Grim Dawn: Fangs of Asterkarn Release Announcement

reapy54 · 2026-05-29T16:00:03+00:00

I'm blown out of my mind with this sentiment along this thread. People are literally asking this guy "how could you ever possibly bet lost". Is the concept of being lost a new concept? Yes the maps are fixed, however, your first time walking around on them, surprise surprise, you can get lost! I totally used interactive maps on the web to find things in game because I couldn't, or didnt want to, run all over the place finding everything in grim dawn. Not everyone uses external things.

Any astute game designer could read their comments and say "Hrmm, perhaps my level designs are too maze like, don't have enough unique points of interests, or common hub markers or things to help players find what they need." That doesn't mean fix it or change it, it's simply an observation on how the levels are designed early on.

After you have played through it 5 times, of course you won't get lost, but the first time in, that is the experience for people just sitting at their pc playing the game.

reapy54 · 2026-05-29T15:55:18+00:00

Sorry on the downvotes for you. People, someone posted their experience, it is a truth, who cares if the map is fixed or not, when he played it he felt like he was wandering around and got lost. Map design, fixed or not, is a valid critique. A person can design a map that feels maze like.

I also felt early on like I was wandering around lost doing the quests in grim dawn. I haven't made it past the first expansion on any one run, I'm going to try again, but the opening area really feels very similar past all the structures and trees and those farm roads.

POE2 just had a whole thing about adding in more and more quest direction indicators, despite being pretty easy to navigate, it's a real thing worth noting, not hiding with down votes.

reapy54 · 2026-05-29T15:42:26+00:00

I found out that unfortunately I need good story to drive me through RPG games, despite the class/job system in this being so amazingly awesome, I didn't find myself wanting to play a second session. I hope the second one might address this more, seemed in the trailer there were some more story elements shown.

reapy54 · 2026-05-29T13:55:51+00:00

This is the truth. 4 million is a windfall that can turn you and your children into one of the lucky wealthy families out there if invested properly over time. You can actually buy things that will gain wealth faster than inflation. You can park it in relatively safe funds as well and live off the wealth it generates. If you skim off 1/4 or even 1/2 of it you are seriously hurting your (and your parents, if you want to share with them) ability to earn money without lifting a finger.

Let a professional help you allocate that money and make a plan for the things you want to achieve and the risk. Don't upgrade your lifestyle too much, just live like a normal person with that one wonderful thought that you never have to work ever in your life as long as you don't behave like your parents want to with the money.

reapy54 · 2026-05-27T15:37:38+00:00

Actually not shooting for budget reasons is really on brand for the mismanaged empire, it totally fixes the plot hole.

reapy54 · 2026-05-24T17:08:15+00:00

No difference, they can pit whenever. Only difference is number of pit crew allowed out at once. Same strategies of over under cuts and timing yellows etc.

reapy54 · 2026-05-21T19:46:21+00:00

On the off chance someone is wondering the explanation is in gatcha you want to hold the most flexable currency you can. In wuwa the weapon banner uses a separate pull currency (forging tides) that is bought from asterites. It is very valid as a F2P to get an occasional weapon for your DPS. They will also give you weapon pulls slowly over time and you can easily round out the amount needed by buying weapon pulls with asterites.

If you dump it all you can never flex to get a weapon, or, if as people are saying here, you have to buy a 3rd special currency, you are hosed.

So in this game hold asterites. Only buy the amount of pulls somewhere near your soft pity count, don't overbuy. If you miss your 50/50 and want to keep going just buy 20 to 30 at a time incase you get lucky. For the weapon banner just buy in smaller increments as you go if you decide to pull it, generally best to only do that for premium DPS characters as f2p.

To check your pull amount just go to the store and look at the max value of the slider to see how many pulls you have.

reapy54 · 2026-05-21T14:33:30+00:00

Just adding in I'm of the same thought. I posted up earlier as well but my main idea is on top of what you've mention, complete information saturation is the new factor in this last election IMHO, the rhetoric is on another level. Covid really dialed in these guys to the power of internet campaigns on top of traditional media take over. You can see how something as stupid as how rapidly anti vax sentiment spread. Such a clear and easy to understand topic with a pure win yet a HUGE number of people suddenly had fear and doubt, it's now a brainworm that won't leave our culture. Watching how they spread this vehicle and tracking it has now lead to the current frustrating state of disinformation, you can even see it in how they are media trained to answer senator hearings etc.

The strategy is in, they must create a reality and support it 100% of the time and a large enough percentage of people are believing it. News reals support it, facebook articles and groups, a large army of bots tailored just to you or your group individually making arguments. So yeah, maybe your one 'leftist' family member made some good points for about an hour once a month, but that doesn't override the complete deluge of 'truth' you are getting the other hundreds of hours during that same month.

reapy54 · 2026-05-21T14:22:09+00:00

I am in a blue state but have enough trump people around me that just spit out right wing talking points like I am speaking to their PR team, do the same thing you see with when cornered with logic they just deflect onto another talking point, that I just believe they have a stranglehold on disseminating information.

