Kickstarter is almost over but the action will be picking up on the Grim Dawn forums so please visit us! 

If you missed out on the KS but still want to contribute or if you wanted a reward that you weren't able to get, we'll be putting up our pre-order system on the Grim Dawn website within the next few weeks.  Some rewards may not be available though and physical rewards will only be available until we send the orders to be manufactured.  We're not sure yet when that will happen but we'll keep you updated on the forums.

Thank you to everyone who helped make this happen!  Crate loves you!

Update #14: Grim Dawn passes $400k + New melee combat video!

View the REWARD CHART to see what's in each tier!

We pledge to contribute 5% of our profits from the sale of the game to other promising game projects on Kickstarter and elsewhere.  Visit: Kicking it Forward for more information on this initiative and to see other projects participating.

Stretch goals:

• [UNLOCKED] $350k - Dual wielding pistols (feature tech and new animation set)
• [UNLOCKED] $360k - 25 extra pieces of unique item art
• [UNLOCKED] $375k - Additional end-game boss monster (total of 2) lurking somewhere out there in the darkness for you to find...
• [UNLOCKED] $385k - 25 more pieces of unique item art
• [UNLOCKED] $400k - A new environment set that you'll get to decide on.  We'll create a thread on the Grim Dawn forums to discuss ideas with fans, then select the best ideas and create a poll for you to vote the one you want most.
• [UNLOCKED] $412k - 2 additional monster types (models and animations)
• [UNLOCKED] $425k - Three large, high-level dungeons, each with its own theme and named hero monster.  The dungeon entrances will randomly appear in the world.
• [UNLOCKED] $450k - Savage two-handed melee weapons (includes animations and all the art required to create an entirely new item type)
• [UNLOCKED] $465k - Additional end-game boss (total of 3) to encounter in some dark and dangerous corner of the world.
• [UNLOCKED] $480k - New survivor town hidden in the remote wilderness for you to discover.  Will include a new faction group and new quest-lines to unlock once you've gained their trust.
• [UNLOCKED] $480.5k - New and higher-quality developer beer, as requested by many after the sad beer in Update #10.  Surely this will help enhance the quality of all our work!
• [UNLOCKED] $490k - 2 additional monster types (models and animations) and another 25 extra pieces of unique item art
• [UNLOCKED] $500k - A new dungeon art-set with a choice of catacom... scratch that!  Not exciting enough?  Fans have suggesting visiting the Aetherial or Chthonic home-worlds and we're down for that!  We'll post a thread on the forum to gather other ideas and then put it up to vote in a poll. ; )
• [UNLOCKED] $520k - SURVIVAL MODE! We'll create a new gameplay mode that will be free for all backers (KS or Website Pre-order).  In survival mode players will fight to stay alive against increasingly difficult waves of monsters.  It will release sometime after the game so as not to delay development.
• [UNLOCKED] $535k - A new faction and story-line!  This stretch goal was determined by a fan poll thanks to William Potash for having the idea to run that!

Update #13: The Grim Dawn Kickstarter ends this Friday! Check out our revised reward chart + New Music!

Update #11: THE FINAL WEEK! Detailed Stretch Goals + New Music!

Update #10: 100% Funding achievement unlocked!

Update #9: New music track "Lonely Moon" posted!

Update #7: Sound and music creation for Grim Dawn

Update #4: New music track "Cult of Ch'thon" posted!

Update #2: Grim Dawn is backed 50% in 4 days! New goals on the horizon!

Update #1: Answers to questions - Do you have a publisher? How big is Crate? How far along is Grim Dawn?

Grim Dawn is old-school style, open-world action role-playing!

Grim Dawn is an action role-playing game being created with the tools and technology used to build Titan Quest by a few veteran developers from Iron Lore, including Arthur Bruno, the lead gameplay designer on Titan Quest.

We’re a small team with limited resources and we’re not competing to launch the next big ARPG but if you’re a more traditional gamer that still craves the complexity, intrigue and quirkiness of older games, maybe Grim Dawn can be the next big ARPG for you.

Grim Dawn won’t hold your hand to ensure you never make a bad decision and it won’t feature a story on rails with linear level design to prevent you from ever getting lost.  It will, however, offer you the chance to do things in your own way, have an experience that is unique from everyone else playing the game and explore off the beaten path to see and do things that not every player is likely to find.

Unlike many other ARPGs, in Grim Dawn,  you’re not the lone hero out on a quest to save the world by vanquishing one ultimate evil.  The world of Cairn, in which Grim Dawn is set, has been devastated by a war between two otherworldly powers, with humankind caught in the middle.  The dangers facing the survivors of humanity are too great and numerous to be solved by any one individual.

There is still beauty in the world but it is permeated with darkness and peril.  The broken remnants of wraith-like Aetherial and demonic Ch’thonian armies rove the lands seeking to gain some advantage in a cataclysmic war that's ground to stalemate.  Bands of human marauders turned cannibal roam the roads and creatures from the days of lore, thought driven to extinction, find the world ripe for their resurgence.

