In 2008, developer Iron Lore closed its doors, despite releasing the acclaimed fantasy action-RPG Titan Quest, its expansion pack Immortal Throne and completing work on the stand alone expansion pack Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War Soulstorm, all for publisher THQ. However members from Iron Lore picked themselved up and reformed as Crate Entertainment. Licensing the rights to Iron Lore's game engine and projects, the developer has been working for some time on its first release, a new action-RPG title called Grim Dawn that will be released via digital download for the PC.
The developer is currently taking pre-orders for Grim Dawn but will it be a game worth your time and money? Big Download got Crate Entertainment's co-founder Arthur Bruno to give us more info about his company and Grim Dawn. He also gives us an inside look at the demise of Iron Lore, reveals the real sales figures for Titan Quest and more.
First can you give us a little history of Crate Entertainment and your relationship with Iron Lore?
Arthur Bruno: Crate was founded in February of 2008 in the wake of Iron Lore's closing by a small, tight-knit group that wanted to try to do something more than drift apart across the country to other jobs at other studios. I had been with Iron Lore almost since its inception in 2001 and most of the other guys were leads or senior people who had been with the company for years. We had no grand plan to begin with but a strong desire to continue working together and to build upon some of the tough lessons we had learned over the years at Iron Lore.
We worked out a deal with the owners of Iron Lore to acquire two of the games that we had been working on and were passionate about. Then we set out to see what sorts of opportunities were available. The vague idea at the time was to find contract work that could sustain us while we pitched these properties to publishers. We were successful at finding contract work and for a while joined forces with another local independent developer Demiurge Studios, who had just finished the PC port of Mass Effect and needed additional design and art leadership for a smaller project. We worked with Demiurge for several months and even went on the road with them to pitch a co-development deal for one of our properties. Unfortunately, at about that time the US and, soon the rest of the world had begun descending into the economic crisis that were are all too familiar with today.
Suffice to say, it was a bad time to pitch and even contract work dried up. We realized that to move forward in that business climate, we needed to start something smaller that wasn't reliant on big funding and which we had the potential to complete ourselves. We abandoned the idea of trying to land a publishing deal and open another mid-sized studio. Instead we went totally garage-indie, although none of us had a garage, so we ended up mostly working remotely out of home offices. In some ways it has been very liberating. With this smaller scope comes the ability to be much more focused on making the game great for our specific target audience instead of having to appeal to the mainstream masses.
Were you surprised that Iron Lore shut down its doors, especially since it was finishing up work on the Dawn of War expansion pack?
Arthur Bruno: No, it was something we all knew was coming. The owners of Iron Lore were very open about the state of the company and like many mid-sized independent developers we were living from contract to contract. We had actually thought the company was going to go under a year earlier when THQ decided they were not interested in a TQ2. ILE burned through a lot of its capital trying to stay afloat during that period. At the last moment, a small group of ILE supporters within THQ put together the Dawn of War: Soulstorm expansion project to keep the company alive.
We had a new lease on life but the clock started ticking down again and this time the company had even less of its own capital to keep it afloat after the project ended. We needed to line up a new project quickly but ILE was a PC developer at a time when publishers were mainly looking to fund console or multi-platform projects. We found ourselves in a situation where we needed to develop pitch materials and a console demo to win a new publishing deal but the team was already stretched pretty far just trying to meet the aggressive development schedule of Soul Storm.
We managed to put together a pretty compelling Xbox360 demo for a multiplatform RPG project called Black Legion. We got a lot of interest from two publishers in particular and it looked like we were mere months from signing a deal. Unfortunately, the Soulstorm project ended and ILE didn't have the reserves to support a 30+ person team through a few months of contract negotiations. The owners made the tough but ethical decision to close down while they could still afford to give the team a good severance package.
How hard was it to establish Crate Entertainment and to get the rights to the Iron Lore graphics engine?
Arthur Bruno: Based on my experience at Iron Lore, I'm not sure most independent developers ever really become "established." I mean, we certainly exist, but are we stable? I'd say we're stable now only because we are so small and our burn-rate is so low. I think our current incarnation is only sustainable so long as we feel like we're moving toward a completed game and some greater future. After the game is released, we'll find out whether it generates enough revenue to make this a truly sustainable business. The recent success of Runic Games with Torchlight makes me think that this model of smaller scope development can work. The incredible dedication of our fans and knowing that we have an audience that believes in us has also been a huge part of what has kept us moving forward. We maintain a good relationship with the owners of Iron Lore, so it wasn't difficult to negotiate a deal for the rights to use the TQ engine. I think they are also excited to see at least some part of their legacy live on through the technology behind Grim Dawn.
