Not sure how we got on open world games, but Gothic 1,2,3, Risen come to mind as good ones. Your level is your boundary, and you don’t know exactly where the boundary is until you walk in to it and get destroyed. Of course its quests and pretty scenery that drive those games, When people say they hate pretty environs and side quests I am not sure exactly why they like RPG’s at all. The point is atmospheric environments in which to go questing and saving cats from trees and killing dragons and stuff. Yes maam you wait right here, I will go and slay that smelly rat in your basement because I am a MFing hero and that’s how i roll.
Coming back to a point earlier made, i too think that the campaign is already on the long side, as you habe to go through it three times. I hope that the xpac with the new act reduces the difficulties to two. By the end of act four the game always feels very strtched, especially as i think act four is by far the weakest.
Even if not a quest, randomize his location because these games depend on randomness, and add a note to make his presence in the world real, a reason for being there.
I imagine it is tough with budgets and time constraints. I think they did a fantastic job over all. In this day with digital distribution though, development doesn’t have to be terminal.
That’s fantastic and all game play wise but doesn’t make his presence in the woods or your detour to find him make any more sense in the context of the story. Right no one cares about story, then a giant open wilderness between you and the objective is the wrong layout, it needs to be a maze.
I will say zooming in the veiw, turning off the map and rotating the camera does alot to randomize the map perceptually. That’s my only gripe really, that lack of randomness in a game genre that demands it.
I could have sworn i was Rick Grimes with the number of Walking Dead references. The lone wanderer is not how the game is structured or presented. If dev’s wan’t us to pretend otherwise then don’t bother with story at all and just put minimal text and 20-30 levels of mazey dungeon full of monsters between me and the end boss.
Problem with many games is that devs feel compelled to try and please everyone. They are afraid to let the player feel lost, even when feeling lost is what the games needs. Afraid not to have much of a story even if they really aren’t trying to tell a story. Best thing Grim Dawn could do is get rid of the World map, fog and shrink the mini map and randomize the inversion and orientation of the map and spawn the sub objectives off the main path at random locations. Then you have a dungeon crawler and not Mario Brothers.
I’m always up for more lore notes.
I don’t understand why you think it absolutely needs to tie directly in to the main story. He was a merchant that was attacked and waylaid. When you actually first enter the area that he is located a message flashes on screen noting the overturned recently damaged wagon.
You explore the area and save him… If you choose.
What’s the matter with it being a more random encounter where you potentially help a stranger in need is what I’m wondering?
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Not the “main story” per se, just some narrative reason for exploring. This is only because all of the “main” objectives sit within eye shot of road, always in the same spot. For instance, If I follow the “main” story, i have absolutely zero reason to go looking for Rovers at the edge of the map, and no reason to ever stumble on them.
I think i missed the connection between the overturned cart and the merchant. Its because I had already spent so much time aimlessly map clearing. The message of the cart is somewhat subtle. The game world is rather intense. That connection should be made more forceful and dramatic. I was expecting a hoard to pop out. Maybe “this looks recent, perhaps there are survivors nearby”…but maybe it does say that, that pop up text is tiny, i miss it about half the time, its gone before i can focus in on it.
Ok, so turning off the minimap and zooming the camera in and using the rotate feature to veiw the landscape better has really improved the sense of being in a maze. A few times I have even been glad to see a familiar static feature that let me know where i was. The mini map and the max pan really suck out the sense of having to look for anything. A little more randomness in objectives and locations would be good but this last run through Burwitch and the Warden Cellar with restricted view and muddled directional awareness made it much more like the Diablo-esque experience i was hoping for.
Curious though as to why the locations, composed of a finite number of elements/textures, are static instead of random or at least semi randomized at the start. The main roads could be fixed and the rest of the area spawned off random foot paths. I know the game has good pathing because I clicked a chest in a different room and my guy pathed a mile of twisting rooms and corridors to get to it. Maybe its more technically complex than I imagine with trying to seam together all the high res textures and objects. Its just my opinion but in a game like this, anywhere something can be randomized, within constraints, it should be.
I usually play mostly zoomed in as well as I like to see a bit more detail. Camera rotate is one of my favorite features and I use it alot… some people don’t like to do such things tho. Not for everyone I guess.
After a while you learn the maps pretty intimately and can navigate well enough no matter the rotation. The only time I get “lost” is if I go afk for a while and forget what I was doing.
As far as I have ever been aware the engine was never made to utilize randomization in the same fashion that you seem to be stuck on, Diablo style. The devs and the more in-depth modders here could probably say more than I the “whys” of this than I tho but I can say that you will not be receiving this particular dream in GD at any point.
I don’t necessarily think it would add anything worthwhile to the game. At the most I wouldn’t mind seeing perhaps certain dungeons utilize it, restricted in application. You will find that a lot of people here strongly dislike this use of randomization and I can appreciate some of the reasons for this, as I can appreciate some of the reasons for it.
