I…what?
For starters, GD is a spiritual successor to TQ, for obvious reasons.
Secondly, I don’t think we’ve ever tried to replicate the ambiance of an environment from any particular game and you’ll certainly find that to be the case as you see more of the Forgotten Gods areas.
You’re making me content hungry. Please stop. I should stop visitting this thread. 
Everytime a new ARPG comes out, there are always people claiming that the new ARPG in town is a “spiritual successor to Diablo”.
Like, why? What’s the need to do this? This is like everytime a new action adventure third person game comes out and it’s toted as the new successor of Ocarina of Time. People, just because a game came out in the same genre, doesn’t mean it’s trying to be a successor to any game before it, unless obviously stated. And Grim Dawn is clearly and specifically stated by the devs to be a spiritual successor to Titan Quest. Not to any Diablo game.
It’s just like that one guy that was saying gd was supposed to “top poe” the other day… I don’t get why people do this, really… they make those fake, ass pull statements and try to pass them as facts, when it’s pretty known by everybody else that they’re full of it.
omg this game devs, keeps making go WOW everytime
it looks f amazing as always and even with much sand some trees still look gloomy and i love it
I cant wait for that shite to release. GIME PREORDER BUTTON
Okay. At first I was “nice wink this come back to TQ!”, now I feel that GD may loss its mood with the next expansion, like D2 went more ‘politically correct’ and lost the D1 nightmare charm.
Little pony and rainbow stories lol.
OK, you got me with the first one. But the other two (the third one actually doesn’t show up for me) kinda proves my point - they are considerably “dirtier,” more jagged/broken, and considerably more layered than the rocks in the screenshots. “Layer” here is in the geologic sense, not the graphic design sense. IMHO just based on search engine image queries, it seems the large majority of large rock formations in Southern Utah/Northern Arizona do not have that smooth unlayered look, which makes your first image more of an outlier than an archetype. I’m not a geology expert though.
Maybe you can say your guys were inspired by desert rock formations in other parts of the world that were smoother?
This is an interesting opinion. For me the juxtaposition of whimsical cartoonishness with somber grimdark doesn’t work, because it’s trying to elicit incompatible emotions at the same time. It’s like a movie with a genuinely tragic scene but with smiling flying bunnies in the background. Just doesn’t feel right to me.
Everyone talk about Diablo II or POE but you know that Grim Dawn is the Dark Souls of a-rpg.
Very beautiful and not a single patch of green aetherfire on sight.
There is no need to tell me there won’t be aetherials on FG. I watched the dev stream.
I’m sure they’ll give us plenty of red sand or some bullshit like that for us to universally hate. The final boss of the expansion will just be a giant patch of untyped floor damage in the shape of a hand giving us the finger.
Wait, I know what it’ll be:
thank you for the hard work
too much resemblance of Old Ankovia though
Ikr? How dare those desert people to also use bricks for their temples, houses and stuff???
Hi Dioarchet, thanks for your observations on the desert rocks. These were heavily inspired by rock formations found in Monument Valley, similar to the ones Zantai linked. While our game models are by no means perfect representations of these real world rocks, one thing that I found particularly striking about the rocks in my research was their large sweeping sections of smooth rock juxtaposed with hard, faceted angles. These rocks are a product of this research with some of those more prominent details accentuated for a more dramatic effect in-game.
As for the lack of geological layering, there is actually a very simple and uninspiring answer for that: it makes assets much less versatile and more difficult to use. As a small studio, we always try to maximize efficiency and reduce waste whenever possible - sometimes that means sacrificing details for the sake of speed and versatility. The rocks you see in the screenshots are only a few assets and are used in all sorts of orientations and angles that would make a sedimentary (layered) texture look horrible.
I know this probably isn’t the answer you wanted, but hopefully it offers some perspective!
Salt kills aetherials, not humans, but we can have quicksand;).
This untyped floor damage final boss made me remember of the stage Phobos Anomaly in Doom 1 in which the player was thrown in a dark room with a damaging floor and the only way to progress to the next stage was to (almost) die to the floor. Even the god mode cheat kept being deactivated.
That’s it. To beat FG the player must withstand the test of the hand giving the finger. If your hp falls below 10%, you live and win, unless it jumps directly to 0%, then you die!
These look nice!
I have to say though, the terrain on the 5th pic looks incredibly similar to a spot in Monster Hunter World
(Region 7 in Wildspire Waste, when looking down on it from its northern end :rolleyes:)
Thanks for taking the time to answer. There’s a lot more geological diversity here than I supposed. Maybe this could be utilised as a storyline element - a change in texture and terrain could be used to achieve a shift in ambiance. For example, a transition from flat desert + buttes to wide valleys to narrow canyons could be used to induce some sense of claustrophobia. Going from smooth rock features to jagged features can induce a shift in tone. But maybe this would require too much work, like you said. It’d be cool though. 
if you wanted any more rocky inspiration thought I’d give you these 2. (Disclaimer from wiki)
Loving the pics though, just hoping to see Grava’s Bridge map make an appearance as a secret area in the new X pack.
Here’s my 2c for more Rocky inspiration
If crate actually did these textures my PC would catch on fire
Cool maybe then you’ll finally upgrade
