Oh, I was going to make one of these later today. I guess you beat me to it. I'm just going to, ah...put this here then.
Another freaking Kickstarter? You kidding me?
Wait! Wait, hear me out-
Its name sounds like a comic book from the ‘90s. Are the characters missing their feet? Extra pouches? lol.
You shut the hell up!
Check out the kickstarter video for some great looking gameplay and information about the game.
The first thing we should stress is that our funding goal is not the budget to make this game; only to help finish it. There is no way you could make Grim Dawn from scratch with its current level of quality and feature set on such a small budget. It is only because we've acquired the rights to a pre-existing engine built for ARPG and invested some of our own money and years of unpaid work into this project that we're at a point now where a few hundred thousand dollars can make a big impact.
Our goal is about the minimal level of funding that would be required to make a big difference on this project because it is enough where we can start to bring on some of our part-time people, full-time and guarantee them at least a certain duration of wages. This would likely be an animator, artist and designer to start out. We'd also use money for more outsourcing so that we could get additional unique item art and enemy models.
Grim Dawn is being made by Crate Entertainment, formerly Iron Lore of Titan Quest/Immortal Throne development fame. This game is already two years into development and it looks pretty damn amazing.
Why don’t you visit the Kickstarter page and check it out?
Welcome back. Another reason it looks amazing is because of fan feedback and input. Crate has learned that (sometimes) fans of a game or genre can actually have really good ideas and refinements. They’ve been incredibly active in their community forums for several years now, sifting through their own and occasionally others’ ideas in order to make a game that is fucking awesome.
Also, I’m just going to throw out a few terms here in case I forget later on:
*DRM free *robust modding tools *semi-destructable environments *open world, randomized elements, non-linear progression *improved loot systems *NPC faction alliances / city development / meaningful quest choices *coop-multiplayer through online match-making or LAN play *deeper skill/customization *more stuff
Oh, by the way, these things already exist and are in game. Hooray!
I remember waaay back before I had even heard about the game, I saw on youtube
a 30 second video (this was pre-pre-pre alpha, by the way) and thought, whoa, that looks really cool. It’s as if Neverwinter Nights had good graphics, back when people were looking forward to NWN. I looked around some more, noticed the game had just gotten underway and eventually tossed the name of the game into the ‘wait, wait, forget’ area of my brain.
*So what are their ideas? What is their vision?
Here’s an interview, oddly enough, that gets into some of that.
Grim Dawn hearkens back to a time when discovery and challenge didn’t simply mean unlocking your next angry bird on your cell phone. Grim Dawn aims to be more complex and, as they say, “probably casual-player hostile.” This isn’t a bad thing by any means, and certainly doesn’t mean people unused to the genre can’t play and enjoy it, but this is a game that won’t be so linear in its areas of progression.
Bruno from Crate / Iron Lore:
I love systems that are asymmetrical and chaotic, where the player can’t easily see the tell-tale structure and patterns of deliberate, organized human design. The real world isn’t always perfectly planned or sensible and I don’t think game worlds should be either, otherwise you see the hand of the developers everywhere you look and it erodes the magic of feeling like you are in a living and unpredictable world. Exploration of game systems is all about the discovery of what is possible. When there is too clear a structure and pattern to the design, not only does it feel artificial but the player is much more quickly able to assess the limits of the system. Unfortunately, most of the industry is moving away from this sort of design.
*What the heck is an Open World Action Rpg?
It pretty much means that if you want to go somewhere, you can go there. If you can survive the crushing onslaught of enemies and weather effects to get there. :black101:
Have some random Game Media:
Keep in mind that there’s still a lot of work to do on things, so certain aesthetics may change slightly from ingame screenshots.
You like Music,
check some out!
This one’s kinda westerny.
Here’s some fan made wallpapers:
*Well, I thought Titan Quest was alright, but it wasn’t…I don’t know…’oomphy’, you know?
First of all, if you own TQ:IM you kinda owe it to yourself to install the
Underlord Mod. It changes up and rebalances a lot of the gameplay mechanics, adds enemies and the like, et cetera. Of course, TQ isn’t perfect by a long shot, even with Underlord, but it’s much better. Well, that’s my opinion, but what about the guys from Crate/Iron Lore (the ones who actually made the game)?
Bruno from Crate:
Iron Lore is gone but I do think Titan Quest turned out to be a game that I’m proud to have worked on.
There are of course many things I wish we could have done differently or better. I could probably write an entire dissertation about it. One of the biggest things I would have liked to improve was the general presentation and feel of the game. You can see our obvious attempt to course correct as much as we were allowed to in the difference between the Titan Quest and Immortal Throne box art and the atmosphere of the games overall. The atmosphere of the original game was seriously lacking a sense of dread and mystery. It was just sort of like “Oh hai! Welcome to ancient Greece, btw there are some monsters around.”
Another big issue with Titan Quest was the feel and pacing of combat. One of the most frequent complaints I’ve seen about Titan Quest was that people felt like combat was slow and attacks had no real sense of power or impact. A lot of this stems from a lack of satisfying combat effects, hit reactions and death effects.
I could go on and on but the last, most significant thing to me was the lack of secure multiplayer. THQ just didn’t want to invest the money for that.
Or you could go down the
Diablo 2 Immortal route.
Bonus:
diablo 2 conversion mod video
*Damn it, Amazon, I hate you so much. I really want to support this and pre-order, where can I do it through Paypal like the Wasteland 2 (yay!) or Shadowrun (support this game) Kickstarters?
Unfortunately, Paypal didn’t quite work out for Crate, and you'll read about it in a second, but you can
pre-order from Grim Dawn’s website directly and just email Crate so they’ll give you one of the first three tiers of prizes.
Read carefully about how, here. This may change at some point in the future! Read the Kickstarter page for the newest information.
Taken from another forum:
Yeah they took paypal payments a while back and well:
http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1880
quote:
However, very shortly after we began using PayPal for pre-orders they froze our account due to "suspicious activity". Apparently making money is suspicious. When we inquired about it they said they would do a review of the account and determine a course of action. The result of the review was that they felt our business model was too risky, closed our account, and held our funds for 6 months.
[...]
They said our business model is too high risk for them because we do not ship a physical product to people that PayPal can verify through postal tracking when claims arise. I brought up the fact that other companies engage in the sale of virtual goods in exactly the same manner using PayPal, at which point she said they could investigate those companies if I wanted. I obviously declined not wanting anyone else to feel the wrath of PayPal. I then pursued a different approach asking what we could do to change our business model to make it more amenable to PayPal. I was told there was nothing we could do. I even suggested we could start shipping a physical product to people. I got the same answer, there was nothing we could do. I didn't understand that since I felt like we had only ever been engaged in fair and honest business and were willing to make significant changes to appease them. After a little more back and forth, I finally got to the bottom of it - the representative told me once they made the decision to close an account, it was their company policy to never reinstate it.
[...]
Uhh yeah, so we're exploring other payment options. We think we've found a suitable alternative but I've just been so busy with development that I haven't had time to take the next step. We'll have other forms of payment up before we go alpha though.
(Emphasis mine)
So yeah basically paypal sucks and this is the best they can do, and from the looks of things they can't even do the Wasteland 2 thing of filling out their kickstarter and then moving on to paypal. Since the kickstarter page mentions a Steam code I suppose at this point the best thing you can do is pre-order, assuming it has one.
Bugger all. Bleh.
