New Engine

[SerzhMHz]

Are you planning to move Grim Dawn to a new engine in the future? And how will the franchise develop in general?

[medea_fleecestealer]

Welcome to the forum.

The answer is we don’t know yet and the devs have no definite plans atm. Some answers from the live dev streams on Twitch TV re the engine:

27th July:
"drazac :if you do decide to make Grim Dawn 2, can you confirm that one of the goals would be to use new engine

Zantai: I can’t actually confirm that for you because there’s really two avenues we could take with Grim Dawn 2. Either we start with a new engine and we rewrite a lot of the mechanics that we added for Grim Dawn to add it to that engine or we take the Grim Dawn engine and overhaul major components of it to bring it up to speed with whatever era we’ll be in at the time technology-wise."

5th October:
"CepheidSauron :How much more can this engine be pushed?

Zantai_GD :any engine can be pushed as far as you’re willing to dedicate programmers. Just look at unreal
Medierra :At this point, the limit is the existing game / content, not the engine. So we could potentially keep the engine and totally update it if we went on to make a totally new game with it."

Atm Forgotten Gods looks like being the last big content for the game, though the devs have said they’ll continue supporting it as long as it makes sense financially to do so. They have some ideas for smaller content which they may continue to push out, but unless FG surprises everyone with its sales figures a third expansion is unlikely.

Any GD2 or another APRG is probably some years down the line. The team have been working on the game for 6 years and would like to try out other game ideas. We know there’s a town builder that Medierra has been working on for the last few years which he’s hopefully just about ready to tell us more about. And then it’s on to another project after that.

Medierra gave his reasoning for diversifying back in 2016 in this post:

Mountain valley town

We do plan to keep working on Grim Dawn. How many expansions we produce just depends on how well the first expansion sells and how well GD itself continues to sell.

There is also a good a chance we’ll do GD2 at some point but, due to the age of the current engine, we either need to undertake some massive update work on it or start from scratch with a licensed engine, which would mean a massive amount of work writing all new gameplay code.

Given that we’re working on an expansion now, might do a second one and I’ve been working on ARPGs for 14 years now, I feel like I could use a bit of break before jumping right into GD2. Imagining exciting new features, systems and a whole new story arc take a lot of energy and passion. I’m happy continuing to work on and oversee content for GD but I feel like I need to recharge before I can give a whole new ARPG my all.

There are other genres of games I love and have always wanted to work on. I’d also like to work on something lower scope next, that requires less building of content and which won’t take too long to finish. I expect to be releasing this new project 12-18 months from now. Then after that, who knows, maybe it will be time for GD2. I won’t know until I get there. One thing I can say though is, I’d be a lot more excited to work on GD2 if we could get to a point where we had a lot more money to throw at it.

Someone mentioned that Banished / Anno town-builders were overcrowded but that looks like a wide open market compared to ARPG. Not only are there a lot of ARPGs coming out recently but players commit to a single one for much longer than games in other genres and it requires a ton of content and features to be competitive - more than almost any other genre of games. Then think about the fact that the ARPG genre has a franchise that is widely seen as “king” and is developed by one of the biggest, most well funded and widely respected companies in the industry. Everything is compared against Diablo and it’s hard to compete with a team that has virtually unlimited resources. Then Grinding Gear has around 5x the people we do and I doubt competing against a free-to-play game has helped our sales. Then there’s Torchlight (although it looks like their next game isn’t an ARPG), Marvel Heroes, Van Helsing, Victor Vran, maybe a TQ expansion or sequel from Nordic, Lineage Eternal (if that ever finishes), Wolcen and too many others to remember. Since the huge sales of D3, everyone and their mom seems to be making an ARPG these days. About the only thing worse would be deciding to make a MOBA.

Even with all that going on, I wouldn’t say it would prevent us from making GD2 but it certainly makes the level of competition in most other genres look a lot less daunting.

A big factor for working on something else though is that I don’t think it is good to keep all our eggs in one basket, as a studio. Our primary goal is to keep the company alive so we can keep being independent and making games. While it’s certainly possible to focus on one franchise and stay alive for a long time doing it, it’s riskier having all your future dependent on the continued success of one game property in one genre. Diversifying the types of games we can make and the IPs we own is a good way for us to better secure out future.

Beyond just branching out to work on other genres, it has always been a goal of mine to be able to work on concurrent projects. Not only do we not want to be pigeon-holed into one genre but I think it’s important for us to be able to work on multiple projects at time. That way, we’re not just counting on the success of a single big release to keep us alive, where if it under-performs, it could take years to course-correct and finish another project (years we likely wouldn’t have). This also helps to increase the efficiency of the studio, as we can shift people around based on the needs of a project at any give time, instead of having lulls at the beginning and end of a single project, where not everyone is needed at full capacity. Another factor is that people get burnt out working on one thing for too many years. When people get burnt out, they leave and look for something new. I feel like we have a great team and I want to keep them engaged with fresh new projects and not solely grinding away on ARPGs for the next 20 years.

Since we would like to keep making content for GD, we’ve brought on some new people for that, to keep up the level of energy and enthusiasm (or new old people in the case of Grava, aka Josh Glavine). We’ll keep making content for GD as long as it’s financially viable. GD2 is a definite possibility but whether / when that happens depends on how things progress in the ARPG genre and internally for us at Crate over the next year or two. We also have some ideas for GD related games that are set in that universe and will share some mechanics but are not quite ARPGs.

You’ll also be hearing about at least one totally new project in the next year though.

[SerzhMHz]

Welcome to the forum.

