This pretty much describes everything I love about D2. Absolute pleasure to read this from GD’s designer, and to know that you’re acutely aware of the massive effect all those little GOOD philosophical design choices can have.
Thanks for bumping this, or I would have never seen this thread lol.
My pet peeve in ARPGs is inventory management. Like Riphawk, I’m also an old-timer. Back when we had cassette tape for storage :), you just took a small unsortable inventory as a fact of life. Muling, going through another player to equip an alt, that was standard fare.
Nowadays, I find that frankly annoying. Deep ARPGs like GD allow for various builds that require specific gear. And most of the fun comes from finding gear that gives you an idea for a build, collecting relevant pieces and the like.
Except that the inventory seems stuck in the dark ages of floppy/cassette storage:) There are TONS of components, component parts, crafting mats and whatever. All of which is unsortable, has to be examined piece-by-piece and fit into small stashes on mules.
Path of Exile, in that regard, did something nice (ok it was also a way of getting money) by allowing you to have pages of shared stash, with editable tags.
Each time I play GD, I dread the moment when I will have to dump the stash to mules. And the moment when I create a new alt and will have to examine the mules.
The worst part of this is that it does not make much sense. ARPGs like GD and TQ largely revolve around looting, loot collecting, making alt builds. Yet somehow, collecting gear is punished with loss (in the sense of the OP)
Small, unsortable stashes do not prevent collection, they just add an extraneous timesink.
And every ARPG around has unofficial inventory mods to try to alleviate this issue. But since the modders have to guess on the fileformat, you get all sort of crashes and item losses, plus you usually have to log out.
Why do ARPGs devs seem so determined to punish loot collection and sorting ? 
I am going with skjuld. I started gaming over 20 years ago and remember the stash problme in various games. I hate muling, but it was the only way to collect equipment in games where you had several character who may need very special equipment for their builds.
I really liked the pulgy mod for D2 where i could have unlimited chest space, only for the character and shared with all. both was nice.
Its nice in TQ / GD that you have a smuggler/shared stash, but the size of your personal and shared stash is really inferior.
As I see it, this game is about farming better equipment as the source of our fun (maybe not running to boss xy all the time, but in general).
It would be really nice to have more space.
I suggest 3 buttons in the personal inventory:
- sort things (like in the backpack)…even if sorting by alphabet or level option would be nice
2+3) a left and right button to swithc to the next/former inventory page.
If the number of pages in the inventory should be unlimited, 100 or something else would be to discuss.
Also if those pages should be for free or if every page should cost an amount of iron bits…maybe 25000.
( if they cost , i dont htink they should be more expensive (Additional to the costs of expanding hte first page to maximum infront of everything else)
because farming million of iron pieces just to open a hand full of inventory pages would seem to be unmotivating for me. but maybe i am just to new with 1 lv 35 and 2 other chars over 20 to see that you may get millions of ironbits later. but atm i dont see that)
Don’t worry about stash, I’m sure we’ll get more space in the future.
Otherwise you can easily transfer stash files while being in game. I think you can do this with the shared stash only and only when you aren’t using the smuggler and don’t use steam cloud.
I don’t think the distinction between personal and shared is really that useful. Diablo 3 has renounced that, Path of Exile too. Both have only shared stashes. (Ok, that’s also a way of making you pay extra) D3 has shared gold, too.
The main gameplay reasons I see for keeping inventories that way are the moneysink aspect and individual progression.
As they are now, I’m not convince buying character stash extensions is that useful as a moneysink. In TQ, that was just a speed bump. The real sink was in buying greens at vendors. For GD, it’s about the same, plus crafting.
Buying extra tabs might be better as a sink, since you might want more.
Ok, if they’re shared, every new char will benefit. So what ? If you’re twinking your alts, you’re already enjoying the benefits of other chars…
And the moment you have a shared stash, the whole notion of “individual inventory” becomes moot anyway.
What I would like to have would be extra shared tabs, bought with iron by any char.
Personally i think the current stash spaces are fine, i dont want to collect everything and stash them in chests or mules i want to hunt for the loot again and again, that was the thrill for me in D2 and now in GD, i love each char to feel unique with the loot that i found playing with him. D3 killed the individuality for me with the shared stash, paragons and the account name and the char name to be viewed in MP.
