Heir to the Throne

Heir to the Throne

This weekend was largely about three things.  Firstly watching the string of new releases coming out of Star Wars Celebration including a Star Wars Episode IX: Rise of Skywalker trailer, a trailer for the game that EA has a high likelihood of cancelling before it sees the light of day, and some leaked footage of the strangely press blackout Mandolorian Television Series sizzle reel and trailer.   It was also a weekend about watching the first episode of the final season of Game of Thrones…  and I had honestly forgotten how good that show was after watching so many recent seasons of Walking Dead when effectively nothing much happens.  Lastly it was a weekend devoted to playing heaps of Grim Dawn.  When I started this recent stint I was sitting at roughly level 15 but throughout the weekend I pushed through to level 38 on my Warder character.

Heir to the Throne

The only negative is that I found out this morning that running in Windows Borderless mode causes you to get some really fucked up screenshots.  The above image is an example of this where it appears to be capturing only the tiniest square of the upper left hand corner of the screen where I would assume the 0/0 coordinators are located.  This means that pretty much all of the cool screenshots that I thought I was getting over the weekend wound up to be duds, and I had to scramble around this morning to take a handful of relevant shots for the purpose of this blog post.

Heir to the Throne

The big problem with Grim Dawn is it never seems to give you a firm boundary between acts, so it is very hard to track exactly where you are in the progression of the main story.  As far as I can tell I am firmly in the middle of Act 3 and have managed to get my way to another large town called Homestead which appears to have everything that Devil’s Crossing has except maybe the Illusionist.  I am now questing for a group of Inquisitors called the Black Legion that is now sending me out into the wastes to kill stuff.  I like the look of Homestead a lot, but it is somewhat of a pain to navigate given its multiple levels and the fact that this game sometimes has trouble with ramps.  Ultimately you have to take any sort of a subtle ramp or rise very slowly or you just keep hopping right back of it.

The only real negative take away from the weekend is the fact that Multiplayer is not as easy as Diablo 3.  Even then there doesn’t really appear to be any multiplayer activity to do like Adventure mode and it would simply be either me joining someone elses game in progress or them joining mine.  The deal breaker however is the fact that both players theoretically have to own the same set of expansions in order for it to work.  I slowly picked up expansion content for this game as it was released and ultimately went on sale… and as such I have everything available.  So it would take someone paying the $24.99 for the base game, and then an additional $39.97 for all of the DLC content to catch up to the level my client is so we could play games together.

As a result this is largely going to be a single player game for me, but I still feel like this is the real heir to the Diablo 2 crown.  It is a happy medium between Diablo 3 and Path of Exile and feels just about right to actually go out and experience.  What is most interesting about it is how well the story line plays out and who it is way more intelligible than that of Diablo 3.  It actually has actions that make a difference on the world because in most of the quests you are given multiple paths to reach resolution.  I am currently paying for my actions because the town I am visiting is apparently missing one NPC because I chose to enact my vengeance during the events of Act 2.  Of all of the various NPCs I have chosen to take the combat route…. I am wondering which other ones will wind up making me miss something as a result.

Still a great game, still very much worth picking up.  However given that this is a single player experience you can probably bide your time and pick it up when it hits a sale point favorable to you.

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