Grim Dawn ARPG

[Tycow]

Hello all! It's time for Christmas game recommendation time.

Have an itch for something similar to Diablo 2? Then I thoroughly recommend Grim Dawn! Made by the creators of Titan Quest, it is my go to game for all ARPG needs... I'm currently sitting at 189 hours played...

Players have six different masteries to choose a primary and secondary class from, enabling a wide range of play styles and tactics. The story is set around a demonic force invading the Grim Dawn world, and the resistance against it.

Major features:

- Dual Class System allows you to combine any of six distinct skill classes to create your own customized playstyle. Advance your class mastery to unlock over 26 powerful skills and synergistic modifiers per class. Additional classes will be released with expansions.

- Choice and Consequence gives you power to shape the world and affect the fate of many. Tough decisions will leave significant impact as strangers on the road, families in need and even entire villages may live or perish based on your actions. With great power comes great responsibility and it is not always easy to predict the outcome of your choices in a world driven to desperate extremes.

- Faction-Based Questing lets you improve your relations with different NPC groups to earn rewards (such as merchant discounts, new items, and additional quest lines) as your favor with them increases. However, aiding one faction could turn a rival faction into your enemy. Choose which side you will support!

- A Hand-Crafted World immerses you in humanity’s plight as you venture out into detailed environments filled with reminders of a once mighty empire on the brink of annihilation. Grim Dawn’s world strikes a fine balance between hand-crafted design and randomization.

- Refined Loot Drops result in less junk items and ensure more consistent rewards from hero and boss monsters.

- Brutal Combat featuring blood spatters, dismemberment and physics-based ragdoll. Crush enemies into a pulp, blow them to bits or send them flying over a ledge to their doom.

- 300+ Hero Monsters individually designed, named and configured with their own special skills provide unique, challenging experiences. You never know where or when enemy heroes may appear and even after hundreds of hours of play, you'll continue to find new names you've never seen before. Occasionally two or more heroes can spawn together to create an ultimate challenge!

- Destructible Environments give evidence of your massive battles as you kick through house doors, destroy furniture and smash crumbling walls to reveal secret passages.

- 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 rain showers that build into a booming thunderstorm. Variable wind gusts blow grass and affect objects like windmills and lanterns.

- Multiplayer allows you to connect with old friends or make new enemies in co-op and pvp modes.

- Recipe-Based Crafting produces powerful equipment and consumables. Collect recipes from enemies, chests or quest rewards and add them to your crafting compendium. Rare recipes can call for exotic items found in the remote corners of the world. Higher tier recipes can use lower tier crafted items as ingredients, resulting in a pyramidal build up to the most uber crafted accessories.

-Controllable 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.

-Modding Tools will allow players to create their own content and to share them with the rest of the world. The amount of content available in Grim Dawn will be as limitless as the imaginations of the players.

Whilst it is in development since (and has been since 2010) as of today the game is feature and content complete, with full release being slated for February 2016.

It's currently available for £11.99 (40% off in Steam sale) and I thoroughly recommend it! It also has 3510 positive reviews out of 3727 on Steam.

Let me know if you get it... I'm always happy to help out new characters with some of my toons!

(Note, I know matthewfarmery made a post about GD in 2011... I thought we could have a new one as it's almost been released!)

[RegisterMe]

Couldn't sleep, read this, bought it. You're a bad person Tycow!

[Memnoch]

Grim Dawn is pretty good fun. I haven't played it in a few months now though. It's one of those games, at its stage of development back then, where you reached the end of the content available at that time and a placeholder would tell you that you could go no further.

If you enjoy Diablo style gameplay then you will like this. Nothing more needs to be said really.

I will need to fire this up again as the final part of the game looks like its available. Time for more monster grinding!

[Tycow]

Couldn't sleep, read this, bought it. You're a bad person Tycow!

I aim to please!

Let me know how you get on!

[matthewfarmery]

I bought this game before it even hit alpha, or when it came onto steam. I'm also one of the internal testers for this game.

But yeah, its an awesome game, while it might not be liked by everyone, (it is a lot better and faster paced then Titan Quest) but the game is a lot better then TQ, I pumped nearly 700 hours in this game, and some have pumped over 1000 hours and more.

But yeah, the game is pretty much complete, what remains is balancing and optimisation. To me, I wouldn't go back ti diablo 2 or Path of Exile ever again.

Anyway, its an awesome game in my book.

[fiksal]

is the coop drop in / drop out style?

[matthewfarmery]

you can host a game, and people can join you. and you can leave anytime.

thing is mind, MP isn't a huge focus on the game, there are still a lot of bugs concerning MP at the mo, its low on the priority list. but as the game gets close to release, then MP bugs should get fixed. It's just that SP content, and the SP experience is first.

unlike D2 and POE, GD is mainly focused on SP, I've mainly play SP, so MP doesn't really bother me.

[Tycow]

I've just got an Occultist to level 45 in the space of two weekends, and he's properly OP at times. I'm trying to run the Steps of Torment (the roguelike dungeon) but I keep getting WTFPwned by the end boss.

One day!

How is everyone else doing?

