KickStarter Grim Dawn

[kazgar]

Beta soon

Project Update #31: Build 13 and Nightblade Mastery are live!
Posted by Crate Entertainment ♥ Like
It's mid October and what has turned out to be a rather large build is ready just in time for your weekend enjoyment! It includes the long awaited Nightblade mastery and a host of other improvements, including rework of the Burrwitch Outskirts area. For all the details check out the B13 change log on the forum.

We've also been grinding along on the next big content update and should be able to give you a sneak peek in the coming weeks.

Finally, those with beta access will be excited to know that we'll be inviting them join in the fun very soon. I'll post another update in the next couple days to let you know when that's happening.

Now back to the game development mines with me...

-Arthur

 

[Stabwound]

At least this shit is making progress, but damn. I guess it's not going to be coming out any time soon.

 

[Zewp]

I think from beta to full release it should go a lot faster than alpha to beta, though. The alpha period wasn't that long, after all. They overshot their target, but 5 months for an alpha wasn't that bad.

I'm just surprised we didn't see more updates during the alpha period.

 

[Renevent]

There was a post on the main forums a while ago from the medierra (the main dude behind the game) which basically went through why the game's development prolonged a bit:

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9455

Take it for what's it's worth, either way game development is obviously not easy stuff :D

 

[Cynic]

I was not really happy with some of the changes into B12. The combat feels a lot less responsive and clunky to me now, and the running animation is stupid and jarring. They seem to be suffering from a few symptoms which are very worrying, namely wasting time on stupid shit that doesn't need to be changed and also listening to the cock suckers that make up their "community". Some douche complains the running animation looks gay, and they change it thereby fucking it up completely. There was nothing wrong with the animation in the first place, it looked fine. For some reason they've "overhauled" the animation system in the game as well...it makes no sense it was totally fine before why are you wasting time on this bullshit? Get the main parts of the game fucking finished.

 

[Sensuki]

Yeah I'm not 100% sure why they did both of those things either. My favourite version of the game was the release version B8 or B9 or whatever, I haven't enjoyed playing it as much since. TBH I think I prefer Titan Quest still, even though GD has a Diablo like atmosphere, it just feels wrong.

 

[Cynic]

And change the logo? It kind of shows they are not spending their time effectively if they can fuck around doing that kind of stuff. It also looks worse.

 

[General Maxson]

I'm sad to hear they're fucking it up...

 

[Cynic]

Perhaps "fucking it up" is a little harsh, but I do think that they've made some pretty odd decisions. The game was a crap load of fun even in B11. It's sad that they didn't realise that they actually had a really solid core to build out from. I personally feel their community is to blame, it's full of people with stupid ideas and yes men who white knight the game in every thread ad naseum then complain about meaningless crap. It's absolutely not what the game needs at this stage.

 

[Sensuki]

Even the very first alteration to the level scaling was a bad decision IMO and that was because of complaints. They designed the game with level scaling from the get go which IMO was a bad idea, because even though they say the game is open world, it does have a linear progression so far. The original level scaling was fine, the game remained fun to play up until the level cap and you could go back to any area to farm XP / Items. They then nerfed the level scaling reducing the amount of areas viable for late game farming, which made it boring IMO, after that I really didn't play much more than a few hours since they did that.

I complained about the level scaling on the forums, but I offered a solution that gave more variation to the range of monster levels in areas, what they did was just cap the areas at a certain level, which is fucking dumb.

The original level scaling was actually pretty good as far as level scaling goes, it only needed a few tweaks and a bit more variation between monsters and monster levels and I think it would have been a well-implemented level scaling solution.

It will probably not be as much of an issue in the 'full' game whenever that happens, but I've kind of lost interest already.

 

[Cynic]

The level scaling is a non issue when considered in context of a full release. That farming you were doing at the level cap would be in a new area with new mobs and better loot anyway. I was fine with it even in B11.

I didn't disagree with their level scaling on principle, capped scaling is fine IMO. You still could get smashed in tougher areas and own the starter areas when more powerful so it's all good, you still have the power balance see saw effect in action.

