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Project Update # 29: "Lazy Devs, where's my game?!" or Delayed Satisfaction"

 

I hope everyone who has alpha access is enjoying Grim Dawn so far and based on forum comments, it seems like you are. : )

We've been hard at work releasing new builds to squash bugs, improve performance and add features. B12 is a big one with an overhaul of the animation system, reworked and some new animations, a major performance improvement to pathing, which has been the cause of some people's stuttering issues and many other changes. We expect to roll that out in a week or two.

After working to address many of the most critical bugs, imbalances and feature requests, we've resumed work on content. It is still going to be a few months at least before we can release Act 2 and we don't have a firm date for that yet.

Alpha released several months later than expected and now August is upon us, which was our original KS estimated release but we’re still a long way from completion. We've gotten behind our original estimates for a variety of reasons and not just because delays are the popular thing to do.

The good news is that we’ve been conservative with our funds and expect we will still have a sufficient budget to carry us to the end of development. I want to give you all some insight though, into why development has been running behind. The following isn’t meant to be a list of excuses; only the explanation that I think you deserve.

Some of it is the usual of the usual suspects - the creative process, spending time on revisions when we think things aren't good enough and adding in new features that we hadn't originally planned. We also went sort of nuts on “Act 1” and made it much longer than we originally anticipated. We said in the past that we were shooting for about a 15 hour finished game and a 2-3 hour play-through for the alpha area but many people are taking 10-15 hours to clear the alpha. The upside is that you’ll be getting a larger game but, of course, that also adds time onto development.

Other things happened though that we could not have expected or weren’t able to plan for.

One of the first setbacks had to do with hiring. As I’d mentioned during the Kickstarter, my intention was to hire on a couple friends from Iron Lore who had significant experience from their work on Titan Quest. For years they had contributed to Grim Dawn as they were able and the plan had always been for them to come on fulltime as soon as we could pay wages. However, over the years, they also had children, took on car loans and mortgages, and earned raises that made it more difficult for me to provide adequate wages out of the KS funds. When we reached our funding goal and the time came for them to sign on, they started looking at their financial situations found they were no longer in a place where they could afford the risk of joining a small startup and taking reduced salaries.

The result was that I did not have experienced people who were immediately ready to jump onto the project and had to spend time hiring. This sounds really terrible to say but it ended up being sort of a lucky break for us when 38 Studios closed because it suddenly created this large pool of talented developers looking for jobs. We were able to hire on some great people and that lessened the impact of our hiring problem but it still took time to train up new people in the use of our tools and to get them up to speed with the project.

Another big problem area was animation and people who have been following development on the forum may remember me talking about this prior to alpha release. After the KS campaign we continued on with two part-time animators that we'd been working with for a long time. Thing went on as usual until around November when they both ended up having to crunch at their day jobs during the same period. It went on for months and animation started to fall behind. At the same time, we became aware that there were some issues with the male PC rig that were going to make it very difficult to reuse any of the animations for the female. Having to create all new animations instead of being able to reuse and tweak them would have been a massive amount of extra work.

We finally had the good fortune to hire an amazing technical animator who, through fantastical feats of techno-animagic, was able to fix all our problems and has been overhauling all our player animations. That was another unexpected bump in the road that slowed us down but we're starting to see tremendous benefit to the game from having a dedicated technical animator. Some of that benefit will be rolling out in B12 and there will be more to come. One of our part-time animators is also back, working on a new enemy, so that helps as well.

Speaking of people having babies, I had one... well, technically my wife had the baby but I'm part-owner and naturally new responsibilities came with that. Is it a good idea to have a baby while trying to start a gaming studio and release your first game? I can tell you the answer is definitely no... sort of... The problem is, none of the last few years have been good times, I don't know if any of the next couple years will be a good time either and time is flying by. At some point, you have to make time for life in between all the work before life passes you by. That time came last summer and while it has been an amazing experience, it did have its impact on my work schedule.

