I just think this game needs a more noticeable sound effect when someone takes away more than 7% of your health bar or something. Currently I don’t even notice being hit unless I gaze at my health bar, and that’s wrong.
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[spoiler]Anyone remember the original Diablo? When you were hit, the player character went “ugh!” and staggered for a while, being unable to swing his sword for a moment - kind of like shield block recovery time.
I’m not saying this should happen with every little hit, but let’s say hits that take more than 5% of your health bar, or something?
Now I realise a change like this would completely rewrite the balance of the game, but - it would mainly affect fights against crowds, bringing some much needed challenge to handling them.
And if you don’t want to do this, then at least please add some sort of a proper, noticeable sound effect that occurs when someone takes away more than 5% of your health bar, because currently if I’m not gazing at my health bar, I don’t even notice being hit. And that’s just wrong.
P.S. In Diablo, enemies managed to hit you less often, so that’s something to keep in mind. It seems like in Grim Dawn, everyone can hit you pretty much all the time (on Veteran at least).[/spoiler]
And that is one of the most hated things ever in D2.
If you are a melee to thin down a crowd, you will be spending half of your time looking at your character flailing around instead of spending time doing damage. It also prevents you from kiting effectively and running away from dangerous situation. If you have a small group of ranged monsters shooting as well from range while you are handling the melee ones, you better be ready to spam those pots, which you can’t do in this game.
Another annoying system in D2 is the ability for monsters to gain an obscene amount of crit chance on you when you are moving.
That is 1 thing I will never ever hope to be implemented.
(EDIT: Nevermind, I completely agree with you - BUT, again, needs a better sound effect because being hit hard should be noticeable.)
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[spoiler]That’s why you were supposed to put some points into dexterity and get good armor - and avoid higher level areas unless you wanted a really hard fight.
You’re right, it wouldn’t work for this game as things stand currently, because enemies can hit your warrior so laughably easy.
BUT that’s no excuse for not at least having some sort of a sound effect when 8% of your health bar is decimated, because as said, this game does lack the sense of being hit. And it shouldn’t.[/spoiler]
I guess that’s why the world needs variety, because I couldn’t disagree more on a personal level preference.
In diablo2 you needed to consider a lot of variables instead of throwing yourself into packs of monsters. Do I have enough stamina not to get out of it when I need to run away?
Do I have some skills to slow down my enemies so that I can enable walking when surrounded, get out of range, and then re enable running to get away if things became too difficult?
It made completely sense that while RUNNING away, your block and dodge chance is going to suffer, it definitely made skillful playing more relevant, until you got so well equipped that you hardly needed to bother anything about that stuff anyway.
But they were all mechanics I used to love and missed greatly in the new simplified ARPGs.
Another thing I missed A LOT and that thank god was brought back in Grim Dawn, is the secondary weapon slot that you can freely switch to.
I’d rather have a gameplay when you need to avoid being surrounded by too many enemies to prevent getting stunlocked by them.
Besides there were countless items that would reduce the recovery time anyways, to the point that it was hardly a problem anymore.
But again, that’s just the way I see things, I understand that for others it might be just an annoyance, we all find fun and challenge in different things I guess.
For example, in my opinion, kiting in this game is way too easy, I force myself not to exploit it, because even as a melee, you would hardly ever get hit at all if you bothered to back step between an attack and another.
Interesting. I guess I should put more time into D2, but I just hate the jungle world. One thing the original Diablo got right and no other such game since then has (as far as I know), is the sense of monsters becoming more terrifying as you got further in the game. In D2 you’ll be fighting some sort of laughable midgets in world 3, who somehow are harder to kill than the gruesome desert monsters in world 2. Laughable. Well, I guess better monster design is something that’s hard to do when you increase the scale of the game manifold.
Anyway, I just learned that Crane have been making Grim Dawn less open-world and more mainstream friendly in that regard. I guess we know now what way this game is going. Which is a damned shame, since it had tons of potential.
I agree, I can sort of understand where they are coming from, they need to make sure the game sells enough, they probably risked bankruptcy by postponing the release so much in order to polish the game and add more features, which is something I appreciate a lot.
Now they need to make up for that and for all the expanses they had because of more people hired and so on.
However, I feel they should focus on the strengths of the game rather than trying to add features present in other titles that were designed around such features.
