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I ran across something interesting while browsing the official Torchlight forums the other day. I had been looking for a way to respec my character (which you can, by the way, with this mod) and instead found a topic called “OVERWRITING SAVES! HERE’S HOW TO AVOID UNTIL NEXT PATCH!” For obvious reasons, I opened the topic and gave it a read.
It turned out to be a post from one of the game’s developers, Travis Baldree, explaining that he had finally discovered why some player’s save files were being overwritten. He explained the problem, detailed a solution, and ended the post with, “Really sorry about this folks, but man, am I glad I found it!” And a smiley face.
The even stranger part? The responses to Travis’ confession were nothing but thanks and compliments to Travis for finding the bug.
“Am I dreaming?” I wondered. “I must have typed a wrong address or clicked a wrong link somewhere. This couldn’t possibly be a video game message board.”
Two things fascinated me here. First of all, that a developer was willing to not only acknowledge a bug but provide a quick way to get around it while they worked on the patch. Second of all, that the audience was grateful for the information and didn’t “troll” the developer for his “incompetency” in allowing the bug to get through in the first place.
In many ways, Runic Games is an independent developer, and this type of camaraderie shouldn’t be too surprising. But in many ways, Torchlight is also a completely commercial game, garnering triple A title buzz in the press and (hopefully) triple A title sales. The relationship Runic Games had with their forums is thus a shock to me, especially as someone coming from the World of Warcraft community. Blizzard’s (outspoken) community is so vile, so putrid and evil in its derision of their developer, that WoW board moderators have been known to literally lose their shit and disappear into the nether.
Obviously when your online community is that large, things are going to get ugly. But I have also noticed that Blizzard is, and always has been, extremely tight-lipped about the goings-on in their development team. It is, in fact, the modus operanti for most of the game industry, wherein the less that is known about development, they think, the better off the game will be, whether in sales or simply public perception.
I’m not really going to go into that topic here, but I think it’s enough to say that I find it quite endearing to know that Runic Games is so close to their community. When I play Torchlight, I feel like I am playing a work, if not of art, then at least of someone’s hands. It feels like a game that an actual group of actual people sat down and crafted. It almost makes it art, not because it has a message (it doesn’t), but because it feels made.
It certainly makes certain shortcomings easier to swallow. More on that next time.