared to Champions and STO, Neverwinter has no redeeming qualities. The D&D style stats are cosmetic, with the same level balancing used as in Champions Online and City of Heroes (bet you forgot that was from Cryptic too!), including killing minions making 'leader' characters weaker. Most of the skills used were simple reskins/tweaks of powers from the Champions Online powers lists, and unlike Star Trek Online, you could neither customize nor uniquely advance your companion characters, and you could only have one summoned at a time (the same limitation exists in Champions Online, but companions in that game are a temporary collector's item that don't advance at all.)
For people who miss the space battles of the Starfleet Command series, Star Trek Online is a visual but not technical facsimile. For people who have heard of, but never played Dungeons and Dragons, Neverwinter is a visual but not technical facsimile. For people who just want to live in a colorful world of cartoon superheroes and villains, and don't have an option since CoH/CoV died, Champions Online is a visual and less featureful technical facsimile.
Having said that: Perfect World already burned most of the technical talent out of Cryptic, those leaks may in fact have been from disgruntled developers. With any hope, this latest closure will paint a huge bullseye on Perfect World Entertainment and see most of their 'valuable IP assets' accessed and leaked, so that the truth of the matter may come out: PWE is Chinese government funded and is slurping up American Gaming IP in order to eventually collapse the developer system in the US leaving China owning the majority of American online gaming IP and being in a position to either buy or quash any newcomers to the market while funnelling endless American profit back into China, never to trickle back to its domestic market.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:17PM (1 child)
When the Korean master race is playing Lost Ark.
Seriously, Path of Exile is a terrible ARPG. Due to the inherent server-client latency issues, like (other) MMOs, Path of Exile substituted enjoyable game mechanics with addictive item fetishism (hoarding), randomness and enough essential game-knowledge and mechanics to qualify for academic credit as to give players a sense of accomplishment, investment empowerment in the otherwise tedious and repetitive progression.
Worse, the game was designed around a LOT of grinding, multiple playthroughs and heavy trading due to the developers' business model relying on players spending so much time staring at their screens as to be willing to pay for purely cosmetic alternative textures and models.
The only value in the game is how the quarterly inflation of the economy between every league reset painfully and repetitively demonstrates the failings of free-market economies as the game become unplayable to people who didn't start off early enough.
To be honest, most of what I've said applies to the current generation of the multiplayer ARPG genre as a whole and would probably apply to Lost Ark in most ways. But saying this as someone who played multiple PoE chars to lvl100 in HC leagues back during the earlier years when the game was even more randomly unforgiving, when compared to games from similar genres like Dead Cells that are even more random and yet far more enjoyable, the absence of actual game mechanics that challenge one's motor skills as opposed to one's ability to search through the wiki and trade is inexcusable.
As for real ARPGs as opposed to MMOs, Torchlight is a mildly better option in my opinion. Grim Dawn is a superior one though it's still not quite as difficult as it should be. Eitr was probably the closest to the kind of ARPGs I think most people want to play but alas, it seemed to have pinned for the fjords... Overall, I believe it's only a matter of time before we'll see a good, skill-intensive ARPG as opposed to the isometric MMOs we have nowadays. Maybe it's already out there and I just haven't heard about it... Either way, I'm very reluctant recommending Path of Exile or any ARPG nowadays considering all of the above.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday November 05 2017, @10:28PM
I'll admit to being a pleb on games. At the end of the day, I don't care enough to know all that info you wrote. +1
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(Score: 2) by damnbunni on Sunday November 05 2017, @11:45PM (1 child)
I like Torchlight I/II and haven't tried Hob.
I think the attempt at a Torchlight MMO probably caused a lot of issues with the studio internally - theoretically Torchlight II was a test run for it, that's why it uses an account system for multiplayer.
If you're looking for other ARPGs, give Victor Vran a look. I rather like it, it has a unique aesthetic, is based weapons instead of classes, and one of the expansions is based on Motorhead (and is Lemmy-approved).
And it has a jump button, which is really weird in an ARPG. (You can use it to find hidden areas, mostly.)
(Score: 2) by mrchew1982 on Monday November 06 2017, @01:14AM
I love Hob! But it's nothing like Diablo, so ymmv. It's more like Legend of Zelda on game boy. Open world exploration with a few enemies sprinkled in to keep you from falling asleep to the placid soundtrack. Level design is nothing short of brilliant though, you change the entire landscape as the game progresses. Look for Aavak's playthrough on YouTube if you want a demo.