Welcome back to Grim Misadventures! Today’s update will cover the underappreciated world of common gear. As the most…common items you will encounter in your heroic journey across Cairn, their importance cannot be understated. Recently, I had been busy with the long-term projections of the defense and damage values for our common gear as well as their stat requirements. In summary, my work involved a bunch of graphs, long data tables, and even longer equations. If that sounds like a fun day to you, then you just might be a game designer in the making. Little industry secret: this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjCo2I3ooK0 is not game design. Picture two screens full of spreadsheets and you might be on to something.
Designer test, question #1: Is this pretty?
Rather than showing off a bunch of data, we figured that sharing some of the item art our artists have polished for your collecting pleasure would make for a better update. Let us dive in.
Where armor is concerned, each item slot has at least two progression variants in terms of defense values and the respective physique requirements. Other than providing more visual variety, this has the added benefit of giving you more freedom in how you distribute your stats. That way, a squishy caster will still see his armor progress with level without being forced to invest heavily in physique to upgrade. Perhaps you want to be a heavily armored battle-mage-tank instead? That is your call. The gear is out there!
Below are some examples of gear you will be acquiring. These represent collections of items around levels 8 and 30. We will not spoil your appetite by showing off high level items quite yet.
Level ~8 Caster Armor Collection
Level ~8 Heavy Armor Collection
Level ~30 Heavy Armor Collection
This marks the last update of 2012 from me. Have a happy holiday season (and a distinct lack of Mayan calendars)! See you all on the other side with an update on 1/06/2013! Things will only get more exciting as we inch closer to Alpha!
Thanks for the update! I am really liking the character screen and all the slots of armour (though if a back gear slot was also added, that would be totally awesome!).
So this update was about common armour? You didn’t really give much information about common armour…
Is common armour going to be useful once you start to acquire higher ranked armours? Will we be able to break down common armour into materials to craft with? Can we combine different types of common armour to make more powerful and higher ranked armour?
Essentially, how will common armour be different in Grim Dawn from how it is in every other ARPG? That being, useless.
That is when my Winter Break vacation ends, my vacation starts on 19th of December when I finish my finals on the day before. On the 7th, my college Spring term courses commences. lol
Also, I want to know the ones I pointed are correct or not, and the one that is in ???, I am curious to know what they are going to be used for? I appreciate if you can an enlighten me on it.
Wow! Loving how the armors all look very renegade/scavenger, and the caster armor, my favourite by far! I guess that’s what I’ll be wearing after all, as a demolitionist + occultist.
thanks Zantai for the newest update always welcome those :), and see you in the new year…
the post lol, Cowboy / samari style persons ?, like the cowboy thing as well…
Are these armors for both going to maybe degrade over time so you have to keep picking up armor or is it going to be god type armor you can swap at any time ?.
The slots up the top like someone was wondering before. one of them was a weapon stat so im gethering either rings / stats for the weapon.
Then the 3 at the bottem im going to guess at 2 rings 1 belt ?.
anyways thanks for the nice screenshots and see you in the new year :).
I think Zantai was going off his knowledge of TQ. We haven’t yet discussed the plan for attribute points since he joined the project. It is still something I was planning to do if we can get to it. I actually wonder what the community thinks? Should both skill and attribute points be reclaimable or should one be more permanent?
I believe a respec system should be allowed for both skills and attributes. A heavy consequence should result though, whether it is a large gold price or something else. But remember, whether or not they are reclaimable, people will still take advantage of things like console cheats to respec skill and attribute points anyway. Just like people are doing in TL2.
Higher ranked? Common gear extends throughout the game and is the foundation for magical and rare armor. Though uniques will be powerful when they first drop they become obsolete over time as the base armor, dmg, etc, get further and further behind higher level gear. It is also very possible to find rare affix combinations that are more powerful than many uniques or more suitable for your class build. So, in that sense, common gear as a foundation for magical and rares, will always remain important.
I dislike breaking down armor into crafting parts - I think it just imposes this burden on players where they feel compelled to pick up everything and perform additional UI actions into order to break it down. It just adds tedium. I’d rather enemies drop the crafting parts, allowing players to just ignore drops that won’t sell for much and have no other worth to them.
I think it is the nature of the game that you eventually grow beyond certain classes of gear and that seems fine to me. Part of what you learn playing, in order to maximize your efficiency, is what items to pick up and what to ignore. Ignoring less valuable items requires no action on the part of the player and reduces the frequency with which they have to travel to town to sell or offload gear.
According to me it should come with a cost if you reclaim them. It’s always fun to change the built of a high level instead of being forced to play another one for 300h, but if the cost of doing so is free, then you literally just killed the whole “class” thing (like D3…).
