I see a Grim Dawn rising...

[Grimnebulin]

Grim Dawn, a long in development ARPG by Crate, who are the current license holders of the Titan Quest engine.



I know Miktar started a thread back in 2010, so it's the mods call whether they want to cast Melt's Spell of Lesser Merging. It's also been mentioned in the Kickstarter thread, but I also reckon the game deserves a fresh start.

Yes, Diablo and Torchlight are just around the corner, so what makes this game any different? (but does it really matter if we're drowning in Diablo clones? For me, no) If we are to believe the developers, here are a few reasons why we should be interested:

- Combine any of five distinct skill classes each with multiple skill trees in which to specialize. Advance your class mastery up to 75 levels to unlock dozens of powerful skills and synergistic modifiers. New classes will be periodically released through downloadable content.
- Destructible environments give evidence of your massive battles while collapsing stonework and flying shards of furniture can be used tactically to cause further injury to your foes.
- Dynamic Weather brings the world to life with region-specific climates and a variety of weather effects. A sunny day can cloud over with mild rainshowers that builds into a booming thunderstorm. Variable wind gusts blow grass and affect objects like windmills and window shutters.
- Gameplay systems designed to expand for 200 levels of character progression, equipment, and enemies to fight makes for ridiculous amounts of replay value.
- Connect with old friends or make new allies in glorious multiplayer. Specially balanced multiplayer encounters will put your teamwork to the ultimate challenge.
- Collect blueprints that allow you to combine salvaged components into unique crafted items and then, later, use those basic crafted items with higher-tiered recipes to complete items of unprecedented badassness.
- Camera rotation enhances the three-dimensionality of the world and gameplay while levels are still designed so that players are not forced to rotate the camera.
- Refined loot system drops less junk items and ensures more consistent rewards from hero and boss monsters.
- Satisfying enemy damage and death effects with an option to enable blood and gore.
- New quest and conversation system will allow players to choose quest paths and rewards, interact with NPCs in more interesting ways, and an intuitive quest creation wizard will make life a lot easier for modders.
- An NPC faction system lets the player improve their relations with different NPC groups to earn rewards as their favor increases such as merchant discounts, new items, and additional quest lines. However, aiding one faction could turn a rival faction into your enemy. Choose which side you will support!
- The ability to spend money to reclaim skill and attribute points alleviates the fear and frustration of having to make early, uninformed decisions that could permanently nerf a character.
- More features are in the works and will be announced as Grim Dawn nears release.

There's also a pre-alpha gameplay vid which makes for very interesting viewing



I'll concede, the use of colour was a little disorientating at first, but I was really impressed by the enemy variety within a single encounter, the pace seems frenetic, and one's approach is going to have to be highly tactical. There's a lot going on, in a good way.

No talk of release date as yet, but the Kickstarter fund seems to be doing well. Here's the vid:

[MonGooS]

Been following it for ages now. It has become more and more impressive as time has gone on.

I have never understood the term "Diablo-Clone" when every Dungeon crawling RPG is referred to as one (Titans Quest, Torchlight, etc.) They are different games in the same genre, its like calling every FPS a "CoD Clone" or every strategy game a "C&C Clone". I see every block based game that is being created is referred to a "Minecraft Clone" also.

Enough about that though. Super excited for this game, and I love how involved the dev team is with the community. It always makes me smile when devs ask and answer questions and actually let them influence their decisions.

[Grimnebulin]

Been following it for ages now. It has become more and more impressive as time has gone on.

I have never understood the term "Diablo-Clone" when every Dungeon crawling RPG is referred to as one (Titans Quest, Torchlight, etc.) They are different games in the same genre, its like calling every FPS a "CoD Clone" or every strategy game a "C&C Clone". I see every block based game that is being created is referred to a "Minecraft Clone" also.

Enough about that though. Super excited for this game, and I love how involved the dev team is with the community. It always makes me smile when devs ask and answer questions and actually let them influence their decisions.

I totally agree about the Diable-clone comment. I used it because it's a term that speaks to a specific type of aRPG, and when used conjures an accurate interpretation of the intention without having to get into detailed descriptives.

I also failed to mention above that Crate have actually surpassed their Kickstarter target, which is very encouraging news. You can read more about what they intend to do with the excess, as well as more on the actual game here.

[Zoop]

I'm actually more excited for this than D3 and Torchlight 2 combined.

I always thought Titan Quest was D2's younger, better brother.

[MonGooS]

I never had any problems with Titans Quest either. My only problem with it was that is got a bit repetitive and didn't have as much of a selection of armor/weapons at Diablo. But other than that I loved it.

Just a bit of info on the release dates.

State of the Game Address

Releases

Alpha Release
We're not far off from a minimalist alpha where players can replay a small chunk of the world that comprises about 3-4 hours of gameplay. With the enemy level caps off, it could be replayed up to level 30.

The following is a rough list of the most significant tasks that would need to be finished:
Finish off the green starting area levels and part of the yellow slums area.
Get at least a main starting quest-line in and polish up some of the existing quest prototypes that can serve as sidequests.
Finish up the 3 nearly complete skill classes
A few other programming and design tasks

Rough estimate is that this will take 6-8 months to complete with our current resources.


Beta Release
The time between alpha and beta will depend on whether we want to shoot for a real content-complete beta or more of a Minecraft or Path of Exile style beta where the game is more complete than alpha but still in development. I'm thinking we're probably going to want to go with the work-in-progress style beta. I think we would still want to aim to have a more significant level of content built out though and this could take some time. With our current resources, it might 4-6 months from the start of alpha but we won't know until we see how alpha goes.

Final Release
We can't really provide a good estimate right now given our current situation. Getting to the full release is mainly just a matter of filling out content though at this point.

[echo]

Wow, some of those screen and especially the gameplay in the Kickstarter video looks like I originally hoped Diablo 3 would look like. I'm seriously considering backing this.

[echo]

Ok, so is there anyone who is still thinking of backing this? There is an option for $32, which includes 2 copies of the game. It works cheaper out than buying 1 copy and Crate get more money. I could pay and then you could just make right with me later on.

I also just want to back this to be able to say I backed something on kickstarter. It's like a bucket-list thing. PM me if you are interested.

[Obi Two Kenobi]

I'm going to be a bit noobish here, I'm not familiar with how this works. When someone backs this, will it also give them the game to download?

[echo]

Not sure if that is the case every time, but in this case it is. So you pay $16, you get the game when it's released (digital copy) and the satisfaction of knowing you backed this game.

[MonGooS]

I'm going to be a bit noobish here, I'm not familiar with how this works. When someone backs this, will it also give them the game to download?

It depends which Reward you choose. On the right side of the screen on the Kickstarter page all the rewards are described. So its basically X amount gets you the finished game, Y amount gets you the finished game along with Beta and Z amount gets you alpha, beta and the final release. There are many rewards, just read through them.

[echo]

Crate Expectations: On Grim Dawn’s $500k Kickstarter

Having read our previous interview with Crate’s Arthur Bruno – a crucial portion of which he has reposted on the Grim Dawn site as a sort of manifesto – I wanted to catch up with him and to talk about how the indie ARPG was looking after its half million dollar Kickstarter success. Read on for a discussion of the challenges of Kickstarting, and some good old-fashioned PC fundamentalism.

Pretty cool interview and nice to get some more feedback.