Grim Dawn: A decent Diablo-like

Introduction

Developed and published by Crate Entertainment, Grim Dawn was first released on PC on Feb. 25th, 2016 and Xbox One on Dec. 3rd, 2021. Following in the footsteps of Blizzard’s Diablo and Grinding Gear Games Path of Exile, Grim dawn features intense top-down action-driven combat, a diverse cast of characters, classes, skills, devotions, and items, but suffers from an underdeveloped, and somewhat leaky narrative mainly told through NPC interactions and reinforced with ledger entries that can be found in the game world. Combat itself suffers from similar scaling issues found in other Action RPG (ARPG) games. As the player levels, poor build choices become more apparent as enemies more frequently one-shot the player, yielding a sense of unfairness in the game design.

Grim Dawn focuses its narrative on a slice of time in the grim dark universe of Cairn. Shortly prior to the players introduction to the game world, a group of alchemists and necromancers, envious of the abilities of the Aetherials, a group of extra-planar entities, make contact with them in an effort to abscond their powers to amplify their own. They open a portal and bring one of the Aetherials to Cairn where they then learn that the Aetherials are able to possess humans, vastly improving their strength, intelligence, and other traits at the cost of their very soul. Seeking to leverage these abilities for their own, the humans invite more Aetherials to their realm who in turn possess more humans, but unbeknownst to the humans, the Aetherials have their own design. The conflicting goals of the two species triggers a trans-dimensional war as the Aetherials take over the bodies of more and more humans, leading to the near extinction of humanity.

The player enters into a broken world with the remnants of humanity struggling for survival not just against the Aetherials, but also against the undead, beasts, and wild humans of Cairn. The player must navigate the world, leveling up as they go, with the end goal of challenging the Aetherial leader and the cult bolstering them. Most characters and NPCs are not voice acted, and a great deal of the story is told through in-game conversations that the player must read. Optional side quests abound to help flesh out the world of Cairn, and there are optional challenge domains to provide additional difficulty to players experienced with ARPGs.

Gameplay

When creating a new character, players enter a name, choose their sex, either male, or female, and select their initial character class. Similar to other games in the genre, there is little in the way of actual physical character customization. Once this is completed, the character is dumped into the game world in the initial hub of Devil’s Crossing. They then pick up their initial quest here and set out into Cairn proper.

Initial leveling is fast and frequent. New players can expect to reach level 5 within the first 30 minutes of the game. Experience required to level scales with player level, so as can be expected, later levels take longer to reach than early levels. However, rewards from quests and killing enemies doesn’t – at least not in any way that meaningfully scales comparable to level experience requirements. This is extremely frustrating because as you approach the endgame, levels begin to take hours of game play to reach. And with the Ashes of Malmouth DLC, the level cap is raised from 85 to 100.

Typical of ARPGs, Grim Dawn enemy scaling starts off smooth, but quickly falls into the traps of the genre in that in order not to die, the player needs to invest heavily into survivability, and that investment just doesn’t pay out. Enemies, particularly elites and bosses in the late game will one shot the player. Later boss chambers even have environmental effects in addition to standard boss shenanigans. Given that the game is single player by default, choice of class and fighting style play heavily in successfully completing the game.

While initially Grim Dawn presents a class experience with many customization and build opportunities, even presenting the ability to pick up a secondary class – realistically, certain classes, such as the Soldier are heavily hampered due to the scaling nature of the game. This is sadly the case for most games in the genre. The classically simple classes are always bogged down by overwhelming firepower and specular effects darting across the screen in an effort to slay them. This leads to my conclusion that the best classes to play are ranged and summoner classes – the Necromancer summoner class in Grim Dawn however, is only available if you have the Ashes of Malmouth DLC. Grim Dawn does not have NPC companions or hires like Diablo, therefore, melee classes are on their own – and they suffer for it.

The saving grace of Grim Dawns gameplay is equipment variety. Similar to Diablo, equipment comes in a number of rarities, including uniques, with a number of presets that include generic bonuses, as well as class-specific bonuses. This adds an additional layer of depth to build variety, but also increases the grind needed to create a late-game playable build. I personally, am not a fan of this type of system. ARPGs in general tend to be boring slogs where the player is essentially doing the same thing over, and over, and over again with little variety outside of enemy and location variance. This type of game design is intended to just draw out player engagement with artificial difficulty brought about by an over-reliance on randomness (an article I am working on will discuss this as well).

