The audio and transcript of the interview I recently conducted with Runic Games CEO Max Schaefer is now online, and if I do say so myself, it’s worth a read. (Or listen, though I cringe at the audio quality via my crappy mic in the noisy coffee shop in which we met, a block from Max’s house in SF.) Most of our conversation was (naturally) about Torchlight and their plans for the upcoming Torchlight MMO, but we talked a bit about general game design issues as well, and Max had some interesting comments on what made D2 so slow and TL so fast.

Flux: Do you think, looking back, at games like Hellgate and Diablo 2 and other such games that take four or five years to make – could you apply any of the lessons you’ve learned with Torchlight to those sort of titles?
Max Schaefer: Yeah, I think so. I think that the era of the five-year, eighty-million dollar project is largely over.

Flux: Tell that to Blizzard!
Max Schaefer: Well not for Blizzard! *laughs* They have their own rules over there, for sure. But as far as the economy downturn and a lot of failed projects out there, people are looking for faster, quicker development and cheaper development and less risk, and I think that there’s a pretty good gap in the market right now between the casual game and the super-big budget project, and I think that customers will like it, especially since you can get a lot more product out.

Flux: Could you imagine, if you went back and made Diablo 2 or Hellgate right now, could we shave a year off?
Max Schaefer: I think that if we started over with Diablo 2 right now, we could have easily shaved a year off. That would’ve saved some marriages, by the way. *Laughs* But yeah, we didn’t have anywhere near the kind of tools that we do now, and that really makes a huge difference. If a level designer, a quest designer, a particle designer, an item balancer, and all these people can get their work in without having to bug a whole staff of programmers and wait a day for the build to see if it works – that’s a huge time-saver.

So, better tools, the knowledge that development isn’t running on a blank check, and a commitment right from the start to work quickly and efficiently. Paging Diablo 3 in 2012?

Click through for some more comments on what Max said, and what we talked about during the half hour when the mic wasn’t running.