One typical solution to inventory complaints is to make every item take up 1 slot.
Personally I think that takes a lot away from having big shields and 2Hers feel ‘real’ in the game. I would be sad if this approach was used in GD.
Items filling multiple spaces are part of the charm. Keep it that way, IMO it’s perfect though perhaps allow a few more purchasable inventory bags.
1 slot per item wouldnt help for me. e.g. i have 1 characters inventory full with components, which take normally only one slot per item.
if you could stack such items in one place it would be different, but thatn those suffixes (different completion bonus) wouldnt be possible anymore.
TLDR: morphs and build enabler items are cool, get (more of) those!
I was going to register anyway and commend the team of GD about their AWESOME game. But ill do that in another post, firs I would like to adress this interesting bit.
Seeing as you have looked at Diablo2’s town design (d2 - a3 never happened!) wouldnt you agree that dropping an extra waypoint marker at the north of Devil’s crossing, or moving the stash wayyy closer to the waypoint would be in line with this?
I just finished my first playthrough till homestead (lvl 35 nightblade/warrior) and already im getting annoyed at the walking there. Then again, it might be my adhd acting up (just like having to drag the cursor on the minimap in order to get to some waypoints. Why not increase the minimap size, I dont think people play this game on 800*600 resolutions).
Anyways I’d like to chime in on your very cool post by saying the fun factor of the diablo2 total conversion MEdian XL (or the more recent Ultimative) was immense. In that game the crafting was so incredibly complex, rewarding and just plain humongous, that you could literally play a character for months continuously, and STILL make tangible progress in stats.
The big DOWNSIDE to that was though, that it used the D2 ui and the horadric, and it was completely unsuited for that kind of complex crafting. You’d just groan at the thought of respeccing your summoner into a xbowmancer, simply because you’d literally be clicking endelssly for at least 10 minutes just to get the stats and skills right. Never mind the itemization. Oh boy, im getting mentally frustrated just THINKING about this. Go figure.
Anyways long story short. I absolutely love this game, and I’m so very happy I caught wind on it on 4chins’ /v/, because else I would hvae missed out on this cool diablo1 meets titan quest ARPG.
I’m surprised that you guys are thinking about making this game a D2 competitor as I think the skilltree isnt really up to that. I feel this game in its current form more of an absolutely amazing single ‘play per build’ experience a la van helsing 2. But I can’t look into the devs head and see what plans they want to implement.
Another easy way to add a shitton of ‘fun’ and replayability (I think) is build-enabler items.
Think d2’s, dream runeword, or even better: wolfhowl. Items that morph or give some unique passive that (especially with the cooldual classing) completely mix up the stats/or even active skills of a class.
Median xl has a ton of those, and yes, those items are almost impossible to balance, but I dont think arpgs should revolve around balance. arpgs should revolve about reward, fun, exploration and theorycrafting. But that’s my personal idea ofcourse, I’ve played D2 hardcore legit to bits, with many level 90 hardcore chars online. To me the fun lies in making cool builds work. I dont need another ‘orbsorc’. I literally get annoyed at a2’s map layout, because it takes the longest to rush your runerush level 1 chracters through (TALK TO CAIN AGAIN). I must have done that act 100s of times (no hyperbole, sadly).
In fact medianxl cured me forever from vanilla d2 by being so much more fun.
Anyways, thank you guys so much for this amazing game, after the dissapointment that was PoE this was just great. I realise you have been at it for a while, but I can’t understand how you managed to deliver such a polished and well made game iwth such a tiny team. Simply amazing!
I hope you guys can improve the ‘speed’ and ‘fun’ factor whilst not forgetting the pillars of what makes this game great in the first place.
(physical combat, art direction, music, skill combinations, amazing map design, plenty of loot)
I keep thinking of this article as I play Witcher 3. Over and over I have to hear a narration of where I am in the story and the repetition is driving me nuts. It might be a glorified loading screen that plays while the game loads in the background but since we don’t know whether something is happening or it’s wasting our time, it causes aggravation while we wait for it to finish. A definite “loss”.
A regular loading screen will at the very least let us know loading is in progress.
I haven’t played The Witcher 3 yet, but if this feature works as I understand, it is certainly very useful for a lot of people - all those who aren’t able to play through the game in one go, but are forced to take breaks of several days or even weeks every now and then. After such a break, you often can’t recall what you did last and what you were going to do next, so such a narrative is very useful to get you back into the game - and means “profit”.
