Grim Dawn Grim Misadventures #52: Arcanist Mastery, Part One

The latest entry to the long-running “Grim Misadventures” feature on the Grim Dawn forums is more substantial than usual, as it covers the game’s B20 release and serves as the first part of a series of articles that cover the skills and build options we’ll have at our disposal when we choose the Arcanist mastery. What’s more, there are two new wallpapers for the Arcanist and Nightblade to go with it:

Arcanist is currently in testing and we expect it will be ready for release by October or earlier. What, you do not believe us?! Okay, it is true, B20 has taken a lot longer than anticipated but mastery development is much easier to predict. I suppose we should talk about B20 a bit before launching into the Arcanist.

Last update it looked like we were getting close to a releasable state on multiplayer but had some balancing and code issues with the new skill transmuters that we expected to take longer. Now the skill transmuters are essentially done, all problems resolved and some reasonable level of first-pass balancing. However, additional significant multiplayer bugs were revealed as testing continued and some of the original problems proved difficult to fix.

We have made significant progress since the last update though and only have a couple more issues that we feel need to be resolved before we can debut it to the public. We are not trying to make it perfect prior to release and it will be rolled out with the caveat that it is (play at your own risk). It is quite fun though and people have occasionally been able to play for an hour or so without a crash. There are still a number of crash bugs though and one of the big show-stoppers is that quest NPCs can stop responding to players and another where destructible objects, like the outlaw barricade in Act 2, can be destroyed for the host but remain for the clients.

We are actually getting ready to test fixes for both of those issues as I write this and we are hoping to knock off a couple more crash bugs in the next day or two. The plan then is a few days of testing to ensure no other major problems have been introduced with the fixes and then release. So currently I think we are looking at a release in 1-2 weeks.

Why have we run weeks past our original estimate? Well, multiplayer is about as complex as it gets. It is almost like releasing alpha again. There are just so many different things involved that can potentially not work right together and it is also much harder to test than singleplayer issues. We thought there would be less work since we were building off the network code for TQ but we have made so many changes to the game (new path engine, new physics, destructible objects, new quest system, quest choices, etc.) that a lot had to be rewritten and it took significant effort to get all those things behaving in a multiplayer environment. We are nearing a releasable state though and everyone who is brave enough to venture into multiplayer testing can help us take it the rest of the way.

The up-side of the delays is that Build 20 is going to be chock-full of improvements to class skills and itemization, new unique items and more. Waiting is never easy, but it will be worth it when Build 20 is released to you soon.