Grim Dawn Has Promising Start

Roughly three days after its initial posting, the Kickstarter drive for Crate Entertainment’s Grim Dawn has already reached its halfway mark.  Pledges at the time of this posting total out at $142,180, with 27 days remaining to reach the project’s target of $280,000.

Crate Entertainment has been working on the Diablo-esque hack-n’-slash for more than two years already, previously turning to preorder drives to help fund development.  As the company’s first stand-alone project, the team decided to focus on what they know by building the speedy combat, customizable classes, and color-coded loot drops on their previous success creating Titan Quest.   New features include a more open-world progression where players will be free to explore areas in any order they see fit, and competing NPC factions that react to player decisions with unlockable items and quest lines.

Our goal is about the minimal level of funding that would be required to make a big difference on this project because it is enough where we can start to bring on some of our part-time people, full-time and guarantee them at least a certain duration of wages.  This would likely be an animator, artist and designer to start out.  We’d also use money for more outsourcing so that we could get additional unique item art and enemy models.

Top-down action-RPGs rarely screenshot well, so check out the pitch video to get a sense of how the game looks in action.

 

 

Assuming the Kickstarter drive is successful and progress continues apace, Crate Entertainment projects Grim Dawn will be ready to ship in August of next year, with an “Early Access” edition available as early as May 2013.  Full details can be found on the game’s official website and its Kickstarter funding page.

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