I just don't understand why they don't do the tinkering AFTER the game is done. Surely they must look at what they've got and think "ok the core mechanics are solid, need some tweaking but they are there, let's finish the fucking game and tweak afterwards". They have so much content left to make, level designs, monster designs, loot. The numbers can easily change after that part is done.

It's just very strange what they are doing.

 

[Sensuki]

I agree ... I wouldn't be surprised if it has something to do with trying to get more sales out of it currently - for when the Beta people come in.

 

[Cynic]

It seems more to me like they lost a prominent team member and that threw the leadership of the project out a little bit. Arthur seems like he's gone through some pretty intense stuff IRL and is extremely sensitive towards criticism. They seem to be making decisions very haphazardly based on emotional impulses and not on pragmatism. "Oh someone said the running animation looks bad! Better change it!", "people are finding the combat not similar enough to Diablo, forget any originality lets make the mechanics as close to Diablo as we can!"

Being independent should mean that you don't have to listen to the petty whims of ANYONE. I think there is a huge danger to KS projects that the producers (backers) are given the same leverage as they would be in the publisher model. That defeats the whole purpose of KS. You got funding because you showed you had talent and a good product. I backed because I trusted them to make a good game. I do not trust the unwashed masses of braying morons who have no idea about anything to do with game design and want retarded shit included in the game. I didn't back for their opinions, I backed for the company's proposition. Successful KS campaigns need to remember this if they want the campaign success to translate over into the product's success. You cannot please everyone, but the difference here is that you got funding to make something you wanted to this time. If you lose sight of that, it's exactly the same catch 22 of the publisher model all over again.

 

[Renevent]

Alright this is getting kinda ridiculous...

B12's run animation was funky and they've def already mproved it in B13. BTW most of the stuff you are saying is pretty asinine. Animations are changing because after some of the IRL stuff they finally got a new animator. Lot's of people complained about the animations (prior to B12), and so they are addressing it. It wasn't just the run animation either...they are tweaking some stuff making moving/attacking smoother and improving attack animations. It's simply an effort to improve overall animations as that was a pretty big complaint and something the Author had mentioned he wanted to improve anyways since they got new talent.

They are also getting through content now, the B12 + B13 patches included new stuff including a new mastery, new items, new enemies, and re-worked/new (minor) areas/graphics.

"I do not trust the unwashed masses of braying morons who have no idea about anything to do with game design and want retarded shit included in the game. I didn't back for their opinions, I backed for the company's proposition"

The only thing it sounds like based on your posts is you don't give a shit about the company's position...you only want YOUR opinion to be heard and think anyone else position on the forums are just a bunch of brain dead drooling morons.

You keep acting as if there's no place on the official forums for contrary opinions and it's nothing but a bunch of white-knighting but all sorts of ideas/changes/complaints/etc get discussed reasonably on the forums with some changes making it in, and many others not. There's plenty of complaint threads with lots of people agreeing with the criticism as well.

Aurthur has been pretty transparent and def will respond if he thinks something is a good idea, or if he doesn't feel a particular idea doesn't work due to whatever reason (his overall design and feel for the game). You didn't get the reaction from the official forums you did because you had ideas or contrary opinions...you got it because you went in there like a angry gorilla and was being insulting.

 

[Renevent]

BTW, here is the bit on the animation stuff:

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.

This wasn't the case of some dude crying and them just changing it willy nilly...this was Crate getting new talent and starting to overhaul the animations. B12 was def funky, but it's an iterative process and B13 further improved it. It will continue to improve as they continue to overhaul the animations.

 

[Cynic]

Alright this is getting kinda ridiculous...

you only want YOUR opinion to be heard...

So is it your opinion that things are "getting ridiculous"? Or is that a universal fact? This hypocrisy confirms you as a dumbfuck.

Anyway bottom line is the game was perfectly fine in previous builds before they started listening to all the retarded complaints about meaningless stuff. Now it plays worse. I'm not going to go into the reasons again, but it feels clunky and less responsive. So they actually had something good, then listened to retards and now it's worse. Simple as that. Don't know how to better empirically explain decline and its causes than that.

