Grim Dawn Development Update, State of the Game

The folks of the Grim Dawn development team have fired up a new development update where they inform us on the state of the game and offer a tentative road map for the title. As of now, the team is close to having a playable 2-4 hours long alpha, but it will still take about 4-6 months to see a beta release, and we’re still far off from the final one. Here’s a snippet:

Gameplay:
As you can see from the Occultist video, the gameplay is well developed and already quite fun. Balance is fairly good for an alpha. Physics, pathing, and all of those sort of underlying systems are in reasonable shape but could use polish. Unfortunately, there just isn’t enough playable or content to constitute an alpha quite yet. More on that below. Major UI is all working, although the art could use some love.

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Enemies
We have two major enemy sets that are basically completed with a large number of skills and behaviors that create interesting tactical situations. These are the zombies / aether corruptions and the grobles / dranghouls. We then have 3 minor enemy sets that include 2-3 enemy types and a couple solitary enemies mostly finished.

In total we have 20 unique enemy models right now. Each of those has or will have 2-5 different “class” variants and hero monsters based off them. Of that 20 though, 15 are in-game while 5 have finished models but are waiting on waiting animation and design work to get them in-game. Also in that 20 are 3 mini-boss / boss type creates but one is still waiting on animation and design work. Note that these numbers do not include human enemies, of which there are currently outlaws and cultists.

About 6-8 more regular enemies and another boss monster would probably be enough to ship with but I’d be much happier if we had 12-15 additional enemies and 2-3 more bosses.

There are currently no named hero versions finished, just normal and champion and the two bosses.

Loot and Economy
We have all of the common items in-game for normal difficulty. We have large number of magical affixes in-game too so that the looting feels fairly rewarding.

There are almost no unique items in yet though. We have art for about 20 unique melee weapons and a couple pieces of armor but we obviously need much more. This is something we could easily outsource if we just had a full-time artist who could help managing the outsourcing and getting the returned items game-ready.

The economy is in pretty good shape. It is actually refreshingly challenging to accumulate money and there is a good balance of finding items in the world vs. wanting to buy stuff off merchants.