Torchlight III

Torchlight III is a dungeon crawler where the player controls a character in a high fantasy world. From an isometric, top-down view, the player controls their character to move about the game's world, using hack and slash with a variety of weapons, magic spells, and skills to fight monsters, collect new items and treasure, and sell and buy items in a centralized town to improve their character's abilities.

Initially, Torchlight III, as Torchlight Frontiers, had been a massively multiplayer online game, introducing large surface levels that allow players to join to fight monsters that respawn over time, and travel between the game's primary dungeons, many of which are procedurally generated. Players would have been able to party together to explore these dungeons. To balance players' overall abilities, the game would have used item-based experience levels rather than player-based levels. Players with high-level items entering a dungeon with lower-level players would have their items temporarily weakened to the lower levels while in the dungeon. With the change to Torchlight III, the game is expected to be more of a linear approach as from the first two Torchlight games, but will still support both offline and online play.

The Torchlight series was originally developed by Runic Games; the first game, Torchlight, was a single-player only game released in 2009, and its sequel, Torchlight II, released in 2012, added in cooperative play between (up to) six players. Runic was founded by several video game industry veterans with experience from dungeon crawlers like Diablo, Hellgate: London, and Fate, many of whom had been at Flagship Studios at the time of its closure in 2008. Flagship had been developing Mythos, another action RPG but with significant massively multiplayer online (MMO) components. With Runic, the company wanted to "finish what they started" with Mythos, but to redevelop all portions of the game, lore, and art for this title.

With only fourteen employees to start, Runic decided to stay closer to their roots and develop a single-player game without an online component so as to get a product out faster and then build upon that in the future; this ultimately became Torchlight. On release of Torchlight, Runic's Max Schaefer asserted that it was a first step toward a planned Torchlight MMO. Torchlight II represented a partial step toward the MMO, giving them the opportunity to expand and test multiplayer elements.

Torchlight III received "mixed or average" reviews according to review aggregator Metacritic. Review outlets unanimously deemed the game an inferior one compared to prior entries in the franchise.

Destructoid gave the game a six out of ten, calling its campaign "forgettable" while writing, "If you’re the kind of player who got deep into Torchlight II mods or spent countless hours crafting your ideal character builds, you’re almost certainly going to feel under-served in Torchlight III". Push Square acknowledged that the game's visuals and core gameplay were fine, but that the title felt "overly familiar and crushingly linear". PC Gamer noted that Torchlight III was technically sound, but called the dungeons "cookie cutter" and ultimately concluded that "what was missing [was] more than what was there". RPGamer noted that the process for online multiplayer was "frustrating" and called its limitations a "glaring annoyance".