The answer is we don’t know yet and the devs have no definite plans atm. Some answers from the live dev streams on Twitch TV re the engine:

27th July:
"drazac :if you do decide to make Grim Dawn 2, can you confirm that one of the goals would be to use new engine

Zantai: I can’t actually confirm that for you because there’s really two avenues we could take with Grim Dawn 2. Either we start with a new engine and we rewrite a lot of the mechanics that we added for Grim Dawn to add it to that engine or we take the Grim Dawn engine and overhaul major components of it to bring it up to speed with whatever era we’ll be in at the time technology-wise."

5th October:
"CepheidSauron :How much more can this engine be pushed?

Zantai_GD :any engine can be pushed as far as you’re willing to dedicate programmers. Just look at unreal
Medierra :At this point, the limit is the existing game / content, not the engine. So we could potentially keep the engine and totally update it if we went on to make a totally new game with it."

Atm Forgotten Gods looks like being the last big content for the game, though the devs have said they’ll continue supporting it as long as it makes sense financially to do so. They have some ideas for smaller content which they may continue to push out, but unless FG surprises everyone with its sales figures a third expansion is unlikely.

Any GD2 or another APRG is probably some years down the line. The team have been working on the game for 6 years and would like to try out other game ideas. We know there’s a town builder that Medierra has been working on for the last few years which he’s hopefully just about ready to tell us more about. And then it’s on to another project after that.

Medierra gave his reasoning for diversifying back in 2016 in this post:

Thanks a lot for your reply

[eisprinzessin]

Are you planning to move Grim Dawn to a new engine in the future?

More answers…

Why did you buy the old TQ engine?

[…] most modern engines are […] just iterations of engines created many years ago. Grim Dawn’s engine is for all intents and purposes a new engine at this point with all of the tech changes we had made to modernize it.

Why did you buy the old TQ engine?

Another major factor is that we didn’t just get the engine, we got the entire code base, which saved a massive amount of time / money because we didn’t have to recreate an entire ARPG gameplay, feature set and tools from scratch.

Even if you license a commercial engine, you still have a ton of work to do before you have any semblance of a game - unless what you’re making is very similar to what that engine was created to do. If you’re using Unreal to make a Gears of War clone, then you’d already have native support for a lot of the gameplay you wanted to create. If you’re making an ARPG, you’re not starting with much besides and engine and then you have to sift through or even try to rework existing code that is irrelevant to your game or not suited for it. Even the way levels are made in Unreal is not great for the way we wanted to build GD, so we’d either have to figure out how to work with it or create a new level editor and terrain system.

We’d still have to do a bunch of work before we could even click on the ground and make a character run around in an isometric view. Then you need to add loot mechanics, player inventory, skills, a skill system, combat mechanics and formulas… basically all the things that make an ARPG.

Starting with the TQ engine, we have everything, in terms of programming, we need to make a game with all the gameplay, features and UI of TQ. Then it’s just a question of what we want to improve, add or remove. We’ve reworked huge portions of both the engine and game. On the engine side, we recently rewrote the renderer from scratch and previously replaced the physics engine, pathing engine, shader model, sound engine, added post effects, etc. The only thing really limiting us from replacing all of the engine components over time is that it has to support the art we’ve already created and we’re sort of obligated to support older versions of directX because we supported them with the initial release and people running older systems wouldn’t be able to play if we didn’t.

Another issue is that a lot of what people interpret as being the look of the engine is actually the look of the art itself and how it was made. We started working on GD 8 years ago now and expectations for the size of texture resolutions and triangles on models was lower than they are today. A lot of what has improved with the look of the game over the years is just us updating art / redoing textures.

The thing that might have the biggest visual impact now would be to redo lighting and the way materials are rendered but that isn’t really feasible unless we move on to GD2 and leave all this current art behind. If we go on to GD2 and no longer have to support older DX version or existing art, then we’d be free to make bigger updates to the engine.

Like Kamil said, the date an engine was originally created is sort of irrelevant since you can continually update it and eventually replace every part of it.

[SerzhMHz]

Thanks for the answer. I wish, in this case, success for the future addition of Fogotten Gods and the entire Grim Dawn franchise. The great Blizzard also started off small … I wish your studio and future projects tremendous growth.

Last question - Will the future of cinematics appear in Grim Dawn as the Titan Quest intro?

[medea_fleecestealer]

There are no cinematics planned for FG. There were some complications when they added the AoM one plus FG doesn’t start in a similar way to AoM since you can try that out any time after killing Warden Kreig.

[SerzhMHz]

There are no cinematics planned for FG. There were some complications when they added the AoM one plus FG doesn’t start in a similar way to AoM since you can try that out any time after killing Warden Kreig.

Thank you, but I meant the Grim Dawn franchise as a whole, or perhaps cinematics will be added with patches for the Grim Dawn intro and the Ashes of Malmuth intro, after the release of the second supplement.

[medea_fleecestealer]

I doubt it. As said FG is likely to be the last big content for the game so why would they change the cinematics when the game is effectively finished?

If/when they make a GD2 or other ARPG maybe they’ll go for a different cinematic style then.

[The_Mess]

Thank you, but I meant the Grim Dawn franchise as a whole, or perhaps cinematics will be added with patches for the Grim Dawn intro and the Ashes of Malmuth intro, after the release of the second supplement.

The problem is, is that doing cinematics is hugely expensive, even in engine, as scripts need to be written, voice lines recorded and the characters etc have to be rigged and animated appropriately, along with any custom art assets needed for the scenes. All of which can get very expensive, very quickly from what I’ve heard.

And that money for a game like Grim Dawn is limited and usually much better spent on gameplay content and features.