Grim Dawn Screenshots and Interview

In addition to a few screenshots from Act 2, IncGamers is offering up a two-part video interview with Crate Entertainment’s Arthur Bruno about their ambitious action RPG Grim Dawn. If you’re the type who prefers video over text, however, I’ll simply link you to part one and part two since transcriptions are provided. It’s a biggie, so I’ll grab an excerpt from each:

PY: Looking ahead to Act Two, what can we expect to find when that lands? You’ve kind of expanded Act One over the last month or so, but what’s coming up?

AB: Basically, the bridge that leads northwest out of town will be repairable, and people can repair that once they’ve killed the Warden and collected the requisite amount of resources. Then they can strike off north and there’ll be a whole bunch of additional quests. The quest tools kinda developed concurrently with us putting out Act One, so I’d say that we didn’t really leverage them to their full capabilities there. We’ve done a little bit more on that end in Act Two, where you’ve got a bunch of quests that offer some choice in terms of how you can complete them, and that has repercussions.

But basically, it’s a new environment and a half above ground. There’s a more open, rocky grassland with a lot of elevation changes, and then there’s a drier highland area that you head into, which will eventually bring you into Act Three. Then we have a new mine underground, and ruins underground, to do.

PY: I was running through some of the underground areas last night and they’re pretty big. I was getting horrendously lost! [Laughs] Moving on to modding, though. Obviously you can’t determine what the community’s going to come up with, but what are your thoughts on the modding right now? Are you guys thinking about creating tools to make things a little bit easier for people? How far have you gone with your thoughts on that?

AB: Honestly, we haven’t gone that far. This project has really been one step at a time. In some ways, when you’re such a small team, each person is responsible for so much that you have to kinda compartmentalise what you’re dealing with or you just go crazy. So it’s kind of in the back of our minds.

Some of the new tools that we’ve created for ourselves will, I think, be much friendlier to modders than what was available on Titan Quest. We’ve built a lot more flexibility into the game for example, one of the big limitations in Titan Quest was that you could only have nine masteries, because that was the limit of what was included in the game. We’ve removed that restriction; people can basically add as many as they want. The quest tools are all new and I think are much easier to deal with, but they’re also more powerful. We’ve added in LUA scripting, which allows people to do a lot more. There’s the whole faction system which we’re still developing.

To some extent, I feel like we haven’t even had the time to really fully exploit these tools and push their capabilities, so I think there’s a lot of opportunity for modders to do stuff above and beyond what we’ve been able to do with the game so far.

…

PY: Looking back on it now, do you think it was the right decision for you to try to develop this independently as a small team?

AB: I do. As hard as it is, I don’t see publisher involvement as an option especially earlier on. We did talk to some publishers and we got to the point of basically looking over contracts, and the reality is the business model there is just so brutal that I don’t feel like it would be sustainable.

Not only is there not a lot of reward for the developer, but it also puts you in a very precarious position where you get enough money to start up faster and assemble a team and put the game together more quickly, but at the end of development, you’ve incurred a large burn rate with all of the people you’ve taken on, and once you put the game out, your funding stops. You no longer receive payments from the publisher you’re basically just losing money.

At that critical point, which is the point where a lot of companies fold. I mean, that’s basically where Iron Lore went under; they finished development on Immortal Throne and the game went out. You basically have to line up the next project quickly. If you can’t line up the next project quickly enough, then you’re out of business.

Beyond that, it also de-incentivises you from wanting to continue to work on that project and support it, because you’re basically not earning any of the reward for doing so. In some cases you actually can’t, because the publisher controls the IP, so you have to get permission whenever you want to release a patch or do anything. We didn’t want to end up in that situation.

This is kind of an all-or-nothing. We’re out here scraping by, trying to do this on our own, and if we’re successful then we’ll be in a very good position where we own our IP and can continue to keep supporting it, developing it, and releasing content for it, and we’ll directly benefit from that. If we don’t, then we’ll be no worse off than we would be had we signed a publisher deal and not been able to jump onto that next project.

PY: I forgot to ask you something earlier, to do with future content: multiplayer’s something I’m desperate to see. How far off are you, on that?

AB: Er. Pretty close. Had you asked me a couple of months ago then I would’ve said that it’d be out by now, but there have been some lingering difficult-to-squash technical issues. We’ve got through a couple of them and we’re able to connect now and play for a little bit, but there are still some bugs that are the result of fundamental changes we’ve made to the engine since we inherited it from Titan Quest. Basically, our changes to the pathing system, the way that things spawn, and factions and whatnot.

We’ve gotten through most of the major bugs and I would say that and I’ll probably be wrong there’s a good chance that it could roll out in the next two months.