Torchlight Frontiers being announced has come as a bit of a surprise to those who have been following the original developers of Torchlight, Runic Games. After their post-Torchlight release, Hob, turned out to be an over-investment, Runic were unlucky enough to get disbanded by the publisher, Perfect World.
Some of the developers from Runic Games, however, were immediately moved over to Echtra, a new Perfect World-created company, who began working on the game we now have in front of us. Torchlight Frontiers is going to be a free-to-play hack 'n' slash action RPG not entirely dissimilar to Path of Exile!
Of course, it was only a matter of time before Perfect World would jump on the opportunity of banking on Torchlight's considerable pedigree and veneration, and the logical course of events was for the publisher to have developers working on a free-to-play successor to the core game series.
To be clear, the showcased materials for Torchlight Frontiers are nothing short of great. A considerable amount of gameplay has already been demonstrated by third-party streamers, who seem to mostly have a vaguely optimistic outlook on the game. The stuff is fast, punchy, and ticks all the right boxes, far as Torchlight games ought to.
The big issue, however, is that of monetisation. Torchlight Frontiers will be going up against a major F2P heavy hitter in Path of Exile, and there's no telling whether the Torchlight IP has the necessary weight behind it to drive players away from a project as substantial as this. We'll see what Perfect World have to say about Frontiers in the coming weeks, but until then, perhaps having a pinch of salt handy wouldn't be a bad idea.
