It is developed by American studio Echtra Games and published by Perfect World Entertainment for Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch in October 2020.

Runic was founded by several video game industry veterans with experience from dungeon crawlers like Diablo, Hellgate: London, and Fate, many of whom had been at Flagship Studios at the time of its closure in 2008.

[4] With only fourteen employees to start, Runic decided to stay closer to their roots and develop a single-player game without an online component so as to get a product out faster and then build upon that in the future; this ultimately became Torchlight.

While Runic had grown under Perfect World's investment, Baldree and Schaefer wanted to get back to smaller scale development, the reason for their amicable departure.

[10] Schaefer was still keen on the Torchlight MMO, but with the direction the studio had taken with Hob, he decided to leave Runic games along with additional programmers to try to fulfill this vision.

[12] Torchlight Frontiers was first announced on August 9, 2018,[11] and early versions of the game were available to play at the 2018 Gamescom trade show and PAX West later that month.

PC Gamer noted that Torchlight III was technically sound, but called the dungeons "cookie cutter" and ultimately concluded that "what was missing [was] more than what was there".

Nintendo Life praised the game for its rewarding gameplay loop, lengthy endgame, and replayability while criticizing its technical issues and calling its Fort system "underutilized".