I think that it’s time to set aside a small portion of the team to focus on updating the game engine and overhauling its capabilities to take advantage of modern hardware.
I’ve been playing Grim Dawn since build 17 and I’ve happily logged more than 600 hours making it my most played Steam game. To add to that, my high praise for the game alone has caused twenty-two (22!) of my Steam friends to acquire the game and play it with me (or even with others). They have then gone on to convince several other friends to acquire the game and nearly all of them have logged between 50 and 300 hours of gameplay. That being said, they have all since quit playing due numerous complaints about performance and multiplayer gameplay issues that have gone unsolved to this day. This is something that is widely considered unacceptable this far after launch and I think it’s time the team takes a step back to tackle these issue before even thinking about launching that next expansion.
I know that the game has seen a few optimizations over time and that Grim Dawn was built atop the now ancient Titan Quest engine but it’s time to cast aside those excuses. Personally, I would much rather the game run smoother, crash less, and perform better than to receive any new content for the next few months. There is plenty here to keep me entertained as is but the stuttering gameplay, crashes, multiplayer issues, and performance dips need to die!
Please, for the love of Mogdrogen, fix the game.
With Grim Dawn, the game still crashes on occasion- especially when trying to close a session (ctd). Is this a 3.25GB ram limit issue caused by the lack of 64-bit support?
Multiplayer frame rate is far lower than single-player and it still rubber-bands like crazy on a 180mbps down/50up connection.
Party members still randomly disappear on occasion, requires entering a new zone or heading back to town (sometimes requires that player to restart)
Multiplayer games are less stable than single-player, still crashes every 2-4 hours no matter who is hosting.
Creating and connecting in multiplayer is inconsistent and extremely problematic.
Performance tanks when a modern computer when a GTX1080 should have ZERO issues.
Items still fall through the game world on occasion. Most times its just fluff but I rue the day I lose a Legendary to the void.
If people are going to play hardcore, the game needs to run at a constant frame-rate that is no lower than 60FPS. I’ve lost two hardcore toons to lag caused by copious amounts of enemies and animations appearing on screen and I’ve seen plenty of other heartbreaking hardcore losses on Twitch.
Grim Dawn is the ARPG for me but the performance of the game leaves much to be desired and there are still plenty of bugs that haven’t been solved since release.
I doubt that we will see this happen in the near future - if ever.
If I’m not mistaken then Crate has always operated on a budget, using a licensed engine that they can’t simply develop further by themselves, be it because of licensing issues, be it because of a lack of coders, be it because of both or of something completely different.
Changes to the fundamental architecture of a system like the multiplayer functionality would potentially have to reach such an extent that Crate might not be able to make them happen.
Then again there have been quite some complaints regarding this topic, and I guess that Crate knows that they would profit more from friends recommending GD to their friends if GD would provide more solid multiplayer functionality, so that those friends could actually play together without too much hassle.
So who knows, maybe they will resolve these issues some day after all.
The team consists of something like 6 or 7 regular members, I’m not sure anymore but it’s very small. They can’t simply ‘set aside a small portion of the team’. The team itself is tiny. A small portion would be a single person, and I’m pretty sure Rhis already does all he can to improve all sorts of things for the engine, and the network guy does his thing too (i forgot his name, sorry!), but they can’t do more than what they already are doing. I mean it’s not like you can expect a sound engineer or an animator to work on fixing the engine…
While they do operate on a budget and have a few programmers, they can and have added functionality to the engine that they are using. The engine is the Titan Quest engine, and they have a licensing agreement with the former THQ owners to use the engine and update it as needed. Crate has updated and did some more optimizations to the engine already.
Of course, there are technical limits to the engine and they’ve hit up against a few of them.
So if more will come is uncertain, it depends if it’s doable and if they have the budget/time to do it - whatever “it” may be.
Yeah. They would need to hire more programmers for sure to do this. “Setting aside” some of the team would mean that no programmers were actually working on new content.
That said, they can probably afford some new hires by now. While I wouldn’t be against them doing such a thing that’s for them to decide if such a move is even feasible or practical. I’m no programmer but I would think rearranging the guts of the game engine would be a lot of work that would have consequences, like breaking things in the game that’s already there and would then need to be further fixed.
Would likely be a large scale project that may just simply be too expensive and too time-consuming to even be worth it.
Hopefully some big improvement will be available once the expansion pack is ready.
I am more than willing to buy it no matter what kind of content IF the engine is optimized not to lag as badly as it does right now on specs exceeding the recommended requirements.
Otherwise I’ll regretfully pass up on it, as it simply isn’t fun to play a game on slowmotion.
Unfortunately, I too would be inclined to skip purchasing the expansion just based on the fact that a large portion of my friends (whom I enjoy gaming with) wouldn’t bother to return to Grim Dawn if the performance and multiplayer issues haven’t been solved by then. They are already pretty sore over the fact that the issues haven’t been solved as is.
I’ve had plenty of fun thus far but I expected that many of the issues that were present in early access would have been solved before its official release. Here we are 6 months after release and these issues still haven’t been solved.
If they really have sold 547,394 copies on Steam (ignoring other sales channels), that’s roughly $13,000,000 in sales (accounting for occasional sales).
I’m no economist but that’s plenty of funds to expand a dev team (if that’s their goal) and do the right thing for the very audience that funded them through Kickstarter and through Stream Early Access.
I am a programmer and you’re right. As old as the engine is, the only option
to better support modern hardware/OS AND not have a God awful kludge
that would break at the at the slightest subsequent code change would be to
rewrite the engine. Of course, a major overhaul of the game code would also be needed for that.