When I start looking at other ARPGs, I really appreciate the subtle things that GD gets right, and notice how picky I am about the presentation and look of a game before I even get to technical competence, if the gameplay feels good, if the systems function well, etc. Here’s my YouTube comment on a LE release video that started this train of thought.
"I’m not a graphics snob, but there’s some subtle things about the visuals of LE that I just don’t like. The sort of rubbery looking models, the font and UI menus are ugly and very Diablo to me, I hate the bright white outline flash around enemies when they take damage, the bright heavily contrasting red mouseover outlines, the enemies and fore/background models look like they were designed by different people who didn’t communicate and don’t look seamless, and the enemies look like they’re sitting on top of the setting sort of look like back in the FF7-9 days when the backdrops were 2D pre-rendered painting-like image and the 3D models were blocky polygon masses.
I bought it 3 years ago in EA thinking the visuals were placeholders tho, so I’m SOL on that one. I want people to like the game because it looks like a decently made game, and F Blizzard, but the visuals and hard-to-care-about story are a turn off to me personally. It’s funny to me that POE, Diablo 3/4, and a handful of other randoms are always mentioned in the “if you like” or “this game is like” bits, when Grim Dawn is by far and away the best ARPG since D2, yet it is rarely ever mentioned."
My F Blizzard comment is in reference to the progress of a company from small group of talented people, making a seamless piece of art that melds visuals, presentation, atmosphere, feel, music, sound design, gameplay, systems, plot, storytelling into one deeply compelling entity, into corporate zombie puppets who do their best to create something cool that subsequently gets deeply subverted by injecting “how can we squeeze every penny out of people” and needing to show quarterly revenue increases to shareholders/ board of directors. Blizz can’t find the balance between the two and has not released a truly solid product that isn’t just a pretty house of cards since WotLK, in my opinion. (despite the fact that Blizzard has always been a company that does its best work by refining other company’s innovation into something better. They can’t even rip off ideas well anymore.)
POE was kinda fun, but has the rug pulled out from under it as soon as I hit endgame and met the extremely bloated systems from the constant development cycles and pressure to keep people playing and paying. I’ve never gone from having decent fun for 60 hours to “this is such an incoherent mess, I can’t be bothered at all” so quickly.
I’m over a year late to the party, but I’ve been no life-ing Elden Ring lately, and even though it is a hauntingly beautiful game and I really enjoy playing, the cracks in the sculpture start to reveal themselves the closer you look at systems. The quest system is the worst I have ever seen. The tuning/refinement of the damage/weapon systems was done with a very blunt instrument and is not particularly well done, the hit boxes of small weapons (daggers/fists/claws) can’t hit many large enemies at all even if you’re humping their legs because the large enemy hit boxes are obviously janky, hidden and built in flat damage reduction against enemies is a balancing tool, but isn’t implemented well and just excessively hampers small, fast weapons at the beginning of the game, but does absolutely nothing to counter their absurd raw dps at high levels with good setup, the poise thresholds for not flinching are pretty stupid, NG is just Skyrim’s “multiply enemy health, divide your damage” slider, and the systems are needlessly difficult to understand because FS is not up front about the way any system works and many item descriptions are just straight up false.
Enter Crate Grim Dawn. Checks all the boxes. Is excellently made, supported, and finely tuned. Has an ethical financial model (despite having the ARPG core gameplay loop of addiction/reward scheduling and could easily be used to abuse). I have my minor criticisms, but the game is exceptionally solid in every way. I’ve 3,500 hours, near 100% achieve (excluding the kill 250k monsters on one char, build 50 construct, etc ones I don’t care to do).
Thank you Crate. You all tread a fine line extremely well to create something great, and don’t get nearly enough credit from online presences that always mention POE, Diablo, Wolcen, etc. Some of those games do some things well, but GD does everything well. I don’t play city builders, but if I did I would play yours without even reading a review (which I would do with exactly zero other video game development companies). Now don’t fuck it up with Fangs of Asterkarn!
Funny thing is that stash and gold collected by first char is available, so… The loss wasn’t that painfull… Still shame for a fully released game 
