Grim Dawn - Fangs of Asterkarn

A 13//10 doggo right from the start!

Дополнение вышло реально крутое и в плане лора и дизайна локаций. Люблю северную варварскую тематику.

Fangs of Asterkarn feels like a least impactful expansion so far and it continues the theme of Forgotten Gods of almost completely ditching the cool eldritch Victorian/western horror atmosphere of the original game and the first expansion. But what it brings is "quite nice". New mastery is fun and has several potential ways you could develop it. Ability to "mutate" the whole world balance is curious. Upgrades to potions are nice. The new locale is very good and most of the enemies are also nice. The music is heavenly and might be even better than that of the original game... The big issue with the game as of me writing it, is that the developers decided to Dark Souls-ify the game balance for bosses for absolutely no reason and it made the game that used to be smart and sometimes challenging feel annoying to play every time any boss enemy is involved. This might be an unpopular opinion, but I genuinely think that Diablo-like action RPGs with isometric camera and classic mouse pointer controls (and yes, you can actually play with WASD controls for whatever perverted reason too) cannot be "challenging", unless they are designed like original Diablo. Where the game had less enemies, but enemies could stunlock you to death and your characters were more limited in their abilities and movement. The challenge was in planning ahead, creating bottlenecks, utilizing your limited skills to withstand extremely dangerous enemies. If you have the explosive modern Diablo style combat with mouse controls, abilities on cooldown and add a dodge mechanic you're making a game that is more involved, yes, but not more challenging if the enemies suddenly hit harder or have more health. But that's what the new balance for Fangs of Asterkarn originally did - the bosses just had so many hitpoints, you had to spend about 10x more time to fight them over the hero type enemies. And sometimes the bosses would do an attack that would just kill you from full health. The final boss in the DLC was like that - my level 90+ werewolf with full health, lots of additional protective armor and resistances would just explode sometimes to the boss attack in the middle of the fight. I could be dodging, I could be standing and mashing abilities - didn't matter. I'd just randomly die if that attempt was unlucky (and most of them were). Maybe this is fine for the people who are into the MMO brainrot "endgame" ideas and who play on Ultimate difficulty (now there's an even higher one), and they like it. But for Normal that should just not be the case. Make me be smart about how I use my abilities and build my character, and sure, make some attacks you need to run away and dodge from. But on Normal people want to click enemies to death and see the number go up. Crate have been actively rebalancing the game back to being fun in the past few weeks, so hopefully they'll come to the same conclusion and Normal playthrough will be super fun once again, instead of hitting a brick wall every time a boss or a dangerous zone is involved.

A lot of potential for interesting builds in new MI-s and legendary sets. The land design is very atmospheric and immersive. Especially because of the new music. Lots of new monsters. Wights are awesome. This is a solid addition to the game.

👍

i made a bug report and they fixed it the next day pretty cool