Soldiers of the Wasteland

I have just been told our server will be taken offline for a short time tonight sometime between the hours of 11pm-2am EST (6-9 hours from now), to perform some important OS and system updates. The downtime is expected to only be about 15 minutes.

During this period the website and forums will be unavailable.

After a week of speculation and playing the guessing game, Runic Games have finally revealed their secret and announced that Torchlight will be getting a sequel that is set to hit the shelves in Spring 2011.

By far, the most exciting aspect of the sequel is the inclusion of multi-player – a feature that fans have been begging for since the release of the original Torchlight. The actual number of players that can play together in one game has yet to be determined, but Travis Baldree told PC Gamer that it could be anywhere from four, to six, to seven.

Another exciting feature is the addition of all new classes. At present only two classes have been revealed.

One is the Outlander, who sounds like somewhat of a loner making his own way through the world and who makes use of ranged weaponry and low magic. The other is the Railman who has been described as an engineer melee warrior class, who retains the steam-punk mechanical feel that was present in the original game.

Among other things, character customisation is now possible, a number of overworld areas have been included for you to explore and the user interface has been redesigned and made more intuitive. Old favourites like the retirement system, pets and fishing are making a return as well.

To read the complete list of key features, head on over to the Torchlight II official website.

We’re finally back up!

Apologies to all for the extended downtime these past couple of days. We (as you probably know) exceeded our monthly bandwidth quota and it ended up taking quite a while for our hosting providers to respond to my support request and top it back up. This event has highlighted two problems in my mind.

One, is that it has taken far too long for our current host to get this sorted out. I guess that perhaps they may have been extra busy these past few days, but even so, a simple email explaining that situation would have been helpful.

Two, and probably more importantly, it looks like we need more bandwidth to prevent this from happening again.

So I think the time has come for us to move on and upgrade to a bigger and better host. That will then allow us the freedom to use more bandwidth intensive features (such as a hosted gallery or a wiki if needs be) if we ever have the desire to do so. I’m still looking through options, but overall I think it is going to be a good move for the site.

Thanks again for persevering, and I’ll let you all know when it’s time to move!

Maeyan, the Lead Developer on the Revival project, has announced that the project which was to port the game assets into another engine and bring back multiplayer capabilities, has been canceled.

Due to the overwhelming amount of work and time that would be required to complete the project, the team have scaled back their efforts to just continue to support and develop the single player modifications of the game.

At the moment the team are working on an SDK for Hellgate which aims to make the process of modifying the game easier for those who want to.

You can read Maeyan’s announcement on the Revival forums.

Thanks to thegreatcthulhu for bringing this news to our attention.

The latest LifeNet Fallen Earth podcast has recently gone online with the well known Chosen featuring as a special guest.

In it the guys primarily discuss the upcoming Blood Sports content patch (v1.4) as well as touching on the current hot topic concerning the recent restructuring of Icarus Studios.

About 48 minutes into the podcast, Chosen discusses how he got into gaming, how he met Tiggs which led to his start at Hellgate: London and the skills he was able to pick up before it’s eventual demise. He then goes on to mention a community of ex-Hellgaters who currently play Fallen Earth – namely the Soldiers of the Wasteland!

So thanks for the props Chosen. If you would like to hear the podcast for yourself you can download or listen to it at blogtalkradio.com.