Just to flesh out the whole lore and the world, I imagine a grand RPG with turned based combat will be the perfect genre for that purpose.
It should be more around exploration and investigation with the player following the footsteps of the our good inquisitor on his investigation or maybe an unnamed inquisitor that are tasked with investigation in a different area than Inquisitor Creed. Player will be talking, picking up clues and complete investigations to piece together the story on how deep the Aetherials influence go in Cairn, how the Aetherials come to discover Cairn and who summoned them to the world.
At the same time flesh out the lore on the Cult of Ch’ton, their history and emergence, as well all the different factions in the world of Cairn and end with the event triggering the Grim Dawn.
it doesn’t have to end with the grim dawn event. it could be like warhammer 40k, which has pre-heresy era, horus heresy era, many events post heresy era, and post 41k millenium era.
there’s a lot of ideas floating around. but eventually, it all rests on crate team’s decision and capability.
Of course you can have many events and skirmishes happening in the timeline but the simplified timeline will still be Pre-Grim Dawn > Grim Dawn > Post-Grim Dawn.
Then it will be up to the developers how they want to flesh out the world and lore by inserting major events into the timeline.
We can even go further with the events of when The Three were at war with Korvak, how the Aetherials are in war with Ch’thon, rebuilding of Cairn after Grim Dawn, and defending against upcoming inter-dimensional invasion XCOM style.
This is actually a kick-ass idea. Tribe/kingdom macromanagement plus micromanagement of parties of classic GD-esque aRPG characters with DOTA-like skirmishes based around a campaign of exploration/looting/conquest. I hope Crate’s town builder will lean in that direction rather than the classic boring sim/tycoon games.
medierra already confirmed it to have ‘optional’ combat so my guess is kinda that they might not be leaning too heavily into ‘strategy’ builder territory and the screens seem to support that. There is ‘one’ screen on the FB page that hints at some type of combat but I doubt it’s what you’re hoping for…
