Hat tip to the Rampant Coyote on this:
OK, so the once-proposed MMO is… nowhere to be seen at present. Curious. And yet, with the fancy new peer-to-peer matchmaking, Torchlight will have multiplayer. Whee, right?
It strikes me that such functionality is similar to World of Warcraft’s Dungeon Finder. The DF is effectively a way to get peers together for an instanced gaming session, it’s just that the “lobby” for the matchmaking is the WoW world at large, a shared persistent game space.
Yes, yes, technically peer-to-peer isn’t the same thing as the client-server architecture that WoW uses, but the actual player experience of dungeon crawling is similar enough. Namely, get together with a few friends in an instanced dungeon and go kill stuff. Take loot home and go do your own thing for a while, lather, rinse, repeat. I find it interesting to see these two games potentially offering similar multiplayer game experience.
If the Torchlight guys are still looking to build an MMO, they seem to be doing it in pieces, layer upon layer. Add a persistent overworld, player economy and a few more treadmills (rep grinds with NPC factions, crafting suites, etc.), and you’re set.
Well, and jumping. You can’t have an MMO without jumping.
Tish Tosh Tesh 
I’m happy enough for Torchlight to be taking it slow. I think it will allow for a better structured, more solid game. I also like the idea that it’s a small company, slowly building themselves up.
Aye, I don’t mean to complain. I like that they are building carefully, making sure it’s a solid product. I mostly just find it interesting that they are monetizing each significant step rather than just trying to shove an MMO out of the door first thing. It seems like a solid business plan, and possibly even good game design, using the market as an iterative testing bed.
38 Studios seems to have come around to a similar philosophy, as did Cheyenne Mountain (Stargate Worlds/Stargate Resistance). The latter learned too late, and the former is teetering on the edge, it seems. The Torchlight team seems to have been building up carefully from the start, and I think it’s going to pay off for them.