For me I imagine it will be add some simple town planning element in the game on top of monster slaying and gear grinding.
Players will have the ability to contribute resources and plan the development direction of the town whether to be more technologically inclined or greater magic attuned. As the town develop, the look of the town will change, a more technologically inclined town will gain access steam engine to pump drinking water from well, steam hammer and forge to help with equipment crafting and capable of building more gears, spiked barricade, gatling gun nest and mines to defend the town. Towns that are magically attuned will gain access to enchanted anvil, hammer and arcane forge for crafting as well as magical wards, arcane seals and magical guardians to defend the town.
The town development too will influence what is available to players in each town. Smith/crafter in tech focused town will get access to crafting gears with physical/pierce/bleed damage bonus/resistance, attack speed, dodge chance and stun chance/resist. Also a higher chance to be able to randomly craft equipment with rare affix and prefix that are related to those stat. Magic attuned town will craft gears with elemental/chaos/aether/poison/vitality damage/resistance, freeze/sleep/petrify/slow resist with better chance to craft gear with rare affix/prefix related to those stats.
As player rescue survivors into the town, players will be able to assign them to specific role like cook to produce food that restore more constitution or grant buffs, additional vendor, scrapper for salvaging equipment into scraps and components, additional crafter to craft components, enchanter to enchant equipment and form scavenging team to scavenge for additional scraps, resource, component even additional blueprints for players and town.
There will also be chance of base defending quest that happens randomly when the player is stepping into the town, rescue quest that happen randomly to rescue a stranded member of the scavenger team every time player send the scavengers out on salvage mission.
First of all, if GD 2 ever happened, it would propably no sooner than 2022ish. Rather later.
And it woudln´t look like this. Sure Crate would add features, but GD is an ACTION RPG. And Crate already has a town builder in the works.
Maybe this time they´d focus a bit more on multiplayer.
But what the heck, speculating now is nonsense, with the Half Life 3 release coming up.
Interesting ideas, but who can say what they may want to do with the game in a few years’ time. It will depend on how well the company’s doing, what other games they have to compete against and even what state the ARPG and gaming world in general is in by then.
Since there’s already a town builder in the works, not sure they’d add that to a GD2, but who knows.
When I first saw Grim Dawn page on Steam I thought this game would be about a post-apocalyptic survival. Something like Darkwood with Grim Dawn combat might be interesting.
Nothing wrong to add different mechanics or new features to compliment the core ARPG gameplay.
Crate is aiming to create an ARPG with compelling stories where player decisions matter and influence the game world, we can see this by the way the town change when we rescue survivors, kick someone out from the town, reclaim defenses/structures, completing quest to repair some structure in the town or the one time when you set a demon free even if the changes are very minor. It is only logical to continue to expand on the current gameplay and add in more features that compliment the current aim set by Crate for Grim Dawn.
