Grim Dawn Interview

Crate Entertainment’s Arthur Bruno is once again back in the spotlight, having addressed several questions about their action RPG Grim Dawn and its current state of development in a new interview on PCGMedia. An excerpt to follow:

What features can we expect to find in the future that are more current or next-gen than past-gen?

We’ve done a lot to upgrade the combat over Titan Quest and I think it feels really satisfying now, whereas it fell kind of flat in TQ. We’re adding in more quests that offer choice and consequence, which has been around forever in traditional RPGs but not something you see much in ARPGs. I think that adds an interesting new dimension to the game for people who are more into exploring the world and lore.

I think we also have great itemization, which will be improved further once we roll out our new crafting system. A lot of the more interesting items are not yet accessible but you can get randomized affixes, unique items and even components (item add-ons) that grant unique skills. There is a lot of potential to create unique builds centered around item skills. For example, there are several items that allow you to summon unique pets not available through the regular class skills, so you could collect a few of those, combine them with class masteries that have pets and create an army for yourself.

Grim Dawn utilizes the same engine as Titan Quest; PathEngine. Why use a somewhat dated engine? In what ways, if any, has Crate improved the engine’s capabilities?

Path Engine is actually just a 3rd party pathing solution, which we don’t even use anymore. Titan Quest was a proprietary engine built by Iron Lore. The engine was advanced for 2006 and, with improvements, certainly still has life in it. I think people often make the mistake of assuming an engine becomes outdated over time but that is really only true if you stop developing it. I mean, Unreal Engine 3 is even older than the TQ Engine and is still widely used for AAA, cutting edge games.

Over the course of development we’ve totally replaced the pathing engine, physics engine, upgraded the shader model, added specular terrain, increased terrain resolution, added anti-aliasing up to 8x and anisotropic filtering up to 16x, added post processing effects, dynamic weather, depth of field and soft particles. We actually just made a few adjustments that I think will improve things even further when we release build 16 in the coming weeks.