Grim Dawn X64

[Thedore Rosa]

GrimDawn is an action role-playing game (ARPG), developed and published by Crate Entertainment for Microsoft Windows in February 2016 and released for Xbox One in December 2021. Developed using the Titan Quest engine, it is set in a thematically dark fictional world loosely based on the Victorian era. It received generally favorable reviews from critics and had sold 7 million units (including its DLC) by February 2022.

The conflict begins when the humans in the setting begin to contact Aetherial entities from another dimension. Using what was learned from these entities, they open a portal to bring one into their own dimension and learn that the Aetherials could possess humans, and that these humans would retain enhanced abilities after the spirit was removed from the host. The people then released more Aetherials into the world, who themselves opened more portals and would intend to use humanity for their own purposes.

This attracted the attention of another race known as the Cthonians, who declared war to destroy humanity before it could be completely dominated. The war caused enormous numbers of casualties to the human population and damaged the fabric of reality, causing additional horrors to manifest.

The remaining human survivors reside in scattered enclaves, observing the war to learn of their enemies' weaknesses and using powers gained from exposure to the warp to prepare to retaliate at the invaders.

Grim Dawn is an action role-playing game that features fast-paced real-time combat and emphasizes collecting loot, such as armor, potions, weapons, and money (in the form of Iron Bits). The game's crafting system is similar to the one used in Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos's popular mod Defense of the Ancients. Grim Dawn also builds upon systems from Titan Quest, including improved physics, location-specific damage effects, dynamic weather, a rotatable camera, dismemberment, the addition of factions, and a completely redesigned quest system.

The game features several Non-player character (NPC) factions, with some of them friendly to the player, and others hostile. The player can earn favor with some factions to unlock additional quest lines, vendor discounts and special faction-based items and augments. Some neutral factions can be turned into allies, but aiding one will make the enemy of another. Hostile factions will remember your deeds and deepen their hatred, sending out large packs and elite heroes to hunt the player down. Some initially friendly factions may also become hostile depending on player choices.

A system of skills that serves as an extra layer of character development. The devotion system lets the player acquire devotion points by finding and restoring destroyed or corrupted shrines hidden throughout the game world, and spend them to unlock various bonuses and abilities from a giant constellation map.

The game's crafting system allows you to combine salvaged components into unique crafted items and then, later, use those basic crafted items with higher-tiered recipes to produce powerful equipment and consumables. Blueprints and Recipes can be collected from slain enemies, chests or quest rewards.

Grim Dawn has three difficulty levels: Normal, Elite and Ultimate. As with Titan Quest and some other games of the ARPG genre, each subsequent difficulty is unlocked by defeating the Final Boss of the base game on the previous difficulty (ex. to unlock Elite Difficulty, you must first complete Normal Difficulty base game content).

On creation of a new character the player also has the option of selecting Hardcore mode, in which a character's death is permanent and thus becomes no longer playable. Any equipment a Hardcore character has at time of death is lost forever. Hardcore mode characters do not share a stash with Normal mode characters and can only join multiplayer sessions with other Hardcore characters.

Players can form a party of up to 4 members. The strength and toughness of monsters scale with the number of players, as does the amount of loot. Items and Iron Bits can be traded between players in a party. The host of a multiplayer session can also enable Player vs. Player (PvP) mode, in which players who are not in the same party can attack and kill each other.

Crate Entertainment announced on July 27, 2009, that they had licensed the Titan Quest engine from Iron Lore[1][2] and announced Grim Dawn's development on January 21, 2010.[1] Initially, few details were revealed, with Crate Entertainment stating that Grim Dawn is set in a thematically dark fictional world loosely based on the Victorian era.[3]

