Play Relevant Month: Grim Dawn

I actually picked up Grim Dawn all the way back in early September, but sort of set it as my tertiary game, something to work my way through over the coming months. ARPGs are often long and take a considerable amount of time to truly review. There's actually several ARPGs out relatively recently I'm inclined to play, but Grim Dawn for whatever reason just looked like the best of the lot, though Victor Vran looks pretty good too.

Grim Dawn is the work of Crate Entertainment, which according to their wikipedia page appears to be an off-shoot or descendant of Iron Lore, whom produced Titan Quest for THQ quite a while ago. While I've owned Titan quest for ages, the game never appealed to me. I couldn't tell you why, but for a long time

Grim Dawn on the other hand was in one of the humble monthlies, and I think this is the game where I mathed it out and realized a full 12 month subscription (which gives a month free) essentially would have worked out as good enough to pick up. Since then, the monthly has actually been even better, with several excellent sidetitles to go with it. So you can sort of blame Grim Dawn from crate entertainment on convincing to me to buy into some crate-style entertainment...

Does that even count as a pun? I'm not even sure anymore.

Regardless, Grim Dawn is an isometric view style ARPG of a proper pedigree and the usual nonsense. Fantasy world overrun with nasties from other dimension, with zombies because zombies, loot because loot and "corruption". No prophecies, though, and mostly bad-ass characters who actually survived the apocalypse.

Initially, in terms of visuals, I took Grim Dawn as being essentially in line with Path of Exile or Torchlight 2 - serviceable, but nothing too impressive. And back in September, that's about where it fell. The models are pretty good, and the game is creative enough, though there's a bit too many zombies and a little bit too much in the way of green fire. Which, if you've played any amount of WoW, you probably saw lots of. You know, fel fire? Yeah, great.

pre-settings change shots

On the other hand, in October I picked up a used 960 GTX and... Uh, completely forgot until December to turn up my video settings. Since I moved forward, you know, five generations of Video card. With everything turned up, Grim Dawn is actually pretty impressive looking, with a solid repertoire of advanced visual effects. It's still a stick in the mud ARPG, so don't expect it to really wow you, but it scales nicely with an improved video card into something a little better looking than I thought.

Oh, and the usual bane of ARPGs, the re-used art assets? There's a bit, but there's a huge volume of different looking gear. Your character doesn't start to look cool til you're into elite difficulty, though. At the start of the game the hobo-force is strong with you. You're armed with a plank of wood and a stick, and you're wearing a sack.

Audio, though, is where the game truly excels. The voice acting for what quests are voiced isn't great, but the monster sounds of battle are fantastic. Enemies hiss, click and swear in a variety of ways, offering lots of distinction. Proc'd abilities have distinct vocal tings and so forth, adding nicely to the immersion. The music as well is just damn fantastic. It has a score in a more relaxed sense, with only a few (if any) points in the game having unique music. Instead you just have 18-25 strong tracks that play at different points as you wander the world. The tracks are moving and somber Except the boss battle track, which is just vicious sounding.

The game has four acts, but on the most part, the transitions between acts is far more subtle than any other ARPG I've played. You begin in a ruined prison, and that's your base camp until somewhere into act 3.There is a clear "boss" of act 1 that is built to, but 2-4 are softer and less focused on individual climaxes. As such, the terrain is extremely varied but also quite gradual. There's no instant shift between rain forest and then frozen tundra, it takes time to roll from harbors to rural farmland to arid wastes to rotting farmlands into logging camps and then through fortresses that guard the mountain passes and the like. Outside of the music this is my favorite part of the game, because it feels so natural and lived in. The world feels like one people planned out, and also one people actually lived in.

And then were driven from. Grim Dawn is post-apocalypse done with far more finesse and intelligence than just about every other story in the genre, which is hilarious, since it's an ARPG about getting loot. Care and skill went into GD's story.

I do want to note that the "end" of the game honestly doesn't feel like much of an ending. It's no Diablo 2 level where you're confused at having gone through Hell but with weird plot threads hanging out, rather, there's plot threads hanging out and nothing really conclusive. The game is getting an expansion next year and I think the ending really highlights that. After 70~ hours I don't mind paying for more content, though.

In terms of storyline, I'm making a choice to review my impression early on, even though I got much deeper into the game. The game is actually named after an event that occurred some period of time before the game, in which another race of beings from outside reality managed to return en masse. To the human empires, this was the Grim Dawn, but to this race referred to as 'Aetherials*' it was the Glorious Dawn. The Aetherials take the place of the demons in Diablo, the myriad of foes in Path of Exile, and whatever was in Torchlight 2. The game comes off closer to Path of Exile, though more 'on the main land', but it's definitely got a post-apocalyptic feeling to it that sings something of the same song.

I honestly like this game's story more than I would expect to; I am sick and tired of grimdark and the usual blood/corpse/flaming ruins nonsense spread all over place but in this case the game mixes it up a lot. Much of your questing has little to do with the Grim Dawn beyond the tertiary. The weakening of the human empires in the region (I think there's two, but it's not clear precisely) have left several other factions of varying degrees of evil to run rampant.

*=Yeah I have no idea why they went with 'Aetherials' when it is pronounced the same as 'Ethereals' which looks a great deal better.

One thing I do wish is, well, the game has the same issue almost every post-apocalypse has. It doesn't actually look like a post-apocalypse, it looks like nine minutes after. Bodies are too fresh, there's blood everywhere, and most buildings look like a bear just ran through them. I think this is just how people portray the genre but eh.

