Torchlight Frontiers, which was first announced in August of 2018 as a free-to-play MMOARPG, has been revamped and will now be released as a mainline title for series. Rebranded as Torchlight 3, the game will be moving away from the free-to-play model in favor of a "one-box" price instead.
Echtra Games CEO Max Schaefer says the decision to make the switch was brought about by feedback from their Alpha testers, as well as internal discussions at the company. Along with the business model changes, the game will be shifting distribution to Steam for the PC release instead of Arc Games. If these changes weren't enough, the game will also be returning "to its roots" in terms of gameplay elements and narrative structure.
Torchlight 3 will return to the classic Act structure of the previous entries in the franchise and the game will feature a more vertical progression system, a turn away from the horizontal progression Frontiers had planned to go with. The game will be playable online and offline, but any characters made offline will not be able to participate in online multiplayer games.
Schaefer says in the Torchlight 3 rebranding announcement that "as you make a game, the game starts to tell you what it wants to be" with Torchlight Frontiers telling the team it wanted to be a "spiritual successor to Torchlight 1 & 2." This would explain the move away from free-to-play and the gameplay changes announced here. It would also explain why Torchlight Frontiers was delayed after hoping to launch in 2019.
The Torchlight franchise shares a lot of DNA with action RPG giant Diablo, a fact that should come as no surprise as Schaefer was a designer for the series before moving into the indie scene. The team working on Torchlight 3 is also made up of Diablo vets. Schaefer saying in an interview, "we have more people that worked on Diablo here than worked on Torchlight 1." This is a promising note Schaefer makes, as who better to deliver a quality action RPG than veterans of the genre itself.
The game will continue its Alpha testing with the new changes implemented, and will soon enter Beta testing. As the release date is still a vague "2020" window, players looking to dive into the Torchlight world right away should take a look at Torchlight 2, which found its way onto Nintendo Switch (as well as PS4 and Xbox One) back in September.
Torchlight 3 is in development with a scheduled release sometime in 2020 for PC.
Source: Torchlight 3 Official Website