You mean Crate, not Iron Lore anymore lol!

And i don't know what's the exact number of enemies on screen that are perfect, because that's surely subjective. That's a question of taste, and while i agree with others in that sometimes there are too many enemies on screen at the same time, i understand it's not easy to balance all the difficulties and having more enemies can make the balancing easier.

But i also prefer to have more than a lot less and stronger, because if not the world seems empty and all these kind of games have big maps. Imagine a whole zone with just 20 or 30 enemies all around, and also scattered. That's why i found Titan Quest to be less enjoyable for me than Grim Dawn, while being the second best try to make a Diablo 2, imho.

Having few enemies would also make for another kind of game. Dark Souls, Lords of the Fallen, The Surge...for example. I mean those are action/adventure games, this is a Diablo kind of game.

I agree you can be more original and "escape" as you said from Diablo-Diablo2 legacy but i'm sure i will love less Grim Dawn of it turned into another, much different game than Diablo 2.

I have been waiting for a Diablo 3. I loved Diablo 2 in my young and never find that "feeling" before, not in Torchligh I and II, not in Path of Exile, not in Van Helsing, not in Victor Vran, not in Sacred 2, not in Nox, not in Fate and not in Titan Quest. All of them have nice features, or some nice details i like, but since i was young i have never played a game i would say "ok, this is what i needed for my loving memories of Diablo 2" until Grim Dawn.

Diablo 3 is like a Warcraft Diablo, cartoonized like all that Blizzard do since W3 and WOW (now much more than before). It's devoid of the "grim" feeling that Diablo and Diablo 2 had and also it's an online game like POE which for me it's an unforgivable sin for a SP game (micro-transactions are even worse, in the Diablo 3 case they had the Online Store with real money and in the case of POE you can buy inventory slots and upgrades for your toon...arghh)

Grim Dawn is Diablo 2 without a Horadric Cube (i miss this, lol) but with a wonderful customization that gives you a lot of replayability, like with any good RPG (Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, etc) It's the best actual Diablo 2, imho, and it gives me the feeling i thought i had lost when i was young and discovered Diablo 2, being unable to play anything more for a long, long time.

You know, after playing other similar games like i mentioned, and while liking something from all of them, i always ended up installing my Diablo 2 with Lord of Destruction and playing again, until the day Grim Dawn was released (if i had known they were doing a Kickstarter i had put my money there, also)

After too many years playing computer games and searching for that Diablo 2 "feeling" (it's a constant feeling, not a few hours feeling and then being bored, returning a week, or a month later trying to play more and repeating this all again and again), i have found it again in Grim Dawn.

I do not get bored of it. I can play other games and i surely have too many to play (i'm actually also playing Diablo, again, after it was released here). But i have dozens and dozens of GD chars and i come back for more even after depleting all the possible combinations. It's like a drug, and i was not feeling this so strong in the last 20 years.

It's not perfect, because nothing is perfect, but it's what i needed after too many years wating for another Diablo 2.

Edit: and nope, i am not a Crate employee or anything. I'm sorry if this was too long, i'm a passionate veteran who is in love with this game, true SP without online sh..t as it should be and also on GOG, what more i can say? :D

Edit2: oh and it needs Ashes of Malmouth not because the assets (not really sure about this but i doubt it) but because the story and char level needed to enter the new zones.

You'll be happy to know the latest updates let completed characters pass down trinkets for lower characters to skip difficulties, so you can start right at level one in ultimate if you want to.

Also, I do like Grim Dawn precisely because it IS slow and calculating, where mob types matter, and I choose certain individuals in them to target first.

Don't be sorry, thank you for the interesting and detailed response. And you're right, ARPG + old-school SP + GOG = winning formula.

I guess for me D2 has never been the gold-standard of ARPG design it is for many players (though I sunk too many hours to count on that game too). I felt it completely destroyed the atmospheric world-building of the original with an unfocused mishmash of fantasy tropes, and had many game-play features I find extremely off-putting (I list some of them above). So unlike many fans of the genre, I'm usually on board with any game that breaks from the mold it set in stone years ago. Thus my praise for S:A, I found that game took the formula on a direction the developers found more interesting without following a particular template.

Of course, D2 holds a very special place for many players of the genre, so it is clever for ARPG developers to emulate it on some level. Grim Dawn certainly did it to good (commercial) effect, but on some points its adherence to the source went too far in my view (see for instance the difficulty model). It's still a great game.

Note: Oops, you're right, old habits die hard and as an old Titan Quest fan I usually forget they're not Iron Lore anymore.

Thank you for the info. I feel skipping levels is a bit of a band-aid on a faulty progression model, but I guess the feature will alleviate the issue.

You're right, Grim Dawn has a more deliberate, calculating tone than most of the competition, which is a huge strength.