A special patch requires a special update, so here we go!
As teased a few weeks ago, we are working on a number of quality of life features that we’d rather get into your hands sooner rather than later. This means that you are getting another major update posthaste!
When we say that this update is focused on quality of life, we mean it. Like we took quality of life features, then we doubled them, then DOUBLED them again. This update is going down in history of Grim Dawn as the most quality and life we’ve ever done.
A Special ThanksWith that said, we wish to express our sincere gratitude to the modding community for not only providing our players with new content to enjoy but also new features and utilities that they otherwise would not have access to.
With today’s preview in particular, we wish to thank GlockenGerda for their hard work in creating Grim Internals and inspiring the team to incorporate several quality of life features that have proven to be a staple within the playerbase.
So, without further ado, let us dig in to what is coming your way later this month!
Let there be balanceNo update is complete of course without a balancing pass and you can expect that here as well. Among the changes, some highlights include: a pass on end-game two-handed weapons, revision of many high-level Epic items to have better resistance distributions (no more just Fire/Cold/Lightning resist), and improvements to the Arcanist mastery’s toggled and passive skill lines.
One major thing we’ve been eager to do for a long time however is going to have major ramifications for all our players. We felt that, over time, the base game’s difficulty has waned significantly relative to the power growth of player characters, and even compared to the Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods expansions.
You would get surrounded by packs of mobs and not care. Their damage was just not up to par, not only compared to your offensive capabilities but simply to the armor you were wearing. Special attacks had become an afterthought as face-tanking every enemy was a better use of your time than repositioning.
With this patch, the base game has received a substantial balancing overhaul of Normal/Veteran and Elite difficulties, over 1800 database records in all! We’ve narrowed the gap between the expansion content and the base game content, meaning that the lower levels should feel more exhilarating to play again and the jump between difficulties will be much smoother.
Does this mean the endgame has gotten more difficult? Well, yes and no. No because we focused balancing on the early game (roughly levels 1-60), but yes because we’ve updated old monster and boss encounters to deal damage in line with expansion enemies.
All in all, we would describe the challenge as more consistent, rather than more difficult, as older monsters are now more of a threat on a level you’ve already been used to with Ashes of Malmouth and Forgotten Gods foes.
Auto-LootingPopularized by Grim Internals, this was probably the #1 most requested quality of life feature we’ve been reading about and the most missed whenever an update broke support for Grim Internals.
With v1.1.4.0, auto-looting of Components and Crafting materials will become standard. You will be able to toggle it in the game-options as it is disabled by default.
Here is a quick preview of THE PROGRAMMER working on this feature last month:
In addition, with this change, we are making Partial Components automatically combine when looted, so that’s one less press of a button!
Target HUDThe Target HUD has been a relic from another era of Grim Dawn, and its time has finally come to join us in whatever century this is now. At 1080p and above, Boss health bars become even more impressive!
Another staple of Grim Internals that is sorely missed whenever we did an update, Monster Overhead Health bars will become a baseline feature. You can toggle various options, including Player Health Bars in Multiplayer, under the new Interface options tab.
With this change, we’ve also updated overhead indicators for Hero monsters to stand out better and included new overhead icons for Bosses and Nemesis Bosses so that you can pick them out in a crowd.
Crafting SearchTurns out when you add hundreds of crafting recipes, it can become a bit challenging to sort through them all.
With v1.1.4.0, we’ve added a powerful search filter to the Blacksmith UI that allows you to not only filter by item names but also by specific stats. If you are looking for Components with Offensive Ability, simply searching for Offensive Ability will filter out everything that does not provide you the desired bonus!
Crucible Map SelectionIt’s no secret that any UI work in this engine makes us cringe, but in this case the pain was worth it. Gone will be the days of restarting the Crucible endlessly until you hit your favorite map (or installing Grim Internals, I suppose).
With the next update, you will be able to select the desired Crucible Map from the main menu, or leave it set to Random if you prefer to the current setup!
Visual UpdatesThe next update continues our efforts to bring older content to our modern standards. Among the sprinkling of Skill FX updates, another monster group has received a complete overhaul. The Boneback rats are now awesome!
Beyond
We’ve already teased the incoming Roguelike Dungeon and the continuation of Riggs’ storyline, and we’ll give you a first look into the areas you will explore in our next Grim Misadventure, but there is actually something else we are thrilled to talk about.
As work continues on the inevitable Xbox Port, we are finalizing the implementation of a new renderer for Grim Dawn with DirectX 11. This tech, known as Deferred Rendering, utilizes additional graphics memory to reduce total draw calls per frame by around 30% or more. This should result in a decent performance increase, especially at high video settings. Complex scenes, such as Devil’s Crossing and parts of Fort Ikon, should see the largest gains.
Whether this major update to the game engine is released with v1.1.4.0 or with v1.1.5.0 later this year will largely depend on how smoothly bug fixing goes, but one thing is for sure: you can expect to see noticeable improvements to the game’s performance in the future!
We are thrilled to get another major update into your hands posthaste and hope you all enjoy the quality of life features. Patch v1.1.4.0 will be a major step forward for Grim Dawn!
For those eager to see these new features in action and to discuss them with the devs, we’ll be doing a livestream this Friday (07/12) at 2PM EDT (6PM GMT)!
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