Fuck, has this thing REALLY been around this long now? That's insane. The game just went live on the 25th.
Anyway, I don't know why I never posted about this. I backed the Kickstarter and played the game a couple times in early access, but was more or less waiting for the full launch. It's out now and it seems really solid. It's super cheap ($25, on sale for $22 and change) and seems to be every bit as big and robust as games like Diablo 3 and Path of Exile. None of that trifecta seems to really "win", as they're all kind of different, but people definitely seem to gravitate to one of them more than the others. It seems the Diablo 2 crowd that was very displeased with Diablo 3 is super into Grim Dawn. One of the Steam reviews I read said "It's like Titan Quest and Diablo 2 had a baby," and that seems to be the general consensus.
I'm only a brief ways in, and so far it feels good, looks pretty good, and generally seems to do what you want. It starts off a little overly basic and slow, and I was kind of bored through some of the initial stuff, but once you start to open up more room for improvement and get some decent weapons, you can see it come into its own.
The skill system in particular is fucking phenomenal. You've got a Diablo 2-like skill tree system, but with more variety and potential for specificity since there are both more skills to choose from and also you can level each of them a lot more deeply by jacking a bunch of points into them (seems like most allow for 12?). On top of that, you can dual-class after level 10, choosing another "mastery" (class) that you can put as little or as much into as you want. Obviously this allows for a host of different potential character builds, much more so than your average game of this time. And while I haven't gotten too deep yet, I've heard the loot system is really robust as well, which can tie into making great builds.
Also telling is that where most of these games seem to generally be built around multiplayer, this is built around the single player experience. I spent a good 4 hours playing with Heather tonight, so certainly multiplayer works just fine, but this more Diablo 2 than Diablo 3 in that regard, something that doesn't require other people quite as much to have a fun or productive outing. Also means that they're okay with the game being a little broken from the standpoint of not cracking down on mods and such. And, of course, you can actually play offline instead of being tied to a server. On that same note, a DRM free version is supposed to be coming out by March 4th, and a GOG version sometime in March.
Anyway, check it out if you like this kind of thing. It start a little slow but seems to be snowballing into something cool. I'm really loving the skill system and pondering the possibilities. It's not a perfect game, but for something built by such a small team, it's really a pretty incredible feat. They've got expansion plans, but the base game has 4 acts, all of which are supposed to be nice and big, and most people seem to be much more pleased with what this game's endgame has been even before the final act was released compared to Diablo 3's even after being "fixed" numerous times. I don't have a big opinion on that yet obviously, but I will say that Diablo 3's endgame of "hey, level up and throw some uninteresting bonus stats on your dude while you grind for gear" did eventually wear on me to the point of not wanting to play anymore, even after developing a roster of high-level characters. I love the adventure mode, love the rifts, think they did so much so well ... but at some point I still just felt like it was a treadmill I needed to get off of.
But yeah, no idea how Grim Dawn will hold up for me personally in the long run, but the buzz all seems pretty damn positive so far, other than a few complaints about environment art and design, generally: "This game is fucking awesome, it just should be a little less brown," etc. I'm looking forward to digging into it some more, as now that I've got two characters moving into more interesting territory with the skill system, it's beginning to come into its own.
I was initially a little put off by the inability to choose harder difficulties from the outset, but realized at some point that the game features the Diablo 2 difficulty system, which means you progress in linear fashion through those difficulty levels, starting with either "normal" or "veteran". I'm playing veteran and the beginning is just braindead easy to a fault, but people have told me it gets considerably tougher.
