How do you want Grim Dawn to age ?
I want it to age well.
What i found replaying recently Titan Quest Anniversary is that i loved what they did to the pets in that edition.
Now in this new version pets have a bigger zone of detecting and attacking enemies when put in aggressive mode. (like it should be, this makes the game work more realistically)
The Sylvan Nymph now has an exceptional AI and unlike raven it actually goes to enemies and attacks them without having you to go too close to enemies.
Moreover Sylvan Nymph now moves away when attacked by melee then shoots like a ranged pet should do.
Maybe these behaviors could be implemented in the expansion for all pets regardless of class when put in aggressive mode.
Moreover what i like about Titan Quest - how well it aged - is the clean look of graphics, the water clarity and everything looks lifelike despite requiring less hardware than GD.
I know you can’t make big changes to how Grim Dawn looks, but maybe you can tweak some environments such as :
a) More dramatic (epic scale) landscape in ACT 1 and other places you find boring after playing 100x times.
b) Make changes to how water looks in swamps - make it look more interesting, especially in ACT 1 where everything is too dark.
c) Medium sized transitional zones between ACTS, you can’t have a desert zone close to a swamp zone geographically and climatically speaking.
d) Small but generous transitional zones in terms of climate and ground texture inside each ACT. It gets boring playing one full ACT in swamp and another full ACT in desert without local micro-climates in different zones of the ACT as you progress.
e) Make changes to how trees look. TQ has really wonderful treas and very well placed !
In Grim Dawn try some different size, scale, and proportions and change how leafs look. (some trees are too big, some look unrealistic, more variety of vegetation and many plants obstruct the view of the game in default camera angle, dead trees could use some love, leafs looked better in TQ,)
f) The way grain and grass fields moved in TQ was really cool when you passed over it.
g) Caves are not impressive and different enough to remember them.
TQ wasn’t good here either.
How do you want to remember Grim Dawn after 10 years ?
Make the actual placement of objects to be artistically beautiful, don’t clutter things or make big empty spaces with no dramatic landscape.
Game mechanics on the other hand should allow a beautiful game to be played naturally without excessive micromanagement.
Anything that becomes frustrating to a player (like how pets behave in my case) influences how he/she perceives the game.
