New Game from Titan Quest Developers

[nomec]

Well, it's not from Iron Lore, but from a new company called Crate that has some old Iron Lore developers in it. The game is called Grim Dawn and it looks to be a spiritual successor to Titan Quest. Here is the web page: http://www.grimdawn.com/about.php.

They are also doing pre-orders like Natural Selection 2 to help fund development and possibly preventing the need for a publisher. I am probably going to pre-order this game to support these guys as they did a great job with Titan Quest but weren't able to continue updating it because of funding issues.

The funding issues came from the game not selling well at all. I am going to wait, it will probably be a fun game but I am hoping that they offer randomized levels to help with replayability.

[NarcissistZero]

I thought Titan Quest was pretty boring.

[HiCZoK4]

BEcouse it was MEGA-TITAN-BORING-QUEST

[NaitoSan]

Awesome! I've been waiting to hear from them on new game. I'm going to pre-order since I love Titan Quest. Especially it's been said it should be around $20.

[nekrosoft13]

Originally Posted by NarcissistZero

I thought Titan Quest was pretty boring.

for me it played like a better Diablo

[Moo]

Originally Posted by nekrosoft13

for me it played like a better Diablo

Roger that

[LurkerLito]

I thought TQ was great. I don't know if I'd preorder though, ETA early 2011 assuming no problems, not even screenshots on the page yet.

[Kaguya]

Originally Posted by |MaguS|

The funding issues came from the game not selling well at all. I am going to wait, it will probably be a fun game but I am hoping that they offer randomized levels to help with replayability.

That's partially true... My understanding is that THQ hammered out a pretty aggressive distribution deal with Ironlore that basically guaranteed them no income until they met a specific target of sales. TQ has sold relatively well, and continues to sell and be played by a lot of people... had Digital Download Indie works been bigger when TQ was released, I'd say that Ironlore would never have gone out of business. If Torchlight can sell as well as it has, Titan Quest could have sold as much or more having a more hashed out story, more varied environments, and multiplayer.

The fact that Grim Dawn is coming out as a digital download indie game, they should do much better even if they sell fewer copies than they did of the original TQ. The one thing that's always impressed me about Ironlore is that they were frequently hanging around the titanquest.net forums, providing assistance, and creating patches based on feedback (they were even hoping to create an additional patch for TQ even though THQ refused to pay them for the work - eventually Ironlore went out of business and put the nail in that one).

Either way, I'm looking forward to this and I hope their 'fan funding' experiment works out.

http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2008/03/thq-blames-pira/

THQ’s Michael Fitch places the blame for the closure of Titan Quest developer Iron Lore Entertainment, squarely on the shoulders of game pirates, though he does suggest that they may have had a bit of help from dumb players, hardware vendors, and one particularly stupid reviewer.

Pretty good read about how he goes off on all those issues which honestly are some of the problems with PC Gaming Industry.

[NarcissistZero]

I think Iron Lore's failure can be attributed to multiple things as Kaguya makes clear, piracy certainly being one of them.

Of course ask a pirate and he will tell you it has nothing to do with that.

[Buio]

The approach they are taking with this game looks a lot like Torchlight. Small scale, keep it cheap and sell digitally. I don't know any numbers from Torchlight, but seems to have done fairly well.