Grim Dawn marks its 10th anniversary with a triumphal update on its final expansion: ‘Grim Dawn will not be going out with a bang, it will be a tremendous roar’

I haven’t touched Grim Dawn in ages, but it will always have a special place in my heart. I first wrote about it 16 years ago (for a completely different site), when Crate Entertainment was fiddling around with something called “crowd contributed” game development: Give people an opportunity to pay now so they can play later, and kick in a few extras to make it worth their while. It took longer than expected to come out—instead of arriving in 2011 as planned, Grim Dawn launched in 2016—but the end result was well worth the wait.

Crate Entertainment has stuck with it since, adding two expansions, a handful of smaller DLC, and numerous updates, and despite not having the cachet of, say, Diablo or Path of Exile, Grim Dawn remains a big favorite among fans of the action RPG genre, racking up a “very positive” user rating across nearly 88,000 user reviews on Steam. But with yesterday—February 25—marking the game’s 10^th anniversary, it’s finally time to wrap things up.

“It’s wild to say that, 10 years ago today, an upstart studio shipped a little game called Grim Dawn,” Kamil “Zantai” Marczewski wrote on the Crate forums (via GamesRadar). “What’s mind-blowing to us is that that game went on to not only become a success beyond our wildest dreams at the time, but to become a staple in the ARPG genre.

After thanking early supporters for enabling Crate to stay independent, Marczewski continued: “When we started, we never could have imagined that 10 years later Grim Dawn would not only still be receiving major updates but it would have another expansion on the way. Our engineers bent the old engine to their will. Even as recently as last year, we addressed bugs that have been there since Titan Quest. Across 82 updates both big and small, we refined and polished, revamping everything from melee animations to how Nemesis bosses spawn on the map.

“After 10 years, Grim Dawn will have a modern scalable UI, something once thought impossible in an engine created when a 4:3 aspect ratio was still commonplace and 1080p was a luxury. An overhauled stash will greatly expand how you organize your awesome loot. And, dare I say, more surprises are still in store for our Fangs of Asterkarn pre-patch.”

Which is what this update is really about. When the Forgotten Gods expansion dropped in 2019, Crate figured sales of Grim Dawn would tail off and that would be that. Instead, the opposite happened: Player numbers went up and stayed up, and in 2023 the studio announced one more expansion, featuring a new mastery, difficulty mode, and other content, all of it “expected to release in 2024.”

Well, an effort was made, and progress is still being made, too: Marczewski said Fangs of Asterkarn “is in its final stretch,” and also laid out some reasons for the extra time taken: The new expansion’s land mass will be “76% the size of the base game, 170% as big as Ashes of Malmouth and 223% as large as Forgotten Gods.” Scattered across that new realm will be more than 60 bosses and mini-bosses, 370+ new unique items, 116 “Monster Infrequents,” eight new Nemesis monsters and three new Super Bosses that “will make your builds weep for buffs,” a brand new alchemy system, and a new “Ascendant” game mode. Among other things.

The only downside to the whole thing is that a release date for Fangs of Asterkarn still hasn’t been set—but its launch will really and truly be the end: “We know for certain that this time it will be Grim Dawn’s final hurrah,” Marczewski wrote. But it’s going out strong.

“When we wrap up Fangs of Asterkarn, Grim Dawn will not be going out with a bang, it will be a tremendous roar that will cement the game as a cornerstone of the ARPG genre,” he wrote. “We are immensely proud of everything that’s in store for you and can’t wait to get it into your hands in just a few months.”