Torchlight 2

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Woah there. Relax. Breathe. It's just a game.

It's easy to point fingers and get angry at Runic. But we have absolutely zero information about the situation. It could be Runic's fault. Or their new parent company's. Or a third party porter. In the absence of knowledge, I have to remain neutral.

It doesn't matter if it's any of those possibilities. The point is that they promised a Mac version a few months after the PC one and it simply didn't happen. Combine that with no statements from them and I'd call it a LIE.

One should never buy a product based on a company's future promises, no matter who they are. Buy it for what it is, not what you hope it'll be.

Well, that would mean I didn't buy it at all then. But I had just finished Torchlight I on the Mac and my disappointment in Diablo 3 (which I won't buy due to its insanely high cost that never drops yet inability to run without a network connection) lead me to want to support the original Diablo 2 team and I wrongly assumed that their support for the Mac version of Torchlight a couple of months after the PC one would mean the same thing again. The latest statement you quoted from them simply makes them sound utterly incompetent as programmers. Their own Torchlight engine was Mac friendly so any issues are of their own making. I especially like the last bit about them wanting badly to move on to their next project hinting at "tough twinkies; we want to make some money and the Mac port isn't going to do it." Yeah, well, like I said, they can count me out on supporting ANY projects in the future. I'd sooner support Blizzard and I don't like what they did with Diablo 3 at all.

While that might sound extreme, it seems to me the only way to drive a message home to developers that their decisions and behaviors are unacceptable is to drop all financial support and instead support companies that are actually Mac friendly.

I bought Torghlight II with a good amount of confidence that there would be a Mac version, but also knowing that if for some reason it never materialized, I could play it in Bootcamp and it wouldn't be the end of the world. If I didn't have that option, I wouldn't have bought the game.

Well, Boot Camp isn't an option here really because Apple decided that newer Macs don't need to run WindowsXP or Vista and I don't really feel like shelling out another $100+ for Windows7 or 8 just to run Torchlight II. I can run it in VMWare in XP, but the performance is really not that good at high resolutions, even on a quad-core i7. My ancient Windows only AMD machine runs it better even though it's like 1/6 as fast and its GPU is probably at least 1/2-1/3 as fast.

I'm going to try a wrapper next and see if it does any better.

 

[Cougarcat]

It doesn't matter if it's any of those possibilities. The point is that they promised a Mac version a few months after the PC one and it simply didn't happen. Combine that with no statements from them and I'd call it a LIE.

It would be a lie if they said it would take two months when they knew full well it would take longer. Sorry, but you can't prove that.

They probably should have known better given how long the Torchlight 1 port took, but calling it a lie is a bit of a stretch.

But whether or not it's a lie is besides the point––never rely on a companies' future promises when you buy something. If the product isn't sufficient to you now, then wait and buy it when it is. That's just common sense.

Iespecially like the last bit about them wanting badly to move on to their next project hinting at "tough twinkies; we want to make some money and the Mac port isn't going to do it."

This is the market reality, you can't exactly blame them for it.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

It would be a lie if they said it would take two months when they knew full well it would take longer. Sorry, but you can't prove that.

I can prove they said a few months. "Few" to me means 3-4 at most. They could have made a new game from scratch by now. The point is they're NOT WORKING ON IT and have NO INTENTION of working on it. THAT is the lie. Whether you choose to believe it or not is not my problem.

But whether or not it's a lie is besides the point––never rely on a companies' future promises when you buy something. If the product isn't sufficient to you now, then wait and buy it when it is. That's just common sense.

Yeah, don't trust anyone. Sometimes, I forget that humans are fracking EVIL.

This is the market reality, you can't exactly blame them for it.

I already have blamed for them and explained my future plans which is to stop supporting everything they do. The fact they've dumped Macs guarantees that anyway.

 

[Cougarcat]

I can prove they said a few months. "Few" to me means 3-4 at most. The point is they're NOT WORKING ON IT and have NO INTENTION of working on it. THAT is the lie.
.

