Mysterious uptick in sales since Nov 2nd...

Been thinking over what you said Medierra. I totally see your point re team time constraints. Re the early developement yes, the initial followers of the game were mostly TQ fans and tolerant of progress. The community’s grown since the Kickstarter, but they’ve also come to know how Crate works (at least for this game) in communicating with the fan base.

So it could work both ways. Yes, you got flack as development went on for GD, but there’ll probably be some flack anyway when the new game is revealed. Few people here on the forum seem to know about the new project, never mind the greater potential audience out there and when it hits some will be saying “Wtf why are Crate making this instead of another ARPG?” because that’s what your reputation’s been built on so far. Maybe if they’d been in on the development earlier it could have generated interest and got people hyped. We’ll never know.

Whenever I tell people who’ve just bought the game or are thinking of buying it that Crate communicate regularly with the fan base via the GM’s and live dev streams the reaction is always positive. They like the fact that Crate does tell people what’s going on. To nick a comment from Zantai (mistress of quotations that I am ;)), it’s working well for you. And I wouldn’t be surprised if Blizzard aren’t kinda wishing they’d done the same.

And if you’re still in a question answering mood Medierra still using this hack?

"Without a doubt the hackiest thing I remember from Titan Quest is how we managed the event scripting. The quest / event tech had a major weakness in that there was no way to delay an action once it was triggered. So if you wanted something to happen 5 seconds after a player ran through some bounding volume, there was no way to set a delay. It would always be instant.

We were nearing the end of production, so it was hard to request additional features, as engineers were slammed just trying to meet their milestone deliverables. One of the QA testers had started helping out with scripting work, and figured out that there was in fact a way to delay an action from triggering based on the length of an animation.

He ended up using these squirrels we had as ambient creatures as the animation timer, and they became the default timing mechanism. He created an invisible version of the squirrel, which he would place in the levels where he needed them, then would time everything based on the duration of their idle animation. Because of his creative problem solving, he was promoted to designer on the next project."

Can’t say I’ve noticed any squirrels lurking in GD, but then again being invisible you never know. Or maybe you’ve stepped it up a bit and it’s now an invisible Zantai in his zentai suit that is the trigger. :smiley:

TIL that invisible squirrels helped improving Titan Quest.

Sent from my 6039A using Tapatalk

I didn’t think zentai suits could get any creepier but I think you managed to figure out how to do it.

I first discovered Crate and GD at about the same time as The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Final Cut was supposed to come out. I bought VH on GOG where the game wasn’t actually released until eight months later. Neocore Games was largely silent during this and the few of us who bought it on GOG were left wondering when (or even if) we were going to get it. I’m sharing this because I’m trying to show how much it means to me to know that every two weeks I can at least get confirmation that you’re still here and that we haven’t been left to twist in the wind. So yeah, sometimes we get a little bitchy but we really do appreciate being kept in the loop.

100 percent agree with that sentiment. I think that if Crate just keeps following that methodology they’ll have no problem keeping on making us games, no matter if its another GD or a city-builder. It has worked out exceptionally well for them to this point and I see no good reason to change that aspect and sincerely hope they never do no matter what comes down the line.

Can’t wait to see them begin the city-builder’s version of Grim Misadventures.

Haha, no, we totally re-wrote the quest system for GD. Trying to make another game with the old TQ system would have been a nightmare and very limiting.

Thanks for answering that big M. :slight_smile: Still sounds a pretty ingenious way to solve the problem at the time - says me who knows nothing about programming/game making.

LOL yeah its such a mystery xD

Whatever the reason, I’m happy it happened :slight_smile:

Another thought on this Medierra. Get some extra copies printed up when you have the hardback editions done. It wouldn’t just be Kickstarter backers of those tiers who’d be interested in having a physical copy. I’d love one if it’s available to purchase, even though I’ll have the PDF version.

Could also have some for merchandising when you get around to organising Cratecon. :wink:

@medierra - So, its been over a month now. Has the uptick been holding out?

