KickStarter Grim Dawn

[Average Manatee]

You generally reach your best skills in D2 by the end of normal, but I agree with the sentiment. D2 also used to be especially bad about this because no respecs meant you were doing shit like only putting 1 point into everything until getting your level 30 skill that you actually plan to use long term.

 

[Vic]

The game starts at max level, simple as.

 

[Cryomancer]

The game starts at max level, simple as.

Then why even have leveling? Serious question. Levels should serve as a representation of how well advanced your character is in an archetype.

Imagine Mystara operating under MMo logic. Every magic user in the setting is a Level 20 magic user that can switch from its specialization every time at will. Every magic user also has the same stats, and the unique difference between them is the gear that they are wearing. There are no specific spells for specific situations; instead, the combat is all about rotating in a set of spells that, after being cast, become unable to be cast again for a set amount of time for no reason and their power scales purely with the gear of the caster.

BTW, in Diablo 2, you will probably NEVER reach lv cap. 80 is end game territory.

You generally reach your best skills in D2 by the end of normal,

Disagreed. Necros? Minions get skeletons on LV 1, and bone necros get bone spears at 18. Druid? Wind druid get tornado at 24, shapeshift druid get werewolf/bear at LV 1/6. Paladin gets a powerful holy fire aura at level 6 and a blessed hammer at level 18.

ou spend the first half of the process whacking things with a stick and maybe casting a lame spell you don't like every 4 seconds due to lack of mana or whatever.

I don't see him running out of mana every time here.

 

[Vic]

Btw abija I've been playing Sacred: Gold much longer in terms of playtime on one character than Grim Dawn and I still haven't been able to beat it on the hardest difficulty. It gets very grindy in the later difficulties. Game has 5 of them and you have to beat the campaign 5 times and each time the enemy levels increase by quite a bit. That's just trying to beat the story on the hardest difficulty. The max level is something like 200+.

https://www.sacredwiki.org/index.php/Sacred:Game_Difficulty

Not saying the game is better than GD, because it's not, more of an euro jank ARPG, but Grim Dawn is far from being the longest ARPG.

 

[Average Manatee]

Disagreed. Necros? Minions get skeletons on LV 1, and bone necros get bone spears at 18. Druid? Wind druid get tornado at 24, shapeshift druid get werewolf/bear at LV 1/6. Paladin gets a powerful holy fire aura at level 6 and a blessed hammer at level 18.

To be clear, I meant at the latest. So at worst you still have 2/3rds of the difficulties to fully use whatever your build is.

 

[Hagashager]

Boy howdy I have mixed feelings on Grim Dawn.

I'm not an ARPG person, and GD is serving as a good reminder why.

Diablo 2 filtered me completely, Torchlight was a little better, but not much, Sacred 2 completely filtered me as well.

Grim Dawn has come closest to making me understand the ARPG's appeal, but it still doesn't feel that great.

Is grinding for higher numbers and refining your build to get higher numbers all there is here? Is that actually why you do this? Because the moment to moment gameplay feels mind-numbing. I mean that literally, I space out half the time while playing this.

The Good:
The aesthetic and power fantasy are fantastic, it's why I stick with it. The Grim Dark schtick is cool without being weird or stupid. Characters still act like decent people even though things have gone to shit.

The class variety is the main hook for me. No other game has allowed **multiple** versions of a gunslinging mage, or techno-barbarian, or Necromancer-Druid. Everything's viable, too. I'm playing a sorcerer (Demolitionist x Arcanist) who uses high explosives for damage and wizardry for support with a shotgun for my default attack. It works really well.

I can say this: Grim Dawn is daunting without being capricious in its design. The devs WANT you to have a good time at any skill level, enjoy the power fantasy. The autistic number crunching is there for the autists, it's not a requirement.

The Bad:
In good faith, none of my criticisms are unique to Grim Dawn, unfortunately, they're all a part of the foundation of an ARPG.

I am bombarded by loot that is so incremental as to be not worth even looking at. I started filtering out Whites, Yellows and Greens except for "Double Rares" and even then it gets cumbersome. The best way to get decent loot is to grind specific bosses over and over again.

There is no real sense of progress. When I reload a game everything repopulates, period. You'll always be clearing out Devil's Crossing be it at Level 1 or Level 100. While not everything levels with you, major enemies do, it makes whatever I do feel like busy work. "Yeah yeah, gotta take out this same goon".