Last year I was budgeting things very conservatively and planned as though we wouldn't get any more money from alpha release. I wanted to make sure we could keep things going long enough to finish the game even if alpha sales were terrible. I didn't want to pay myself additional money from the project to cover the exorbitantly high cost of daycare. Instead, we made plans to have a family member take care of the baby when my wife returned to work and it seemed like the perfect situation. After just two weeks, misfortune struck and that person was no longer able to help us. Not knowing what else to do, I ended up having to become a part-time daycare provider for a time... yeah...

That situation has been resolved and I’m back to dedicating ridiculous hours per week to Grim Dawn development but time was lost and, since I’m responsible for skill mastery and world development, it is lost time that pushes out the completion of beta content.

Oh, but wait, that's not all! Why not throw in a little lead poisoning as well? So yeah, right after alpha shipped I found out from a blood test that my family was somehow being exposed to toxic levels of lead. I ordered some test kits and discovered our apartment was totally contaminated with invisible poison dust. The upside, if there is one, is that we found out very early before it reached critical levels and required treatment but we had to get out of the apartment ASAP.

The result was that I had to dedicate a lot of time to finding a new place, packing, moving and unpacking. It was particularly difficult trying to find a suitable new apartment because we did not want to risk moving into another older house that could have lead contamination and a lot of the rentals around here are older houses from the era of lead paint. We're all moved in now though and things are returning to normal.

Earlier this year, we also lost one of our designers who some may know as Jalex on the forum. He had been working for us on a reduced salary when his wife lost her job. When he then received a job offer from another company for way more than we could afford to pay him, it was something he understandably couldn’t pass up. Since he was primarily working on quest creation, we’ve gotten behind on implementing quests for “Act 2”.

Finally, the release of alpha itself has slowed us down more than we had expected. Once the game was out and thousands of people were playing it, we felt compelled to respond quickly to feedback and bug reports. I think the quality of the game has improved significantly as a result and we’ve gotten in some much requested features.

So, it has been a bit of a rough ride but we’re still here and cranking on Grim Dawn. Some people may ask what happened to the additional funding we received and why the project is delayed after reaching almost double our goal. Fortunately, we’ve budgeted conservatively and so we still have a large portion of that money in our account to help pay for the rest of development. We also ended up having to pay about $138,000 in taxes on it, so we couldn’t hire on quite as many people as you might expect.

There are also some aspects of development that you just can’t accelerate with more people or where you get a diminishing return. For example, you can only really have one person effectively on a class mastery at a time and you can only have so many people working on quests and story before it starts to become inconsistent. More money mainly helps you to broaden scope and the game has definitely grown larger than what was originally envisioned but also higher quality.

Ideally we would have kept this expansion of scope and quality to a point where it wouldn’t have affected our development schedule (baring all the other setbacks) but along with the increased attention and funding we received came increased pressure and the capability to make a better game. When we started this project, we expected to make a small, somewhat rough indie game that would have limited appeal but still be financially viable because it was so low-budget. Since then, it seems like expectations have skyrocketed with some people setting their hopes on Grim Dawn to be the next big ARPG.

We’re still a very small team though, as far as ARPG makers go and despite surpassing our goal on Kickstarter, $537k is a fraction of the budget available to the bigger name studios in the genre. Yet, we did feel that we had the capability to do more than we'd originally planned and I think most of you would be disappointed if we didn’t strive to create the best game we could.

While I’m not happy about our delay and I’m not trying to casually dismiss it, I do believe that a huge part of the reason developers and gamers alike are attracted to the crowd-funding model is the flexibility it provides developers to do what they think is right to ship the best game that they can.

Under normal circumstances, the delays we encountered wouldn’t push out our ship date; it would just mean that we would have to make cuts to features and content. Likely, in the end, we would have been forced to prematurely ship a game that was never allowed to reach its full potential.