They’d be silly not too bite the bullet and do Grim Dawn 2 server side…use Unity and just go for it. The dev team for Wolcen is doing it, so why not Crate…

It’s time and the time is right for it…PoE is bigger then ever right now and people are always looking for the next best ARPG.

Not sure Wolcen is the best analogy given what seems to be the state of that game.

Not really sure what timeframe you’d think this would happen in as well. It’s been said several times that moving from the current engine means having rewrite major parts of the game into a new one. So that’s a major consideration, not just a case of go for it. Then add the fact that the team would be starting pretty much from cold with storyline, art, animations, etc, especially with a different engine. Base game took about 3.5 years from the Kickstarter finishing to being fully released and Medierra was working on it himself for a couple of years before that. Okay, they might be able to turn out a new game in a shorter timeframe, but it certainly wouldn’t come out next year which would probably be the only way to jump on the Blizzcon fiasco bandwagon. You’d be looking at GD2 coming out in around maybe 3-4 years’ time, by which point the market may well have changed again.

And then there is the server cost itself. Medierra said during the Kickstarter he thought they’d need 2 million to be able to have that feature and while Crate are making money, whether they’ve got several million lying around to fund them I don’t know.

And what about the GD team? Medierra started working on the town builder because he was feeling burnt out from working on ARPGs for 14 years. The team have been at this for 6 now. I certainly don’t want them burning out and maybe looking for another job elsewhere because of it. Plus Medierra doesn’t think it’s a good idea to just have the one franchise, he wants to diversify into other genres.

I’m curious, approximately how many copies have been solid collectively on all platforms??

From what I’ve heard, at least 1.5 million copies of the base game have been sold so far.

It’s only marginally better than their initially projected target of 200.000 copies… :stuck_out_tongue:

Well done, Crate, well done! :slight_smile: :cool:

From the 7th December stream:

"kinointernational : have you ever expected such a big success of Grim Dawn

When we started out our goal for success started at 200,000 copies. We told ourselves we shift that many copies we’ll be okay, we can keep working on what we’re doing, maybe make the game a little bit bigger, maybe make an expansion or two and we’ll see how it goes. And then the project started taking longer than we thought because we wanted to make it bigger, do more Acts, more classes, increase the level cap and then said okay, maybe half a million copies would be a good range to aim for. Since then Grim Dawn’s sold close to 1.5 million so it has exceeded our expectations in a good way. The expansion has also exceeded our expectations which is why we’re doing a second expansion. The second expansion would have to exceed our expectations quite a bit because there is a diminishing return for each expansion you release."

This forum is in desperate need of a “Like” button…

Iirc Medierra decided against that sort of thing for the forum when it was set up. Long time ago now though, so not 100% on that.

That will happen anyway. Look at Runic Games. Consumer | Gamer expect once a Dev. Team made a hit, and they payed for their Product, they own the company basically and like slaves they only have to work for them. It’s ironic that these folks are often the first one, who complain that there isn’t any kind of innovation or how they sell their soul and have no kind of (own) vision anymore and that’s why AAA Products are going down, but once it comes to creative freedom for developer studios and they either try a spinoff or an completly new project, than they jump on the hate train, why they don’t stick to their guns, how they go commercial and sell their soul, and so on. That doesn’t mean the Gaming-Industry also have it’s faults, but if you ask me a huge part also comes with the Gaming-Community and in such Scenarios it shows how much hypocrites a bung of gamers are(and this sadly are often the loudest).

I loved Torchlight 2, but anyone who tried Hob without any bias would’ve seen that it isn’t worse than Torchlight 2, they simply want to work on an different project… but nope i know some folks who are happy that Runic gone down because they come up with “it’s their fault to not develope Torchlight 3”. And you can be sure, however Crate approach this Situation, even in the best case of scenario there will be more than enough people who hate on Crate because instead of another Expac or Grim Dawn 2 they work on a “shitty, mainstream cashgrab Builder-Game” …

That’s where, in my eyes Crate should try to be not influence by such hating-comments and stand their stance of the new project, because if a dev falter after such an backlash and don’t believe in their Game / Product anymore, it will be more problematic.