It is the dawn of a desperate and dangerous new era in Cairn where isolated enclaves of human survivors struggle to rebuild and many are in need of help.  This is the backdrop for the countless adventures that await you in Grim Dawn.  There is no one central story; there are many stories and whether you help the weak or help yourself and how you go about it is yours to decide.  It pays to have some allies in troubled times like these but choose them carefully…

Core features

We’ve listened to years of feedback from the Titan Quest community and continue to do so every day on the Grim Dawn forums as we strive to improve upon past performance and make this our greatest work yet.  The creation of Grim Dawn is guided by traditional design and old school sensibilities, with innovation only in the areas where we feel it truly improves the game and isn't just a gimmicky back of the box feature.

Grim Dawn will:

• Be DRM free!
• Include robust modding tools so you can create your own worlds!
• Be faster-paced, with much more satisfying enemy hit reactions and deaths.
• Allow you to fight house-to-house as you lay waste to enemies and the former owner’s furniture in the process.  Break through walls to open up new areas of exploration!
• Feature a more open-world design with randomized elements that will greatly enhance replay-ability.  Each play-through will be unique with "set-piece" spawners that can turn a patch of wilderness into different types of enemy camps, a traveling merchant caravan, etc, each with their own unique art.
• We don’t control where you go; you do!  If you don't want to follow the main story, you aren't forced to.  Non-linear progression allows you to unlock new areas by repairing bridges, defeating enemy blockades, etc, as soon as you have the resources and power to do it.  Race ahead into higher-level areas and get pwned, we'll warn you but we're not going to stop you!
• Let you combine any two of five distinct skill classes, each with multiple skill trees in which to specialize.  Spend money to reclaim skill points if you’re unhappy with your build.
• Have a refined loot system that drops far less junk-items, produces more uber randomized gear and ensures more consistent rewards from hero and boss monsters.
• Immerse you in a gritty, dangerous, Victorian era fantasy world where humankind has been pushed to the brink of extinction by warring otherworldly powers. 
• Give players meaningful quest choices and the ability to visually change the starting town as they help to rebuild and secure the future survival of humanity.
• Let you ally with NPC factions to earn rewards and unlock new quest lines.  Be wary though, aiding one group can make another your enemy!
• Join up with friends in coop-multiplayer through online match-making or play over LAN and experience the full game together.
• And so much more…

What else makes Grim Dawn different?

At its core, Grim Dawn strives to perfect the magical formula of fast-paced, satisfying combat, strategic character development and frenzied loot collection that defines the genre.  However, we don't know of too many (or any?) ARPGs that let you make meaningful quest decisions and allow you to earn favor or go to war with different NPC factions.  Have you ever been able to repair bridges to unlock new areas in whatever order you choose?  With so many stylized ARPGs coming out now, we think our gritty art style and realistic world also help to define us.  Speaking of realistic world, did we mention that the levels in Grim Dawn are actually stitched together to form a giant, continuous playable world, reflective of natural geography?

These are some of the features that help to set Grim Dawn apart.  With your contribution, who knows how far we can go!

Sound overly ambitious? 

It might be... if it weren't for the fact that these features already exist!  Well hey, we're not just some dudes rolling up in here, looking for you guys to take all the risk in funding our dream gig.  We've already put a lot of our own blood, sweat and tears into this labor of love over the past 2+ years to get it where it is today.  We've developed a ton of cool new features and the core gameplay is already quite fun, if we do say so ourselves.  What?  You want to see the gameplay?  Well, here is our latest sampling! (hopefully just enough to get you hooked...)

Why do we need your help?

Though we have several experienced developers working on Grim Dawn, only two of us are in a financial situation where we can afford to support ourselves without a salary (albeit on a steady diet of bread and moldy cheeses).  The other guys involved with Grim Dawn work day jobs at other game studios to pay the bills and contribute as they can on nights and weekends.  As you might imagine, this makes for pretty slow going and it is certainly not ideal for creative collaboration.  When critical team members end up in crunch at their day jobs, they can sometimes get tied up for weeks, causing certain aspects of our development to temporarily grind to a halt. 

Occasionally, just to get things in-game, we have people performing jobs that are really outside their area of expertise.  This can result in such things as "1990s looking", designer-created UI and programmer-drawn lightning bolts.  Even so, some aspects of development, such as art, animation, and world-building, are falling woefully behind the programming and gameplay development.  We're at a point now where we have solid core gameplay and some robust features but not enough content to release anything and we really need to accelerate that process. 

While we could still finish a fine little game on our own, that would be rough around the edges but very fun, we believe there is a much greater potential that could be realized if we were more adequately funded and staffed.  So we're hoping you can help give us some proper funding so that we can get the team together, start making faster progress and ultimately release a bigger, better game for you and everyone else.

