*edited to preserve the crispness of teh magic"
Sure you did.
I’m not a Blizzard fanboy either dude…
Sure you’re not.
I am not some blind hater
You are the model of civility and genteel discussion.
A few points:
Warcraft was originally being developed as a Warhammer RTS when Games Workshop pulled their IP and the Blizzard team then turned to using the amazing creative talents of Chris Metzen to re-write the story into an amalgamation of their own. To say that it ‘ripped it off’ is a bit incongruous. 
When you are successful, powerful and wealthy there is little reason or necessity for creative problem solving.
Heh. Yes, there is, and it’s one of the most basic reasons to do anything: To become more successful, powerful and wealthy (unless you have a full/near monopoly, in which case you need to still innovate to continue your dominance of a market). There’s also the point that recruiting some of the most creative and talented people in an industry to do what’s already been done before leads to you losing your staff to a ‘hungrier’ firm.
Ontopic: Ahhh, the addition of AA and AF did wonders! Screenies aren’t a good judge of anything more than a moment, but those are some very sexy pre-alpha moments!
Regards,
~Frag 
Edit: See I was a bit late to the posting, ahh work. Anyway, leaving it up and adding that; Void, there’s a distinct difference between trolling and being an antagonist.
So who is the damsel in distress then?
So who is the damsel in distress, and are they in another castle?
*edited to preserve the crispness of teh magic"
I have been summoned here by the spirit of antagonism…
I suggest certain people go back and edit or, in some cases, delete some of their posts before I do.
I think the comparison between Blizzard and Zynga is pretty valid in terms of their business practices - which I think are very smart. I’m a massive Blizzard fan and I’ve followed what they’ve done closely over the years. I also have connections to senior people at Zynga and I know about their development practices. They both do what most of the consistently successful companies in this industry do - which is take proven successful ideas and iterate on them. As was pointed out, we did the same thing at ILE and I intend to do the same thing at Crate.
This is such a “clone” obsessed industry, I really don’t get it sometimes. Who really cares who took what from whom so long as the result is another fun game? Virtually everyone does it whether it is intentional or not. Humans in any given culture all tend to think along similar lines and are inspired by the trends in our own cultures. Even beyond that, there are certain universal commonalities between all people. From a business perspective, trying to innovate totally new ideas is extremely risky and, to some extent it is true that the more money you invest in a project the less you tend to innovate. However, this isn’t because companies lack talent, it is because a larger investment poses more risk. Once you’ve built something, be it a company or a successful game franchise, you don’t want to lose it. When you start thinking too far outside the box, you’re really just rolling the dice. For every great new idea that comes seemingly out of nowhere, there are a million that fail. It still takes creativity and intelligent innovation on a smaller scale to take an existing idea and successfully iterate on it. It is no easy process and it isn’t a sure win, it is just a more structured and analytical bet. Yet still, there are plenty of companies that fail at it.
That brings us full-circle to cloneophobia. I’ve always been frustrated (and you can imagine why) by how especially prevalent this is in the ARPG genre. I think generally something is labeled a clone, not when it copies another game, but when it does so and isn’t as successful or is lacking features or, in some cases, because some zealous fanboy is trying to justify why it is improper for someone else to have enjoyed it. In most other genres, two or more top franchises emerged fairly quickly after the original innovator or were able to launch with the full feature-set of the original. If you look shooters, you have doom dominating early on but then in the late 90s a bunch of successful new franchises suddenly emerge. With RTS, there were predecessors to Dune II but to me that is the game that really solidified the genre with pretty much all of the core features that continue today, except of course, multiplayer. Note, that the first Warcraft did not have multiplayer either. I think Command and Conquer holds the title of first multiplayer RTS. Next product cycle you also have Total Annihilation and Age of Empires showing up. All were great games in their own right but other than being iterative improvements and having all the features of Dune II, given the way people use the term, couldn’t you say they were all clones? I think part of the reason the term gets thrown around so much in ARPG is that no one has definitively released a game in this genre that has all the features of D2 while also delivering as good or better gameplay. Battle.net is big ace in the hole that Blizzard was very smart to have created when they did and it makes it very difficult to compete with them. Maybe impossible? Fortunately, I think there is room for one than one game per genre.
