Grim Dawn. According to Steam I’ve owned this game for years. Also according to Steam, I only played it about ten hours before putting it away… many years ago. Now, my reasons for this are that the game seemed especially simple and straightforward, making it a very boring experience for me.
Recently I got a big old hairy bug up my ass to play a new ARPG. I have thousands of hours in Diablo 3, hundreds of hours in Torchlight II, and I was looking for something new. I decided to re-install Grim Dawn after getting inundated with Youtube recommendations telling me about a new Grim Dawn expansion. Right ad, right time and all that. So I reinstalled, bumped the Grim Dawn thread a couple times while I found new success and compulsion triggers in the game’s world of Cairn, and managed to play through the main campaign a few times in the last month. It turns out that my first build several years ago, while uber-powerful and all, was just straight up boring because all I had to do was hit a thing with a sword and watch them die in one hit. I mean, that’s cool and all, but I wanted a little more meat with my gravy.
So, I managed to dump about 80 hours into the game last month because I’m a stupid idiot that needs to go out more. But in the meantime I’ll keep hacking away at bad guys while waiting for the potential sale prices on current DLC when the new expansion drops in a month or whatever.
I originally backed the Kickstarter for this game, and played it all the way through on the PC, back at release. But a week or two ago I noticed the Enhanced Edition was on sale for ten bucks on Xbox One. Now, even though I’d already played the the game, I did so before the Enhanced Edition, and before any other huge patches were released. My experience, though very fun and rewarding, was also complicated by horrible game-ruining bugs and campaign issues at the time. I had to keep reloading older saves and doing things over because certain quest triggers just weren’t working right. But I always wanted to go back and play this sucker again, without all those problems, and with a whole new party build. So that’s what I’m doing now.
Back when I first played it I used a mouse and a keyboard, as any self-respecting gamer is wont to do. But since I’m on Xbox, I am stuck using a controller, for what I was sure would be a horrible, disastrous, controller implementation. However, my fears were all for nothing because it turns out this is flat out the very best controller implementation for any isometric 3rd person perspective RPG I’ve ever played in my entire freaking life. It’s just perfect for this game, as far as I’m concerned, and I actually prefer it to mouse and keyboard simply because I’m getting lazy, and it’s just so simple to use.
It also looks fantastic on my Xbox. I mean, damn.
I had also recently started up the sequel on my PC, but I totally screwed up on my party build and I’m tempted to just scrap them and start over. I’m still mulling that over. I’m also tempted to find a comfortable way to play that with a controller now too, without being forced to buy it a second time.