Tag Archives: loot

Grim Dawn

Grim Dawn is an ARPG made by Crate Entertainment – largely refugees from Iron Lore, who made Titan Quest – which I have previously mentioned being excited for. Now that the game has reached Alpha stage it has been available to various backers and such, and having spent a decent amount of time with it now I’m ready to share some thoughts on the game. Do remember it’s still an alpha so nothing I say should be taken as absolute.

If you’ve played Titan Quest then Grim Dawn will immediately feel very familiar. The engine is the same and there haven’t been truly revolutionary changes in that regard. That said they’ve not been idle either and the engine is certainly a lot more impressive than it was in TQ. At first I was a little wary and wondered if I hadn’t just booted up a reskin of TQ, but Grim Dawn soon reveals that it has made a lot of changes from that game and the engine similarities aren’t indicative of the whole experience.

There are two major things I want to praise about this game. The first is that the pacing and character advancement seems to be spot-on, even though it’s still just an alpha. Leveling is far faster than the incredibly slow experience in TQ, where it rapidly became a chore. You similarly pick from a ‘Mastery’ – a skill tree – and can pick a second after a few levels to make a hybrid character. As you advance through these trees you obviously gain more powers and abilities, both passive and active, and there’s a pretty nice big mix of different things you can choose from. You can also spread skill points thinly or focus narrowly, and I’ve not played enough different characters to say for certain yet but it does seem both are viable in different ways. I never felt really overpowered unless I went back to older zones, and challenges were commonplace without being either overbearing or unreasonably hard. Basically GD has taken any criticisms and comments about TQ and worked to address them, and it has done so very successfully. Given that TQ is one of the better examples of the genre to begin with that says something about how GD is handling things.

This is the Demolitionist tree. It's not terribly glamorous but it does the job perfectly adequately. The Demolitionist herself is, however, both effective and explosively glamorous.
This is the Demolitionist tree. It’s not terribly glamorous but it does the job perfectly adequately. The Demolitionist herself is, however, both effective and explosively glamorous.

The second, and perhaps even more impressive achievement, given the genre’s pedigree, is that loot is damn well balanced. Not just in terms of giving you appropriate items, but inasmuch as you’re not inundated with tons of useless crap and vendor trash. You pretty quickly are able to graduate into only picking up yellow or better items for sale, and for my part I never felt like I was being punished because I wanted to get on and play instead of constantly warping back to town to sell stuff. On the other hand rare drops are indeed fairly rare, but they tend to come with stats that really do make them unquestionably better than anything else you’ll find at that level. Unless you get something for a totally different class it doesn’t seem likely that you’ll very often discard a new blue item because your current green is better. There does need to be a little more tweaking of the ‘gem’ equivalents in the game, I think, but nothing terribly drastic there.

Between those two major factors already existing at this stage the game really seems to be refining the ARPG genre to a fine polish so I’m eagerly awaiting new content updates with the arrival of the beta. That all said there are a couple of things that could do with some improvement. The sounds in the game aren’t terribly inspiring and contribute to a niggling sense that your weapons and attacks lack ‘Oomph’ (the music is superb though). Guns especially feel like they fall short of this, and whilst guns in reality rarely sound like they do on the movie screen, these more subdued and realistic sounds in GD make the things feel quite weak. Similarly, although there’s not much you can do about it given the nature of the genre, attacks in general can sometimes feel rather lightweight regardless of the damage they actually do. It’s especially strange because I never really shared this feeling in Titan Quest, where combat wasn’t the most immersive ever but never felt like it fell short either in that regard. So I would say the one big area the game needs to look at improving over the coming months is that the combat needs to become more visceral, to feel like there’s more impact and power to blows, and a bigger bang with guns and bombs.

Despite those concerns the game is shaping up to be something pretty darned good, especially for still being in alpha. Due to the limited content so far I can’t really recommend the buy-in price for alpha access at this point ($50) unless you’re a huge fan of the genre and really jonesing for a fix, but if you want to hop on the beta bandwagon when that rolls around I’d be very surprised if you don’t get your money’s worth, and I’m confident that by the time release rolls around we’re gonna have a pretty damn good ARPG on our hands.

ARPG

With all the hubbub around Diablo 3 lately it’s probably been lost, but the Action RPG genre is actally a thriving one, with several exciting things on the way. I thought I’d quickly run through a few on the horizon in this post, so those of you who don’t already spend too much time hunting for loot can begin to do so!

First up we have Torchlight 2. The original Torchlight was a great little game, if lacking in a couple of areas, and the sequel looks likely to tidy up pretty much everything that was criticized to make for a great experience.

Next we’ll look at Grim Dawn. Grim Dawn is coming from Crate Entertainment, founded by folks from Iron Lore who worked on the fairly well-regarded Titan Quest. I’ve not played that myself but I got it in the Steam Sale so I will be giving it a look soon, but everything I’ve seen about Grim Dawn has me very very excited. Grim Dawn is also promising an open world where you can wander into trouble long before you’re prepared to deal with it, which sounds like a pretty promising angle to me, and the whole exploration side of things will hopefully be played up!

Taking a slightly different approach is the online-only Path of Exile, which gave us a truly glorious image of a skill tree I shall show you in a moment; it really puts Diablo 3 to shame. At any rate it’s another promising-looking ARPG on the way, and one whose funding through microtransactions looks to be backed up by people who have actually got a notion of why microtransactions cause some problems, and are trying to avoid them.

Meanwhile, in Spira…

There are also people trying new things in the genre, such as Nyrthos, being made by some Czech czaps which is aiming to be playable in browsers and on iOS. At first I was skeptical about that, but upon reflection, if they can get the pacing down properly, that might just work – ten minutes of ripping through baddies on your lunch break or on the bus could actually be a whole lot of fun. We’ll have to wait and see!

So if you like sitting around all day clicking the mouse incessantly and weighing up whether your new Chastity Belt of Frustration +3 is better or worse than your Codpiece of the Equine King then it seems like there are going to be a heck of a spread of options in the coming months! Tell us in the comments what you’re excited for, and let us know if we’ve missed any!