Torchlight Frontiers Becomes Torchlight III, Will Be Buy-To-Play On Steam

A couple of weeks ago on the F2P Cast, Magicman gave an ominous prediction that Torchlight Frontiers might never come out. As it turns out, he was right -- a game titled "Torchlight Frontiers" will not be released, in 2020 or any other year.

That doesn't mean it's dead, though. Perfect World Entertainment and Echtra Games today announced that Torchlight Frontiers will now be known as Torchlight III, marking it as a "true successor" to Torchlight and Torchlight II. "As you make a game, the game starts to tell you what it wants to be," said Echtra founder Max Schaefer. "And Torchlight Frontiers told us that it really wants to be the spiritual successor to Torchlight I and Torchlight II."

The name isn't all that's changing about Torchlight Frontiers. The game will now use a premium model -- i.e., go from free-to-play to buy-to-play -- where one box price gets you get "the entire game, all of the content from day one." We're sure there won't be any additional microtransactions to make that statement from Schaefer less than truthful. In any case, now that it's got a box price, we'll be less likely to cover it here on MMOBomb.

A little surprising, though, is the game's move from Perfect World's Arc platform to Steam. Arc's been operating for several years now, so moving a much-anticipated title away from Arc and to Valve's mega-store is a curious move. An accompanying press release confirmed that the game would be launching on PC in summer 2020, with a round of closed alpha testing starting in two days, on Jan. 29.

The announcement of the move also lists several ways gameplay will be changing, most notably that "Horizontal progression has been removed, so all Frontier-specific levels, gear stats, and scaling has been removed as well." Well, horizontal progression was a neat idea, at least. You can check out the announcement in full on the Torchlight Frontiers -- er, Torchlight III site.