Runic Games lacks resources to create both at the same time

Apr 20, 2012 23:31 GMT  ·  By

The pressure of working on Torchlight II means that the Runic Games team has no resources left to allocate to the upcoming MMO based on the same universe, although they do still have a lot of ideas that might be integrated into the game.

Max Schaefer, the chief executive officer at Runic Games, has told Rock, Paper, Shotgun that, “We’re not saying we’re gonna do next because we don’t want to be locked into something and disappoint people if it turns out we get to the end of this and really what we should be doing is an expansion or another platform. We want to have that flexibility.”

He added, “We’re a small company. We’re 30 people, and we can only really do one thing at a time. So we want to have the flexibility to pick what we want to make, that our fans are asking for, and make the decision based on that.”

Neither Runic Games not publisher Perfect World has offered a clear launch date for Torchlight II, which will be delivered on both the PC and the Mac.

At one point the development team spoke about launching their take on the action role-playing genre before Blizzard and Activision put out Diablo III.

Since then it was announced that the long-awaited Blizzard title would arrive on May 15, which probably means that, even if Torchlight II is code complete, the publisher will wait for a few months before actually launching it.

When Runic Games has first formed, the developers said that their main aim was to create the MMO and that the single-player titles would only be created in order to acquire the funds needed to create the resource hungry experience.

Since then the priorities seem to have changed a little for Runic Games, and a Torchlight MMO might only arrive in late 2013.