For now I have around 150 hours of Grim Dawn played since it was in early access on steam. I play it every now and then and just recently got my first character to ultimate (on level 66).
I enjoy variety so I have several other characters between 30 and 65, around 6 under 50, and 3 above 50. I also lost a few HC characters now and then and like to take it slow. I still enjoy cleaning out areas, doing sidequests and all that stuff.
With all that being said I think I can potentially provide an interesting perspective on how the game plays for me. Of course providing you guys can endure my subpar english mastery (ha, get it? … Sorry.)
So first of all, why do I play Grim Dawn at all?
Well I played a bit of Titan Quest but never got really into it. Almost all skills felt weird to some extent. I was more of an Sacred fan, sadly the games had their fair share of problems and eventually the franchise and even the spiritual successor Unbended died.
So I needed something different. The only alternatives were Diablo 3 and Grim Dawn. I played both but stuck with Grim Dawn. Don’t get me wrong, both games are fun, but my friends play Grim Dawn and playing with friends is always more fun.
There is one thing that Grim Dawn does very well though. For me it really is a “Easy to learn but hard to master” kind of thing. It provides a lot of options to customise your character but keeps it simple enough to not lose sight of what you want to do. The character building is arguably more complex than in other ARPGs but it times it’s access to skills/devotions quite well so I never felt overwhelmed, while still maintaining a decent feeling of weight behind the decision to spent points on things that make your character better.
I guess that is enough general banter, let’s get to the things a bit more in depth. It is going to be a lot of text containing my personal and subjetive opinion on different aspects of the game.
Presentation:
Well, I don’t want to lose too many words here. I like it. The wold is dark and apocalyptic and the graphic fits. You can see what is going on and that is pretty much all I need. The only thing I would love to see more is gear that makes more of an visual impact. Even the old Sacred 1 does a good job with that while I find Grim Dawn a bit lacking. There is visual differentiation but I never had a moment of “Oh wow badass gear that also looks badass!”. To be honest I stopped paying attention to what the gear looks like at all. Most of it is very simliar.
To some extend this also goes for the visual of some skills. Somethings I enjoy watching immensely, like the storm effects of the Shaman, and other effects feel very flat and are lacking impact, like the Occultist’s Doom Bolt. Most of them are still very fun to play with, but looking at them is meh.
All in all it is still a decent looking game with visuals that fit to the aesthetics I think the game wants to show.
The technical side of things:
I don’t know what it is that makes Grim Dawn work, but even if I want to I can’t praise it. Grim Dawn is one of the games I had the most technical troubles with. Starting at random PC shutdowns because of very strange power supply problems that are exclusive to GD, to sudden blackscreens because my graphics card’s Core Voltage was too high, to random blue screens, to sudden FPS drops that only a restart could fix, to random stutter ingame and mini lags and HC characters that died to those, to saves that got lost because of the crashes, I had it all.
After a few patches after the official release I wasn’t even able to play Grim Dawn at all. It either went black or crashed my pc. Only thanks to powbam (all hail my savior!) who helped me here in the forums I was able to identify the problem. For some reason Grim Dawn did not like my graphic card’s default Core Volt. It is a standard GTX 970 without any overclocking. I still need to turn down the core volt by at least 100 to be able to play Grim Dawn at all. Now it works, it still stutters and lags and if there is a lot of action going on the FPS still drop considerably regardless of graphic settings.
So yeah, I think GD needs a lot of optimisation.
Gameplay:
Now to something I have a lot more positive things to say about. GD offers a lot of fun things. Let’s start with the most important one.
Combat is fun. I like the option to decide between the classic targeting and the new “fluent” one. Combat is dynamic, can get pretty hectic and there is a lot variety depending on where you are leveling and what enemies you are fighting. There are the single big bad guys that can get dangerous even when they are only trash mobs (I’m looking at you Yetis and Flesh Hulks) and then there are the swarming little guys that just come from everywhere at once. And of course everything between these two types.
