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At the end of last week, Torchlight III surprise-launched on Steam in Early Access for $30. The game has been in closed testing for what feels like forever, though for most of that time it was a “different” free-to-play MMO called Torchlight Frontiers.
I put different in quotation marks up there, because wow, this release sure does feel like a free-to-play online game that had some hasty design changes slapped in which was then thrown onto the Steam store. If you click that store link up there, you’ll notice that it has mostly negative user reviews. They are fully justified.
Take a quick scroll through the Torchlight twitter feed and you’ll start to peel back the curtain on the mountain of issues here. The account is replete with posts like “we fixed the server!” and “this time we fixed the server!” and “no, really, we definitely fixed it this time!” In spite of promising that Torchlight III would be an offline game with online multiplayer options like its predecessor, this current Early Access build is still very much an online-only affair. That would be fine if the servers weren’t on fire…
