Design decisions you might disagree with
Limited stash space
Storage is actually kind of a personal thing, in terms of what is the right amount for people. Some people obviously want infinite storage and wish they could collect and categorize everything in the game. Other people will never hang on to enough stuff to fill up the storage available. Another group likes to collect things but wants some limit that eventually forces decisions about what to keep and what to sell.
If you’re a hoarder who wants infinite space, you might be thinking “why on earth would anyone not want to keep all their items?!” Basically because people start to become overwhelmed by the amount of crap that they have. It becomes tiring looking at it all, sifting through it, trying to organize it. Some people love that but most people find it burdensome. Yet, left to their own devices with infinite space, a lot of people would just keep collecting things to the point that they didn’t even want to open their stash and have to deal with all the shit in their there.
With very subjective, psychologically driven things like this, it is pretty common for people to assume that their viewpoint, which makes sense to them, must be the majority, as opposed to another view that is incomprehensible or even seems absurd.
The problem is, no one ever “just doesn’t use it”. There are many instances in games of features, intended or accidental, that detract from player enjoyment but which people feel compelled to use if they exist.
Naturally everyone would prefer that the game just be designed specifically for their own preferences rather than not but we have to try to find a compromise that will provide what we believe is the best experience for most players. For the cases where we can’t find a suitable compromise for everything, we allow modding. This is exactly the type of situation modding is meant to resolve.
Stash space was increased when we vastly expanded the number of items in the game, aka with expansions.
We have no plans to add infinite storage to the game.
For those that need that, mods exist and are supported for a reason.
Quest markers are only shown, if you are close to your objective
Some quest objects now display a star on the mini-map once you get close enough and if you already have the quest (ex. the trap door to Devil’s Aquifer once you get the clearing the well quest). Objecties that you’re supposed to find through exploration won’t appear or will only display once you’re very close (to the point where it is visible on-screen). Other things that are supposed to be obvious or where an NPC has given you explicit instructions, will appear from further away as though they were marked on your map (the new treasure quest, where the dying man tells you how to find his stash).
we kind of deliberately wanted Grim Dawn to be about discovery and exploration and the quest NPCs who give you the quest and the dialogue and also the quest log gives you directions on where to go and when you get close to a quest target that’s when it shows on the mini-map. And that is by design, it’s not something like oh well we could still improve. We actually wanted it to be this way and I do realise that that isn’t for everybody.
sometimes you may find yourself traveling to unexpected places, eagerly stalking a foe you have never met before. Unlike standard quests, bounties are unguided. That means minimal instructions and no quest markers on the mini-map.
Using nerfs to balance the game
Our responsibility to the game is balance at all levels of play. This is something many people forget/don’t seem to realize. The vast majority of the playerbase does not play at the level that concerns forum goers, and any concerns about build viability at SR9000 and Gladiator Crucible 3x clear times are effectively irrelevant to them.
This is also why some things that certain users consider to be “big issues” or “desperately in need of redesign” are often not actually all that problematic because for the average player they are not only viable, but they also enable alternatives to min-maxed playstyles.
Obviously, the prospect of a game balanced at all levels of play is a very complex one. One could argue that it’s not even feasible with all of the moving parts intertwining in an ARPG, but it is one worth striving for nonetheless.
When it comes to balancing build performance, we have our own standards of what we believe is healthy for the overall game, even if those standards don’t align with what some builds consider “crap” or “fine”. When we observe outliers, we look into bringing them back into the middle.
Now that is going to happen whether the community works with us or not, which is why I like to remind builders that you really have two options: work with us to improve the game’s balance or accept whatever changes come your way.
Some have accepted (and benefited from) this over the years, while others feel that they need to treat us like some enemy to resist. Don’t forget that the devs have really high -%RR against Nerf Resist.
At the end of the day, we all want the same things…more viable builds and more ways to enjoy the game. This can only be achieved by finding a happy middle-ground between the overachievers and the underachievers.
every balance patch, every…single…patch, includes more buffs than nerfs. New possibilities are created, old ones are brought up to new standards, and yes, overperformers are brought back to the middle where they belong so that the overall game can thrive.
My point is that players are often reluctant to discuss nerfs, some straight up refuse to acknowledge that nerfs are an acceptable tool in a dev’s arsenal. When more players accept nerfs can and will happen, they can approach a discussion from a more objective standpoint.
