Hello and welcome to Grim Misadventures 2015! It’s already shaping up to be an exciting year for Grim Dawn as we release new features and content for you to enjoy. We are now building on top of a strong foundation, polished and refined over 2014. To say that the game has grown tremendously over the past year would be an understatement. Thanks to the support and feedback from our players, Grim Dawn has become a richer and grander experience.
Let’s take a look back into the past to see just how much has been introduced into the game in 2014.
From the Past…
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Act 2 - With hours of new content and many difficult choices to make, players traveled into Old Arkovia to discover the nefarious activities of Darius Cronley’s gang and the mystery of the skeletal undead roaming the lands.
- Multiplayer - After many months of reworking the game’s network code and updating it to handle our new pathing system, Grim Dawn now has one of its core features: multiplayer. Players can join together over Steam or LAN and take on Cairn’s monsters together.
- Crafting - We refined the original crafting system and made it bigger and better, with gambling recipes available for those who crave a little more RNG luck and skill-granting Relics that you can base your builds around. To top it off, you must also choose between two different blacksmiths, who each provide unique crafting bonuses.
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The First Rogue-like Dungeon, Steps of Torment - Steps of Torment is the first area in the game where you cannot use a town portal rift. The door also seals behind you, requiring a key to enter each time. The enemies within are some of the toughest seen yet, but the treasures they guard are well worth the risk.
- Component Skills - Now whenever you apply a component to your weapon, you also unlock a powerful skill to bolster your builds.
- Veteran Mode - Players craving an additional challenge on the game’s first difficulty can enable Veteran Mode to spawn more monsters (which includes the dangerous Hero variants) and increase their strength. But with more risk comes greater reward as more loot drops from these powerful enemies.
- Two-Handed Melee Weapons - Brutal warhammers and vicious great axes, two-handed melee weapons provide an outlet for the reckless and the bloodthirsty with massive damage at the price of defenses.
- Dismantling - Dismantling combines everyone’s love for explosions with awesome loot. Bring some dynamite to the Inventor along with an item you no longer want and turn it into valuable Components, which you can use in your other equipment or in crafting.
- Transmuters – We improved upon the original skill tree design by introducing skill transmuters. These 1-3 point branching skill modifiers significantly change the skills they are associated with in order to give you even more options in your builds.
- Updated HUD and Tooltips - The HUD and tooltips were cleaned up and redone with new art, providing you with a sleek new look and better at-a-glance information.
- Character Sheet Overhaul - We completely redid our character sheet info pane in order to give you all of the information you crave about your character at a glance. Now you can see all of your major character stats tallied up in one convenient location.
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Arcanist Mastery - Grim Dawn’s fifth mastery, the aether-wielding Arcanist, has been introduced, bringing the total number of possible mastery combinations to 10. The Arcanist is a pure spellcaster, capable of massive area of effect damage but also quite squishy. She is challenging to play, but those that learn the ways of the Arcanist are well-rewarded.
- Caster Weapons - Two new item types, scepters and daggers, were introduced in order to provide casters with superior main-hand options that require less physique and cunning and deal damage purely in the form of an element. These caster weapons also favor % damage bonuses when generating affixes and never generate physical damage bonuses.
- Instanced Loot - Ever since multiplayer was released, players have been asking for personal loot, a feature which drops loot in multiplayer privately for each player. We answered this and many other community requests with Build 22. When starting a multiplayer game, you can now choose between the standard loot system and Instanced Loot.
- Additional Storage - Another highly requested feature added in Build 22, we expanded the shared character storage by adding 3 extra tabs, unlocked across all characters. Finally, a place to store all those precious Components.
- Weapon DPS Comparisons - In order to speed up the process of equipping new gear, we added DPS comparisons to weapon tooltips, allowing you to quickly compare your existing weapons to new ones without having to actually equip them. Holding CTRL even compares the two items without any attached components, for a truly unbiased analysis.
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Act 3 Chapter 1 - The first chapter of our biggest Act yet has been released in time for the holidays, giving you a glimpse at what’s to come as Grim Dawn approaches its epic ending.
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Augments - A new item type introduced for the upcoming Faction system overhaul, Augments allow you to customize your equipment further, even adding glow effects to weapons.
- Constitution - The original out-of-combat regeneration system required some adjustments as it was too easy to exploit. To alleviate this, we introduced a new mechanic that plays off the post-apocalyptic scrounging for resources world of Cairn. Players must now recover rations out in the world in order to regenerate out-of-combat. If their constitution runs out, no more out-of-combat regeneration.
- Updated Item Art - We continue to update all of the game’s unique items with, well, unique art. Most of the items you’ve been collecting since the game first went into Alpha now feature their final art.
- Localization Files - We began releasing localization files with game updates, allowing the community to translate all of the text within Grim Dawn to their native languages.
- Colorblind Options - In order to provide a better experience for colorblind players, we have added a collection of standardized filters that re-tint the game to a range appropriate to several forms of colorblindness.
What’s next?
- 2015 will see you journeying through the remainder of Act 3, and possibly a short Act 4, as we wrap up the story for Grim Dawn’s initial release.
- You will interact with factions in an entirely new way and earn lucrative rewards with the Faction System Overhaul.
- Grave new challenges will await you in the darkest places of the world as we introduce another rogue-like dungeon.
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Legendary Items of immense power will begin to drop for your collecting pleasure.
[li]And more…[/li]Our programmers are busy with exciting new features, bug fixes and optimization. I can’t speak too much about what’s to come, but they sure seem Devoted to the task.
Grim Misadventures will return on 01/19/2015 with another development update.