Then there are the two types of healing potions. I’m one of those players that typically does not want to use anything but the character’s build to progress. The less I drink the happier I become. At least that was the guy I used to be. Now I am a potion addict and don’t know how much money I spent to ensure I always got a bottle ready… You teached me new habits GD… What have you done… But well, I kinda did that to myself. I did say, I was enjoying variety, right?
Skills are fun. And you can do a lot of very cool stuff in GD. Currently my favourite is my Demolitionist. I have a maxed out Ulzuins Chosen, maxed out Blackwater Cocktail, a few very potent Points in Grenado and a maxed out Canister Bomb. I throw bombs, depending on the procs of Ulzuins Chosen up to 6 seconds straight just mashing buttons, and a second later everything explodes and dies. That is also the character I got to ultimate. But well… he dies extremely fast. I don’t have good gear, shit resistances, but I honestly doubt that I can get far with a build like that seeing how tanky the enemies have become. So I probably need a reskill or there are just some great pieces of equipment I have yet to discover.
Either way at least up to the end of elite you can pretty much do what you want I guess. As long as it’s not melee… From my experience melee chars are the hardest to build in GD. Kinda unintuitiv but I always had way less problems with bosses or other difficult areas with squishy ranged characters than tanky melee chars. At least till ultimate. That also leads to my next point.
Stats and Mastery are so so.
I like the way you allocate stats. It’s simple and gives weight to your decisions. I also like the amount of different traits the items can have. There are some very cool things on them, but I still hope they expand on that. The more options the better it gets.
I know that Masteries are a very basic game design decision and that they are not going to change much, if at all. And I can get behind the reasoning. But I still don’t like the idea of giving up skills points that could be invested into skills that are doing fun things for simple and boring, but nevertheless extremely important attribut points. But that is just me. Not having a strict level requirement for the skills also has it’s merits.
What I really don’t like is that there seems to be an excessive high stat wall on ultimate. I know it is the last difficulty and that it should be a challenge, but from my very short experience with ultimate it seemed like I need at least 50% resist in every single damage type and around 6k health to even start without getting 2 shot from yellow mobs in the starting area (that may be a bit exaggerated since I am still a bit salty about all the very swift deaths. The two shots may have come from some hero mob).
This stat wall also shows on elite since the last patch (I think?). My lvl 66 commando suddenly got unplayable with his current build even though he tanked pretty much everything before.
So I still need to learn ultimate and when I do my opinion may change, but for now it is fun and do-what-is-fun only up until the end of elite. Good thing I can always bomb the s*** out of the crucible or do the rogue dungeons.
Maps:
Damaging terrain… I… Don’t know how many deaths I had thanks to those pesky spots. I can’t even call them little since they are literally everywhere.
I don’t like them, they are not interesting at all. Especially playing a melee character. I would like it though if they provided some kind of strategical condition that is not “stand here and die”. There are a lot of stationary skills like AoE or the Totems or the Mines, etc that could in some kind interact with those environments. Please make them in some way more interesting or at least less frustrating.
Besides that there are a lot of pretty maps. Sometimes they aren’t quite logical, but that isn’t really important. Many provide interesting combinations of choke points and wide, large areas.
Items:
I. Need. More. Stash. Now. Please. つ ◕.◕ ༽つ
Crafting:
I like it. I love that there are craftable legendaries even if I probably won’t ever get to craft something like that since I simply don’t play enough to do that. The drop rate of the recipes could be a bit higher since I only recently realized just how many things there are to craft, but I like the system. I could be a bit more streamlined though. Not in the sense of made easier but be less cumbersome. A search option, more sorting options, not needing to craft every single relic and every single rare crafting component for the relic needed by the relic would be very nice. It should be automated a bit more if the components are there and the recipes are known.
So yeah, Grim Dawn is fun. It has it’s fair share of problems like every other game out there but makes a lot, and I really mean it, a lot more right than wrong. I’ll keep on playing it, so thank you for this awesome game!
I probably forgot something so if there is any kind of interest in it, I will update it at some point in the future when I got more comfortable with the ultimate difficulty.
it summarizes pretty well the feeling (mostly positive) of many players from what i read in different forums.
(from the “OA buffs” thread^^)
