Torchlight II Is Now in the Polishing Stage

Runic Games has confirmed that it’s completed work on the upcoming Torchlight II role-playing dungeon crawler and that it’s now time to polish it up before its expected release later this year.

Torchlight II is one of the most anticipated dungeon crawlers of the year, second only to Blizzard’s massive Diablo 3.

We already tried it out during its beta stage and came away quite impressed with the stylized experience that doesn’t require special features such as a mandatory online connection like Diablo III.

Sadly, while plenty of hype has been created around the game, a concrete release date still isn’t available, as developer Runic Games declined to reveal such a thing until it’s absolutely sure that the game will be ready.

It won’t be long wait, however, as Runic Games co-founder and Torchlight II project director, Travis Baldree, mentioned on the game’s forums that his team has “finished our primary goals and moved back into polish.”

"There are two main parts to this - Skills, and Acts. Skill polish involves making all the tier bonuses interesting, and finishing up the skills that we didn't show in the Beta, and just generally making sure that everything feels good and is reasonably balanced. A pass has already been done to give everything tier bonuses, but some of them are not as nice as we would like, so we are punching them up."

Balancing also plays a big role in the polishing process, so the whole team is now going through the game in order to make sure it’s a stable experience.

"Polish means taking that and making sure that the individual monsters are fun to fight, that their groupings work well together, that we expose balance issues late in the game ( be they from monster leveling, or skill leveling, or what have you ) and correct them. We want the individual monsters to each have a 'thing' that makes them unique, and interesting to fight in the context of other monsters around them."

Once polishing enters the home stretch, you can expect Runic to finally reveal a release date for the upcoming game.