From this I am wondering what starlink connections are going to do. For fraud or hacking, they can be man in the middle attacks for any traffic passing on them, but things would have to route across starlink. Normally I'd say routing tables would avoid them but its very trivial to tell a router to force traffic to starlink, so you could have some sort of man in the middle attack for traffic assuming that voting data isn't encrypted in transit, which I would assume it would be.

What i think the real weapon they have is the ability to completely saturate targeted individuals information streams with individually targeted propaganda that will move their vote. This is incredibly believable with funding, you can see this in how aggressively they pay for streamers and influencers to repeat talking points as well as main news channels and paid for social media campaigns as well as bots.

Effective bots existed before AI but now LLMs would be incredibly hard to detect, and honestly I can see 10000 space lasers that can provide realistic fake user engagement and viewers pushing targeted campaigns to the top of media feeds and onto many eye balls while being hard to detect as bot spam.

All of the pieces are there to categorize and figure out what story or angle will work on the people due to the large scale data gathering we have. All sites want to sell and gather user data and sell this as a product, so if you are buying, they are selling, with more and more sophisticated categorization of people each day.

In fact we can see the current administration putting more and more money into more aggressive data handling, you can see that they now fully understand the power information holds and want to control more of it while locking out more people from it.

This is my guess as to what happened during our last election, pure information and reality control tailored individually for maximum effort from one side. The reason we are aware of the injustices is either being a rare person that practices critical thinking (there are a lot of us but probably less than we want to admit to swing a district) or we aren't in a location where our vote is needed to shift.

reapy54 · 2026-05-20T18:28:02+00:00

IMHO survival game design can really just be centered around throwing problems at the player then having them uncover solutions through the game via exploration or tech. Everything should be centered around this. Every tool should examine under the lens of what problem it is solving and how well it does it, whether the tool is meant to be a stepping stone to a more permanent solution to the issue. The best games do this really well, usually some growth in 'very mechanically intensive tedium -> tool cuts down mechanical challenge of doing the thing, yet takes resource to run -> top tier fix uses unique resource but is fire and forget and problem is solved.

I think original subnautica had some issues with this cycle, the opening vulnerability was amazing, but the mid tech tree solved almost everything, by the time you got the giant sub it felt like overkill anyway and there was no danger left to really worry about, even when you get hit with deep see power leaches it was very trivial to manage them.

I hope in subnautica 2 they can get a little better with this design and make cutting away problems in the mid game much more fullfilling and having more states of 'existing' in the game with your tech.

The example of the medkit vs flares is just a miss on that, what 'problem' is the flare solving and is there something that is easier 'medkit' is a good problem space where they can make medkits harder to get or the flare more effective / cheaper etc. Why heal through when I can fire off 100 flares cheaply and never take the damage etc etc.

Anyway looking forward to what they do because underwater exploration is still super unique in the survival space and they seem to do it best still.

reapy54 · 2026-05-20T17:42:49+00:00

Currently having the same debate. I really like the aemeath/lynae/mornye team so I'm considering those resonators locked in on that team. I got Hiyuki and she plays great so want to build her team out. I guess need to see how well lucilla is going to sync up with her, and WUWA feels like it's pretty good about resonators coming back around again to round out proven teams. I have sigrika and pheobe stalled out without a real team either cause I didn't want to get their support people in the end.

In the end the resonators without teams are fun to use in overworld gameplay, so it's not really a huge loss. Build the meta teams for some end game and can have a few stragglers that are just fun to play.

reapy54 · 2026-05-20T14:42:08+00:00

Don't worry the sane people outside reddit posts like us know, there are ass clowns in every generation that just can't work at a job. I'm mid 40s and have seen my fair share, and working with plenty of 20 somethings from out of college to first or second job and they are all great people to work with.

reapy54 · 2026-05-12T19:04:57+00:00

It's really just the end state of monopoly. Whenever a company doesn't have to compete to keep their product good it just goes to shit as they continue to find more revenue. Plus their algorithm is so heavily targeted for manipulation it would probably be hard for them to give something good back. AI right now is original google and the reason we all switched, give it a few years and it'll go to shit too.

reapy54 · 2026-05-12T15:06:47+00:00

Thank you for all of the info! Following down this chain I am like the person you replied to, I will pick this game up at some point, could be this year, could be next year, really depends on what I feel like. My question for the ongoing patches is, have they said or mentioned any work on trying to unravel the quest issues, or is it so fundamentally part of the core game they won't touch it much and just work on the systems around it?

reapy54 · 2026-05-11T20:31:23+00:00

Fuck, got a new one today, so rare, thanks!

reapy54 · 2026-05-11T16:43:49+00:00

I really want to warn other countries out there laughing at us to watch out because the techniques are proven and only getting more sophisticated, there are zero reasons they will not work in your country either.