How did the idea for Grim Dawn come about and did the idea for the game originate at Iron Lore or at Crate?
Arthur Bruno: Grim Dawn was an idea that developed after Iron Lore and after we had met with defeat while trying to pick up where Iron Lore had left off pitching Black Legion. In retrospect it is such an obvious idea and one we probably should have thought of much earlier but there were reasons that it was not obvious to us at the time. After Titan Quest debuted to poor sales in North America and THQ subsequently declined a TQ2 citing lack of interest in a PC-only ARPG, many of us felt disappointed in what we had invested years of our lives to create and demoralized by the state of the PC-market in general. We questioned ourselves, lacked confidence in our creation and generally just wanted to move on in a different direction.
Then something funny happened. Those low initial sales that were supposed to rapidly drop off to nothing never dropped off. The monthly sales never increased to anything impressive but they just kept going and going, longer than anyone could have imaged. After Iron Lore had shut its doors and Crate was struggling through its first year in existence, sales of Titan Quest just kept rolling.
According to the Electronic Entertainment Design and Research Institute, only 20 percent of games that are released onto store shelves ever become profitable. At the end of 2008 I found out that Titan Quest had managed to claw its way into that 20 percent. The game had not only reached profitability for THQ but it was very close to surpassing a million copies sold. It became obvious that we needed to make another game for this audience. Our good fortunate was that Iron Lore had retained ownership of the engine, tools, and other technology it created while developing Titan Quest. We knew these tools well and frankly, were very excited to get back to doing what we knew how to do.
So we then started generating ideas for and planning the small-scope ARPG that would evolve into Grim Dawn. I'd worked on several different game concepts over the past couple years and so there was a lot of material that I could adapt and borrow from. Grim Dawn is sort of a merging, refinement and evolution of some of those gameplay and story ideas, tempered by the lessons we learned in our years working on Titan Quest and Immortal Throne.
We have seen action-RPGs before. What will make Grim Dawn stand out from the rest?
Arthur Bruno: We're not really trying to stand out so much as we're trying to make an exceptional game for an existing audience that improves upon their previous experience. That said, we have added quite a few new features. Most of them though are just tried and true mechanics that have existed in the RPG genre since I was kid but just weren't in Titan Quest. I would say our top two goals are to make the combat more satisfying and the questing / fictional world deeper and more robust.
For combat we've created a new hit-effect system, added blood and dismemberment death effects for some enemies, and improved the physics. On the questing side we now have a faction system a new quest system that provides the ability for the player to make choices that could lead to different quest paths. We've also spent a lot more time developing the fictional world of Cairn, in which Grim Dawn is set; its history, conflicts, and characters. There is both an older history that provides a backdrop for the game's events and gives the world character but also a newer history that the character can pick up on and become involved in through questing and the collection of journals.
We understand there's a crafting system in Grim Dawn. What can you tell us about it?
Arthur Bruno: The crafting system is actually somewhat inspired by Defense of the Ancients or DotA, the incredibly popular Warcraft III mod that seems to have spawned an entire new sub-genre of games. We actually created our own DotA knock-off mod at Iron Lore, which we called Pirates vs. Ninjas. The item recipe system was simple and fun. My favorite part was how there would be several different tiers of useful items that you might create in the course of building towards a final uber-item. We wanted to capture this same dynamic. Blueprints can drop in the game that require the player to collect a number of other items or components before they can be combined into a single more powerful item. Higher level blueprints may include other lesser-blueprint items in their recipes. Often the items you create will have a mix of fixed and randomly generated bonuses.
How will the game's multiplayer features work?
Arthur Bruno: We haven't started working on the multiplayer yet but it will be built off the existing TQ architecture, so I imagine it will be fairly similar. Whether we'll make any improvements or add new features, I don't yet know for certain.
What other features do you think are important in Grim Dawn?