[matthewfarmery]

got a shaman / acanist lighting based char to level 58, so not doing too badly.

one thing to note mind, b30 that will be coming next year will focus on balance, I also feel that armour is a bit off at higher levels, and you need a huge amount of physique to get better armour, (especailly when your not a soldier or not invested hugely in phys. as casters seem to be a bit of a raw deal hen it comes to armour. still, hopefully once the game has been balanced out, that hopefully will change.

oh yes, only fair to warn people. a number of uses have reported losing their stash, (it gets completely wiped) the devs are on their hols so not done anything yet. but from what little the mods of the forum and a few users have gathered, its seems to be linked to MP and maybe steam cloud.

its a very nasty bug, so until this matter is fixed, my advice is the following

1 turn off steam cloud

don't play any mp games (or play them at your risk)

also manually backing up the save folder is a good idea, there are a few threads on this, the cause seems to be linked to MP, but not 100%

hopefully once the devs are back, they can fix this nasty bug.

[Krusade]

Gah! I really don't need another time sink of an RPG to get it's grips on me what with Fallout 4 and Xenoblade Chronicles X currently lurking in my PS4 and Wii U. Then I read that this is from a company founded by on of the main Titan Quest devs. Since Titan Quest is in my opinion the best game of it's type ever made I kinda have to give this a shot.

Downloading now.

EDIT: Yup that's a good game.

[felter]

It's quite a good game, it's a shame it suffers from baganitis (just made that up). This is where a game has a small inventory bag and far too many useless drops, and the player has to return to town every 5 minutes to empty inventory so they can get even more useless junk into their inventory, just to have to return to town again 5 minutes later. This results in them spending as much time going back and forward to town than actually playing the game. Titan quest suffered from the exact same infliction just like a lot of other games, but a lot of the other games tried to do something about it. Even back in the old days with Dungeon siege you could get a donkey with extra baggage space and a spell to turn items into cash. Torchlight 2 with pets that you could send back to town to sell the goods while you carried on playing. Diablo 3 where rather than useless items that you are just going to sell or break down you drop gold instead. Grim Dawn lets you expand your bag a tiny little bit, where you might just get an extra 2 minutes before having to return to town.

I find the lack of inventory and the over amount of useless drops so annoying, if I was to give the game a 4 out 5 score for game-play, I would drop that score down to 3 at best due to this annoying feature. Apart from that, like I said it's a quite good game.

[RegisterMe]

Interesting, I never run out of inventory space. Note though that I do have the loot filters turned on so I only see magic and better (and sometimes raise it higher still).

Oh, and I have a level 58 Witchblade (Soldier Occultist), and have just started act 2 Elite. Elite is.... hard.

[matthewfarmery]

It's quite a good game, it's a shame it suffers from baganitis (just made that up). This is where a game has a small inventory bag and far too many useless drops, and the player has to return to town every 5 minutes to empty inventory so they can get even more useless junk into their inventory, just to have to return to town again 5 minutes later. This results in them spending as much time going back and forward to town than actually playing the game. Titan quest suffered from the exact same infliction just like a lot of other games, but a lot of the other games tried to do something about it. Even back in the old days with Dungeon siege you could get a donkey with extra baggage space and a spell to turn items into cash. Torchlight 2 with pets that you could send back to town to sell the goods while you carried on playing. Diablo 3 where rather than useless items that you are just going to sell or break down you drop gold instead. Grim Dawn lets you expand your bag a tiny little bit, where you might just get an extra 2 minutes before having to return to town.

I find the lack of inventory and the over amount of useless drops so annoying, if I was to give the game a 4 out 5 score for game-play, I would drop that score down to 3 at best due to this annoying feature. Apart from that, like I said it's a quite good game.

first off, what are you collecting? white items should be ignored, yellow items should be ignored once you hit a certain point, otherwise, you can sell the items (or stop collecting them). you really should be looking out for blue and green gear.

components can now stack, (as the completion bonuses have been stripped) also completing certain quests can also give you extra bags. (4 total on normal difficulty) So I'm not really sure why you seem to think you need to collect everything. I played the game a lot, I only go back to town on occasions. (also the loot filter is now a per char basis) and is on the bottom left of the screen. so once you are past level 20 plus, you will see more yellows and switch your loot filter to magic.

there will be third party mods like GDvault that will allow you to store gear (once the game is final). I mainly story blue items, and components in my transfer stash. the increasing of stash size has been talked to death. And probably won't really change.

[Tycow]

Hit level 50 on my Occultist/Shaman... now going to start again with a pure Shaman.

[Tycow]

Rock Paper Shotgun have done a "Wot I Think" for Grim Dawn.

[Morkonan]

The famous Diablo II Battlechest is still sold in retail stores...

Just sayin'

(Actually, I need to pick up a new one. I think my last D2 disk is beyond repair. :/ )

PS - I'm not dissing Grim Dawn. It looks interesting. I'm just promoting the best-ever ARPG ever, ever.

[felter]

Don't know what they have done with the last patch but the game doesn't do it for me now. The map is broken and certain areas seem to have been cut off and I can no longer get to them or does that happen in the game anyway. There seems to be a part of the map that has a question mark on it wasn't there the other day, and I can't get to the area, I used to be able to get it but no more.
The local map is broken you scroll on it which takes it so far, then when you try to scroll some more it moves to a different part of the map so you cant see certain parts of the map any longer.

[matthewfarmery]

if you are talking about act 2, they redone it, made it more linear, so you need to find those riftgates again. but I suggest you post on their forums, and get some help there. I not played the game for a bit, so will try a bit later.

[felter]

As far as I know I'm still on act 1, never had any message telling me anything different or that I had finished act 1.

[felter]

Seems the map has been changed, and it is just confusing people, as they are having trouble getting to places that they could get too before, so I'm not the only one.