Lots of sentiments and questions, might be a novel.

[CaptainDingo]

Just signed up. Saw about all this stuff on the Titan Quest Steam forums.

I have to say that I was borderline angry when I saw that Iron Lore bit the dust. Or maybe beyond borderline; I think I was clearly angry. I couldn't understand why a game that was so ahead of its time that it's still more artistically and technically beautiful than Diablo 3, which is coming out years later, and (in my opinion) is already such an upgrade over Diablo 2, and yet never really got played as much as it should have. The fact that there are thousands of people playing Diablo 2 right now and literally nobody playing Titan Quest boggles my mind.

I've rarely felt this sort of anger at fellow gamers; this feeling was only trumped once long ago when I saw the sales figures for Psychonauts. I nearly went ballistic just because of how unfair the market can be towards games that deserved to smoke the competition but didn't generate enough hype.

I know that all I can do is to just buy the games I believe strongly about, and hope others do the same. To that end, once more information about Grim Dawn breaks, if it interests me, I'm sure I'll put down the $20 easily.

I had a few questions as well; maybe the developers could take the time to answer a few.

• You mentioned satisfying deaths. Hopefully ragdoll deaths will be making a return? Nothing was greater than coming back to a low-level area and flinging satyrs 50 feet backwards with a fireball.
• Is this the same engine used for Titan Quest? One of the things that I thought was so great about Titan Quest was that it was technically great for its time and artistically nice as well. But don't get me wrong, I'm no graphics whore. If we're looking at a more modest engine, that's fine by me. Art means more than polygons.
• In the same vein, the level editor for Titan Quest was so organic that I was truly blown away with how easy it was to create some interesting terrain, scrub it with a few different brushes and get an amazing looking piece of geography. On the other hand, some of the finer points of the editor weren't very intuitive and a chore, like quest creation and triggered events. Not a question, just a comment, something to keep in mind if we're going to see another editor. I'd try and draw some inspiration from editors like the Warcraft 3 editor, which remains the most simple yet powerful game map editor I've ever used, and the editor's amazing ease of use and power alone paved the way for Warcraft 3 to be played long past when its life cycle would have otherwise ended.
• I'm glad to see a high level cap of 200 (if I read that right). I hate when levels cap out at some timid amount like 50. Was the motivation for this to offer more frequent leveling, or to increase how long it takes to max a character? For example, will it take about the same length to get to 200 as it might take to get a D2 character to 99, the main difference being that you get rewarded with levels twice as often, or will it take twice as long?

Anyways, glad to see this game being made.

[yerkyerk]

Welcome!

I'm not a staffmember but I'm going to answer you anyway

satisfying deaths

Well, blood and gore I might hope - and medierra keeps stating that they improved on the ragdoll engine when it comes to monsterkilling.

same engine

Yup. With some tweaks here and there.

level editor

There's probably going to be one (not on release though) and it's tweaked a bit. And hopefully we'll also get the extracting tools so we can import meshes back into TQ. I don't think there's going to be a major overhaul though.

high level cap

Not sure about this one; I think they initially cap at 75, but DLC is planned and they should be able to allow you to get to 200.


EDIT;

Psychonauts

2 bucks on Steam! Get 'em while they're hot!

[medierra]

The level cap was increased primarily to expand the length of time people could play a character before hitting level max but the early levels are also probably a bit faster. Since we want to expand the game significantly over time, characters need to be able to keep advancing.

I'd say 1-100 will probably be equivalent to 1-75 in TQ:IT. 100-150 in GD is probably equivalent to another 1-75 in TQ:IT. 150-180 yet another. 180-200 is just for people who are insane.

This is the current thinking but it isn't really set in stone yet. I'm also not sure how exactly we should cap it. We could always do the hard cap or we could have a soft cap where you eventually out-level enemies and XP gain becomes really inefficient until the next expansion comes out with higher level enemies.

If you want to see what the game looks like, just go to the media section.