Greetings, Hunters of Torchlight!
It's been more than a month since the start of the Black-sail season, and we've seen that many Hunters have already overcome the Lord of the Void Sea, the most difficult challenge of the game, which means it's time for us to spend more energy on enriching the gameplay content.
We are very sorry that the experience of the game this season wasn't as good as expected. We will reflect on this deeply and make changes. We urgently need to enhance quality control for the version, adjust the game's balance, and improve response and processing speed when issues arise. Although many people on my team are veteran players of ARPG games who have played many similar games, it's the first time for many of them to actually use the UE4 engine to make a game with such complex data types and such a high degree of freedom.
But this is only the second season of Torchlight: Infinite and we're confident that everything will be improved in the updates we'll roll out in upcoming seasons. Naturally, we'll need the support, company, and feedback of all our Hunters.
We're now focusing on developing the next season, so we'll resolve the problems we couldn't fix in the Black-sail season in the new season. We'll also try our best to improve the game experience in the new season.
【Game Content】
Although we set the duration of each season to be about three months, there hasn't been enough actual gameplay content to support this period of time. So in addition to adding new gameplay content, we're also considering extending the progression cycle and providing more goals. Naturally, if the progression curve changes, we'll also adjust the corresponding stage difficulty curve.
- One example is that we may adjust the crafting system to make it more exciting to make gear. At the same time, it'll also become more expensive to craft late and end-game gear.
- Another example is that we may adjust the difficulty of Netherrealm Timemark 8 when using a relevant compass in the new season to increase the difficulty and benefits at the same time.
【Loot Experience】
We've noticed that everyone seems to have been too focused on grinding Flame Fuel this season. At first, we did want to give more Flame Fuel drops to give everyone a more stable drop experience and the feeling of always getting something, with the additional effect of making it easier for everyone to learn and try out the crafting system, which would help players pick up the game faster.
However, this made the progression and drop experience of the whole season too monotonous, which is not that desirable for a loot-based ARPG. For the next season, we may add more crafting base material drops. These materials will be particularly important in the new crafting season mentioned above. Of course, we need to design corresponding filter prompts to help players recognize the corresponding gear quickly.
【Other Optimizations】
We've been working on optimizations and developing new contents at the same time. The following are optimizations we plan to launch in the new season.
Control experience:
- More skill casting settings and options, such as auto-channel, auto-aim, and instant cast, will be supported. These options can be enabled or disabled according to players' own control habits.
- Controllers will support more interfaces, and it'll be possible to call out the navigation wheel and customize it.
- Pactspirits will support the saving and switching of different point allocations and bonding schemes. However, it'll only be possible to adjust and switch Pactspirit builds in the Hideout, and the adjusted build will only take effect the next time a new battlefield is opened (which means players cannot change their Pactspirit build in the battlefield or by changing their Pactspirit build in the Hideout and returning to the battlefield)
PC version:
- The Inventory interface will support a floating UI feature. Instead of clicking on a piece of gear to view its information, the information of the gear will appear as floating text when the mouse hovers over it.
- Some graphic materials will be processed in HD.
- Changed some UI into windows. For example, other interfaces will no longer be blocked when displaying the information of two equipped One-Handed weapons and one weapon in the Inventory.
Trade House:
- It is now possible to conduct advanced searches for the same affixes in the Trade House. For example, it is now possible to search for a Chaotic Ending with two or three "Max Tenacity Stacks +1."
- We've been paying attention to everyone's feedback on the trade tax and actively increasing the distribution of Tax Refund Vouchers. We issued Tax Refund Vouchers as rewards in the Special Hunter Training event that was recently held and will distribute more Tax Refund Vouchers in the future. For example, the more times you farm Timemark 8, the more Tax Refund Vouchers you will be able to get, or you may get more Tax Refund Vouchers when your second or third character reaches a certain level in the current season... We want to minimize the impact of the tax on normal active Hunters to make everyone's experience better.
Visual experience:
We will add an option to adjust the transparency of skill effects to provide better protection for Hunters' eyes.
Netherrealm gameplay:
- It will be possible to collect cards faster in the Chaos Invasion gameplay to allow Hunters to use more card strategies.
- It will be possible to end God of War early before the countdown ends if all rewards have been claimed.
Hunter Profile: The Hunter Profile (including Hunter Profiles opened in the Hero Ranking) will show more specific information, such as the specific talent allocations, skill connections, Pactspirit info, etc.
Hero Emblem: From the next season, Hunters will be able to obtain up to 100 Hero Emblems, which will allow Hunters to try out more Hero Traits.
Of course, we're working on far more than this. We're already developing the content for the next season or even the season after that in an orderly manner. Planning and developing the content of the next few versions in advance allows us to deal with emergencies more calmly and arrange more time to verify and optimize the game.
As we intend to keep this game running healthily for a long time, the seasonal system and improvements are key to maintaining the vitality of the game. Although Torchlight: Infinite has just started, with the support of all the Hunters, we're confident that we'll be able to keep improving the game through the seasons. Please continue to support and share your suggestions with us. Thank you!