Grim Dawn - Crafting Your Future

Crate Entertainment has a new forum post as part of it's Grim Misadventure posts.

A happy 2014! Welcome back to Grim Misadventures, new year edition! 2013 saw us releasing our Alpha build to eager backers, gradually opening up access to everyone that purchased the game. Since then, we released eight builds ranging from small quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes to significant additions to gameplay and content. With the feedback provided by all of you, we improved everything from the environments to the itemization. We tweaked drop rates, added incentives to explore, revamped animations, updated textures, added new art sets, implemented localization support, the list goes on.

I can say without a doubt that the game we had back in May 2013 has grown and improved immensely, and it is in no small part thanks to the feedback and playtesting provided by our players. So thank you, to all of you.

We can only hope 2014 is just as productive!

Now moving on to what we still have in store for you. Area B, commonly called “Act 2”, has entered the playtesting phase. We are now in the process of fixing any bugs and issues that arise from the playtesters’ sessions. This includes everything from fixing pathing issues to problems with content or layout. One key reason for this phase is to make sure we do not break existing characters with an overlooked quest bug. We are currently trying to address one such case.

We’ve also realized, from tester feedback, that the current content and the way it is presented results in a somewhat anti-climactic ending. The problem is that we didn’t plan for this area to be a full act and, even though we call it “act 2”, it is still more of a large region filled with sidequests that you pass through on your way to Homestead. The major story quest in this area is completed about midway through it, which leaves a significant portion of the area at the end without any major quest line beyond just trying to find your way to Homestead and, of course, not being able to actually get there since it isn’t finished yet. Since it seems like this doesn’t meet people’s expectations and, we can understand why after hearing the feedback, we’re looking at what we can do to rework things a bit to make the story in this particular area more involved and extend to a more climactic end to this particular chunk of content. We’re not sure yet whether that will push out the delivery date much or not. It depends how much we need to do to reach a satisfactory result