Rather than trying to fit a bit of everything, I think they should improve the many things they already did very well.
I agree about the rooster of the mobs, but mostly about the environments in general. I did appreciate that in diablo 2 they wanted to add more variety to the environments, but in my opinion, diablo remain king for what concearns the atmosphere.
It was focused around a specific place, and yet while exploring it you would discover new entrances and exits every few levels, the general tone was kept the same, it left an impression on me, the mood was perfect, the pace as well.
It used barrels, traps, opening AND closing doors to perfection, I throroughly loved it. The only real downside of that game was the amount of mouses you would break because of the lack of a “keep the button hold for autoattack”, and you were forced to spam the left click so much you would tire your fingers
Anyway from my point of view, Grim Dawn remain the only ARPG to get close to that after so many years. It still has lots of potential, but what remains to be seen, is in which direction the rest of the development will go, towards its niche, or towards the mainstream.
Did you know Diablo 3 used to lack monsters scaling to your level, but then Blizzard completely redesigned that aspect of the game in version 2.0 and now all monsters scale to your level always? So it wasn’t designed to be like this originally, they just suddenly decided their game should be like that. You can’t even say they were aiming for higher sales, because they had already sold most of the copies they were gonna sell, and that was a lot of copies. I’m not an insider, but I’ve heard some stories and I suppose that often these companies are just barely able to produce anything at all resembling a game once the original geniuses behind the original success-stories have left. I don’t think they understand what makes games fun to play, they are just blindly copying titles that happen to sell for some reason, it seems.
There are a number of reasons why Diablo clones shouldn’t have aggressive level scaling, but personally I just like being able to take advantage of a complex character & skill system and finding ways of creating unexpectedly powerful characters that I can use to skip content and attempt to tackle higher level areas sooner. You can’t keep me hooked for thousands of hours like you can WoW players, but then again you don’t have to because like everyone else (and unlike WoW players) I can only buy your game once anyway.
(BTW, it can’t be said often enough, obvious though it may be: monster level should be a Threat Rating regarding a species of monster - which is what they were originally in Dungeons & Dragons I believe - zombies should ALWAYS have low level, and dragons should ALWAYS have super high level, for example. Regardless of what your character level is.)
It’s ironic, but I feel like the only action RPGs these days that aren’t sell-outs on some level are console games: the Dark Souls games and Bloodborne. I’m not sure if you’ve tried those, but it sounds like you would appreciate their lack of hand-holding and their sense of dread and exploration.
It’s not that obvious to me. Completely subjective imo. I don’t think threat ratings are good at all. In a sense, Crate sort of does that already. The monsters scale in all areas but there’s a cap. One thing that Crate does exceptionally well is character progression, which most games miss, and miss badly.
I think threat levels on enemies force a player into content without ANY consideration for the rest of the world or environment. Granted, you get sort of tunneled into certain content in the “end game” but getting there, you can fight all over Cairn with much of the same reward. That’s the big picture. Almost all of the content is somewhat relevant, whichever run you choose yields somewhat decent balanced rewards.
I think Crate hit the sweet spot with this ARPG. They take a little good out of everything and bring it together nicely. The only thing that is lacking is the story line is all over the place (which I’m okay with).
Why would anyone want the whole world to scale to them? Like, lvl 70 zombies, lvl 70 rats and slime balls… And let’s not forget lvl 1 demon knights and lvl 1 hydras who can’t defeat a peasant with a stick as weapon. Sorry, it just seems so mindless.
When I get to the end of the game, I start over with a new character; I don’t need the game-world to keep up with me so I can grind forever pointlessly. I start over, and that’s why the game needs openness and areas with monsters of different levels so I can have totally different playthroughs, not just cosmetic difference like going anywhere you like but everyone being your level and the loot being the same so that the differences are only cosmetic. If a low-level me manages to find a cave containing vampire lords, then by God I should get higher level loot if I somehow manage to kill a few of them (and I should get to use that loot too - usage restricted by level is stupid) - and yes, they should be very hard to kill for a low level character.
I’d also like a ranking that ranks how fast you completed the game, and the ability to skip content if your character can handle higher level areas sooner. That way the game becomes more about starting over and trying to beat it faster with an even better character - it becomes about how good you are at building a character, it becomes about strategy rather than some pointless grinding that goes on forever for no reason.
