Matt Tanwanteng, Engineer

I love just seeing all these different ideas take shape in our game. Most recently, Matt Nguyen’s Spirit Dancer class is a fun class that has a distinct feel from the original three, largely due to it’s abilities that allow the class to continue moving through attacks. There’s a full set of varied skills, and one specialized variant feels quite unique from the others.

I’m looking forward to the Decimator robot, a full class mod with a new skillset, a new model, and animations, as well as a new helper robot pet.

If you want to see more of the mods Runic is playing, check it out right here!

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Best RPG
Torchlight
The year 2010 could well be known as the one where causal gaming went mainstream, and Torchlight winning the RPG category is certainly another fine example of this trend. The dungeon-delving title looks great, plays smoothly on almost any hardware, and offers some great Diablo-style gameplay that is both easy to learn and challenging to conquer. For a title on sale for $20 to compete and beat the big boys in the RPG field shows how great this game is. It’s the little RPG that slayed the giants.
See our Review.

You can see the rest of the awards right here.

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Here are some of the topics in the podcast, mixed in among the puns and other jokes. Apparently Max is a funny guy!

• Torchlight going on consoles
• Torchlight less likely on facebook
• Talk about Max’s history
• How to apply at Runic Games
• Shared Overworld in the MMO
• More examples of how instancing could be done
• Lots of talk about possible “end-game” content in regards to retirement

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I will draw to your attention the one piece of new information: The Torchlight MMO will have some kind of Retirement System. The possibility of one has been speculated, but Max comes out and says that it will be included in the next game.

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This week’s Mod Spotlight is a very small one, and yet can change the way you play the game. Gold Sharing Service allows you to trade in your gold for an item which you can trade in later to receive the exact same value. Why would you ever want to do this? Well, plenty of reasons come to mind, but the main reason is to allow you to trade gold between your characters. You also could use it as a way to preserve your gold before going into situations where you may die a lot. Just go to the portal near the Shared Stash and go inside for a gold scroll!

You can get Gold Sharing Service right here.

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Marsh shared this laugh-out-loud story about one of Erich’s culinary experiences:

HOST – “This is a herbal soup..”
ERICH “I’ll try it..”
Erich takes a bite …
ERICH – “Oh my God that was the grossest thing I have ever eaten. It exploded in my mouth.”
HOST – “Yes, the soup has cow penises in it.”

They found out later that wasn’t all it had in it, but we’ll leave the finer details to your imagination. Let’s just say that dining in a foreign country often is an adventure, and sometimes it’s a reality TV challenge.

Go check out the official site for more pictures and comments!

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The Short Version: We are doing a complete revamp of RGF, which will result in the entire site being remade. We need people to help test (and try to break) the new site, as well as people who want to give their input and help steer the direction RGF goes as we head into the MMO’s development period.

If you are interested, leave a comment in the thread for this post.

The Long Version:

Early last year I gathered a small group of helpful community members to help me improve our site. Many months later that cooperation ended up in the completion of the Torchlight Mods Database, as well as various improvements to the main English wiki. We had a goal, and we accomplished it, and it helped our site and community grow larger than ever before.

Now, with the release of the single player Torchlight months behind us, and the development of the MMO looming in the distance, it is time to take another big step in the development of this site and our community.

I can’t go into all of the details here, since I want to leave some surprises for you all, but here are a few of the changes you can expect in store for us:

• Wordpress, phpbb3, drupal, and mediawiki will all be replaced with one unified and amazing installation of the vBulletin CMS Suite and specially purchased add-ons. This will result in one shared login for the entire site, easier wiki editing, a much better organized system for Mods, and a lot of new features all around.
• In preparation for the MMO, a slew of new social features
• Some social features for your single player Torchlight that will blow your pants off
• Better integration with TorchLeech, for all your modding needs
• A complete visual overhaul of the site’s theme
• And plenty more interesting additions that haven’t been finalized yet

What we need is people who will volunteer to do the following:

• Try out the various features of the site
• Try to break the site and find bugs, glitches, errors, etc
• Give us your opinions and ideas for the site’s development
• Most of all, just give us your input

We hope to get people who have experience with (and even complaints about) the site as it is now. Once we get about 5 people I will contact you all with the information requires to access the test area.

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There are plenty of game mechanic changing mods out there, some that change the amount of treasure or gold that drop, some that change skills and even mods for trading gold. However, this mod is one of my personal favorites. It essentially replaces all gem and ember drops in the game with a remade version of Chaos Gems (now simply called Gems). Each Gem has randomly attached prefixes and affixes to give it random stats. The end result is a lot more item customization, more use of the gem removers and the Enchanter (for sockets), and a lot more time customizing your equipment.

You can find Gale’s Gem Overhaul right here.

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I’m glad you guys are interested in what we’re going to do next, but I think you would probably get tired of a constant stream of hype. A lot of our day to day work just isn’t that interesting. To build outdoor areas we spend a lot of time talking about rocks and how they could fit together, modeling and painting rocks, assembling rocks, and then talking about how the rocks could be better. It’s the sort of groundwork that’s necessary to build a world, but I think you’d get tired of hearing about it.

We’re also talking about game systems and how they could be fun, but we’ll end up changing our minds and pitching most of our ideas out the window several times before release, so that doesn’t seem like a good thing to talk about either. Early screenshots are too rough to release, and so are early ideas.

In other words, he’s reminding us to hang in there, because over-hyping for too long can lead to burn-out and disappointment. Just remember to check in here at RGF for updates when they arise!

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