Yes, because you've been secretly spying on their offices the past 8 months. /s

You can prove what they said, you can't prove their insincerity or that they aren't trying.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

They said they were going to do this a long time ago now. The bottom line is they dropped the ball and failed to deliver. I don't care why. I measure performance by results not intentions.

I doubt they deliberately lied personally. Think about that for a moment. Why would they do that? What possible motivation could they have for deliberately doing that? I think it is much more likely that at one point it at least seemed like a good idea to them and then for whatever unknown reasons it became a problem for them and then they abandoned ship on the idea.

I am not condoning going back on one's word but I do think it is more a case of that than any deliberate dishonesty. I am not pissed at them personally. I just wish they did not screw up is all.

 

[Cougarcat]

I think it is much more likely that at one point it at least seemed like a good idea to them and then for whatever unknown reasons it became a problem for them and then they abandoned ship on the idea.
.

They are still planning the Mac version. It hasn't been abandoned.

Reading their latest statement, I think it's pretty obvious what happened--they misjudged the time/effort it would take due to their inexperience with the Mac, and that coupled with their other projects--GUTS and their next game--has contributed to the delay.

 

[antonis]

They are still planning the Mac version. It hasn't been abandoned.

Reading their latest statement, I think it's pretty obvious what happened--they misjudged the time/effort it would take due to their inexperience with the Mac, and that coupled with their other projects--GUTS and their next game--has contributed to the delay.

No, this team has no lack of experience on Mac platform. It is consisted from Blizzard North ex-members, meaning they've released Diablo 2 and several other games for Mac and PC simultaneously, as blizzard always did (and still do). They do know the platform really well (maybe not as good as Feral or Aspyr though). They've also released Torchlight 1 for Mac. This is totally lack of effort, obviously they have allocated their resources to other projects, and - being a small company as they are - they chose to bury the Mac port of TL2.

This is not uncommon from small development teams. What is unacceptable, though, is the lack of communication, since they already fell far from their initial release announcement, which would be "near" the pc release. They obviously consider the Mac gaming community too unimportant to inform them of the delay, and this is something we should not defend.

FWIW, I think they missed a chance here, as the Mac gamers would buy their game in a big percent, given the fact that Blizzard shot themselves in the foot with diablo 3 gameplay, and even more if you consider the poor performance of Mac port.

 

[Cougarcat]

No, this team has no lack of experience on Mac platform. It is consisted from Blizzard North ex-members, meaning they've released Diablo 2 and several other games for Mac and PC simultaneously, as blizzard always did (and still do). They do know the platform really well (maybe not as good as Feral or Aspyr though). They've also released Torchlight 1 for Mac. This is totally lack of effort, obviously they have allocated their resources to other projects, and - being a small company as they are - they chose to bury the Mac port of TL2.

They outsourced the TL1 port, and perhaps they are trying to do it in-house this time.
The fact that a few of them are ex-Blizzard employees doesn't mean that they personally worked on the Mac versions--Blizzard is a big company.
In their statement they said that the platform "still poses complexities for us" and there is no reason to doubt them on that.

This is not uncommon from small development teams. What is unacceptable, though, is the lack of communication, since they already fell far from their initial release announcement, which would be "near" the pc release. They obviously consider the Mac gaming community too unimportant to inform them of the delay, and this is something we should not defend.

I completely agree with that. Their lack of communication was baffling.

 

[Solomani]

FWIW, I think they missed a chance here, as the Mac gamers would buy their game in a big percent, given the fact that Blizzard shot themselves in the foot with diablo 3 gameplay, and even more if you consider the poor performance of Mac port.

What are you talking about? Diablo 3 plays flawlessly on my iMac. Plays smoothy, no crashes, no stutters, smooth as butter. Can't say that about 80% of all other Mac games (which are typically year-old ports).

I'll continue to enjoy D3; and Torchlight 2 I've dismissed as vaporware.

