Grim Dawn “Ask Me Anything” Reddit Q&A

A few days ago Crate Entertainment’s Arthur Bruno has offered himself for an “Ask Me Anything” Q%A on Reddit, and now that it’s concluded we thought you might be interested in seeing some of the answers rounded up here for readability reasons. Here are some interesting ones:

What aspects of Titan Quest have been improved for Grim Dawn in your own opinion?

The biggest are mood / atmosphere and combat. I always felt like TQ was a little flat in terms of the atmosphere. There wasn’t that sense of mystery and danger that the Diablo games do so well. We’ve put a lot of effort into developing that more and creating an interesting world with a well-developed history. We’ve also put a ton of effort into combat and pacing. We’ve added blood / gore effects, enemy hit reactions, special deaths for some enemies, others ragdoll, zombies can be dismembered, hit sounds are crunchier, blood spatters on the ground and pools under bodies, etc.

There are also a lot of cool new features though. The more open world is something I really enjoy as a player who prefers to ignore the main story and run off exploring. We’ve also added more randomized elements, dynamic weather, a faction system, destructible environments – really cool busting through doors or blowing up walls to reveal hidden areas.

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Haven’t heard of this game before, but checking out your website it reminds me of that NWN and Baldur’s Gate/Planescape esque style and I love those games! So I’ll keep an eye out and donate to your kickstarter. 🙂

Two questions, how hard is the journey from concept/idea to actual substance, IE, a working game model? I see a lot of people who start with these excitable ideas but eventually they loose steam and the idea is just vapourware.

And secondly, where the heck do I find little indie studios? Is there a bar? A small watering hole on the web that you meet so I can see what sort of indie games people are working on? At the moment I rely on word of mouth from friends and Destructoid.

I think you’ll enjoy Grim Dawn then as we’re going for sort of a blend of ARPG and old-school style RPG. As a kid I loved the TSR Goldbox AD&D games like Pool of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Eye of the Beholder, etc. I want to advance the core gameplay of ARPG while bringing some of the magic of those older games into the mix.

It is a huge challenge and one that I think inexperienced developers often totally underestimate. The only reason we can be doing what we’re doing is that we started with the sourcecode from Titan Quest, which represents about $3m worth of past development. I’ve also built up a massive tolerance for working long hours, over the course of multiple years, from the development of Titan Quest – that was a brutal project. ; )

Honestly, I’m not really sure I have any better idea than you. I mainly only find other indie studios when read about them in articles or bump into the developers at conferences and such. I think it is tough though to really compile any sort of list since indie can range from larger more established studios that are technically independent from publishers but not really “indie” and, on the other end of the spectrum, inexperienced developers right out of school or may or may not ever finish a game.

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Hello, I loved Titan Quest and played it to death. The only thing it left me wanting for is a deeper and denser storyline. Will Grim Dawn fulfil that for me?

There will be more story in Grim Dawn and a deeper back-story / world history but not as much of a structured main quest-line. There is more open-ended exploration and different quest-lines / stories that you can become involved in. There will also be more lore to find in the world. So, we’re not aiming for a single, cinematic story experience but I think you’ll be pleased with the amount of story and lore in the world. We also have big plans for the future as we’ve taken the time to develop a back-story with multiple layers of reveals that will develop over the course of multiple expansions.

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Will there be more “direct” synergies in GD? My biggest issue with TQ is how the classes are rather disconnected, i.e. an archer/pyromancer can’t shoot fire arrows. “Only” one skill per “double class” would have sufficed and made the game feel better IMO.

Yes, I’ve been trying to make more of the skills have cross-mastery synergy. You can actually shoot fire arrows in TQ as a hunter / pyromancer though using earth enchantment. ; ) I’m also making more of an effort though to make skill masteries less weapon-type specific so that there is more potential to create different buildings around different weapon configurations.

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Loved titan quest, but one of my two concerns (the other being the nonexistant gore) is the difficulty level being to easy. I was blasting through the whole game running and gunning pretty much without dying until level 30 or something.

So what I’m wondering is will the difficulty level be more like titan quest or diablo 2, were I was dying pretty often and had to plan my moves for just about every encounter?

Also how is your approach to boss monsters? Any unique original abilities? Will they pack a punch (kinda like rakanishu from diablo2) or are they more like slightly stronger monsters with better loot?

Death comes a little quicker in Grim Dawn. I’ve balanced the combat so that you can basically kill or be killed a little more quickly if you don’t watch out. If you get surrounded, for example, you’ll die a lot faster than in TQ, so tactical movement is more important. There are also some enemies with pretty hardcore ranged attacks that you need to keep an eye out for and avoid. We’ve also created a number of enemies with high-damage attacks preceded by special animations, so if you’re paying attention, you can quickly get out of the way. No, the bosses definitely pack a punch. They tend to have an array of skills that can quickly prove deadly if you let them land a couple on you or don’t dodge the big attacks. We’ve put a lot more effort into creating encounters where players have to think a bit and keep moving around. Finally, we’ve balanced ranged and melee better in terms of their relative survivability and also created enemy skills that are particularly challenging to one or the other.

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I absolutely loved TQ and the expansion, and spent many, many hours playing them. I’m extremely excited to learn that you are working on this new project, and will be checking it out as soon as I post my question.

My question for you is, what were your takeaways from the character customization in that game? What worked and what didn’t in hindsight?

I’m assuming you mean the attribute, skill and equipment customization since our visual customization was total fail. ; ) I actually think it worked fairly well and there isn’t too much I’d want to change other than to correct some balancing problems with particular skills and equipment. It is a system that allows people to make mistakes but I don’t think that is a bad thing as long as it isn’t too unforgiving. The main thing I want to try to do better this time is to balance the distribution of attributes on various equipment types to prevent some of the imbalances that occurred on TQ, such as 100% dodge.

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Dont know if that was posted already, but please please change the loot system, so that strong bosses actualy drop good shit. If i remember correctly, most of the “good” loot was in chests in TQ. Was so dissapointing…

We’ve actually already fixed this by changing the way the loot tables work to provide for greater consistency in drops. The TQ loot system was just way too random and basically was just as likely to drop 0 legendary items or 6 at once. In Grim Dawn the odds scale more properly so on a boss chest, it is guaranteed to drop 1-2 good items, has a moderate chance of dropping 3-4, and a low chance of dropping 5+