Yesterday Echtra Games released the “Cursed Captain” update for Torchlight III, adding a playable class, new pets, and applying several bug fixes and quality-of-life changes to the dungeon crawler. The developer also announced this update would be its last, due to its acquisition by Zynga in March.
Founded by original Torchlight studio Runic Games’ co-founder Max Schaefer in 2016 to continue work on the colourful Diablo-esque action RPG series, Echtra Games released Torchlight III in October of last year. It’s a fine game with some cool and goofy ideas, like the engineer class with its ever-evolving train pet or its latest edition, the pirate/necromancer Cursed Captain.
Zynga acquired the studio in March of this year, setting it to work on an unannounced multi-platform action role-playing game al0ngside Zynga’s NaturalMotion Studio. Seeing as Perfect World Entertainment owns Torchlight, it was only a matter of time before Echtra halted work on Torchlight III.
In a letter to the community posted yesterday, Echtra founder Max Shaefer said goodby to the players and the game his team created.
“As you may have heard in the news, we were acquired by Zynga back on March 2nd. As a result of this transition, we are moving on to new (and exciting) things, and we will be passing the baton back to our partners at Perfect World. We absolutely enjoyed our time with Torchlight III, and only hope for the best for the future of the franchise. We are grateful for the opportunity to have worked on it. But more than that, we owe a huge debt of gratitude to all of you who took this journey with us.”
So that’s that. Echtra’s moving on, and there’s no word on what studio Perfect World will tap to pick up the torch on Torchlight III. But hey, at least we got Pirate Necromancers.
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