Torchlight 2 interview with Runic Games

Classes & Characters

PC Gamer: Shall we move on to the new classes you've got and talk about the customisation?

Travis Baldree : We're only announcing two classes at this point and, man, I hesitate to say what their names are, because they were arguing over them!

Max Schaefer : These are working names. These are not the actual final names.

Travis Baldree : I'm going to check my email, because I'm pretty sure someone had some names down! We're going to get in trouble with our art teams if we say the wrong names. So the two classes we're going to be revealing are the Wanderer, who's almost kind of a... hell, we've got a class description here somewhere!

Max Schaefer : There was some push to call him the Nomad, or the Wanderer...

Travis Baldree : I guess they're called the Outlander, now. Who has, what's a good way of describing this so that somebody also doesn't kill me? It's kind of a Dune Fremen sort of character, someone who's on the fringe and has survivalist tendencies, various facility with ranged weapons and low magic. The other classic is the Railman, who'se like an engineer melee warrior class that basically, on the frontier, trying to push forward into unpopulated areas, and they're responsible for constructing the means of getting there and also the advanced fortifications and they also have to be able to protect themselves. They have some of that steam-punky mechanical bent from Torchlight.

PC Gamer: Are you bringing over the original classes from Torchlight into Torchlight 2?

Travis Baldree : The original classes from Torchlight will actually not be playable in Torchlight 2. We didn't want people to feel like they were retreading the same ground with a class, we wanted to introduce new stuff. We'll probably represent those classes in the game so that it feels coherent, but we're not going to ask you to play them all over again.

PC Gamer: Did you want to introduce new classes simply for the sake of newness? Or were there things about the previous classes that you wanted to mix up?

Travis Baldree : We certainly wanted to explore different dynamics for the characters, it's always interesting to try new stuff and it really frees you up not to have to stick to whatever fiction you've come up with to justify these abilities with the previous classes, you can just try totally different things. There's also the excitement of trying something different visually, and trying to expand on the world by showing a little bit more about the characters that live there.

Max Schaefer : As Travis also mentioned earlier we have increased the customisation of your character so you can pick genders and hairstyles and stuff. Since we didn't have that the first go round we would have had to completely reconstruct those characters anyway to add the facility to do that. So it's a good opportunity to do some new stuff.