 

[antonis]

What are you talking about? Diablo 3 plays flawlessly on my iMac. Plays smoothy, no crashes, no stutters, smooth as butter. Can't say that about 80% of all other Mac games (which are typically year-old ports).

I'll continue to enjoy D3; and Torchlight 2 I've dismissed as vaporware.

I'm guessing you have an iMac 2011 or newer so you keep fps over 40. On my iMac (2010 model) it's on the edge of playing smooth/lagging. But this is not the important part. The ugly part is that if you play the same game, on the same machine on the Windows part using bootcamp, with the exact same settings, it has exactly the doubled frames per second.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

They are still planning the Mac version. It hasn't been abandoned.

Reading their latest statement, I think it's pretty obvious what happened--they misjudged the time/effort it would take due to their inexperience with the Mac, and that coupled with their other projects--GUTS and their next game--has contributed to the delay.

Do you have a link where someone from the company discusses their plan for the Mac version that is recent? I'd be very interested in seeing that if so. I'm not disputing what you are telling me but I'd like to get it from the horse's mouth.

 

[Solomani]

I'm guessing you have an iMac 2011 or newer so you keep fps over 40.

Yes, you are correct that I have a recent iMac. I easily get well over 40-50 fps in most situations. Which is why I disagree with you calling this "poor performance", given the fact that my iMac is the 21.5" variety..... certainly NOT a top of the line Mac model, nor a Mac that is even built-to-order carrying the top-of-the-line video cards that are available for high-end Macs (the Pros and the iMac 27" have the honor of having the better vidcards).

Do realize that I only started playing D3 in early 2013.... months after initial Mac/PC release, which means I jumped into the game when it's already had many months of patches, updates, game balancing, and polish.

Gameplay (the way the developers intend the game to be played, as in having an Auction House or not) is a different issue. Has nothing to do with software performance. Let's keep the two issues separate.

 

[antonis]

Yes, you are correct that I have a recent iMac. I easily get well over 40-50 fps in most situations. Which is why I disagree with you calling this "poor performance", given the fact that my iMac is the 21.5" variety..... certainly NOT a top of the line Mac model, nor a Mac that is even built-to-order carrying the top-of-the-line video cards that are available for high-end Macs (the Pros and the iMac 27" have the honor of having the better vidcards).

Do realize that I only started playing D3 in early 2013.... months after initial Mac/PC release, which means I jumped into the game when it's already had many months of patches, updates, game balancing, and polish.

Gameplay (the way the developers intend the game to be played, as in having an Auction House or not) is a different issue. Has nothing to do with software performance. Let's keep the two issues separate.

I will clarify; bad performance means that the Mac port of the game is not well done, since I can get exactly the doubled frame rate on the same machine when played under windows (of course this is the case for many other games as well but I expected something better from blizzard as they develop Mac games like forever). I mean if feral and aspyr can do it, they should too.

As for the gameplay, d3 has some really bad design flaws targeting to extra cash when tochlight 2 seems to be designed mostly to offer maximum fun. That's why I think it is a lost chance that the Mac port is not released, it would offer a great alternative (btw I run the demo using parallels, it's so light that it runs great even that way, even on my iMac).

Still, I won't buy TL2 for windows. I can only hope for a delayed Mac port eventually, but I'm not holding my breath.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

Yes, you are correct that I have a recent iMac. I easily get well over 40-50 fps in most situations. Which is why I disagree with you calling this "poor performance", given the fact that my iMac is the 21.5" variety..... certainly NOT a top of the line Mac model, nor a Mac that is even built-to-order carrying the top-of-the-line video cards that are available for high-end Macs (the Pros and the iMac 27" have the honor of having the better vidcards).

Given the game will run on a 5 year old PC just fine, I'd call it pretty lousy. I put a lot of blame on Apple's poor drivers as well, though and the lack of the latest OpenGL standards that would make DirectX conversion calls a lot more efficient. Even when the next OSX comes out this Fall and finally does support newer OpenGL, gamemakers may not take advantage of it right away since they won't want to lose sales from people with Lion and Mountain Lion (although I'd imagine that Apple will make sure many more Macs in general aren't allowed to run the next OSX version period, so they can try and "encourage" more hardware sales, especially since Apple under Mr. Cook is a total lame dog operation now and the stock will continue to fall and fall and fall....

