My remarks are very preliminary. I found a more detailed youtube overview below (disclosure: I haven’t watched most of this, as the guy’s sugar-high enthusiasm sort of puts me off; also it’sĀ a bit NSFW):
I played about an hour and half of the game last night. My character is an Arcanist or some similar name — not sure about the spelling. All I know is that she uses elemental magic. Other classes are fairly standard.
I wasn’t able to tell much in my short play time. The atmosphere reminds me of what would happen if Path of Exile created a love child with Titan Quest. The starting area and events are very reminiscent of how the latter game begins, and the design/look are very similar to the former. I’m not able to tell you much about the skill system because I don’t really understand it yet. Maybe the youtube guy will elaborate on this.
The good news for Master Race types is that this is wholly a PC game. It was obviously made not only first and foremost for the computer; it appears to have been made exclusively for that platform. I don’t see how they would conveniently port it to a console. Everything is clearly mouse- and keyboard-driven. The inventory, for example, would have a hard time translating to Xbawx.
The game runs well so far on my computer (i7 4790, GeForce 970, 16gb RAM, 500gb SSD, etc.). I experienced no crashes, slowdowns, or other anomalies. However, the general look and feel is a little, erm, rough. It doesn’t have the slick professional feel of something like Diablo 3 — I wouldn’t say it’s clunky or amateurish, but it’s more PoE-ish than it is D3.
Everything is . .Ā . grim. Yes. Grim and dark. But it’s still pretty nice-looking. I would say it’s somewhere between PoE and The Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing in this department.
I can’t say much about gameplay. The starting area is full of pushover creatures who seem to be there just to let you get used to the combat, which is standard ARPG pew pew and whack whack.
I can say nothing about mp or co-op, as I haven’t tried this part. The developers claim that you can have four players in co-op, so that’s nice, I suppose — if it works and isn’t too messy.
The game regularly sells for $25, but I got a 10% discount as an early-adopter encouraging gesture. I will have to play more to determine whether this is a good buy, but right now I’d say that if you want more Titan Quest with an overlay of Path of Exile, and if you want this in a single-player game, you could do worse than Grim Dawn. I hope to add more as I progress.
I’m sorry but your review mentions nothing about Coke machines. Are they in-game or not?
Also, no mention of the cash shop. Can I buy sparkling pink fairy wings for my character for $25? What about a fedora and sunglasses?
What about mounts? Sure I’m talking about the standard horse but can you pay money for a unicorn?
You also mention nothing about unlocks? After killing a certain number of monsters, can I unlock the super AK47 Elite Sniper Rifle? Or do I need to go to the cash shop for that?
What about DLC? Is there anywhere I can buy a wedding dress or tuxedo? All these things are need to know!
All in all, I give this review a 4/10.
LOL
Sadly, in all the departments you mention, Grim Dawn fails. It has only a very primitive grasp of millennial uber hardcore nickel/dime transactionism. This may hurt it. I’m not sure you can even buy hats.
Well, Necro was raving all about this to me last night in Steam so between the 2 of you I’m pretty much sold.
If we could only get Necro and muppet in the same co-op game my life would be complete.
According to the youtube above, the game scales well on lower-end systems, so mup might be able to run it. Steam has the system requirements on the store page. Not sure about a Mac port — likely not.
Yes, we must have Necro, too. His instruction and wisdom will be invaluable. I will look to him for guidance in creating a powerful but comically unhealthy toon.
So it’s a Diablo clone? I need to get back to Diablo 3 at some point. I’ve been too busy making silly costumes, to spend any time gaming.
Umkay, well, I am rather disappointed in Grim Dawn’s multiplayer model. Contrary to appearances, there are no real Grim Dawn servers. Multiplayer, as far as I can tell, is exclusively p2p and you have to enable UPnP to get a game going. “Or” you have to forward port 27016. “Or” is in quotation marks because manual forwarding is not likely to work if UPnP isn’t enabled.
As you may know, UPnP is potentially a very dangerous protocol set. There may be ways to limit the risk, but I’m not a network person, so I don’t know what they are. I don’t want to download wackadoo software workarounds either.
Am I missing something here? This seems like a really lazy and irresponsible way to provide mp.
Well, its a REAL pc game that does REAL pc networking š
I’m sure you have updated real-time intrusion software on your machine. Couldn’t you just enable UPnP on the router while you play and then disable it when you are done?
You also have a good enough rig to run a virtual machine but the game will probably run like crap in that.
Also, if I remember right….. isn’t this your gaming machine? Don’t you use another machine for work/important stuff? After all that I’ll probably get hacked by Necro today my bank account drained.
