For me Torchlight is a cartoon Diablo-lite.
It was even made by an ex-Blizzard employee.
It even gets more complicated then that. For anyone who cares:
- Diablo was developed by Condor Games
- Condor Games was comprised of The Schaefer brothers, and David Brevik
- Blizzard had an orgasm when they saw Diablo, so they bought them and they became Blizzard North
- Bill Roper later came from Blizzard to Blizzard North
- Blizzard North (formerly Condor) went on to develop Diablo 2
- Blizzard North dissolved after issues with creating Diablo 3 and the 4 above names went on to create Flagship Studios.
- Flagship Studios was then comprised of all the major Diablo developers.
- Flagship Studios then made the disaster that was Hellgate: London
- A few devs at Flagship Studios made the game Mythos originally only to internally test LAN/WAN stress limits.
- Everyone thought Mythos was a blast to play, and decided to make it their new title
- A small quiet closed beta opened for Mythos
- Development was really quick and major changes were made from very active forum users
- Mythos became a hybrid of WoW and Diablo (you could even choose 1st/3rd person or Isometric), in the best sense, not worst
- The damage had already been done by Hellgate London and Flagship Studios shut down, taking Mythos with it
- Everything was acquired by Hanbitsoft and looked nothing like it's original fun concept
- The team working on Mythos (specifically the Schaefer brothers) grabbed Travis Baldree who made Fate, and started Runic Games
- Brevik and Roper went on to other projects, and didn't join them
- Although they wanted to make Mythos, they lost all assets, so everything had to be from scratch
- The intention was to make Mythos again, but they didn't have the budget
- With a tiny budget, they grabbed the open source OGRE engine and developed a single player only version to throw out the door within months, called Torchlight, which would in theory give them the financial security to make the game they wanted after
- It was a success for the most part, and they went on to develop Torchlight 2
- Torchlight 2 was a fun game, but it wasn't Mythos. It was just (as others have said) Diablo 2 lite.
- Runic made Hob and then shutdown, with their publisher PerfectWorld keeping the rights to the Torchlight IP
- Somewhere in there, Erich Schaefer and Travis Baldree went on to make a super tiny studio called Double Damage games
- Perfectworld then funded a new dev company called Echtra with Max Schaefer
- They went on to create Torchlight Frontiers, which is now Torchlight 3
So while Diablo 1/2 was released by Blizzard, it wasn't really developed by them. Not the core of it at least. Most of it was Condor/BlizzNorth/Flagship.
Mythos, was developed by ALL the original Diablo 1/2 devs.
Torchlight (while still fun) lost it's way after loosing half the Diablo folks, and never really became Mythos
I just got the beta invite for Torchlight 3 today, so now I get to see if Max eventually was able to make it anything like Mythos was...