Anyone played Majesty? 
Google says it’s an RTS though you couldn’t control units much. I remember I had it on CD and played it a lot as a kid. Some vague memories of building military buildings all over the map and rat enemies from sewers haha.
I think that’s just human nature; if the same thing appealed to all of us we’d just be playing one or two games and that would be it.
After I played Two Worlds and got interested in the ARPG genre I tried several different ones: Morrowind, Oblivion, Sacred Gold, Divine Divinity, Fable and a few others. Nothing really clicked with me, Sacred Gold I played most, but even then I only finished it a couple of times. Then I tried Titan Quest. I wasn’t that good at it, but something about it made me want to keep trying. I went looking for help and found the old Titan Quest forum and the helpful people there and that was it. Never looked back. Then there was a post about GD on the TQ forum so bought into that as well and here we are. In all the years since I haven’t seen an ARPG that I want to try. I’ve seen people playing other games like Torchlight, PoE, etc, and I have the occasional look at what’s on Steam, but nothing’s called out to me enough to give them a try.
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My ARPG experience has been somewhat similar, except that I started with Torchlight and then moved on to Torchlight II, TQ and Grim Dawn. Have tried a few other ARPGs (including D3) but none of them have felt right.
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I loved Diablo II, played it around year 2000 a lot, then took a hiatus from gaming for several years. Somewhere around 2008 or 2009, due to various reasons, I started gaming again, and wanted to play an ARPG, and I took on Dungeon Siege 2. After finishing that, I actively looked around the web for similar games and came across Titan Quest. I played that, and I read somewhere that some of its creators are working on a new ARPG. I saw a short gameplay video, I think it featured an Occultist and the Demolitionist in Burrwitch. Once I saw the Sigil on the ground, I was hooked. I started following Grim Dawn’s development closely, and bought it before release, but haven’t actually started playing it before fall of 2016.
It’s not easy to say what exactly is so good in Grim Dawn, in contrast to other similar games. Some of the things I like are: serious and dark atmosphere (unlike Torchlight), normal pacing of the gameplay, and not a chaotic swirl of colors on the screen (like in D3 and POE), abilities and movements somewhat grounded in reality (unlike the oversized weapons and dramatic animations in Asian ARPGS, like Lost Ark), the visual style (unlike the cartoony Torclight and D3).
Those are the things that attracted me from the start, but over time I really liked other aspects: I think Grim Dawn has just the right amount of complexity, and the best itemization I’ve ever seen.
I really hope that the eventual sequel, if it happens, will preserve those aspects of Grim Dawn and enhance them.
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Bit of a nerco, but did you play any ARPG’s before you started working at Iron Lore on TQ @medierra? Or was it a completely new genre for you from the RTS games you were used to?
As so often many of medierra’s old posts were removed / not carried over, when we switched to Discourse, but here you go:
I believe he played D2 before working on TQ.
I played D1 when it came out and really enjoyed it but I didn’t play that much. I think I beat it once or twice.
I skipped D2 release. At the time I was engrossed in MMOs and the idea of playing a 640x480 game was looool… I eventually started playing it after I joined Iron Lore for research purposes but by then, LoD was out, which made it a lot more playable and I ended up really getting into it. I played hundreds of hours and beat the game on hardcore hell with a couple chars. Playing so long gave me insight into how some of what appeared to be design flaws on the surface actually added to longevity and long-term enjoyment of the game. I don’t know if they were intentional or not but I tried to emulate some of that in GD. I’d found some similar things to be true with AoE, although, in talking to the creators, it was apparent the “flaws” that actually made the game better, were not intentional there haha…
RTS has really been my favorite genre though, since the days of Dune 2. I played a lot of RPGs also and I’ve played a few other ARPGs but I have never really gotten into any as much as D2 (or GD of course). I think for me, ARPG is a tricky formula to get just right.
I guess I haven’t liked that many RTS games either. In more recent years, it’s basically just AoE / AoE II, WC3 and SC / SC2. I actually didn’t really even play that much AoE II - I figured out to break the mp game balance with mass persian TCs right after release and then sort of moved on. Now AoE feels really slow and clunky to me, trying to go back to it.
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Interesting and thanks for the insight. 
And yes, sometimes flaws actually become features because the players love them so much.
What design flaws did you add to GD then, from Diablo 2 or in general. I don’t see items’ durability or stamina bar in GD! 
IMO. The abundance of magic quality on normal item, considering in both games Rare quality are not that hard to drop. 
Those “feature” do increase the longetivity of farming, though D2 have magic find properties and GD have MI to help lower the chance of magic item.