Grim Dawn's development is notable for Crate Entertainment's open appeal to their fans for financial support. In a posting on the game's official website, the developers announced that after a period of increased email activity from fans wishing to donate to Crate to support the project, they had added a pre-order page to the game's official website allowing fans to contribute to the project in an official manner.[4] Fifteen days later in another posting on the game's official website, Crate stated that they had received financial support from the gaming website Gamebanshee and one of the authors of the gaming-related web comic Penny Arcade.[4] Despite this support from their fans and various websites, Crate manager Arthur Bruno stated in an interview with The Escapist that pre-orders made for only a very small percentage of Grim Dawn's total budget.[5] In a later interview with the gaming website Big Download, Bruno again confirmed that donations and pre-orders alone were insufficient to fund the project completely. Additionally, Bruno revealed that Crate intended to provide new gameplay content for Grim Dawn through expansions every six to ten months.[2]

On April 17, 2012, Crate Entertainment opened a project page on Kickstarter, setting a funding goal of $280,000, with the halfway point of this goal being reached in four days.[6] It finished up with $537,515, well exceeding its initial funding goal.[7] Crate released an alpha version of the game (Build 8) through the Steam Early Access program on May 15, 2013.[8]

Leif Johnson of PC Gamer wrote: "If anything, Grim Dawn is both empowered and chained down by its retro stylings, preventing, say, the randomized levels of Diablo III and thus its endless potential for replay. But on the upside, none of its recent competitors deliver that old-style hack-and-slash experience so purely and so satisfyingly, and its hybrid class system makes each new jaunt a little different. More than once it found me playing until dawn, and my appreciation for any game that manages to do that is anything but grim."[19]

So dark. So very grim. So many of us wanted this in the wake of Torchlight's Pixar-ed up heroes and Diablo III's dazzling halls, and Grim Dawn certainly delivers. It's a true heir of old ARPGs like Diablo II and Titan Quest, dumping mountains of loot in dimly lit dungeons but with far more spunk and personality than you'll find in its closest cousin, Path of Exile. It's got skill trees, five classes, and (admittedly fiddly) peer-to-peer four-person multiplayer, and it plays like Crate Entertainment used the most upvoted nostalgia posts on Reddit as a blueprint. If you want an old-school action RPG, this is it.

It sticks to that legacy with such grim determination, in fact, that it pushes it to absurdity, as if afraid any fleck of humor might oust it as a sellout. Grim Dawn unfortunately never recaptures the promising pathos of the opening cutscene, but it slathers the grittiness around in text boxes and often laughable voice acting like old crunchy peanut butter on otherwise savory fresh bread.

Here's the guy who tells me to track down the partner who stabbed him and stole his cart full of scrap; here's his partner, who tells me the other guy tried to rape his daughter. There's the traitor I let live in return for the key to a loot-filled hovel; in the distance there's a man attempting to burn his family in his house as a mercy. All this, all the time. It's so unrelenting I ended up wanting to skip over a lot of it, but Grim Dawn allows enough important choices regarding which factions to level and which NPCs to send back to base that I never felt comfortable ignoring the depressing conversations entirely.

Happily, though, the story's a mere sideshow to the action and exploration. Grim Dawn handles these aspects so well I barely cared about the origins of the "aetherials" who've borked the world and why the second act suddenly becomes Red Dead Redemption with greataxes. With the ability to mix classes like demolitionist, occultist, and soldier with one other class to make a hybrid, there's virtually no playstyle it doesn't embrace.

And the massive world around him is a wonderful canvas on which I use him to paint destruction. Some settings slightly outwear their welcome and the trek from one hub to another often tends to drag, but the shattered, wasted landscape nevertheless delivers a welcome balance of light and color to serve as the yang to the yin of the gloomy dungeons and basements. Grim Dawn also caters to the challenge-minded with two starting difficulties and two tougher unlockable ones. It offers choice on virtually every front, and thus the limitation of choosing between a dirty brunette man or a dirty brunette woman on the creation screen feels like some kind of inside joke.

The loot can feel a bit like a joke, too, as gear, weapons, crafting parts, lore scraps, and more drop like Louisiana rain. More often than not, the gear's not even useful, being either vendor junk or limited by huge stat restrictions, and I found myself accidentally picking it up in my click-trance even when I meant not to. That thus leads to one of Grim Dawn's few real downsides: the perpetual trips back to town to sell it all off. At least it has the decency to give us a free portal to get back there.

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