What Grim Dawn does correctly is item crafting. Grim Dawn features an item crafting system similar to Warcraft 3 and other similar games where the player finds or purchases blueprints as well as item components that they can then combine together into powerful potions, weapons, armor, and other forms of equipment and useful items. Some of the most powerful items in the game are created through this system, but unfortunately, whole swathes of this system are locked out through level progression and world exploration with the best blueprints being found in challenge dungeons.

Let’s talk about those challenge dungeons. Grim Dawn features three kinds of dungeons (referred to as domains in Grim Dawn): bog-standard ARPG-style domains with no modifiers, standard enemies and loot; dangerous domains with one or more enemy and player modifiers as well as increased loot rarity and drops; and lastly, sealed domains, which require skeleton keys to enter, contain the hardest enemies and bosses in the game, and drop the best loot amongst all dungeon types.

The first two domain types can be found all around the world of Cairn. The player may enter them freely and outside of losing experience upon death, dying in them does not punish the player. Conversely, sealed domains require either crafting or finding a skeleton key to open their entrance. The player may not use their personal warp rift inside, and dying inside almost always means they are required to offer another skeleton key to recover their lost experience and complete the domain. Remember when I said the late game in Grim Dawn has too many enemies that one-shot the player? I’m mostly referring to sealed domains here – albeit, the open-world can be a problem as well.

I stated in the last paragraph the phrase “personal warp rift”. Scattered throughout the world of Cairn are warp rifts – fixed locations where once they are discovered and optionally cleansed, can be used as teleport locations to rapidly traverse the world. The player also carries with them a warp stone that allows them to open a personal warp rift that will persist until the player activates the stone again, returns to the main menu, or exits the game. This allows the player to mark a location to return to later. The stone can be activated anywhere in the overworld, as well as in any domain with the exception of sealed domains. This is a fairly standardized mechanic across all ARPGs so I’m not yielding much praise here.

On a last note, the world feels too large. There’s a reason I usually avoid ARPGs, and it’s because the worlds are growing too large. It takes probably 50 or so hours on a single save to explore the entire game world and complete a standard save without attempting any of the DLC. The standard size location in Grim Dawn seems to be oriented towards taking anywhere from 10 minutes to 30 minutes to complete and that is if the player avoids at least some of the enemies. These estimates are compounded once quests are factored in. All of Grim Dawn’s interactive Points of Interest (POI) – NPC’s, shops, long-term storage, rift portals, quest targets, etc…, are all hidden until the player approaches them. The in-game map (both the mini and full maps) do not render any of these POIs outside of range. This requires the player to memorize where POIs are – and this can be extremely frustrating for quest NPCs in particular that are found in the wilderness.

Technical Discussion

I do not have much to say in this section. All ARPGs seem to implement the same mechanics all derived from Diablo – leading to a lot of these games simply being Diablo clones. Grim Dawn is not different in this regard. Everything including the world design, the quest design, the shop design, the combat design, the character and skill design, the equipment systems, they all come from Diablo. If you’ve played Diablo, odds are you’ll already be familiar with many of Grim Dawns systems, only requiring some learning regarding the somewhat unique aspects of it’s systems such as equipping skills granted by items or devotions, as well as the item crafting.

I’ve talked about this in the previous section, but I want to discuss some more on the map system. Due to the size of Grim Dawn’s world, having any map is a requirement, but a useful map is not what Grim Dawn provides. Like I said, POIs are only highlighted once the player is in range – and I’ve discussed why this is bad, but just scrolling the map is an issue in itself. There’s no delineation in regions on the map interface. The only indication of location is the name at the top of the map, and this only shows the location the player is currently in, not what they are currently looking at on the map. This was the weakest portion of Diablo’s map system as well – Grim Dawn is only better because it at least has a way to tell you what region you’re in. Personally, I would prefer at least a dropdown box in the interface that lets you center the map on a discovered region. Instead, the player just has to scroll the map to find what they’re looking for.