In the end it’s a moot point and GD isn’t going to be seeing this unless they turn around and surprise us with it in the expansion or something.
There are some modders that were working on some randomization workarounds (not anything that would affect the official game) I think but I haven’t looked in on any of that recently and am not sure if it’s a thing.
Nah, i don’t expect my rant on the forums to result in a redesign of the game or engine. Even creating spawn points for the 4 zombies in the first area would require extensive redesign of the map.
I imagine some don’t like it. To me it just eases the repetitiveness of a game that is intended to be played multiple times. As you say, after a few times you know the route by heart regardless of map orientation. Particularly the dungeons like the wardens lair. There is nothing particularly unique about the objects in the dungeon or the layout. I would wager that the dungeon was randomly generated based on those elements and a best roll was selected for editing and became the final cut. It would take ages to hand place all those objects. Could be wrong but I would think the time to render the dungeon is the limitation, and then needing to weed out frustrating or nonsensical layouts.
You should check out some of the level design streams. Everything really is placed by hand.
Yup as Anathema points out above GD’s world is handmade as far as I’ve ever known. If they were randomly generating elements of the game then they would also likely be able to implement randomization in the game. So unless they are sitting on a dirty little secret …
Which is very unlikely considering they gave us the same tools they use to make the game with.
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Any form of randomisation reduces the unique look and layout of the world and then involves more work creating software to check that everything is working and accessible.
Grim Dawn is completely hand made and every part of the world and all items, trees, rocks etc are individually hand placed.
There’s no random world / dungeon creator used in the game creation anywhere.
WRONG as AF. The unique look feeling does not only come from static content but rather from the ambience and graphic style
Maintaining the “ambience” is not easy to do with generated layouts. For example, a large part of the ambience in GD’s first act… Is the houses. It’s not EASY to generate houses that you can actually enter and interact with, without causing bugs. A lot of them. Plus, if you randomly generate… How exactly do you expect Crate to keep things like The Hidden Path, and our other fun secrets? Generating around a static area makes an already difficult task even harder, and just makes it more likely that the result will look ridiculous.
Random generation works well for some games. GD is just not set up to be one of them.
It could be. It is just too late maybe. It was a decision that could be decided at first then start designing according to that.
This is true. But as the results are the innumerable little secrets, hidden places, bosses, and items that I do so enjoy… I’m perfectly fine with that.
Ill take everyone’s word for it then that its hand placed
As far as uniqueness, that’s the point, some of the lairs are not unique. Some caves look well designed, others look like a random walk with textures painted on, and that is fine as caves should, and a few are similar enough as to be identical (putrid caves, dump and warf, for instance). The wardens lair is unique because its the only one, but every corridor is made up of similar repeating textures, nothing that couldn’t have been done randomly. Not inherently unique as though its all hand painted.
As far as making sure everything works, you do that by a set of constraints on your random generator. Exit must be at least X units from the entrance but no more than Y, main path must be at least so many units long but not more than so many units, must not cross it’s self, must connect to some unique premade cell, etc etc. With enough constraints you could ensure that every roll of the dice is sure to produce maps that are similar in size, theme and distribution of objects but are varied enough to make for a different experience each go through.
I don’t think you need to explain one, Crate simply does not have one
Also, I have never seen one where I felt it actually contributed anything. All it does is have you fight the same monsters in the same environment and complete the same quests as each other time. You just do not know if turning left or turning right will get you there faster. To me this never added anything and destroys both the ability to have a well designed unique world and to skip parts I want to skip.
Not sure what the hidden path is just yet, the crazy guy mentioned something like but not sure what it is. How to maintain something like that across random rolls, it just has to be defined with parameters that makes sure it appears.
As far as houses go, the houses in Burwich are exactly what made me think the map was randomly generated. They are essentially laid out like corridors in a maze or random walk. Certainly not in a way that people designing a town would approach house layout. Some of the rooms in the houses are long unrealistic corridors and they connect to other houses and courtyards in strange random seeming ways. I though it was brilliant if someone actually designed it, being that the area is a dungeon and not a “town” so to speak. Again, its just a set of constraints that certain blocks of the maze pathed out by a random walk get textured as houses.
I played a lot of Torchlight 2 and the random layouts did nothing for me. Heck, at points i got annoyed because in some playthroughs i would get layouts that allowed me to get to quest objectives fast and other times i would get them more spread out, blocked by more terrain than the previous playthroughs.
I’d rather have a consistent world where i can plan out my path for quick quest completion.
The maze is the game. Finding your way is the game. Losing your way and stumbling into a room with a potential rare loot chest is the hook. You say in a random world all you ever do is fight the same monsters in the same environment, then what do you do in a static pre-generated world?
I am sure Crate has one. Random generators just create values that are fed to the engine that specify where something will be. Its not an ultra complex piece of technology. Random walks are something every student of coding and computer science will do. Solving PI with a random generator is an elementary task. A well designed random world is just a matter of well designed constraints on the values to be passed to the engine, in essence.