An example, why nerfs are appropriate
Let’s say we have 100 skills. 4 of them are Overpowered, 86 are average and 10 are underperforming. In addition, if you use some or all of the overpowered skills, monster balance feels off and the game is too easy.
You are the developer.
Do you buff 96 skills to match the OP ones and then adjust every monster in the game to make the difficulty feel right again?
Or do you do the sane thing and fix the 4 overpowered skills and 10 underperforming ones, leave the monsters alone, and move on to other pressing tasks also on your immediate to-do list?
Enemy Design, Damage Types, Resistances & Immunities, Resistance Reduction
Zantai:
As contentious of a topic as this is, I think if we were working on Grim Dawn 2 right now, I’d still consider having monsters with high resistances/immunities as we do now.
There are a number of reasons for this:
Theme and Expectation
Likewise, when you have skeletons, you don’t really think about an enemy that’s made of just bones to bleed.
Damage Diversity feeling different.
Varying resistances on enemies help differentiate damage types further and, going back to the earlier point of theme, make them feel different.
Highs and Lows
Resistances also create a cadence to the combat. When not every foe takes the same amount of time, you’re not going to as easily check out of what you’re doing, mouth partially agape as you check what’s playing on Netflix on the other screen. It snaps you back in and gets you paying attention, if just a little bit.
Or it makes you sit in the spawn area of the Crucible without moving for 5 minutes and taking all of that extra damage from the portal then complaining that you died to an immune enemy. There is so much variety to the ARPG playerbase!
Learning Moment
Running into foes early on that are really resistant to your damage type might (can’t speak for everybody here, some people are tenacious) make you rethink your strategy.
All that said, Diablo 2 had enemies that could, by pure random rolls, generate immunities that would make them susceptible to nothing except one damage type (usually poison), and D2 was much less forgiving in that regard. I’m sure many of us can recall wailing on an enemy for 10 minutes (because fuck leaving them alive, amirite), with a damage type that’s maybe 0.5% of our output and leaving rather dissatisfied.
That’s not an ideal scenario either, and RR exists for that reason.
Too many damage types
I think there’s a point where too many damage types actually hinders buildcrafting. It makes class synergies more complicated and more difficult to parse for the typical player. It also means that each damage type doesn’t feel as unique.
To combat that to a degree, we’ve leaned towards having damage pairs that are frequently seen together (ex. Chaos and Vitality, or Cold and Lightning). Conversion helped as well.
I’m not convinced that culling some damage types would hurt build diversity. I think it would make your choices feel more meaningful, which is why if there is a GD2 some day, it will definitely be a step we will be taking. Most certainly you would see flat and dot damage share modifiers. Elemental would likely be removed as it only complicates things and requires additional explanation.
The story with Aether/Chaos is that they were originally intended to be damage wielded by enemies and not by players, but somewhere along the way in an effort to distinguish some classes early on, we ended up adding those damage types to mastery skills.
I think if we went back and did things all over again, we’d have stuck to those damage types being exclusive to enemies. Makes Aetherial and Chthonian powers feel more distinct than just “things players also do”.
Having less damage types is also something I think would be good if we did a sequel. Too many damage types means it is harder to overlap skills between masteries, makes gearing more difficult and muddies resistances.
As for dots being separate from flat damage for % bonuses, that’s a relic from TQ. By the time we had a moment to breathe during development and think about it, it was too ingrained in GD to rip out without significant time invested. That said, most end-game sources of damage that boost a flat damage now also boost the respective dot, so it’s not that big a deal anymore. For clarity’s sake, we would not do that again for a sequel.
Crowd Control skills are not working on bosses
Why unlearning skill and devotion points at the Spirit Guide comes with a fee
while making decisions meaningful is important, we also don’t want to discourage new players from trying new skills and experimenting. Learning your character should not turn into a grind for resources or force you to reroll.
I personally think we’ve struck a fine balance with tuning respecs in Grim Dawn such that you are free to change your character’s loadout as you please, but excessive (excessive being another topic of personal opinion) respecs will cost you.
Even then, respeccing never becomes prohibitively expensive. You can almost completely reset any character (except for mastery choices) if you so choose regardless of what point you are in the game, but you have to commit to it.
The argument that respecs are necessary as a cash sink is a bit silly. We can adjust costs all over the game if we want players to burn more iron bits. Even in that, I feel we’ve actually ended up in a really good place in the end where cash flow is plentiful, but there’s a lot of meaningful ways to spend it. Respec costs were absolutely not factored into that.
4 Likes