matt's grim dawn page
this game bravely asks the question "what if d3 was actually just more d2"
it also says this in a fantasy of "I am a guy in a fantasy world and i have a gun" which, separately, owns hugely and should be in more games.
Stuff I Like
- best loot filter, extremely easy to turn on and off and go through
- its very funny you can just choose to not help the blacksmith and not have one in your town in act1
- i like the animation where the guy bends over to pick stuff up
- i appreciate that this world is slightly different than the standard arpg world. it actually has guns.
- i like that you start with a basic dash
- the game pauses when you tab out, which is great. except it also seems to do it during loading screens? lol
- very TQ vibes. exploration heavy, very "walk around this world and see stuff" and less "running you through a linear track to get stronger"
- the best beginner guides are made by a dude named "rektbyprotoss" :)
- this dual wield playstyle is actually pretty fun and kinda unique, and the endpoint of it is a meteory that procs on the gunfire
- the vibe where you're in the old west picking up dynamite and shooting people with guns and having wild west style gun fights is fun
- my playthrough on Elite is actually pretty different than my playthrough on normal which is neat, doing some quests in different orders and chasing down more random crap
- the ragdoll effects are funny as fuck, very 2010 but they own
- I like that the stash is literally just A Guy
- I legitimately feel like this game successfully executes on "open, living, breathing world" better than d4 ever did
- game does verticality better than d4, with areas on top of other areas and shit
- cool you can go into a cave, and come out somewhere else on the world map. a lot of this is actually just better than d4's semi open world
- the chests and barrels and shit actually hold a lot of crafting materials, the world seems to want you to engage with it
- has my favorite arpg troipe: several of those those "sorry ur friend is dead" quests.
- its funny the endgame is 'greater rifts' and apparently in the last 15 years we haven't found a better endgam activity than just variations of this.
- kinda intresting that these "act bosses" dont seem to really drop loot but all the stuf you farm is in weird outof the way minibosses, sorta cool design. nice that yo ucan target farm a decent amount of good-ish stuff though by killing various dudes easily accessible on the world map. Really good SSF game.
- Love that every armor piece rolls +skills but I am slightly saddened there appears to be a cap on them, so you can't just get +45 levels to Blizzard like in some Diablos.
Stuff I Like Less
- a game without a minimap overlay
- took me an embarrassingly long time to understand how to equip a skill in the skill bar
- i have a shitload of components and idk seems clunky and this system has terrible UI
- i dont like that how much dps you actually do is weirdly opaque, i just want green number man
- when you die it respawns you in town with no tp and the runebacks are long as fuck
- the 2 classes thing is nearly identical to how POE handles class + ascendancy, but in a more messy way. I need to revisit how TQ2 does this now.
- these "meals" you collect to give you constitution that regenerates your health out of combat or w/e is a stupid system
- got to a section with fkin land mines you can barely see now thats bullshit
- hilarious how bad the voice acting in this is, like worse than Diablo 1
- i am one shotting most stuff and then this random Kra'vall boss is killing me without any idea as to whats going on. butcher ass shit and this happens at a few times during my campaign runthrough.
- game has a lot of sidequests which is neat but it also means i just have a shitload of random quest shit hanging out in my log and quest items loose sitting around
- hit a part in this expansion where i legitimately cant figure out what to do, because what i need is buried somewhere in these fucking side quests
- I feel like my power growth is still always only linear and I'd prefer crazy exponential jumps like d3 or d4 might have but maybe i just dont understand the game enough yet
- The final this korvaak fight is pretty bad, and basically requires "I am powerful enough to skip his skills" but GD gets a break because no game really did this in an 'okay' way until very recently.
- they were really ahead of the curve on this "bullshit boss has some idiotic invincibility phases" though which I am less enthusiastic have become common
overall great game, will play a lot. very much made to appeal to a guy like me who wants some meat on the bones but it did take me like 20 hours to really grasp why its good and get sucked in. very "made for ARPG nerds" and has pretty bad ramp up between the game being slow, hard to find where to go, and no real onboarding for the various systems.
I love this guy because he actually has 1 shoulder armor. a single pauldron, finally an arpg that gets it.
the writing in these quests is for real pretty funny and its great
glad I could be helpful to this dude and tell em to chin up
me going into my apartment am i rite fellas
