Grim Dawn Interview
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How did the idea for Grim Dawn come about and did the idea for the game originate at Iron Lore or at Crate?Thanks, RPGWatch.
Grim Dawn was an idea that developed after Iron Lore and after we had met with defeat while trying to pick up where Iron Lore had left off pitching Black Legion. In retrospect it is such an obvious idea and one we probably should have thought of much earlier but there were reasons that it was not obvious to us at the time. After Titan Quest debuted to poor sales in North America and THQ subsequently declined a TQ2 citing lack of interest in a PC-only ARPG, many of us felt disappointed in what we had invested years of our lives to create and demoralized by the state of the PC-market in general. We questioned ourselves, lacked confidence in our creation and generally just wanted to move on in a different direction.
Then something funny happened. Those low initial sales that were supposed to rapidly drop off to nothing never dropped off. The monthly sales never increased to anything impressive but they just kept going and going, longer than anyone could have imaged. After Iron Lore had shut its doors and Crate was struggling through its first year in existence, sales of Titan Quest just kept rolling.
According to the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research Institute, only 20 percent of games that are released onto store shelves ever become profitable. At the end of 2008 I found out that Titan Quest had managed to claw its way into that 20 percent. The game had not only reached profitability for THQ but it was very close to surpassing a million copies sold. It became obvious that we needed to make another game for this audience. Our good fortunate was that Iron Lore had retained ownership of the engine, tools, and other technology it created while developing Titan Quest. We knew these tools well and frankly, were very excited to get back to doing what we knew how to do.
So we then started generating ideas for and planning the small-scope ARPG that would evolve into Grim Dawn. I'd worked on several different game concepts over the past couple years and so there was a lot of material that I could adapt and borrow from. Grim Dawn is sort of a merging, refinement and evolution of some of those gameplay and story ideas, tempered by the lessons we learned in our years working on Titan Quest and Immortal Throne.
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What other features do you think are important in Grim Dawn?
The big one would be randomized undergrounds. We haven't finished the tech yet, so it isn't 100% but it is looking very promising so far. Allowing for some "dungeon" areas of the game to be randomized would be a big win for replayability. We realize that our audience is split with some people desperately wanting randomization and others hoping we'll stick to hand-crafted environments. I think we can find a compromise that will keep most everyone happy with outdoor environments and some undergrounds being hand-crafted and most undergrounds, especially optional areas, being randomized. We're also looking to add in some level of quest randomization but we don't have details on that yet. The completely new quest, conversation, and faction systems are also very exciting. I think these will mesh together to create a much wider array of questing possibilities and more interesting world interactions. This will also be important for modders who will find the new system, which includes a quest wizard, much easier to use. We will be releasing more details about in the next couple weeks on our forums.
I don't know that it is an important feature but I love our new dynamic weather system. It really adds an unexpectedly huge amount of atmosphere and life to the game. The way the system works is that designers paint regions of the world with different climate types. The climates are controlled by climate files where designers can add different weather patterns and set probabilities for each to occur. The weather patterns, in turn, are built out of individual weather effects such as wind, fog, thunder, dust, etc, that can be set to varying intensities. I have to admit, I get a bit of a tingly feeling when I'm running through a wheat field and then the sky darkens, rain starts to fall, gently at first but then it starts pouring, the wind picks up and blows the grass around and then there is a sudden boom of thunder. Dynamic weather changes really make me feel like the world is alive.