Virtually all skills are some form of AOE or buff. Tne entire design of the game is fighting hoards and hoards and hoards, sometimes the hoards are lead by a damage-sponge boss who will demand 13 grenades, 7 ice-blast, 57 gunshots, at least three swigs of your infinite health potion and a partridge in a pear tree.

I'm only about level 30, so I'm hoping at least some of this will ease up, but so far this feels very mechanical and meta. Any ability to be immersed in the game itself is dashed by the sheer *mechanism* of the thing.

 

[spectre]

Is grinding for higher numbers and refining your build to get higher numbers all there is here? Is that actually why you do this? Because the moment to moment gameplay feels mind-numbing.

Yeah that's basically it. The ideal endgame for the genre. That and the dopamine hit when you get showered by correctly-colored loot.

More seriously, the genre's ancestry is with roguelikes, so at least in theory, it should be about making good use of whatever the game (randomly) drops at you and staying alive.
Modern arpgs (diablo clones) will blur that line, cause dying is usually not an issue and you will typically be able to freely share stuff between characters,
so that unique item you've found may actually be an asset to a character you haven't even made yet.
Part of the appeal is coming up with a build, finding gear for it and seeing it all come together (unless you're one of the spoiled persons who immediately look up the most efficient shit online).
That's basically it when it comes to stuff you'd traditionally expect in and rpg.
After that, it's the loot casino, fishing for stuff that will make you slightly more efficient at what you're already doing (though some finds enable highly specific builds, as happens in Path of Exile, for instance)
and feeling good when making groups of enemies die in an entertaining fashion. Yeah, don't overthink it.

 

[Fedora Master]

Played to Ugdenbog again and the ga- zZzzZzzzZzz

 

[MjKorz]

Yeah that's basically it.

The real endgame is beating all the celestial bosses.

 

[Krivol]

The real endgame was the friends we made along the way.

FTFY

 

[MjKorz]

The real endgame was the friends we made along the way.

FTFY

The best friend I made along the way was Ravager.

 

[Sinilevä]

Is grinding for higher numbers and refining your build to get higher numbers all there is here? Is that actually why you do this?

Pretty much. When I played this I would play the build until I can kill Lokarr on ultimate difficulty, then I would consider the build to be viable. You can, of course, set your own challenges, like killing all the celesteal bosses etc, but I personally couldn't be arsed with all the grind.

 

[Vic]

Don't lookup builds online though because most of the fun is coming up with your own build ideas.

 

[ferratilis]

I'm not an ARPG person, and GD is serving as a good reminder why.

You've made a mistake by approaching the genre in a wrong way. To understand the appeal of arpgs, you should play Diablo 1. It's unsurpassed in terms of style and atmosphere, and has a more simple design where you descend a series of dungeons to kill Diablo, that's it. There are no complex skill trees or crafting materials to collect, it's hack and slash in its most pure form. The current state that arpgs have evolved (one could also say devolved) into can make it difficult to understand the appeal of the genre at the time when Diablo 1 came out. It was so popular that the development team at Bioware was losing time working on Baldur's Gate because they got hooked on D1. So go back, play D1, and then you will know if the genre is good for you or not.

 

[MjKorz]

So go back, play D1, and then you will know if the genre is good for you or not.

How can you find out whether the genre is good for you by playing a game that is no longer a representative of the current state of the genre?

 

[udm]

Played to Ugdenbog again and the ga- zZzzZzzzZzz

Ugdenbog was extremely boring. I don't know why, but it put me to sleep a couple of times. I can't put my finger on it, I think maybe it's because there's not much challenge apart from a few new enemy types. Also maybe the layout of the map is too homogeneous in places and the whole place has only 1 shade of green and brown. The game picks up again when you get to Act 6, thankfully.

 

[Cyberarmy]

whole place has only 1 shade of green and brown.

I think this coupled with uninteresting enemies makes that place really boring.
Reminds me of Titan Quests Asian parts with cavemen where I literally slept while in a LAN party...

 

[ferratilis]

So go back, play D1, and then you will know if the genre is good for you or not.

How can you find out whether the genre is good for you by playing a game that is no longer a representative of the current state of the genre?

