Shacknews got a short preview of Torchlight 2, which they evidently enjoyed greatly. It sounds like the game is already in a very polished state, which bodes well for its impending release. (The game’s music is also really good, it must be said.) Gaming Illustrated also got a preview.

G4TV has some Torchlight 2 gameplay footage from PAX; check thou it out! Or, ya know…don’t. It is G4, after all.

A evidently in a public beta for those who purchased the game through Steam. Which makes sense, seeing as how the editor itself ties in to Steam Workshop.

A flurry of screenshots of Baldur’s Gate: Enhanced Edition were released in the last week or so:

• Here’s one of the PC interface…
• Here’s nine more…

Also, don’t miss this RPGFan interview with Trent Oster.

You know, I have to confess: Neverwinter just looks interesting to me. Yes, I know it’s an MMO, and yes, I know that Cryptic aren’t exactly all that and a bag of competence, but…there’s just something about the idea of an MMO that allows for (encourages?) player-created content that seems interesting to me. (Of course, I can also see how that sort of thing might end up going horribly, horribly wrong.)

And…Irrational Games is still hiring! They’re looking for level designers and environmental artists. They’re also taking pre-orders for this book of BioShock Infinite concept art, which admittedly does look pretty cool.

Which brings us to…you know, we went a whole week without 38 Studios-related news, but the studio and its unreleased Kingdoms of Amalur MMO were back in the gaming press this week. And not just because the loan to Curt Schilling’s failed studio could have consequences in the Rhode Island state elections. (See also: Engadget’s take on the pitfalls of public-private funding partnerships.)

R.A. Salvatore and Ian “Tiberius” Frazier chaired a panel at DragonCon in which they discussed some of the philosophical underpinnings of the doomed MMORPG. Set 5,000 years after Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Kingdoms of Amalur would have featured a world in which the technology used to kickstart the plot of Reckoning — the Well of Souls, a means to immortality — would have been activated and brought into effect over all of Amalur.

“What does it mean to the societal structures of the world when all of the sudden you’ve got immortality?” the author asked. It’s one of those deep questions my generation would ponder back when it was in its late teens, the party dying down and the munchies running out. “The obvious answer was everybody’s going to be happy, we’re all going to live forever!”

But it’s not so simple. Population, for one thing, doesn’t stop growing. The world becomes more and more crowded.

Salvatore wanted to take it a level deeper still, exploring the ramifications on a more personal level. “What does it do to the leader of a church whose entire power base is predicated on promising you an afterlife?” Suddenly the churches are no longer needed. How does that effect the moral structure of a society?

“What about the old lady whose lost her husband and children.” Old and broken down, she’s looking forward to dying and seeing her family again. “Does she want to live forever? Does she want to go through the Well of Souls? What about the emotions of the last people that lost a spouse, mother, husband, child or best friend before the Wells became active?

“This was the philosophy of Amalur. When you did something that was going to have implications you had to explore those implications,” Salvatore explained. “Instead of giving me a quest series to go collect 11 rat ears… give me the quest about the woman that doesn’t want to go through the Well but her family wants me to. Give me the quest about the bitter person that’s trying to get back at the Gnome who she thinks created the Well of Souls in her town because her son died before. Give me those kind of quests. That’s what we were trying to do.”

You know, the more that gets leaked about the game once known only as Project Copernicus, the more of a tragedy I think it is that it never saw the light of day. I praised Reckoning for some of the philosophical questions it raised with its presentation of a single fateless protagonist in an otherwise wholly fated, fully deterministic world. It sounds like the MMORPG would have taken that same philosophy and expanded upon it by a good order of magnitude.

Pity.

And while I hate to end on a downer of a note, this story is worth highlighting for the very…unexpected and perhaps bizarre way the real world and the virtual intersected in one particular tragedy. Sean Smith was one of four US State Department officials killed in the assault on the US embassy in Libya yesterday. In the universe of EVE Online, however, he was known as Vile Rat, a well-respected and highly influential player who participated in the game’s ruling council and many of its more tumultuous events.

In one fell swoop, the Libyan rabble not only managed to de-stabilize US-Libyan relations…they also managed to de-stabilize the universe of the biggest sci-fi MMORPG going. Not that the latter was their aim, of course.