PCFormat Forum Archive

Introduction

Grim Dawn is an action role-playing game intended for digital distribution on the PC. It is being developed by veterans of Iron Lore entertainment, the makers of Titan Quest. Grim Dawn is being built with Crate's own improved version of the Iron Lore engine and toolset; the same technology used to create Titan Quest. As a spiritual successor, Grim Dawn will attempt to better perfect the magical formula of exploration, character advancement, and loot collection pioneered by Diablo.

Players will be thrust into the dark, war-torn world of Cairn where a once proud empire has been brought to ruin and the human race driven to the edge of extinction. Cairn has become ground zero of an eternal war between two otherworldly powers, one seeking to use human bodies as a resource, the other intent upon destroying the human race before that can happen. This cataclysmic war has not only decimated human civilization but is warping the very fabric of reality and, in its wake, giving life to new horrors.

For humankind it is the dawn of a grim new age where iron has replaced gold as currency and the importance of salt as a weapon makes it far too valuable to waste on food. Small enclaves of human survivors exist scattered throughout the world, holed up in hidden refuges. These humans have quietly watched the warring invaders destroy one another and have become wise to the strengths and vulnerabilities of their otherworldly foes. A few survivors have begun to exhibit strange new abilities after surviving possession or exposure to the warp. These unnatural powers are feared by some but give many new hope of launching a resistance to fight the "outsiders" and reclaim what's left of their world.

Combine any of five distinct skill classes each with multiple skill trees in which to specialize. Advance your class mastery up to 75 levels to unlock dozens of powerful skills and synergistic modifiers. New classes will be periodically released through downloadable content.
Gameplay systems design for 200 levels of character progression, equipment, and enemies to fight makes for ridiculous amounts of replay value.
Connect with old friends or make new allies in glorious multiplayer. Specially balanced multiplayer encounters will put your teamwork to the ultimate challenge.
Collect blueprints that allow you to combine salvaged components into unique crafted items and then, later, use those basic crafted items with higher-tiered recipes to complete items of unprecedented badassness.
Camera rotation enhances the three-dimensionality of the world and gameplay while levels are still designed so that players are not forced to rotate the camera.
Refined loot system drops less junk items and ensures more consistent rewards from hero and boss monsters.
Satisfying enemy damage and death effects with an option to enable blood and gore.
The ability to spend money to reclaim skill and attribute points alleviates the fear and frustration of having to make early, uninformed decisions that could permanently nerf a character.
More features are in the works and will be announced as Grim Dawn nears release.

StarBound wrote:Torchlight with multiplayer? That's all you needed to say

rustypup wrote: hmmmm....

Titanic Quest: Crate Speak About Grim Dawn

By John Walker on August 3rd, 2011 at 11:03 am

Crate Entertainment, an indie development studio born out of the ashes of Titan Quest creators Iron Lore, have been working on their first major project for a while now. Grim Dawn, built using the tech behind Titan Quest, will hopefully be entering alpha at some point this year, and it’s a game we’re extremely excited to see. So we caught up with Crate’s core man, Arthur Bruno, to learn more. In a wonderful interview he tells us about the fall of Iron Lore, and the birth of Crate, explains where Titan Quest fell short, and how Grim Dawn is not attempting to appeal to casual players. In fact, it’s going to be actively hostile toward them. And he introduces us to the concept of rainbow farting machines.


RPS: Can you explain a little about how Iron Lore came to an end, and then how Crate began?

Arthur Bruno: There were many decisions and factors within and outside the studio’s control that lead directly or indirectly, over the course of several years, to the studio’s ultimate demise. In some ways it is similar to when an individual suffers some misfortune like a car accident and then looks back and thinks about how the whole terrible event could have been averted if any number of little, seemingly innocuous events or decisions had played out differently. “If only that other guy had been going the speed limit, if only I hadn’t stopped to get the coffee that spilled in my lap and distracted me, if only my boss hadn’t kept me at work late to fill out my TPS reports.”

Ultimately though, all the decisions the company made and all the events that transpired, lead to a situation where Iron Lore couldn’t survive a gap between projects. This is generally what has occurred when a seemingly healthy independent studio suddenly vanishes after releasing a game.

What a lot of people don’t realize is that many, if not most independent studios, make little or no money off the actual sales of games they develop. If you take the case of Titan Quest and Immortal Throne, information I’ve been given put the combined sales over a million copies in late 2008. At that time I heard that it had reached profitability for THQ. Since then it has continued to do surprisingly well in digital sales given its age. Yet, the owners of Iron Lore never and probably will never receive a royalty payment due to the structure of the funding deal.

Studios survive by jumping right from one publisher funded project to the next and try to build enough of a profit margin into their development budgets that they can potentially survive a few months between funded projects. Supporting a thirty person development team, similar to what Iron Lore and most mid-sized studios employ can cost $300,000 a month or more when you add up salaries, office rent, taxes, and other operating costs. Those costs don’t all stop after the last publisher payment is cashed and until funding starts for a new game, the studio is just burning through whatever they’ve managed to stash away.

It generally takes a hit game before a studio can build up enough of a nest-egg that there is some breathing room in this cycle. Until that happens, the count-down to bankruptcy is always running and each new funded project just puts a little more time on the clock. For a variety of reasons, some just bad luck, Iron Lore couldn’t line up that next project fast enough and the clock ran out…

RPS: Were you happy with Titan Quest? Was there anything about it you wished you could have done but couldn’t?

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rustypup wrote:the alpha release has the HC and SC sharing twink stash which is.... weird...

GDI_Lord wrote:forum.NextPost(rustypup.Decode());

Twinking wrote:In MMORPGs, twinking refers to a character gaining equipment with the assistance of a higher level character, particularly by giving said low level character higher level equipment

rustypup wrote:the HC chars can rely on kit acquired by face-rolling SC chars

rustypup wrote:

to be fair, it's shaping up to be a great game...