Thyroid

Grim Dawn

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ActionRPGs are sexy. This is the second aRPG thread I've created in under a minute.

I've seen very little coverage outside of some circles, but the bottom line is that it's an aRPG from the Titan Quest guys plus an attempt to fix whatever problems Titan Quest may have had. Much of what I've gathered from this interview indicates wanting to add weight to your hits (good) and a darker, "edgier" approach - which is probably fine, but man I wish these games stopped inspiring each other when it came to the art.

(Digression: Everything is either a rainbow factory or the inner mind of a goth teenager. Or, god forbid, a rip-off of Team Ico's stuff. Hey developers, when you play Ico, do try and notice everything else. It's the stuff that made the game so great and which you've missed.)

Anyway, Grim Dawn. It still looks good.

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It looks really good! Though I wonder if Diablo 3 won't scratch all of my ARPG itch. I might donate just because it looks good though.

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Backed it, I loved Titan Quest, liked it much more than Diablo 2.

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I own TQ and the expansion and I think that the game is really good, but the loot system is not. I love everything else about the game and am hoping Grim Dawn will fix that.

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Titan Quest isn't aesthetically pleasing as diablo 2, but it's a better game, and honestly, the visual style in diablo 3 is just plain bad. I'm actually more excited for this game

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Man, I backed them with the Legendary Edition ages ago and completely forgot about it. Nice to see they haven't died or something.

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I too also liked titan quest more than diablo 2. I've been looking forward to grim dawn for so long that I actually forgot it existed...

It looks awesome

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I'm more excited about this and Torchlight II than I am for Diablo III.

*runs*

Totally agree.

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I liked torchlight a lot but it definitely had a lot of things that needed improvement. if the sequel addresses those then it's definitely something to keep an eye on.

TQ though... that game destroyed my life for like a month. Grim Dawn is going to hurt me.

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I loved the classes/class system in TQ, I haven't looked into the ones in this game at all if they've said what they are, but I hope they're just as cool

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Funded! :tup:

Update #10 (for backers) has some new gameplay footage. True diablo 1 like graphics and non of that neon diablo 3 stuff.

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Has anyone played this? I installed it last night and put maybe three hours into it. It's... a very strange beast, to be sure. On the one hand, the systems are solid as solid can be. The basic act of clicking on enemies to make them die feels impactful, the gear and skill progressions make sense and go easily, and overall it's just a nice thing to run around in.

 

On the other hand, it's very messy in a way that I don't think would happen in a traditionally published game. The art design is grimy and dirty to the point of making some enemies and objects unreadable. The items themselves are all trash or trash-derived, which make sense in the setting but is distasteful in that teenage "hardcore" kind of way. The skill system is needlessly complicated, with most skills having fourteen or sixteen ranks that make for incremental changes and rarely connect to anything else. The devotion system is hard to understand and feels like it's been tacked on. NPCs will natter at you for screens, usually with uninspired voice acting, and the upshot is always "Go here, get/kill this thing, come back."

 

So much of the game is mediocre in a way that makes it hard to see where the ambition was. All the best parts are easily recognizable from Titan Quest, but they don't come together with the same cogency, especially with the basic act of making a character. You're never really making a build, you're just collecting a set of tools that often has duplicates or gaps that you just paper over. I'm very mixed at this point, to be honest. It's not my first Kickstarter regret, but...

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It's scratching my aRPG itch at the moment, but all your criticisms are valid. It's no Path of Exile. Titan Quest never really clicked with me, and I doubt this will either.

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I've enjoyed some time with it. I do wish the art was more inspired. I mean that was one of the fun things about Titan Quest. Even if it did look pretty familiar right down to the Jason and The Argonauts inspired skeletons it still looked bright and inviting with a middle ground (not that I don't like grim dark or rainbow it's just that GD is pretty muddy.)

The gameplay feels not too challenging once you've figured out some synergy with skills and what to gear. But I think finding what works between so many skills and options makes it quite the chore. It doesn't help that there's not a lot of brevity in descriptions for things. 

I also miss the social side of things. I'm glad the game has a lobby system like Torchlight's. I wasn't actually sure if the game went beyond local multiplayer. I do kinda miss having some kind of in game chat though even if it's filled with trash most of the time.

 

I think I'll stick with PoE in the long run. Especially with the Ascendancy expansion being released on the 5th. Unlike GD I think it manages to have complex character development without making it utterly inscrutable. But that might just be Stockholm syndrome seeing as PoE's skillpoint system is pretty daunting to start with.

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Spent a couple of hours with this the other day and I was surprised by just how Titan Quest it is. The skill system especially is exactly the same as far as I can see, right down to the visual design. Thankfully the feel of combat is much quicker and more impactfull than TQ. I also agree that the visual design of the world is kind of muddy and cluttered, to the point where, for example, it took me quite a while to notice the first merchant in the first town.

 

Also, has anyone found this to be quite demanding on system resources? Granted, I have a potato for a video card, but I've had to set all settings to low and also set resolution to lower than native to boot.

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I haven't had any serious issues in regard to performance in my four-ish hours with it so far.

I am enjoying this game so far in that it is scratching the previously mentioned aRPG itch and it is a good way to sort of zone out for a bit and click bad guys. Everything feels good to me. It isn't a revolutionary game by any means, but it is getting the job done and I'm okay with that.

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It's scratching my aRPG itch at the moment, but all your criticisms are valid. It's no Path of Exile. Titan Quest never really clicked with me, and I doubt this will either.

 

Yeah... Titan Quest had the unique setting, at least. This has nothing even approaching that. Apparently I've put sixteen hours into it over the past two weeks and, although I enjoyed myself, I just finished the first act and felt no intrinsic sense of progress from it. I've unlocked a few skills, some of them active as opposed to my tendency in Titan Quest to prioritize the more-powerful passives, but I'm still playing the game in the exact same way that I did during the first hour. I don't even have the silver lining that I frequently find when revisiting Diablo 2, where I got to see my guy go from a peasant in cloth in leather to a metal-clad god; in Grim Dawn, I'm a weird, spiky bucket of rust throughout.

 

Anyway, I've gotten my fifty bucks of overeager Kickstarter funding out of this. I'm probably going to uninstall now.

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I picked this up recently and it's scratching my ARPG itch quite well. I liked Titan Souls and this keeps some of my favorite ideas from there intact, like how enemies that drop particular weapons also use them (just had a tough fight against a human boss cause he had a rare pistol that could freeze me) or how it sorts and now even stacks your inventory for you. Not entirely convinced by the setting, but I did like that for a while early on there was a focus on finding other survivors and kind of upgrading the camp that way. Then the tone kind of shifted away from that unfortunately.

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Got this over the weekend and really enjoying it so far. It needs a sense of humour rather badly, but mechanically it's fine and really scratching that aRPG itch for me

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