What happens when a customer runs into a fun-ruining bug in a game, and since it’s an offline title there’s no support department to help him? If you’re a developer at Torchlight creators Runic, you step in yourself.
Now, I really liked Torchlight, and it’s a great game, but it’s a game that’s being developed by a smaller, more independent development team – so naturally, there are going to be a few bugs. One particular bug involved characters who would get stuck on the terrain and be unable to perform any actions, such as teleporting back to town.
Runic Games’ President & Project Director Travis Baldree posted a workaround on the game’s forums, but for whatever reason it just wasn’t working for one unfortunate gamer. So, the developers took his save file and manually edited it to pop his character up a level, where he was free to roam the halls and slaughter monsters mercilessly once more.
Now, this sort of thing isn’t exactly uncommon in MMOGs or other online games – that’s what live support is for, isn’t it? On the other hand, Torchlight is a completely offline game, and Runic is a fairly small startup company. You have to imagine that with a small team, they’re already worked pretty hard with addressing post-launch bugs and issues. So even if it was something so trivial as changing a variable or two in the code, it’s just a fun little example of good customer service. Kudos, Runic team.
(Reddit)