I'll try out B13 soon. Hopefully the new class is good.

 

[Jaesun]

Joined: Feb 22, 2013

 

[rafaninja888]

Alright this is getting kinda ridiculous...

you only want YOUR opinion to be heard...

So is it your opinion that things are "getting ridiculous"? Or is that a universal fact? This hypocrisy confirms you as a dumbfuck.

Anyway bottom line is the game was perfectly fine in previous builds before they started listening to all the retarded complaints about meaningless stuff. Now it plays worse. I'm not going to go into the reasons again, but it feels clunky and less responsive. So they actually had something good, then listened to retards and now it's worse. Simple as that. Don't know how to better empirically explain decline and its causes than that.

I'll try out B13 soon. Hopefully the new class is good.

Alright this is getting kinda ridiculous...

you only want YOUR opinion to be heard...

So is it your opinion that things are "getting ridiculous"? Or is that a universal fact? This hypocrisy confirms you as a dumbfuck.

Anyway bottom line is the game was perfectly fine in previous builds before they started listening to all the retarded complaints about meaningless stuff. Now it plays worse. I'm not going to go into the reasons again, but it feels clunky and less responsive. So they actually had something good, then listened to retards and now it's worse. Simple as that. Don't know how to better empirically explain decline and its causes than that.

I'll try out B13 soon. Hopefully the new class is good.

Ive played the Alpha since it came out, and not really quite sure what to make of it. I found the running animations were ok.If anything i found the female char a tad...fugly.... but thats a personal preference LOL. What complaints about meaningless stuff? (only check the official forums sporatically)

 

[Renevent]

Alright this is getting kinda ridiculous...

you only want YOUR opinion to be heard...

So is it your opinion that things are "getting ridiculous"? Or is that a universal fact? This hypocrisy confirms you as a dumbfuck.

Anyway bottom line is the game was perfectly fine in previous builds before they started listening to all the retarded complaints about meaningless stuff. Now it plays worse. I'm not going to go into the reasons again, but it feels clunky and less responsive. So they actually had something good, then listened to retards and now it's worse. Simple as that. Don't know how to better empirically explain decline and its causes than that.

I'll try out B13 soon. Hopefully the new class is good.

Actually just confirms what I said about you...it's not a my opinion about the game vs yours...I actually have my own criticisms of it and even agree with some of yours. This is a simple matter of you being wrong on the facts and my having to correct it. Crate isn't just making changes willy nilly based on one complaining fool like you are suggesting, and I posted their exact reasoning on why it changed. Let me post it again because in your angst you might have missed it:

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.

This WAS the result of Crate doing what it felt best, not willy nilly changes based on the complaint of some dude on the forum.

Oh, and yeah, I was pointing out again how you were simply run off for being an overly aggressive asshat. There's plenty of criticisms going on there, with people sometimes agreeing and sometimes not.

The issue was not with the forums, it was with you. Sooner you figure that out the sooner you will stop acting like an angsty teenager. My apologies if you are in fact an angsty teenager.

 

[sea]

What concerns me most isn't the tweaking, or whether the game plays worse or not, it's the fact that the devs are focusing too much on those tweaks too early rather than developing new content. I mean, don't they have like 2 new acts to do, all these different faction and quest systems, new classes, etc.? Why are they spending so much time on tweaks they are just going to overwrite later when the full game comes out and they realize they don't work outside the context of a limited chunk of gameplay? That was Cynic's main point and I have to fully agree with it.

 

[Renevent]

What concerns me most isn't the tweaking, or whether the game plays worse or not, it's the fact that the devs are focusing too much on those tweaks too early rather than developing new content. I mean, don't they have like 2 new acts to do, all these different faction and quest systems, new classes, etc.? Why are they spending so much time on tweaks they are just going to overwrite later when the full game comes out and they realize they don't work outside the context of a limited chunk of gameplay? That was Cynic's main point and I have to fully agree with it.