You play D1, then you play one of the currently popular arpgs and you will know whether the genre has evolved or devolved into something you don't like. By devolved, I mostly mean D4, although I understand why someone would also be bored by games like GD or PoE if they find the gameplay loop "mind-numbing."

And if not for that, D1 is a classic that is worth playing at least once. Few games since have had that kind of atmosphere.

 

[Fedora Master]

Played to Ugdenbog again and the ga- zZzzZzzzZzz

Ugdenbog was extremely boring. I don't know why, but it put me to sleep a couple of times. I can't put my finger on it, I think maybe it's because there's not much challenge apart from a few new enemy types. Also maybe the layout of the map is too homogeneous in places and the whole place has only 1 shade of green and brown. The game picks up again when you get to Act 6, thankfully.

The game itself is just too long. Titan Quest had the same issue. An ARPG needs to be somewhat short in order to facilitate replaying it on higher difficulties.

 

[Krivol]

So go back, play D1, and then you will know if the genre is good for you or not.

How can you find out whether the genre is good for you by playing a game that is no longer a representative of the current state of the genre?

You play D1, then you play one of the currently popular arpgs and you will know whether the genre has evolved or devolved into something you don't like. By devolved, I mostly mean D4, although I understand why someone would also be bored by games like GD or PoE if they find the gameplay loop "mind-numbing."

And if not for that, D1 is a classic that is worth playing at least once. Few games since have had that kind of atmosphere.

I would rather say - play D2. D1 is so different from today's HnS looter aRPG, and it was D2 that set standards. Even D4 is more like D2 than D1 (but games like PoE and Grim Dawn are much closer to the D2 formula).

D1 is more like a roguelike, with much less skill needed (the game is quite slow and you will usually just set yourself in a strategic point and kill all enemies from there, by distance as a rogue/mage or 1 by 1 with a sword as a warrior), while D2 formula is more like an aRPG.

 

[Damned Registrations]

D1 is more like a roguelike, with much less skill needed

I think that was his point. The original appeal of the genre was never about the combat action (it's basically warcraft if you control one unit) but about the excitement of exploring a dungeon and finding stuff that makes you way stronger. Modern entries, including D2, lost sight of that very quickly and became more and more obssessed with balance, giving the player a steady dripfeed of power and enough stats to win fights no matter what, and the action became more demanding to compensate for the lack of excitement with the looting and encountering powerful enemies, I think.

 

[Krivol]

D1 is more like a roguelike, with much less skill needed

I think that was his point. The original appeal of the genre was never about the combat action (it's basically warcraft if you control one unit) but about the excitement of exploring a dungeon and finding stuff that makes you way stronger. Modern entries, including D2, lost sight of that very quickly and became more and more obssessed with balance, giving the player a steady dripfeed of power and enough stats to win fights no matter what, and the action became more demanding to compensate for the lack of excitement with the looting and encountering powerful enemies, I think.

Honestly, I can't even say current HnS evolved from D1... D2 is just so different.

OTOH it may be vanilla, unpatched D2 was much closer to D1, I don't remember and you need to ask someone more experienced, like luj1 who created this thread.

 

[luj1]

TOH it may be vanilla, unpatched D2 was much closer to D1

D2 Classic (especially on Hardcore) is a terrific experience very similar to D1 dungeon crawling. Slower pace (simply walking instead of running has a tremendous positive impact on gameplay) and down to earth numbers.

 

[Damned Registrations]

I have to say, the biggest change between D1 and D2 everyone seems to forget ever happened is moving spells from loot to gained from level ups. Gaining random spellbooks while exploring is such an awesome feeling it truly baffles me it has basically vanished. Used to be a thing in Everquest and PSO as well, though in a limited way.

PoE kinda sorta had this for a while, but really they just wanted to encourage people to trade with eachother and eventually just said 'fuck it' and put all but one spell in easily accessible merchants. Given different balancing, doing a run of PoE where you can only use gems dropped by enemies and they don't level up with usage would be pretty close to an ideal game for me.

 

[luj1]

whole place has only 1 shade of green and brown.

I think this coupled with uninteresting enemies makes that place really boring.

Reminds me of Titan Quests Asian parts with cavemen...

This is a problem in Path of Exile too

An ugly game with no style, where you fight statues and curtains (?) until you become mentally ill

Did that for a couple of years, no thanks