You want to know what the vision for FoA was? Sure…
The ideals were extremely straightforward, to build upon the momentum the game regained following Diablo 4’s release and expand the world’s lore with a new culture and people we were working on for the RTS. To take the vast amount of underutilized campaign content and turn it into another viable pillar of endgame for those that are sick of, or were never interested in to begin with, the Crucible and Shattered Realm.
On both counts, I would say we were successful. I’m sure plenty of internet opinions would fight me about that.
Stuff like the customizable altar and even the ascendant affixes came much much later in the process, but ultimately amounted to a huge portion of the work required, both in terms of coding and tuning.
Which isn’t to say everything was perfect.
I think we went overboard with making the new zones big and vast, which actually did us no favors despite taking more time to make. People complained about stuff feeling stretched thin and a “lack of content”. When people started saying FoA felt smaller than FG, that was a real mind blown experience. I mean, we can post all the charts we want with actual numbers and facts, but that sort of thing means nothing versus user perception. As we often say with design, perception is reality. So we kind of shot ourselves in the foot there, but ultimately I feel that will ease up as content updates happen.
In regards to making the main story require going to Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods, I mean, sure, that was probably a mistake in hindsight? But the reasoning for doing that was pretty straightforward: to tie the world’s events together and to nudge new players towards that content as well.
What I was definitely not anticipating was the outrage, how could we stretch out the campaign in this manner? How could we force players to do this? We’re just “padding the game time”. Like it fucking matters to me what someone’s playtime is, as if we make money per hour people play. I guess it was a mistake to assume “play game more” was a good thing?
The content was tuned, as happens with every expansion we’ve done, too high. This is where the majority of the negative reactions stemmed from, which…fair I guess? We went through this with every expansion. What I found comical was all the people saying devs played PoE2 and now want to ape it. Like, guys… pre-release Grim Dawn was wildly more difficult. The game is a shadow of its former self after getting systematically nerfed so some internet main characters could play on a difficulty called Ultimate, a difficulty in name only these days.
When it comes to build balance, I suppose everyone expects me to present some master plan. There isn’t, nor has there ever been, one. We’ve always developed the game through a combination of personal experience and community sentiment. This applies to the content, the features we work on, and yes, the balancing. By the seat of our pants, if you will. We are, quite literally, reactionary to your whims, even if we do not necessarily solve a problem the way you would.
You are asking me for benchmarks and numbers. I don’t have any for you. Like the community at large, I think we are all still staring at all the new plates spinning in the air and seeing how things shake out until we find a new balance point that feels good.
Now some things were obvious outliers and needed to be addressed. The Berserker mastery and the raw power of the wereform buffs, the effectiveness of onslaught, global cooldown resets, and yes, WPS activation stacking. Some of that we nipped with hotfixes, and some we approached in this first major balance pass.
When we hit up balance, we try to look at things on the grand scale, how will a change affect endgame, leveling? What will happen to those that don’t own the latest DLC? What is the domino effect of changing this item on its other more niche uses? Sometimes the answer is straightforward because a change will benefit the targeted goal with minimal to no impact on the other stuff, or something was simply universally out of line. Those are easy changes to make.
With the WPS changes, WPS builds were obviously fine before FoA, so the problem was clearly in what was added since. Now I will fully admit that the first approach was too aggressive and has been rolled back. We did let that genie out of the bottle and now have to live with it. Fine. I don’t feel great about nerfing old items (ex. Boltthrower) to compensate, but I guess we just have to look at this through the lens of long-term health of the game.
But the reactions to the initial numbers were so dramatic. Like oh my god, 12 damage to Execute? Are these people brain damaged? It’s a number during an active playtest, guys. I could make that 12 12000 and it’d be the best most sought after ascended modifier in the game. Everything eventually finds its sweet spot, even if it takes a few updates. Relax.
And here is honestly where I go from “well mistakes were made” to “what the fuck?” What vision of the game did we promise and fail to meet? Did we overhype this expansion or something?
What the actual fuck did I destroy myself for 6 months for only to be met with this kind of “truth bomb”? Because we didn’t create someone’s particular ideal of an ARPG? Were you hoping for us to reinvent the game at the 11th hour? Give me a fucking break.
Here I am also honestly at a loss. What was undercooked?
The tuning? Sure? That wasn’t going to come out perfect no matter how many extra months we tinkered with it for though.
The bugs? Honestly less major issues than I was expecting from a gargantuan effort as FoA was.
So what exactly was it? Again, expecting Ascendant mode to be something we never said it would be?
And here we get to something else entirely. I don’t know if it’s the enshittification of everything consuming the world, but over the last year or so I’ve observed all our forums becoming much more…angry? Like there is too much pent up pressure and any opportunity people find to lash out is taken, like a relief valve. People seem way more eager to jump at each other’s throats and the tone towards the team has turned much more hostile. Every action taken by the dev team is a personal affront to somebody. I’ve seen this both in our Frontier communities and here, so it’s not unique to just Grim Dawn.
It used to be that the occasional asshole would come along, and we would shut them down with a dose of their own medicine. But when suddenly everyone seems eager to be an asshole, not only has that strategy rapidly fallen apart, it made us part of the problem.
But also, when almost every interaction feels like I’m fighting for my and my team’s dignity, where I’m having the same tired debates over and over with people acting like us adding Evade and Sunder was some kind of betrayal of our old values, it starts to beg the question: why am I doing this to myself? This isn’t worth it. Honestly, I’ve already pared back my online participation significantly in the last couple months because it feels like wading into a pool of eagerly awaiting sharks with cuts all over my legs. Where I’m doing “damage control” with people that don’t actually give a shit about having a constructive discussion on the topic anyway.
In my 15 years doing this, I never imagined there being a time where I’d stop interacting with our communities, but lately that question has been crawling in the back of my mind.
And I wonder if people realize that there is a world where we don’t bother to anymore. A world where everyone can just scream into the void, and occasionally someone may, silently, listen.
-Zan