Torchlight Frontiers Becomes Torchlight 3 With Big Changes On The Way

For a couple of years now, Torchlight Frontiers has been in development over at Echtra Games. Billed as something of a free-to-play Torchlight MMO, Frontiers was set to shake up the franchise rather drastically, but today, Echtra Games announced a big shift for the title. From here on out, Torchlight Frontiers will be known as Torchlight 3, and there will be some changes implemented to make it more of a proper successor to the first two Torchlight games.

For starters, that means Torchlight 3 will drop the free-to-play model that Frontiers was planned to have. Instead, Torchlight 3 will be a "premium title," meaning that you'll pay one price upfront for the game to get all of its content, just as you did in the first two Torchlight games.

That move to an upfront pricing model means that Torchlight 3 will also be distributed through Steam, with those who have been alpha testing the game through Arc set to receive Steam keys for the game.

Besides the changes to how Echtra Games plans to charge for Torchlight 3, we'll see some big changes to the structure of the game. Torchlight 3 will follow the more traditional act structure that was seen in previous games. While players will still encounter others in towns and can party up with them, most areas in the game will be private. The real money store has been removed from the game, and players will have the option creating both online and offline characters, with the latter not requiring an internet connection to play.

All of the items, classes, content, and features that have been shown to players participating in the Frontiers alphas will remain in the game, and Echtra even states that beta tests will be coming soon. The studio also plans to have the game on PC at some point in 2020 with "a console release following shortly after," so we'll keep our eyes peeled for more information.