Hi guys, I’m a Grim Dawn Veteran and like many I absolutely loved Grim Dawn. Currently I am playing Path of Exile, and have a history of playing ARPGs, RPG’s and MMO’s, I am looking forward to Path of Exile 2, Diablo 4 and Lost ark online. ARPG’s are my sweet spot, I tend to spend most of my time discovering new places, new items, refining my build to progress to more difficult content.
After experiencing Path of Exile I really think there can be a lot to take away from this game, and I would like to share a conceptual idea which could work in the Grim Dawn Universe.
The thing which keeps me coming back to Path is the regular updates, the changes in meta, the diversity in character builds. complex itemisation. Grim Dawn had all of this, and it did get fairly regular updates. End game was huge too, so what would I love to see in the next instalment?
Create a campaign which levels a character up to start end game without needing to re-run the same campaign many times. Fans of the game will have to run the campaign many times because they will be creating lots of different characters, but the idea of running the campaign 3 times for each character was pretty tough and it contributed to player fatigue.
Give the players the option once they have completed the campaign, to start end game with new characters (from level 1). This method should speed up the levelling process encouraging players to experiment with many builds with having a huge impact on the amount of time they need to spend. Example, in Grim Dawn, I spent a total of around 800 hours but I only created about 8 different characters meaning I missed out of many builds :(((
Make almost impossible content as an optional end-game, give the players something to aim for, make it so tough that only a handful of players are likely to beat it. This coupled with lots of other end game content with varying difficulty.
Raids, this would be a seasonal objective, ideally every 3 month. We have a reset where all characters are push to a standard league much like POE, each season, a new raid would become available and this raid would be extremely difficult (see point 3), raids would scale based on party size so that players who wish to solo the game can do so.
We had the crucible, amazing. I would like to see this featured in Grim Dawn 2, but with global leaderboards, rewards, something for players to aim for. Endless difficulty so that players can really measure of strong their character is.
Game speed, I actually switched to playing GD at 1.4 game speed, it just felt so much better. I would like Grim Dawn 2 to be faster than GD.
Fresh content, retain players, surprise us with amazing idea’s.
New engine, new graphics
Town Hubs, where hundreds of players can meet chat and show off their armour.
PVP leaderboards and ranking. Season rewards
I realise Grim Dawn 2 may not even happen, and that this is pointless post. Hope you are all well
1 and 2 are already possible, if you have the Forgotten Gods expansion, through the use of Merit Tokens which allow you to skip from Normal to either Elite or Ultimate depending on which token you use.
3:. The Shattered Realm is pretty much endless since it becomes so unbalanced that few will get close to shard 210.
4: Well, Crate is a small team of around 15-16 people and they’re working on other projects as well so how easy it would be for them to do something like that I don’t know. And a big attraction for many players is the solo aspect of GD; unless the raids were optional I can see a lot of players being unhappy.
5, 9 and 10. I don’t know how easy those would be to do without dedicated servers. Crate aren’t against them per se, but whether they’ll have something like that if they make a GD2 we’ll just have to wait and see. Again would need to be optional because many players prefer the solo aspect of the GD and don’t want to do those sort of things.
Unless Crate gets backing from a big company, i don’t ever see them doing anything related to dedicated servers. Keeping the servers up takes a ton of money and manpower, something Crate isn’t exactly loaded with. Which is fine, because the appeal of Grim Dawn is the focus in single player.
Exactly this. If you want your online, fast-paced ARPG, PoE isn’t going anywhere. If modding tools return for Grim Dawn 2, you can make most of those changes as well besides the always online or MMO stuff like raids. Leagues or competitive scenes can be organised by the community as is the case now.
For the rest us, please don’t force the game to be something we don’t want it to be. Don’t make Grim Dawn into another PoE.
^the weakness of online games that force competitive gameplay and constantly changing metas to rake money from events.
for grim dawn… no. just no. grim dawn is about single player arpg loot game with focus on lore and testing builds for fun without competition and pvp disturbing its design. titan quest, torchlight 1 & 2 is also similar in nature to grim dawn.
if crate decide to go focus on multiplayer however, i think single player and multiplayer chars and their worlds should be separated so that single players can still enjoy the pve without being annoyed by constantly changing season metas from the multiplayer worlds.
same, I do not want online play, leaderboards and endless grind aka endgame. The speed is also fine.
About the only thing I would not mind is having one playthrough only - if the world is big enough to allow for that and I do not have to play some braindead endgame for the second half of the char levels. I take repeating the campaign over that at any time…
I definitely don’t like the idea of constant online connection. That’s the thing i dislike the most in Diablo 3 because i can’t play if my internet is slightly unstable. Grim Dawn doesn’t need any sort of online authentication. I can just launch it and play it at any moment and at my own pace. I picked up Last Epoch recently and i hated that i needed to make an account and need to authenticate to play the game.
For me the worst is off-line and not being able to use / make tools / mods and adjust the game to my preferences. Maybe there could be two modes for different kind of players.
For example limited Stash in D3 was a deal-breaker for me. However paying micro-transactions for more tabs would work too I guess but on the other hand others would hate it for sure.
Being able to quickly test builds with GDStash is handy too - I make sure I like the final character and if it’s the case I make it in a legit way. Or not because I have altoholism and cannot finish a character before creating a new one. Starting on SSF + Veteran every time doesn’t help.
Oh I dunno, while I don’t know their financials I’ve done enough “maths” to get a hint of what kinda ballpark they are in and I’d wager that if they really wanted too they could probably do servers no problem now.
However…
^I also happen to agree with this. Tho I would note that I wouldn’t be against them adding server-play so long as we still had offline and modding capability. I definitely wouldn’t want server play, however, for myself so if they didn’t feel like committing to such a dual operation I am always going to go with offline capabilities - as this is the thing I want in a diablo.
Multiplayer just doesn’t interest me tho I get it that there are many that do these days but what makes GD unique compared to most the other options is that it serves the niche of people that want offline (and mods) and they’ve done very well for themselves as a result of this difference.
Aw, I was hoping this was going to be a discussion of what would be a cool Grim Dawn 2 concept but it’s just an ‘I like online games, wouldn’t Grim Dawn be cool as an MMO’ post. I’ve honestly never understood the appeal of online play, if I wanted to talk to people I’d go outside and if I wanted to show off isn’t that what Reddit is for? But I’m glad they exist for those that enjoy them.
I know that at some point Crate stated they wanted to try other genres of games and that is one of the reasons Farthest Frontier is a RTS. I do really love this game but weirdly am not a big fan of ARPGs in general, this is the only one I’ve ever bothered to play high difficulty on. I’d love an RPG sequel with the same skill trees as Grim Dawn and some kind of mechanic involving the rift gates - they are supposes to be a big deal about your character aren’t they? Maybe on a mission with the outcast aetherials or something. That would be a cool concept I think.
I am a heretical casual player - it’s ok, you can say it.
