Xbox Gaming in South Africa

The sequel to Runic Games' highly acclaimed 2009 dungeon crawler is just too big for the Xbox LIVE Arcade platform, according to CEO Max Schaefer, who in an interview with Eurogamer claimed that "in all likelihood," the only hope for it reaching the Xbox 360 is a comprehensive redesign.

"With Torchlight 2 there is a little more complication as far as just being able to do a straight port, as we did with Torchlight 1," explained Schaefer. "In all likelihood, if Torchlight 2 gets to the Xbox it would be probably fairly comprehensively redesigned.

"We would have to be redoing the interface for a console release anyway, just like we did with Torchlight 1, so it would probably make sense to do something more specifically tailored to the Xbox.

"We managed to shoehorn Torchlight 1 in there but just barely."

The first conclusion would be that the Xbox 360 port is exceeding the 2GB file size limit set for all XBLA games, however, according to a tweet on the developer's Twitter account, it seems the real culprit is the Xbox 360's memory capabilities, meaning even a Games on Demand or retail release would still be problematic in its current form.

"Apparently even in disc it exceeds Xbox memory loads - would still need a redesign," tweeted Runic Games.

Okay, so we all know that the hardware in current-gen consoles is starting to show its age, but it seems a bit odd that a game like Torchlight 2 would battle with the Xbox 360's memory limits when memory hoggers like Halo: Reach, Crysis 2 and Mass Effect 2 managed just fine. It sounds more like a problem the developer needs to overcome on their side rather than the limitations of the Xbox 360, and considering that the original XBLA port was such a success for the developer, it's a problem worth solving.

Torchlight 2 will be out this spring on PC, which hopefully will free up the developer to start looking at "shoehorning" in the Xbox 360 port.