So anyway, can’t we all just get along? I demand equal rights for clones! We need a clone pride month. 
You guys ruined the magic crispness of this thread 
I have edited my posts in hoping that some of the magic crispness can be preserved.
My apologies to everyone 
Also medierra…now I could be wrong…but I do believe Warcraft did in fact have multiplayer:
It did have it, but there’s a big difference between development with netcode support and tacking it on two weeks before you go gold :p. Both Warcraft: O&H and Diablo added multiplayer onto their existing game code very late in the development cycle and as such calling C&C the first multiplayer RTS, while perhaps not literally correct, isn’t completely untrue from a certain perspective.
Regards,
~Frag
I’ll beeeeee there!
~Frag
That was a long time ago but I do remember messing around with it with my friend…to be honest though I can’t remember how good it was.
Diablo had pretty decent multiplayer though…that I do remember.
But wait, wikipedia also said C&C was the first multiplayer RTS… its on the internetz so it has to be true… but then it says warcraft had multiplayer and was published first and thats also on the internetz so that must be true too… whats happening? ERROR ERROR ERROR
my world is coming down around me 
Well, I think the main reason D2 is still so viciously popular, is because of their secure servers. I don’t even know how anyone could afford those for as long as Blizzard has without bankrupting the company!
But, not everything D2 did was necessarily great, I mean here’s just a few annoyances of my own from the game - potion spamming (This includes mana and health potions), TP spamming, potion hoarding (by this I mean buff potions), horrible skill design (which was barely fixed by making synergies, which then broke the system in a different way), lack of skill chaining (most players picked 2-5 good skills, and stacked them, compare that with the 30 skills designed for each class, essentially you didn’t spam more then 3 skills at any given time), and ammo.
I don’t know… there’s definitely a lot to improve upon in the ARPG genre.
Heeya Medierra master don’t be sad!
(Did you eat/sleep properly today?Try to energy up your brain.) 
We the 634 loyal GD fans fight on your side and support your hard work!
Ready 4 alpha testZ.
The world become a little better as the development progress go on…
Keep up your HARD WORK!
Well this thread certainly exploded into… errmm… something.
In order for a game to be successful compared to others in its genre, it must have something unique and intriguing about it. I feel like Grim Dawn has plenty of features that separate it from the pack (and yes, even from the “leader of the pack” lurking in the distance).
Exactly.
With more money comes more to lose, so there is less of a reason to take risks and with more money also comes the ability to throw it at things to make problems disappear which is both a blessing and a curse. Products become more polished and professional at the loss off those little sparks and quirks that came about in the development process due to someone having to jury rig the system.
That brings us full-circle to cloneophobia. I’ve always been frustrated (and you can imagine why) by how especially prevalent this is in the ARPG genre. I think generally something is labeled a clone, not when it copies another game, but when it does so and isn’t as successful or is lacking features or, in some cases, because some zealous fanboy is trying to justify why it is improper for someone else to have enjoyed it.
Doom was the first game to spawn the term “Doom Clones” and before that it was referenced as X-Like" so you had Roguelike, Elitelike etc.
Its certainly not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, I mean this is why we have genres in the first place and its not often that someone comes along and invents a new genre.
I do have to disagree with the problem fans have being that games are not exact copies of one another. I think with certain genres its a very delicate balancing act to work within the given guidelines while simultaneously adding your own style and flair.
Some games become iconic of a genre, usually when they help shape or reinvent it.
The term “clone” is a rather poor one, in that people do not really want to see the exact same thing all over again, what they want is all of the features that worked well untouched, and all the features that didn’t work so well done better.
Idiot reviewers aside, I think Titan Quest is a classic example of doing it right. It hit on all the key notes for an ARPG yet vastly improved on the class system and combat mechanics and I have full confidence that Grim Dawn will do the same again, touching on all the notes that make ARPG’s fun while bringing something uniquely Crate to the table.
+1…
Agreed! In Feralas (WoW) you can enjoy an occasional downpour.
Can this not be implemented through a future installment for GD1?
Zomg, it’s the “Grim Dawn: Seasons” expansion pack!