In any case, one of the biggest problems with gaming on many Macs made a few years ago and even my 2012 Mac Mini with spinning hard drives is something in their SATA drivers that causes DELAYS in gameplay and so if a game is loading something in the background in real time while the game is still playing it can cause STUTTERS. I had this problem on my Mac Mini (which is using two 1TB drives in RAID 0 for a much faster 2TB equivalent and gets over 300MB/sec reads so it SHOULDN'T be an issue, but is never-the-less). I can verify this is the cause since Call Of Duty 1, 2 and 4 both stuttered during loads in gameplay at times, but if I used a USB 3 thumb drive to load the game (which measures in at only 120MB/sec, but has near instant seek times), the games are 100% stutter free. I get the same stutters even with WindowsXP running in VMWare with those drives. Apple clearly has a driver issue. Call of Duty never stuttered on my ancient PowerMac Digital with a 3rd party SATA card. It ran perfect.

Yes, because you've been secretly spying on their offices the past 8 months. /s

You can prove what they said, you can't prove their insincerity or that they aren't trying.

Why should I care if they were sincere at the time or not? The bottom line is they haven't said ANYTHING until recently and not much even then despite numerous people writing and asking them. That's no way to treat your customers. You can keep buying crap from them if you want, but I'm done. There are plenty of other games out there.

 

[JordanNZ]

Even when the next OSX comes out this Fall and finally does support newer OpenGL, gamemakers may not take advantage of it right away since they won't want to lose sales from people with Lion and Mountain Lion (although I'd imagine that Apple will make sure many more Macs in general aren't allowed to run the next OSX version period, so they can try and "encourage" more hardware sales, especially since Apple under Mr. Cook is a total lame dog operation now and the stock will continue to fall and fall and fall....

Any mac that can run Mountain Lion can also run Mavericks.... So this argument doesn't hold up.

Although to take advantage of OpenGL 4+, you need to have a graphics card that actually supports it.

 

[jedolley]

Do you have a link where someone from the company discusses their plan for the Mac version that is recent? I'd be very interested in seeing that if so. I'm not disputing what you are telling me but I'd like to get it from the horse's mouth.

Here's a tweet from Travis Baldree (President of Runic Games) on August 3rd.

https://twitter.com/TwinStickGames/status/363700677685420032

EDIT: For some reason the other part of the conversation is not there, but it was a question about the Mac version for TL2.

 

[Dirtyharry50]

Here's a tweet from Travis Baldree (President of Runic Games) on August 3rd.

https://twitter.com/TwinStickGames/status/363700677685420032

EDIT: For some reason the other part of the conversation is not there, but it was a question about the Mac version for TL2.

Thanks for sharing that. Considering how non-commital that is, I will still believe it when I see it at this point. Fortunately, I've no shortage of other good games to play so I can wait and whatever will be, will be.

 

[N19h7m4r3]

Have to say that tweet is quite disappointing. I hope they get out a decent mac version though.

 

[MagnusVonMagnum]

In case anyone missed the announcement that's been waiting for Torchlight 2 to be released for Mac, I just found it in my Steam game list recently for the Mac (apparently released back on Feb 2, 2015). I'm downloading it now. I suppose I should be able to pick up where I left off on my Windows machine before the last patch made it crash randomly (might be a memory limit of XP of who knows what since not everyone had an issue).

I'm thinking Divinity: Original Sin looks better at this point and is on sale right now.... I kind of wish I had gotten Diablo 3 when it was on sale last fall; I didn't realize it was temporary at the time I accidentally saw it at a reduced price given it went right back up to ridiculously overpriced again (supposedly they fixed the worst gameplay issues although it's still online only).