There are quality of life improvements that Grim Dawn brings to the genre. Health and Energy potions for example are infinite – that is, they exist on cooldown. Players are not required to purchase health potions from vendors, but consequently, they do not upgrade at all to a stronger variant. Players instead have the ability to craft potions with pre-defined effects using the in-game crafting system. These potions, as expected, are not unlimited. Usage consumes them. Related to potion usage is Grim Dawn’s introduction of a stamina system. In effect, stamina is a secondary resource that overlays on top of the player’s health bar. All characters have natural health regeneration in Grim Dawn, but this is augmented by stamina. When a character takes damage, there is a period of time that must elapse where the player can not take additional damage, after this time, stamina will be consumed to rapidly refill their health bar. Depleted stamina can be restored by finding meals or other sources of stamina in the open world or within dungeons.

Grim Dawn of course also has a customizable loot filter and it works the same way that the loot filter in Path of Exile functions. There’s not as much customization in Grim Dawn’s loot filter, but it performs the job of filtering garbage drops admirably. Accompanying this is the addition of inventory storage pages. Initially, the player starts with standard main storage. Throughout the game, they may complete certain quests that award storage pages. These are approximately half the space of the standard starting storage space, but there are at least three of them to be found in the game world. These extend the amount of time the player can explore and reduce the amount of downtime needed to return to a haven and sort or sell loot. The draw for this feature from my own point of view is that it reduces the amount of times I need to break action or exploration. While the game loop of “kill-loot-sell” is standard in ARPGs, it becomes tedious the more of them you play, and any features a developer can add that make this game loop more entertaining or better to interact with, the better the overall experience will be.

Grim Dawn overall performs quite well on the machines I have played it on, both mid-range and high/enthusiast-end. The game does not hitch, there are no major audio or graphical issues, and FPS is fairly consistent even when the game is trying it’s best to ensure it isn’t. There are many dials and knobs in the settings for both audio and graphics settings so the performance accordingly, is highly tunable for a wide variety of systems.

Modern cards that can take advantage of FSR or DLSS will not find support in Grim Dawn. The developers themselves question the usefulness of such technologies roughly stating on the game’s official forums that “While there are advantages to dynamic resolution scaling in console environments, the advantages of such technology on PCs becomes less apparent.” Grim Dawn is an older title, and it is unlikely to see adoption of either AMD or Nvidias scaling solutions (not that it needs it at all). Users may find that their drivers offer experimental support for features provided by modern graphics cards, but I wouldn’t expect the game to perform better with them turned on.

According to protondb.com, Grim Dawn is rated as having Platinum support on Linux when running under Proton. While there is no native port of Grim Dawn to Linux, users can still run the game on the platform mostly bug-free and have the same overall experience as playing on Windows. Grim Dawn also supports Steam Controller out of the box (though the Steam Controller itself is discontinued), and additionally it has support for various other x-input style controllers that just needs enabled in options menu. When playing with a controller, the UI will change correspondingly so that the hotbar and all other relevant UI controls will now show buttons for the gamepad – with x-input controllers, the UI appears to use Xbox style button overlays.

These two factors raise the question as to whether the game is playable on the Steam Deck. My initial hunch is that it does, but I have not tested it on my own Steam Deck to confirm it. I would however, expect that the UI would be a bit cramped and difficult to read simply because the amount of information presented in some segments of the UI leads me to believe that it would appear squished on the Steam Deck’s smaller resolution. Additionally, I doubt gyro controls would work with Grim Dawn – it’s simply too old of a title, and I doubt any ARPG developer would ever expect anyone to want to play their games with gyro controls in the first place.

Conclusion

In conclusion, Grim Dawn is a viable alternative to Activision-Blizzards Diablo series of games. It composes features of Diablo, Path of Exile, and several other classical ARPGs into a robust set of systems set in a grim dark fantasy setting. While the narrative is somewhat weak, this is to be expected of its genre, and it is bolstered by the addition of both DLCs. There is no seasonal content like Path of Exile’s leagues, and while there is multiplayer support, it isn’t as popular as either Diablo or Path of Exile. Grim Dark seems to be fairly well-balanced around single-player play, allowing players to easily complete the main story content as well as most DLC content with little knowledge of the more advanced mechanics surrounding character builds and the games many seemingly-simple systems. It offers numerous build variety, and the combat is just challenging enough to offer replay value. Players however, may be turned off by the written nature of the stories narrative and lack of overall spoken dialogue in addition to the spreading of lore around the game world as collectible tomes, letters, and notes, that can be easily missed.

Attribution

Christens Fair Shake