Following the long-awaited announcement of the May 15th 2012 release date for Diablo III, developers of comparatively small-fry action RPG Torchlight 2 -- who's members include several of Diablo's original creators -- issued a statement to congratulate the Blizzard team and assure their fans that they're still moving full-steam ahead toward their own launch.

With a competitor as massively anticipated as Diablo III to contend with, it would be folly for the 32 man Runic Games team to not take Blizzard's behemoth into account, but it seems that potential conflict might have been closer than they originally let on.

Speaking to Shacknews, Runic Games' CEO, co-founder (and originally one of the co-founders of Blizzard North) Max Schaefer, confirmed that now that Diablo 3 has an official date, they have adjusted Torchlight II's launch schedule to keep a bit of distance between the two games.

As for competition with Diablo 3, Schaefer says the newly announced date is a relief. "We're really bad at estimating when we're going to be done, but we think it would've been right around then," he said. "So we're going to give them a little bit of a wide berth, because we don't want to come out on the same weekend -- that would be really dumb. We're just going to use the time to finish up our polish pass so when we do come out it will be legitimate competition."

Whether this means we can expect it several weeks or months after May 15th is unclear, but at least it sounds like they're giving themselves enough time for the D3 hype to simmer down a little bit first.