Maybe this could’ve been implemented in a better way, but I guess that what you have is still more beneficial than not having the feature at all.
Interesting design post, and very important to D2’s online replay-ability too. Regarding the bit about town layouts - I think Homestead is Grim Dawn’s Lut Gholein. D2’s Act 2 was also the worst for having to talk to multiple NPCs, made worse by the distance between everything.
I just posted about this in the thread about distance between riftgates, and it’s probably been said a lot of times, but Homestead adds a lot of tedium to Grim Dawn beyond the first time you visit it. Everything is simply too far from the Riftgate, and then there’s also staircases separating some of the main elements from the rest. Has this already been addressed by the dev team anywhere?
This is really something that could be improved upon. Inventory management is by far the most annoying feature of ARPGs. I think the best way to deal with inventory issues is to create the kind of hierarchical database-style storage that respects item classes and treats items like commodity.
I’ll use Titan Quest items as an example of how I would change storage.
First you open your storage. You see tabs in plaintext:
- Weapons
- Armor
- Charms
- Relics
- Rings & Amulets
- Set items
- Unique items
Let’s say you want to open set items tab and see three plaintext headers.
- Normal set items
- Epic set items
- Legendary set items
Let’s say you want to open normal level set items.
Now you see a text list of every normal level set which you’ve collected items for. As you pick a set, you see items of that set you’ve collected. When you click item of a set, you see every instance of that item you’ve placed on storage. Finally you can withdraw the item to use for your character. Similarly equipment could be grouped by character level requirement and there could be search field for desired attribute.
Open Rings & Amulets tab
- Req. 3 rings & amulets
- Req. 8 rings & amulets
- Req. 15 rings & amulets
…
Open req. 8 rings & amulets. 30 rings and amulets in storage listed. Search “defensive ability”, see 3 rings and amulets with defensive ability bonus. Pick and withdraw the right one for your character.
Think of it as Pokédex for your items! Store items on this automatic database by right-clicking the item with database open. If the system was really sophisticated, it would check if the item you’re about to store is strictly inferior to existing item in storage and sell it instead. Vice versa if new item trumps existing item.
Got 25 Boar Hides? Sub-tabs for completion bonus. Armor bonus x10, Defensive ability bonus x5, and so on.
This way the player could really collect every item in the game and never have to worry about “muling” anything.
an interesting read.
you can see this profit and loss in the most currently played games. Dota 2 would be an example. You state that these games can be like a slot machine, well that would explain dota 2 perfectly. Its a slot machine with 10 players and sometimes you have fun, sometimes you dont. I cant get rid of it. I keep reinstalling, then uninstalling because its so bad. If i play unranked I stomp everyone and its boring, if i play ranked I get two or even three feeders and can never get more than 1 win per loss, specifically because of valve programming match making so that you will get 3 feeders if you win too much.
What is it with these games that are acronymed “D2” and their ability to steal our lives?
All the same, if grim dawn can get this profit and loss as good as either D2, I’ll be happy. Its hard to predict how good this game will be come launch. Its hard to predict if I’ll even have time for it when its ready to launch.
Farming dynamite to dismantle stuff is definitely a loss. Yes, you can buy from Isaiah Reddan, but why not just increase the upfront cost of the service and remove dynamite from the equation?
Another loss that is quite apparent so far is how incredibly cluttered the inventory and stash can become. The main issue here is the accumulation of materials for crafting, namely components and pieces of it thereof. There are just -so much- of it all and we are incentivized to hold onto it all due to the a+b+c=x, x+y=z nature of the crafting system (therefore lower tiered components will occupy more stash space). I think it would be nice if there was some sort of designated component stash utilizing a dropdown folder for organization, along with a search function for said stash.
I think this is a very sophisticated way to sort and store items. I for one would love a system like this.
I do think stash size is too small especially now we’ve had the legendary items news update. 240 of them! So many! Given how rare they might be you will not want to get rid of them, especially if they’re part of a set. I think the shared stash is big enough but your personal stash is way too small. If your personal stash had 3 or 4 times the space and a sorting system similar to what Joopa has suggested then that would be a jump in the right direction
That’s good article on Games profits and loss. Really nice and informative.
interesting