Arthur Bruno: The big one would be randomized undergrounds. We haven't finished the tech yet, so it isn't 100% but it is looking very promising so far. Allowing for some "dungeon" areas of the game to be randomized would be a big win for replayability. We realize that our audience is split with some people desperately wanting randomization and others hoping we'll stick to hand-crafted environments. I think we can find a compromise that will keep most everyone happy with outdoor environments and some undergrounds being hand-crafted and most undergrounds, especially optional areas, being randomized. We're also looking to add in some level of quest randomization but we don't have details on that yet.
The completely new quest, conversation, and faction systems are also very exciting. I think these will mesh together to create a much wider array of questing possibilities and more interesting world interactions. This will also be important for modders who will find the new system, which includes a quest wizard, much easier to use. We will be releasing more details about in the next couple weeks on our forums.
I don't know that it is an important feature but I love our new dynamic weather system. It really adds an unexpectedly huge amount of atmosphere and life to the game. The way the system works is that designers paint regions of the world with different climate types. The climates are controlled by climate files where designers can add different weather patterns and set probabilities for each to occur. The weather patterns, in turn, are built out of individual weather effects such as wind, fog, thunder, dust, etc, that can be set to varying intensities. I have to admit, I get a bit of a tingly feeling when I'm running through a wheat field and then the sky darkens, rain starts to fall, gently at first but then it starts pouring, the wind picks up and blows the grass around and then there is a sudden boom of thunder. Dynamic weather changes really make me feel like the world is alive.
What sort of graphical changes and improvements have you made to Iron Lore's engine for your game?
Arthur Bruno: On the engine side we've done a lot of optimization to fix past performance problems and we're using a new pathing system. Some of the most noticeable graphical features will be depth of field, specular terrain, soft particles, terrain painting on objects, place-able and dynamic decals, etc. We've also made a few enhancements to the lighting and added a new post-processing adjustment layer that allows us to tweak the contrast, saturation, and color values on per-level basis. There are a number of other less sexy sounding improvements such as an updated shader model, support for much higher anti-aliasing and anisotropic filtering, and the list goes on. We've tied most of these improvements to video options so that people with older machines can disable them. We'd like to make it possible for anyone who could play Titan Quest to play Grim Dawn.
You are already taking pre-orders for Grim Dawn. So far how has that worked?
Arthur Bruno: It's been great in that it has allowed dedicated fans who wanted to contribute early to the project to do so while also generating some additional funds that we can put toward developing more content. There has been somewhat of a misunderstanding that keeps cropping up that we're "crowd funding" Grim Dawn. However, we never intended for the project to be funded with pre-order money and certainly the amount of pre-orders we've been getting, while meaningful, is not nearly enough to completely fund a game of this scope. We've had some people applauding us for pioneering this novel new funding model but really we never thought of it that way and can't even claim credit for the idea. It actually got started after we received several emails from fans who wanted to know if there was some way they could donate to the project. We weren't in any position to turn down people wanting to help but we had no structured way as a company to accept donations. So, finally we decided to put up a pre-order system on the website. We figured if people wanted to donate, they might as well be getting a game-key in return.
Any plans for downloadable content for Grim Dawn after its release?
Arthur Bruno: Our plan is to continually update the game with small expansions that provide new regions to explore, new quests, equipment, enemies, etc. We'd like to be able to put out small expansions every 6-10 months so players always have something new to look forward to.
PC games seem to be moving more towards the digital distribution business model. Do you see a time where PC games will bypass retail stores for the most part?
Arthur Bruno: I think it is inevitable and for PC it is almost a reality in some places. Just 10 years ago you could go into almost any game store and find a complete range of PC games on the shelves. Now many, if not most game stores in North America have their shelf space dedicated primarily or completely to console games. Where stores do carry PC games it is usually difficult to find anything but the most recent top-selling games and a couple classics. You almost have to turn to digital distribution to find some smaller games. Given that console makers are all expanding on their online services, including digital distribution, I don't think it will be long before buying full console games digitally becomes the norm there as well.
Finally is there anything else you wish to say about Grim Dawn and Crate Entertainment?
Arthur Bruno: We're working hard to meet the high expectations of our audience and we're hoping to release our first video footage of the game on the grimdawn.com within the next month or two.
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want ik hou wel altijd van de obscuur omgevingen /u/53244/monkey_yay.png?f=community)
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Beetje Fallout achtig bezig zijn (of Fallen Earth) Maar dan lekker hack & slash gameplay en geen mmorpg slome troep. Of weer persé first person.
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