So, here we are. It is August and we have to announce a delay, a significant one. I apologize for that and we are working hard to ensure that Grim Dawn will be worth your wait. Under the circumstances, we are also planning to alter our release schedule somewhat to compensate so that access to the game is no longer tied to specific development milestones, which I'm not sure really made sense to begin with. Instead, it will be more like earliest, earlier, early access.

Alpha is already out, as you know, and I’m happy to say that, based on feedback, the vast majority of those playing will tell you it was worth the wait. So, I hope those not playing the game can, in turn, wait a little longer for their releases. We’re hoping to open the game up to beta access in a few months. Then, at some point beyond that, once we have a critical mass of content ready to play, we’ll open it up to everyone who has backed the game.

I also wanted to say that the vast majority of you have been incredibly patient thus far and we greatly appreciate your understanding.

Now back to work…

-Arthur

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  • 2 months later...

Just thought I would throw a quick update out there...they released the newest character, the Nightblade and have opened up access to all patrons having Beta access. The new areas aren't yet available but should have an update on that soon.

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I checked my inbox yesterday morning, greeted with this lovely revelation. A brief moment of disarray when the game would not run initially, but a video driver update did the trick. Got in an hour and a half and the game is very good. Very, very good :drool:

 

Can't wait for MP :hugs:

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Just let me know if you guys have any questions on mechanics/gameplay. Played the Soldier and Demolishionist a lot and now getting to know the Nightblade. Haven't really played the Occultist yet.

 

Quick tip...you have a personal portal available to you right from the start. Just press 'L' to activate. (Before you could only get after doing a quest and typically you were level 10 or so before completing)

 

Can't wait for MP also. When Beta is released it is supposed to have MP enabled. It will be Open only, no closed servers but we do have a Hardcore mode. I guess we can make up a name/password and post here so any member can join. Not sure on limit in-game though I have heard that 6 people can play a few times but nothing official.

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  • 1 month later...

Heh it kinda feels like crashing into my own thread which is true I guess :P

Is steam currently the only way to play the game? I guess it is looking though their website, but maybe you guys are more in touch with 'em

And will they offer downloads which do not require Steam in the future (upon release maybe?) I would like to have the game without having to install Steam.

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Heh it kinda feels like crashing into my own thread which is true I guess :P

Is steam currently the only way to play the game? I guess it is looking though their website, but maybe you guys are more in touch with 'em

And will they offer downloads which do not require Steam in the future (upon release maybe?) I would like to have the game without having to install Steam.

Yes, only for right now are they going through Steam for the Alpha and Beta releases. Release will be totally free of any DRM if you want :)

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So how's the alpha looking, crude or pretty OK?

I'm pretty much on the fence for a new game to play at the moment, and can't decide what to try :)

Edited by Timotheus
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So how's the alpha looking, crude or pretty OK?

I'm pretty much on the fence for a new game to play at the moment, and can't decide what to try :)

"If you loved Titan Quest, you'll love Grim Dawn" is what I say to everyone that asks. As the developer team is super small (at only 4 members I think), they are basically taking Titan Quest and adding in new assets, through obviously the art, setting, and character/skill design. It plays basically identically to Titan Quest (being the same engine), so it's a very enjoyable experience. If you're floating around looking for a good game to try, I'd definitely give it a shot! And if that doesn't cut it for you, we've got some Darkies and a lot of the german SIF playing Path of Exile :D

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I was disappointed when I learned pre-release access was only through Steam. I got a beta key from pre-ordering it, but I guess I'm just gonna wait until the final release.

 

I'm a little concerned that the game is said to be only about as long as Act 1 of Titan Quest. That seems pretty short. It could be done in about two days, three days comfortably, even if you did every quest and explored everywhere. In Sacred 2 terms that's like less than Tyr Lysia alone.

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I believe all beta key holders can now access the game even though it's still technically in Alpha. Right now there is only one 'Act' though a 2nd one should be out by Dec/Jan. It depends on what package you pre-ordered, but you can upgrade if neccessary.