If you'd like to see more information about our current state of progress, check out this recent "State of the Game Address" on our forum.

Why should you care?

Because we care!  Yeah, yeah, we know, you probably hear that a lot nowadays.  Suddenly everyone is denouncing publishers and talking about how they want to make games for traditional gamers... as long as you provide the funding first.

How are we different?

We also set out to make a game we were passionate about, guided by old school design sensibilities, for traditional gamers.  The difference is that we started Grim Dawn over two years ago with no funding except for our personal savings. 

I'm Arthur Bruno and at my last job, as Lead Designer at Iron Lore, I made a pretty comfortable salary with great benefits.  Now I make zero thousand dollars a year with no benefits (well, there are definitely some benefits but health insurance isn't one of them).  I'm not complaining though, it has been totally worth it though to be able to pursue a dream and work on a game I love, for fantastic fans that have supported us from the beginning.  It hasn't been easy but I wouldn't have it any other way... well, I mean, if you guys funded this project, that would certainly make things easier and I'm down with that.  In thirty some-odd days though, regardless of whether we reach our funding goal or not, I'll still be working on Grim Dawn, trying to make it happen.

Not only are we dedicated to creating this game but we're dedicated to our fans.  We don't need to promise that we're going to start a new, open dialog with fans and seek your input on development because we already are.  I personally have over 650 posts to the titanquest.net fan-site forum and over 1800 on the Grim Dawn forums.  That's an average of over 2 posts a day since the forum went live more than two years ago.  We've put up polls to get consensus from forum members when we are on the fence about an issue and we've asked for feedback on everything from place names to class skills, to UI.  We've even implemented a few features based on suggestions from the forum.

Here are just a few links to threads that serve as examples of the type of collaborative interactions that take place on our forums:

Main menu development discussion

Mastery names and description discussion

HUD UI modification discussion

Another proof of our dedication to fans is that we don't hold back game information in order to arrange exclusives with the gaming press.  We release information and updates directly to the Grim Dawn forums, our Facebook page and...  well, actually that's usually it.  When stuff appears in the press about Grim Dawn, it usually comes from our website.  Fans always see everything first!  We've always had a very open, honest and personal dialog with our fans.

Finally, we have a long-standing passion and commitment to making this a hardcore ARPG for PC, guided by the best of old school design principles.  The game as it stands today, is the same game we told fans that we were setting out to make in 2009 and the feature set reflects that. Whether we get funding or not, that isn't going to change; it's only going to get better.  Want to know more about my philosophies as a designer?  Check out these posts, one of which is pasted from an interview I did for Rock, Paper, Shotgun.  

Rock Paper Shotgun Interview - Old School Design

Design philosophies - The profit and loss of playing games

How will the Kickstarter money be used?

The first thing we should stress is that our funding goal is not the budget to make this game; only to help finish it.  There is no way you could make Grim Dawn from scratch with its current level of quality and feature set on such a small budget.  It is only because we've acquired the rights to a pre-existing engine built for ARPG and invested some of our own money and years of unpaid work into this project that we're at a point now where a few hundred thousand dollars can make a big impact.

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.

Just having a few full-time people in these critical roles would be a world of difference for the project.  Not only would we be able to get so much more done and produce better work but we'd also have more time to post updates and interact with the community.  We'd be able to reach alpha release a little faster but as the extra help had time to work, content would start to flow much faster, leading to a speedier beta and final release, as well as a lot more frequent updates along the way.  It would still be a lot of work with such a small team but we'd be progressing at more than triple the rate that we are currently.

If we exceed our goal, all of the extra money will be used to bring more full-time people onto Grim Dawn and expand our art outsourcing.  That means more content, more quickly.  The ultimate goal would be for us to bring all of our part-time people on full-time and hopefully even hire a few more people.  Then we would be totally rocking and well on our way to making Grim Dawn all that it can be!

Thank you for helping us make this happen!

The Crate Team

Please note that reward delivery estimates are conservative.  We think we can deliver many of them earlier, especially if we exceed our funding goal but we want to try to play it safe.  Also, note that the delivery estimates are based on whatever item will take the longest to produce in any tier.  Since we're not sure whether we'll be able to finish the Crate story and get it sent out during development of the game, we've allowed some time post-release.  In a best case scenario though, we'll be able to deliver much of this stuff earlier.

Existing Grim Dawn Key-Holders - Please Read!

To ensure that you get the reward that you desire and are properly credited, you must carefully read and follow the instructions posted in the Official Kickstarter Project thread on the forum.  It is important that you only pledge the difference between the value of your existing key and the tier you want.  If you pledge more, we won't be able to refund you, so please pledge carefully!

Also, please note that the first 3 tiers on Kickstarter are identical to the 3 website pre-order levels despite the minor price differences.  If you have a Legendary key, for example, you will get all of the stuff in the KS $50 reward and do not need to pledge any more money if you don't want to.