The studio won't be leaving the ARPG arena as it's their "sole marketable skill" among the team. The early success of Diablo 1 "sort of stuck" with the veterans, but now they want a "twist on it".
"I would imagine the next iteration in the Torchlight universe would involve a twist, and I don’t know what that would be just yet," said Runic Games' Max Schaefer on the future.
“Our team has made the Diablos, Mythos, now we’ve worked on the Torchlights and they’ve all been action RPGs. We’re eager to break that mold a little bit.” The studio boss was giving an interview with I Eat Games. The developer won't travel outside of action RPG gaming? "I think it might just be our one good idea in the world," he joked. "It’s our sole marketable skill and if we weren’t doing this we would probably working at Home Depot or something."
“I think it’s just something we had a lot of early success with in Diablo 1 and it just sort of stuck with us. We kind of have a head start on everyone else in making them. Travis our president and lead programmer made Fate. He’s got a lot of experience and has had success with this genre."
"Starting a new company it seemed like the obvious and most responsible thing for us was to stick to what’s in our wheelhouse make something we know we can do really well. Something that would allow us to build a foundation beneath us before branching out and taking some risks," continued Schaefer.
“That’s kind of part of the deal with Torchlight. It was really really fun making Torchlight 2 so I suspect we’ll never get too far from that but we definitely want to put a twist on it for the next thing.”
Torchlight 2 released on PC recently, with a Mac version due in the near future.