Interview by: James Fudge

Were you shocked at the sales you got for Torchlight?

Well it has certainly has given us a lot of encouragement in going forward with this game.

I would guess that you have high expectations for the sequel?

I am getting the sense right now that we're going to do a quite a bit better than that [Torchlight] right now. I think that a lot of people were looking for multiplayer in the first version, and, given that this is a sequel - people have heard of Torchlight now - we're not dumping something completely new on them that they've never heard of before.. So we actually have high hopes for sales on Torchlight II.

How has it been working under the Perfect World Entertainment banner?

They have been very good to us. We were really careful when picking out a partner this time around and made sure that we really did have aligned interests. They are an MMO company almost completely and so we had to do a little bit of discussion to get them comfortable with the notion that we were going to do a single-player game, and then after that we would do a multiplayer game that's not an MMO. They see the same comments and reviews that we do and they've been really supportive of us and we couldn't be happier right now.

Torchlight got rave reviews and fans loved it, but what was the user feedback like - in other words what did they like about the game and what did they hate?

The number one thing that the reviews and the user feedback said was "we love it but where's the multiplayer?" and that, of course, prompted us to make Torchlight II as quickly as we can. Otherwise, people said that they really liked the feel of the game. We got the feel, and the controls, and that old school action RPG atmosphere and pacing ... and that we really hit that well. And to be fair Torchlight was a very fast project. We started with nothing - no tech, no tools, no nothing - and 11 months later had a shipping product. There were some rough edges to it; when you got into the late game, the item balance, the monster balance and the skill balance were not perfect… we kind of took a broad brush approach to that and so, as more people got into the game, and played it for many hours they uncovered some of the rough edges. So that's been kind of a priority this time around - to go back and learn from that stuff, pay more attention to it, and get the details a little more finer this time around - which we're able to do because we kind of have a running start with it all this time.