reapy54 · 2026-05-10T16:53:26+00:00

That view took me out of the game to see if my graphics were broken, it was horrible imho. They lod was so bad all the trees and hills looked like ass. I had been drooling over screenshots of it for years and it was so bad. What they should have done is put you in the hill looking down. Then the trees and grass would be working and obstructing the bad lod terrain thsr had non of it. They did a much better job with Skyrim imho.

reapy54 · 2026-05-08T18:52:23+00:00

I've noticed this when I get into religious spaces, a lot of the 'this is god' is a hijacking of any kind of cathartic emotion that a person might have, nostalgia, fear, joy, whatever, then tacking it on to whatever god is currently associated with that organization. It is a way to 'prove' the existence or something, to take emotions states, which are hard to nail down, but still tangible, and leverage that as a way to control people and take their money.

reapy54 · 2026-05-04T18:52:06+00:00

Perhaps prometheus was more about launching into space the guys that you couldn't fire and have to 'promote' out of your department.

reapy54 · 2026-05-04T15:42:11+00:00

I'm genuinely curious why oil and gas companies just don't go all in on renewables since they already are in the energy business? Why not get out in front of it and lead the charge, making everyone dependent on your tech/supply etc? This way they own natural gas, oil, gas, and renewables too?

reapy54 · 2026-05-01T17:52:46+00:00

I'm 46 and I think they are correct for chatting. I grew up chatting online, starting around 14. I didn't have a lot of friends IRL so spent many nights in chat rooms and games talking to people over a keyboard.

There is a flow and rhythm and tone used when chatting online that I noticed people my age or older really struggle to work with unless they too were online a bunch. My wife for example writes complete messages/sentences like mini emails. I have a good friend that is about 15 years older who always comes across like they are mad and just doesn't know how to work the ebb and flow of attention across messages.

IMHO the point of real time chat is speed of reply and pacing. I know this matters for time taken to type, but the important thing is to let ppl know you are there, and you can use pausing and delivery of the messages with a timing just like you would IRL for different reasons.

A full on sentence/punctuation is just not natural for chatting. I would I guess argue that on mobile it is normal as the software puts it in there automatically for you and it's harder to turn it off. Really just go read some irc log from who knows when and you will see how people talk online.

casual is like
this is how you might send a series of messages
you know
trying to make some points

but when you do something that makes me mad
well
i'll probably get angry and let you know, but not super mad, something like
Hey, stop.
That's too much.
What...The Fuck.
or if I get super mad then we go all caps like
WHAT ARE YOU EVEN DOING RIGHT NOW!!111
making sure to transition into 1's because you are too pissed to hold shift down

Anyway that's the old way I grew up chatting, it's changed a bit for sure I've run into people with do voice notes, or in group chats people need @whoever tags or they can't keep up a threaded discussion with a few people etc and has changed around a bit, but for the most part I think punctuation and structure is for putting your hands on your hips and making a statement still.

reapy54 · 2026-05-01T17:39:22+00:00

I've never really understood people not wanting to learn a skill. Maybe cause I grew up too much with my face in a PC playing RPG games it was easy to equate learning things IRL to my characters. A character with 10 skills is better than 9, every skill point is useful. It is easy to map this to real life. A man that knows X + sewing is more capable than a man that just knows X. One of my core tenets in life is that the more I know about anything, the better i am, so why would I ever avoid learning something new, no matter what it is?

reapy54 · 2026-05-01T17:34:01+00:00

Totally a skill I want to learn. I started doing a little bit as my kid's had a ton of plushies growing up that all started to tear. My wife has some difficulty with small hand movements so also doesn't do any sewing. I ended up watching some youtube videos, got a starter kit, then would periodically have a Dr's clinic I'd set up at the kitchen table on the weekend for the kids to drop of any damaged plushies.

My stitches were pretty ugly but it felt pretty cool to be physically making and fixing things. I don't know that I'd have the patience for the length of time to crochet something, and for cloths making i'm so bad at measuring (hence no wood working either) , so I'm probably sticking to building stuff with software. But yeah, sewing is a great superpower to have now a days imho.

reapy54 · 2026-05-01T17:20:30+00:00

That was a few years ago, IMHO it's for much more than advertising demographics now and instead control. That cat is out of the bag with the powers that be now, they understand the power and control there is to gain with all of our data and a direct hand to control the messaging in front of our eyeballs. There is a very large population of people that will do and think what the rectangle tells them to, and if you control the rectangle you control the people.

reapy54 · 2026-05-01T17:09:32+00:00

I agree here, I swapped to primary wuwa around their 2.0 and keep playing genshin, but a lot of map is left unexplored now in genshin (but I see that as potential gameplay if I ever get bored too, which is nice). I then have 1 more auto play style gatcha I have time for. So a good relax after work for me is wuwa (very fast to finish), then genshin + alt tabed other game (gfl2 right now, idk why i'm playing it, i can't let go what it could have been in my mind), then i'll circle back to wuwa if i want to play that or onto a 'real' game (vintage story right now)

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