Duriel scroll of nightmare anyone?
I have no idea what this RTS project is, (like everyone else) but I do ask for one thing. If there is a single player part to the game, please have tactical pause. I just can’t play RTS games without pause. Be a shame not to be able to buy and play the game.
Multiplayer I understand no pause. Single player, me pausing shouldn’t effect anyone else’s game. Heck even put it in as an option. So many RTS games I wanted to buy and didn’t because it didn’t have this feature in single player.
Which RTS has tactical pause? Doesn’t that make it not-real-time?
All RTS that I’ve played had a pause function in Singleplayer.
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i think one of the issues with RTSs and why ther isnt a huge following is the full game can be pretty complex. It would be interesting for low ranks in multiplayer to be very accessible with features unlocking as your rank up. more upgrade paths/more units ect
Most RTS have a pause in single and multi-player but while paused, you can’t issue any commands or really do anything.
This “tactical pause” thing some people are hyped on, I assume is the ability to issue orders while paused.
I am sort of philosophically against it as an RTS purist but, its not for me… so part of me says, its fine for SP, let people do what they want… but a potential issue with this sort of thing is, you introduce a mechanic that provides an obvious player advantage, it can make even more experienced players feel like they have to use it, otherwise they’re not playing their best.
Maybe we could add it just for lower difficulties or something, I dunno… we’ll have to figure it out when we get further along.
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Oh right, that is very much true. Then the only RTS that I can think of that has a tactical pause is supreme commander (I believe). It’s been a long time since I played a good RTS besides AoE2/SC2, so I don’t remember too well. The RTS market is pretty empty after all…
RTS does have a decently large following, it’s just not large enough that big publishers are very interested. They want to fund something that could sell 30m copies. The next Call of Duty, GTA, Skyrim, Overwatch, etc… Based on historical data, a top selling RTS is probably going to land in the 5-10m copies range (now sure if any aside from the Age and Craft series have hit there) and many others end up with 1-3m sales or less. For us, >1m sales is great. For EA or Actiblizzard that’s suck. So that’s a big part of the reason you don’t see a lot of RTS.
Also a lot of what has come out in the last 10-15 years has been… not good. When a crappy RTS comes out and has shit sales, publishers go “oh see, RTS is a bad investment.” When you pitch to publishers you can’t say the reason your RTS is going to succeed where other’s failed is just better execution - which is our entire strategy lol. They want to hear about some special marketing gimmick that will set it apart - but that’s exactly what makes some RTS’s suck.
Low ranks in mp tend to self-regulate difficulty because you’re playing against other people who don’t really know what they’re doing (baring smurfing… but maybe we can find a way to limit that with more intelligent match-making.
The other thing though is most people really don’t play mp in RTS. I think a bigger issue with RTS is people don’t like to invest a bunch of time building up a base, econ, army, then get smashed. Not only does the loss for your time investment feel bad but in RTS, people can feel bad about being out-skilled.
I think back to playing games in the office and prior game companies and people tended to gravitate toward shooters because even the worst player could occasionally get lucky, take out the best player, and feel like a hero (even though they were like 1 for 9000). Getting crushed over and over in an RTS is less fun for lower skill players.
Not sure what we can really do about that but I guess it’s worth thinking about it. At the end of the day though, I think if we just ship a really solid RTS with an appealing, fun campaign, we’ll do well enough. Anything beyond that is icing.
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And with good map editor plus mod support it may as well prolonged it life span, just like how Red Alert 2 and WC3 community doing all this year
Stellaris has this feature, and we are using this in SP as well as in MP. Even the base game has so many features, that there are times when you get snowed under in messages, and you need some time to plough through them while also issuing other commands. And it only gets worse with the DLCs.
I’d prefer to slow down the game in these moments, but in SP it’s just more convenient to hit space and pause the game than to click a tiny button a few times.
Add it as accessibility option. In MP this could be selected if you want a more chill atmosphere.
I don’t mind getting smashed and try again, but my defeat needs to be satisfactory. I’d also like to have enough information to understand why I lost, so that I can develop better strategies myself. As opposed to watch / read up strategy guides and end up with the feeling others impose their playstyle onto me.
Instead of being removed from the game when you are defeated, the game could put you into a guerilla mode, so that you have a chance to recover, while the powerful parties have to use different strategies to defeat you for good.
I guess you have to handle two audiences: story mode and competitive players. I assume the challenge is to build up the former group through the campaign, so that they can hold their ground long enough in MP to stay invested. Provided they have any interest in MP gaming.
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