If you dont want to risk it I understand Mr. Fuddy Duddy. š
Is UPnP even really all that risky? I mean, it’s less secure than not having it on, but I’ve never regarded it as a huge open window, either.
Well, here’s my understanding of UPnP. You more knowledgeable network types can correct me when I get something wrong.
UPnP seems to be a good idea for sharing LAN-side devices. You can use someone else’s printer, for example. The problem is that UPnP doesn’t have a reliable way to distinguish between what wants to use your printer on the LAN and what might want to use it in WAN-land. How do you communicate with a device? Last I heard, it was through software. Some software, therefore, can be construed as a device. An example is Adobe Acrobat Reader. Call me crazy, but I see a teensy problem here.
So what’s going on in Grim Dawn is this: you’re supposed to broadcast to the world that you either have a game server on your computer or you’re looking for one. Theoretically, this is pretty elegant. Another Grim Dawn player can find you and jump into your game. Unfortunately, UPnP is also broadcasting the presence of your computer to everyone else who might be interested, and UPnP does not bother to distinguish between Grim Dawn owners and other people. Nor does it worry about whether it’s communicating LAN-side or WAN-side. Nor is it concerned about hiding other “devices.”
It’s like going to Fish World and swimming with sharks. Normally, you wouldn’t really be swimming with sharks. You would have a nice glass wall between your side of the aquarium and the sharks’ side. UPnP retracts this wall. If the sharks aren’t interested in eating you, you’re good to go.
There are about 273 better ways to handle multiplayer networking in a game. The makers of Grim Dawn avoid all the work and just tell you to retract the aquarium wall. I find this less than satisfactory.
ME: “Hi, UPnP. I have some things on my local network which need to communicate with each other.”
UPnP: “Great. I can do that.”
ME: “You’ll keep other things out there in the WAN from intruding, right?”
UPnP: “Nope. That’s your router’s job. Or whatever software firewall you have.”
ME: “Okay, so if I enable you in my router, it won’t drop requests from Boris’s auto-ransomware-bot to meddle with certain software?”
UPnP: “That’s about right.”
ME: “So I’m defeating the purpose of the router to drop requests from outside the LAN unless I specify otherwise?”
UPnP: “Um, yeah.”
ME: “You don’t care what communicates with my devices?”
UPnP: “Not my job, man.”
My dim recollection of UPnP protocols are that they have nothing to do at all with sharing LAN side resources. I remember it as a protocol that allowed ad hoc firewall exceptions to be made on your router as long as the request originates on the LAN facing side first. So, you don’t have to put in port forwarding exceptions manually to play Age of Empires, etc.
But it’s been a very long time since I paid attention to this stuff at all.
You are right. UPnP is basically an avenue for programs to forward ports in your firewall automatically so that you don’t have to do it manually.
The only reason Grim Dawn requires it is because its multiplayer is peer-to-peer and not server based like Diabro.
If you don’t want to disable it, all you have to do is forward the port for Grim Dawn(27016 TCP/UDP) in the firewall yourself (which you told me you cant do because you lost your router password). Obviously doing this means any program wanting to use that port has access to your machine because UPnP doesn’t require authentication/authorization.
I’m probably not telling you anything you didn’t know already.
So I guess you are stuck unless you find the login credentials since you don’t want to do a hard reset.
Still looking for the router info. Hope to have it soon. I don’t see any problem with forwarding the port, though this seems kinda primitive to me in 2016.
As I recall, UPnP was originally intended to make device connections easy via a router. The envisioned devices were things like printers — sharing was the object. I can only imagine that the preference here was for local devices, like in a home or interconnected offices in a building. Dunno.
Anyhow, some routers are better/worse than others, it seems:
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/357851
http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/922681
I shall stop now before you guys stop being so nice and destroy me with experience and knowledge. š
Good job on the router. That was pretty fun. Monstarz were falling down all over the place…..
Yes, the router port thing was easy but still stupid. Good thing it worked because I couldn’t find a single option for UPnP.
Now that we have the team approach, monsters will perish. If we can get Necro and muppet, the band will be complete. We can go on the road. Four fried chickens and a Coke.
Too bad Necro would want to play Defcon 4 elite perma-death mode at level 1 if we played with him. All the while screaming that we are noobs for not playing 2h Shaman like him. Oh, and going AFK at a moments notice for hours at a time….
Wha? Necro? Never!
BTW, I can’t be on tonight. I have to catch up on Black Sails. Will try to do mah Steam thang tomorrow.