Torchlight: Infinite Devs Respond to Blacksail Season Issues and How They Plan to Improve

mmorpg.com:

Torchlight: Infinite ’s most recent major update, opening up the Blacksail season, was in January, and the team at XD Games has released a devblog on what they’re working on to improve the game experience.

Part of the issues with the second season were balanced and quality control, as well as admission that the team didn't always respond quickly enough to issues when they came up. One issue cited was inexperience with Unreal Engine 4. “Although many people on my team are veteran players of ARPG games who have played many similar games, it's the first time for many of them to actually use the UE4 engine to make a game with such complex data types and such a high degree of freedom,” the blog explains.  

A problem with setting a goal to have three-month seasons, they admit, is that you have to have enough content to support that timetable. While games like New World are going over to the seasonal model, andGuild Wars 2 just announced a quarterly cadence, those are big MMORPGs with a lot of systems, places to explore, and mechanically different from an ARPG. 

XD is extending the progression cycle and working on adding more content and more goals, and rethinking the seasonal timeline and difficulty again. They’re looking at possibly overhauling crafting to make it deeper and, potentially increase resource cost to craft late- and endgame gear. They’re also exploring other ways to increase both difficulty and reward, to make things feel worthwhile.

When it comes to loot, it’s at the core of a game like this. The team noticed that demand for Flame Fuel was what many were grinding for all season. They considered increasing drops, but instead, they want to broaden demand for other things too, to be sure it’s not monotonous.