Eh that's not really how it was presented...it was more they were just willy nilly listening to the 'idiots' on their forums and making changes for no reason. Regardless, in the context of them not getting enough new stuff done and wasting time redoing things that don't need to be redone...I'm not sure that's really accurate either. They got a new animator and that was something they wanted to do, I don't think that stops them from creating new content. In fact, if you read their development updates they are completing those new acts/etc. They also just released a new class and Author mentioned he was finishing up the Arcanist (final class).

Check out this for more information:

http://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=9704

They clearly *are* working hard on new content. If it's your opinion they aren't releasing content fast enough, or that the changes they are making suck...not going to argue with anyone about that. The fact is the idea they are just listening to idiots on the forums changing shit without reason instead of working on new content is simply wrong.

They did run into RL issues and development definitely suffered...totally agree. I hope they start steaming through content faster now that they (seemingly) are regrouped.

 

[sea]

Fair enough. I think it's more a case, however, that they aren't really talking about or displaying much in the way of new content, or clearly demonstrating that it's in the works. One gets the sense that act 1 was all they had when they released the alpha, and the game had already been in development for years.

 

[Cynic]

@Renevant They were able to get the animations working fine on both the male and female rigs before B12, the hires happened well before that, so that kind of blows your whole argument to pieces. Nothing was wrong with the game as far as aesthetics, control and responsiveness prior to B12. Now there are problems. The community complained SPECIFICALLY about every area which now has problems prior to the changes happening. I don't know how to make it any clearer to you. The community and Crate listening to them is the reason why B12 plays worse than B11 and so far seems to be a large contributing factor to why the development is slowing.

Let's take another example - new faces for NPCs! Because the fans wanted it!

I mean come the fuck on, how do you make the call as a lead that this is important enough to spend time on. It can only be justified if all your other developers/artists are so completely tied up that absolutely no work can be done on other parts of the game. Instead of new faces for NPCs who you barely see anyway (they are just a minute talking head next to a text box FFS), how about spending some time on a new monster or boss, or some new content that will actually contribute to the game getting released faster?

Sorry but their resource management has some issues, and from what I am seeing, it has issues because they are paying far too much attention to the words of idiots.

 

[Nael]

@Renevant They were able to get the animations working fine on both the male and female rigs before B12, the hires happened well before that, so that kind of blows your whole argument to pieces. Nothing was wrong with the game as far as aesthetics, control and responsiveness prior to B12. Now there are problems. The community complained SPECIFICALLY about every area which now has problems prior to the changes happening. I don't know how to make it any clearer to you. The community and Crate listening to them is the reason why B12 plays worse than B11 and so far seems to be a large contributing factor to why the development is slowing.

Let's take another example - new faces for NPCs! Because the fans wanted it!

I mean come the fuck on, how do you make the call as a lead that this is important enough to spend time on. It can only be justified if all your other developers/artists are so completely tied up that absolutely no work can be done on other parts of the game. Instead of new faces for NPCs who you barely see anyway (they are just a minute talking head next to a text box FFS), how about spending some time on a new monster or boss, or some new content that will actually contribute to the game getting released faster?

Sorry but their resource management has some issues, and from what I am seeing, it has issues because they are paying far too much attention to the words of idiots.

I'm not going to go back and look it up but this reminds me of a post I saw from one of the lead developers on their forum. A player posted a nonchalant comment about his disappointment that the hellhound was just a reskin of another monster model. It wasn't out of line by any stretch of the imagination and was more of an offhand lament, wishing the devs had more time to attend to details like that. Well, the developer responded with a vitriolic rant on how unappreciated he felt and how the player could go fuck themselves and this and that. It was fairly embarassing. Anyway, the point I am making is that even though this might look like it proves the opposite of what you are saying what it actually shows is that the John Does on their forums get under their skin and they pay way too much heed. It's all well and good to listen to your customer base IN A GENERAL SENSE but when you start taking or even listening to their advice on how to do your job you are probably going to be joining them soon enough.

 

[Cynic]

LOL that was my post