 

Alpha/Beta is available only through Steam but the final release will be DRM-free.

 

I'm thoroughly enjoying the game. Got 400 hours in now :) I can't think of one aspect of the game I don't like (other than game length but it will get bigger soon) I believe there will be 3 Acts total for release with expansions at a later date. First Act is at least 10-15 hours long if you explore everything.

But there are 4 total classes/masteries and you can go dual masteries so there are several different varieties to try out. So there is quite a bit of re-playability.

The Alpha play is pretty polished. No major bugs, no crashes. Plays like a finished game for me. The hunt for loot is very satisfying...farming is actually fun and even though level cap is at 25 right now there are several areas that still provide quite the challenge.

 

I would say if you liked D2, Sacred, Titan Quest type games you probably will enjoy Grim Dawn. Release is is still several months away, but if you want early access and don't mind Steam I think you can get in for 35 bucks. At release it should be around 20-25 bucks

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  • 5 months later...

Thought I'd give this topic a little more love...lot has happened since last post.

 

Grim Misadventure #42: Information Overload More detailed stats/info on character abilities

 

Grim Misadventure #43: A Tale of Two Smiths Crafting !

 

Grim Misadventure #45: Descend the Steps Only way to escape dungeon is fight to end or die !

 

Grim Misadventure #46: We Need Food An interesting way to deal with Healing system

 

Build 18 is live - Let the crafting begin! Crafting, DW pistols, Veteran difficulty. MP progress update..and much more

 

This game is truly awesome.....sooo many different builds to try, items to find or craft, quests have consequences depending how you choose to complete. MP is still a build or 2 away. Guess a lot of the code had been written for Gamespy but they are shutting down so it has to be re-written. If you like Diablo, Sacred, PoE etc, I can almost guarantee you will love this game. If you are interested in MP only, it is coming but will be open servers...I'll will just make private games with friends but otherwise loving everything this game has to offer.

 

p.s. Now have over 1000 hours into this game...and not even officially released yet lol

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  • 3 weeks later...

Does this mean it's actually finished now? Jeesus Creesus it feels like I pre-ordered this thing 5 years ago. But I'm not a dang beta tester. I'm waiting for it to actually be released.

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Does this mean it's actually finished now? Jeesus Creesus it feels like I pre-ordered this thing 5 years ago. But I'm not a dang beta tester. I'm waiting for it to actually be released.

nope :P

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Does this mean it's actually finished now? Jeesus Creesus it feels like I pre-ordered this thing 5 years ago. But I'm not a dang beta tester. I'm waiting for it to actually be released.

See my biggest gripe with their development cycle right now is that they STILL haven't added in multiplayer components. I understand the need to get the game out to the masses and keep having content updates, but PLEASE add in the ability to play with others. Gets lonely :(

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Any idea anyone when it will be released? I purchased it but I didn't want to play the beta and get bored of it before the game is even complete.

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  • 1 month later...

Heyo everyone!

 

Been away for a while sinking most of my spare time into Grim Dawn. Been in and out here and there but since I've not been playing Sacred I really haven't had much to say (or any comments I would have would be based on fuzzy memories of when I was playing).

 

But now that GD is a mere couple of weeks away from Multiplayer being implemented, I wanted to get in contact with the D.a.r.k members to see if anyone is interested in some kind of playgroup. Personally I'm not against jumping in with a bunch of randoms but I would definitely prefer to have some friends to hack and slash away with!

 

So, just a quick stop to say "Hi, everyone!" and get back to my "roots" (since DM was the actual first gaming forum for me)

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If the game's ever available without Steam DRM I will probably give MP a shot. My internet isn't fast enough for any MP now but I am moving soon.

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I preordered this game when they first came out with the website. MP for me has always been a four letter word, I've avoided it like the plague. But now that I've played so much Illarion, I'm actually excited to play a MP game

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