As with all modern ARPGs worth playing, Grim Dawn has talent trees. GD goes for an interesting mix as to building your character. First, you assign a point in one class. Later on, you're allowed to assign points into a second class, which actually creates your cast. For example, a Nightblade + Soldier is a 'Blademaster' while an Arcanist + Demolitionist is a "Sorcerer/ess". Those were the first two classes I put together. The game isn't forceful about equipment or how a given spec plays out. A Blademaster can be a dual-wielding cold ninja or it can be an upfront brutal fighter with a shield and huge armor. There's a huge amount of variety, though there is some sense of homogenization.

On top of that, there's also an alternate progression grid, called "Devotions" in which you unlock stars to gain the power of constellations. Devotion progression isn't tied to your leveling, rather, you repair or restore shrines on the way through the game which rewards you with a devotion point (a star) and then unlock the constellations. Constellations generally offer stat bonuses til the end, with the last point often having some unique ability you can add to your skills.

Like I said, the game does homogenize things a little more than it should, but between six masteries and the devotions there's a lot of room for different specs of the basic fighter/caster/paladin/ranged/pet-class archetypes spread through all those trees.

Basically, it's a big world, you've got lots of skills at your disposal and lots of different undead to kill. You kill a lot of undead in this game. Like... Too many. But you have lots of different ways to do it.

It's kind of a neutral thing, with pluses and minuses, but I want to mention that Grim Dawn is a bit looser with its difficulty settings and levels than other ARPGs I've played. Enemies scale, to some extent, with your level. This can feel a little weird, as zones can remain overleveled for you for quite a while, but it has the odd perk that a build need only get into Elite (the 2nd difficulty level) to see much of the itemization. As enemies continue to level, you can get pretty high level drops, which tends to keep the game from having that weird problem where zones "go stale" and can't produce anything useful.

On the other hand, you will often get loot too high level for you, which is oddly annoying. I started getting level 75 loot at level 65 in the middle of elite, which is about halfway through the game's three difficulty run. Although again, it scales with level.

And now we start talking about what Grim Dawn is bad at, and it's pretty bad. It's really bad. It's the itemization.

The original Diablo had a very limited number of item combinations as a result of a fairly limited stat system. Diablo 2 was a little under-complex, but eventually by the end of its expansion cycle, it got to a pretty good place. I think Diablo 2 was close to where you'd want to be, but everything after that always seems to tip toward overcomplication and Grim Dawn hurls itself off a cliff in this regard. Itemization here is just ridiculous, with eight different resistance types and with it eight types of damage (plus several Damage over time versions of those damage types, which also get their own bonuses and defensive measures to boot), bonuses to skills, bonuses to stats and stat outcomes and everything in-between. You get huge piles of loot and going over each item is just reading a manual on poor design. It's just unnecessary bloat that gets in the way of enjoying the game. A big chunk of the epic/legendary items will have a text box detailing a bonus to, say, Bleeding damage, Piercing Damage, Acid Damage and then a mix of stats, skills and none of them necessarily work together on all but the most specific spec.

It all ties back to Diablo 2, which sold millions upon millions of copies. A majority of my friends bought it and played it, and you could find a game to roll with. Grim Dawn just feels like it imagines its that popular, so kooky overcomplicated itemization is no big deal. And you know, if you're playing it with four other people or whatever, I bet it isn't. But playing it solo, it's a real bummer. You sort through a lot of pointless garbage.

The other thing is the inventory just bloats out like crazy. You have protection potions which are sort of annoying but there's this huge inventory mini-game involving item upgrades that slowly combine together and I have no idea why they work this way. Basically they usually take three or four to combine into one complete item, all of which you can use on your gear to offer small upgrades a la gems or enchanting in other games. It's a great system, except WHY does it drop tiny partial upgrades? Just drop the full item one-third as often and stop annoying me with 56 tiny items that combine together into a huge unwieldly mess. You can use completes and partials in different crafting recipes, so again, it's just a huge mess. The game gives you like four extra bags by the end of normal, and then you keep getting more bags.

But that's ultimately the issue with this game: It just didn't know when you stop. There's no attempt at polishing everything because there's just so much. None of these systems are really bad, but they're nowhere near as good as they should be, and it takes more away from the game than it adds. Inversely the game's crafting system is legitimately good and offers you a lot of help in gearing up or options to keep loot interesting.

LOOK AT ALL THE WORDS

This is sort of tied with the itemization, but the tooltips in this game are way below what they should be. For example, I tried making a Sigil of Consumption (looks up class pairing) Conjurer. By level twenty, the tooltip reflected the actual damage of the spell not at all. +spirit doesn't define how much more bonus damage you get, nor does +physique show how much more HP you get. It makes items harder to compare and it makes talent comparisons really difficult as well. I'm still not entirely certain how different talents interact, mostly boiling down to bad wording.

The game's other flaws, as far as ARPGs go, are pretty light. There's a weird obsession with floor damage and enemies leaving damage on the floor that lingers far too long. It interacts poorly with the constitution system, which replaces chain-chugging potions with an "out of combat" healing that depletes a very deep pool as you go. Damage over time effects and lingering floor damage can keep this from triggering, which can be a little odd if you're not paying attention. Constitution in general isn't quite where it should be. You eat food or devour "vital essence" to restore it, but your after the fight healing often triggers after you've eaten food that enemies have dropped. What ends up happening is the bar refills your health and depletes your constitution and leaves it at less than full. Makes me twitch every time.

Largely, I would say Grim Dawn does "being an ARPG" extremely well. The itemization thing is annoying, but the game drops lots of loot and having so many specs to feed isn't exactly a downside. The visuals and musics are excellent, though enemy design could use a bit more variety. You fight a lot of the same things in what feels like nearly every act. As such, if you're looking for an ARPG, I think I'd feel confident in recommending it. But if you're not, as good as Grim Dawn is, the lack of critical polish and innovation means it's at best just a very good ARPG. It won't change your mind on the genre.