Grim Dawn is old-school style, open-world action role-playing!
Grim Dawn is an action role-playing game being created with the tools and technology used to build Titan Quest by a few veteran developers from Iron Lore, including Arthur Bruno, the lead gameplay designer on Titan Quest.
We’re a small team with limited resources and we’re not competing to launch the next big ARPG but if you’re a more traditional gamer that still craves the complexity, intrigue and quirkiness of older games, maybe Grim Dawn can be the next big ARPG for you.
Grim Dawn won’t hold your hand to ensure you never make a bad decision and it won’t feature a story on rails with linear level design to prevent you from ever getting lost. It will, however, offer you the chance to do things in your own way, have an experience that is unique from everyone else playing the game and explore off the beaten path to see and do things that not every player is likely to find.
Unlike many other ARPGs, in Grim Dawn, you’re not the lone hero out on a quest to save the world by vanquishing one ultimate evil. The world of Cairn, in which Grim Dawn is set, has been devastated by a war between two otherworldly powers, with humankind caught in the middle. The dangers facing the survivors of humanity are too great and numerous to be solved by any one individual.
There is still beauty in the world but it is permeated with darkness and peril. The broken remnants of wraith-like Aetherial and demonic Ch’thonian armies rove the lands seeking to gain some advantage in a cataclysmic war that's ground to stalemate. Bands of human marauders turned cannibal roam the roads and creatures from the days of lore, thought driven to extinction, find the world ripe for their resurgence.
It is the dawn of a desperate and dangerous new era in Cairn where isolated enclaves of human survivors struggle to rebuild and many are in need of help. This is the backdrop for the countless adventures that await you in Grim Dawn. There is no one central story; there are many stories and whether you help the weak or help yourself and how you go about it is yours to decide. It pays to have some allies in troubled times like these but choose them carefully…
Core features
We’ve listened to years of feedback from the Titan Quest community and continue to do so every day on the Grim Dawn forums as we strive to improve upon past performance and make this our greatest work yet. The creation of Grim Dawn is guided by traditional design and old school sensibilities, with innovation only in the areas where we feel it truly improves the game and isn't just a gimmicky back of the box feature.
Grim Dawn will:
- Be DRM free!
- Include robust modding tools so you can create your own worlds!
- Be faster-paced, with much more satisfying enemy hit reactions and deaths.
- Allow you to fight house-to-house as you lay waste to enemies and the former owner’s furniture in the process. Break through walls to open up new areas of exploration!
- Feature a more open-world design with randomized elements that will greatly enhance replay-ability. Each play-through will be unique with "set-piece" spawners that can turn a patch of wilderness into different types of enemy camps, a traveling merchant caravan, etc, each with their own unique art.
- We don’t control where you go; you do! If you don't want to follow the main story, you aren't forced to. Non-linear progression allows you to unlock new areas by repairing bridges, defeating enemy blockades, etc, as soon as you have the resources and power to do it. Race ahead into higher-level areas and get pwned, we'll warn you but we're not going to stop you!
- Let you combine any two of five distinct skill classes, each with multiple skill trees in which to specialize. Spend money to reclaim skill points if you’re unhappy with your build.
- Have a refined loot system that drops far less junk-items, produces more uber randomized gear and ensures more consistent rewards from hero and boss monsters.
- Immerse you in a gritty, dangerous, Victorian era fantasy world where humankind has been pushed to the brink of extinction by warring otherworldly powers.
- Give players meaningful quest choices and the ability to visually change the starting town as they help to rebuild and secure the future survival of humanity.
- Let you ally with NPC factions to earn rewards and unlock new quest lines. Be wary though, aiding one group can make another your enemy!
- Join up with friends in coop-multiplayer through online match-making or play over LAN and experience the full game together.
- And so much more…
Sound overly ambitious?
It might be... if it weren't for the fact that these features already exist! Well hey, we're not just some dudes rolling up in here, looking for you guys to take all the risk in funding our dream gig. We've already put a lot of our own blood, sweat and tears into this labor of love over the past 2+ years to get it where it is today. We've developed a ton of cool new features and the core gameplay is already quite fun, if we do say so ourselves. What? You want to see the gameplay? Well, here is our latest sampling! (hopefully just enough to get you hooked...)
Why do we need your help?
Though we have several experienced developers working on Grim Dawn, only two of us are in a financial situation where we can afford to support ourselves without a salary (albeit on a steady diet of bread and moldy cheeses). The other guys involved with Grim Dawn work day jobs at other game studios to pay the bills and contribute as they can on nights and weekends. As you might imagine, this makes for pretty slow going and it is certainly not ideal for creative collaboration. When critical team members end up in crunch at their day jobs, they can sometimes get tied up for weeks, causing certain aspects of our development to temporarily grind to a halt.
Occasionally, just to get things in-game, we have people performing jobs that are really outside their area of expertise. This can result in such things as "1990s looking", designer-created UI and programmer-drawn lightning bolts. Even so, some aspects of development, such as art, animation, and world-building, are falling woefully behind the programming and gameplay development. We're at a point now where we have solid core gameplay and some robust features but not enough content to release anything and we really need to accelerate that process.
While we could still finish a fine little game on our own, that would be rough around the edges but very fun, we believe there is a much greater potential that could be realized if we were more adequately funded and staffed. So we're hoping you can help give us some proper funding so that we can get the team together, start making faster progress and ultimately release a bigger, better game for you and everyone else.
Stretch Goals!
$350k
- Dual wielding pistols (feature tech and new animation set)
$360k
- 25 extra pieces of unique item art
$375k
- Additional end-game boss monster (total of 2) lurking somewhere out there in the darkness for you to find...
$385k
- 25 more pieces of unique item art
$400k
- A new environment set that you'll get to decide on. We'll create a thread on the Grim Dawn forums to discuss ideas with fans, then select the best ideas and create a poll for you to vote the one you want most.
$412k
- 2 additional monster types (models and animations)
$425k
- Three large, high-level dungeons, each with its own theme and named hero monster. The dungeon entrances will randomly appear in the world.
$450k
- Savage two-handed melee weapons (includes animations and all the art required to create an entirely new item type)
$465
- Additional end-game boss (total of 3) to encounter in some dark and dangerous corner of the world.
$480k
- New survivor town hidden in the remote wilderness for you to discover. Will include a new faction group and new quest-lines to unlock once you've gained their trust.
Existing Grim Dawn Key-Holders - Please Read!
To ensure that you get the reward that you desire and are properly credited, you must carefully read and follow the instructions posted in the Official Kickstarter Project thread on the forum. It is important that you only pledge the difference between the value of your existing key and the tier you want. If you pledge more, we won't be able to refund you, so please pledge carefully!
Also, please note that the first 3 tiers on Kickstarter are identical to the 3 website pre-order levels despite the minor price differences. If you have a Legendary key, for example, you will get all of the stuff in the KS $50 reward and do not need to pledge any more money if you don't want to.
Current total
$383,258
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/crateentertainment/grim-dawn for more details and/or to pledge
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