[Dev Blog #17] CBT2 Concludes on June 18th
Hello Torchlight Hunters! Thank you for your support dedicated to the beta, we are here to announce it will end at 21:00 on June 18th, CST. All gameplay data will be discarded once the beta concludes.
To share our current development, many smaller branches extended from the core gameplay are all under rapid development! We have shifted from CBT2 to working on new content scheduled for the next version, thus this beta will unlikely have major updates till the it ends, but to only prioritize essential adjustments and fixtures.
We are responding to the enormous amount of suggestions and feedback collected from players with a number of optimization and adjustments in the nest release. Now, let's take a look into some of the more noticeable changes.
Fuller Story and Adventures
Every single Hunter is important to Torchlight as you are the helping force against the Amber crisis happening on the land of Leptis. More acts in main quest storyline will soon reveal in future versions as Torchlight Hunters' journey expand further and farther. New heroes and characters will appear and join us soon! Are they coming in friendly or hostile, we are leaving the answer to fellow Hunters.
On the other hand, we noticed a lot of requests on explorable and interactive elements on maps, map diversity and backstories for side quests. We are not overlooking on them! In fact, a lot of interactive elements are in final testing already!
Comprehensive Hero Build Balancing
An interesting phenomenon is that Summon builds stand out to be the most popular playstyle during early beta, bringing a strong spotlight on our new hero Commander Moto. We are happy to see it aligning to our expectation from CBT1's analysis. Soon, as more players started to understand the gameplay, Berserker Rehan gained more attention. However, we are surprised the rest of our Torchlight heroes including Frostfire Gemma, Spacetime Witness Youga and Divineshot Carino's gameplay data share is far from our expectations.
Commander Moto's prominence can be explained from his summon nature for players to be able start their Torchlight journey with ease. On the other hand, Berserker Rehan's attention has much to do with his melee skill Whirlwind. Whirlwind is a redesigned Slash-Strike skill in this CBT2. It grants players with fast mobility to drift between enemy crowds while outputting damage. It is also designed to be one of the more versatile skills with all sorts of attributes, allowing players to work out unique playstyles. Furthermore, Rehan's hero trait being the most sufficient support to Whirlwind also gives a boost to his popularity.
All things considered, imbalance largely lies in skills and talents. This beta gives more diversity on skills, for instance, ground skills for DoT, Demolisher Charge aided demolisher skills, sentries for stationary damage, so on. However, talents and affixes side with these skills are still limited, even for summon builds. We will evaluate for talent redistribution for the next release to facilitate better diversity in build styles.
Legendary Forging
More legendaries have been added in this beta along with the seasonal expansion's feature Forbidden Craft, all fuelling into powerful gears. However, some affixes that merely support numerical reinforcement instead of playable mechanisms and build logic had drifted off our expectations. One example is the popular legendary Double Rainbow's extra damage add-on.
Then, Flame Elementium inflation caused by insufficient expense when Hunters are already geared up with powerful legendaries leading to crafting demand drops significantly.
Another big change will be the reevaluation on the majority of present legendaries. All of the gears will under go a balance test and to fix abnormal attributes.
Gameplay Advancement - Netherrealm 2.0
Are you satisfied with all the rarer drops in the new Spacetime Turbulence Netherrealm difficulty? In fact, we are not stopping here, a "talent" mechanism for Netherrealm will be released soon. With this feature, Hunters will be able to fully customize Neatherrealm challenges in order to boost MF! This 2.0 version is likely to release in our next game version.
Optimization on Dark Surge
This expansion will be the first-ever official seasonal expansion in Torchlight Infinite! From gameplay feedback and data in this CBT2, players are highly satisfied with Dark Surge's playability. We are now working on fulfilling the expansion with more guidance for a better emergence experience. Stay tuned to the unique storyline!
The Newcomer "Invincible junior"
You might be able to sniff some clues from the newcomer's name. An utterly helpful bot is under development. Its first debut in the next version will only feature combat resistance and damage recording while more functions to be added later on. It will eventually learn and upgrade to Hunter's own trainer with insightful tips!
Although CBT2 is in its final weeks, we are still actively collecting all player feedback and suggestions on each of our game communities and social media accounts. Feel free to let us know your opinion under this blog as well.
Talk to you soon!
Mentioned games
:strip_exif():background_color(white):format(jpeg):quality(40))