Anyway those stats skills didn’t matter that much in TQ, I even had to see one of my friends leveling up before realizing we could chose some on leveling up (after finishing the game twice XD).
I have a little suggestion, that may be a little to work to implement for the alpha but might worth thinking about, instead of receiving X soulless “stats points” at leveling up, create a “stat tree” with a bunch of traits. (smart = +1 spirit --> intelligent +2 spirit --> genius +5 spirit or (exclusive) astute (+0 spirit but +1 skill)…
Very nice update. I’m extremely excited to play the alpha build when it is ready. Base gear is always extremely important, as it gives the player a jumping off point. I’ve always liked the idea of equipping base items at the beginning of an RPG, and then progressively finding better rarities of gear. However, it does make base items almost worthless a lot of the time. They don’t fetch a good price, and as Medierra said, they won’t be used for crafting materials. Perhaps there could be a way in game to fuse base gear with crafting materials to upgrade the item’s rarity.
On another note, that commercial was borderline offensive and did nothing but support the notion that game development is 100% fun and easy. I’d say I’ve spent more time with flowcharts and spreadsheets than anything else during the two years I’ve been working on my first title.
I love the caster armor. I do hope there’s the possibility to dye the equipment, as having that armor in pitchblack would look so sweet…
I also wonder about the missing slots. The ones below and above the character. But also the two big empty slots on each side of the screen.
I think it is kinda obvious that those slots are for the weapons, shields, bows, and etc.
The ones on the upper right (the small slots) I think may possibly be trinkets or charms in some way. Who knows, but I second guessing that they are for those slots.
Nice update Zantai, oddly I like playing with spreadsheets, they can be so fun to make the complex ones sometimes ;).
Personally I would like to be able to re-spec both the skill and atribute points, but it needs to be very expensive, similar to how the skill adjustments worked in TQ would be great for both of them. This way if you want to you can change a caster orientated build to a melee focused character if you want, or switch from a glass cannon to a tank of some description, if you can’t change your attribute points you would be locked into a style of class and I find that this would lead to limited use for changing skill allocations.
Don’t get me wrong I don’t think that you should be able to easily able to change classes randomly in the middle of a game, I would expect that it would take a lot of money in order to redo a middle level character’s points, but if you want to I think that you should be able to.
Thanks for the answer! And I apologize in advance for the wall of text.=)
By common gear being the foundation of magical and rare gear, do you mean that the attributes of common gear are the basic attributes that will also be seen in magical, rare, etc?
I’m not asking about higher ranked gear (magical, rare, unique), but thanks for the clarification. In every ARPG I have played, by the first 10 or so levels, you aren’t using common gear any more, as common gear is useless no matter what level it is. A player may find a piece of common gear that is more powerful then their lower levelled magical gear, however, will not use it as they will surely find a piece of magical gear that outmatches that common piece within a short amount of time. Thus, common gear becomes redundant and is essentially just there to clutter the screen and make the appearance of higher ranked gear all the more exciting. This use of common gear, while effective, can be improved on.
I understand why you would rather players finding crafting components from enemy drops rather than breaking down common gear. But I don’t necessarily agree entirely with this. I would argue that it would be even better to include both. Allow players to break down common gear into crafting materials as well as finding those materials from enemies. This adds a more in-depth system and allows more player choice. In this way, people who like to pick up everything can have another use of common gear rather than just selling it. All it requires would be to right click on the gear and click “salvage” to acquire the materials. You can also include an inventory icon that can “salvage” all common gear currently in your inventory. One extra click is hardly a burden. =)
I completely agree that players out-grow gear, and that definitely adds to the feel of progression. However, as I said, common gear is out-grown much to quickly. In fact, in most games, people making a new character don’t even pick it up as it isn’t much harder to find the next rank in gear. Yes, a disadvantage of giving common gear a more important role such as “salvaging” does make a player return to town more frequently, but the beautiful thing is, is that it is completely up to the player. It gives freedom of choice, players don’t have to pick up common gear and “salvage” it if they find crafting materials of enemies, but they can if they want to find materials at an exceeded rate. If there is a good balance, then it becomes entirely optional.
You must agree, it would benefit farming at end game if pieces of gear, not only common, had chances to drop really interesting materials. This would lower the frustration of players feeling like they may get nothing out of a run of farming, when they have more than one thing to do (kill monsters and find better gear), they can also improve their chances of acquiring crafting materials by salvaging gear they find while farming. It adds options, and I am all for options. =)
Great update, Zantai! But when are we going to get to see the female versions of player and gear?
Btw, I about laughed myself out of my chair when I saw the cod piece on that third set of armor! I’m surprised ya’ll didn’t go Road Warrior with it and add spikes!
