r/Grimdawn • u/Terry__Poppins • 4h ago
The lack of FOMO and seasonal stuff is probably my favorite thing about Grim Dawn, and keeps me coming back.
I really hate one thing about the current ARPG trends, the relentless three month seasons. Every big game now runs on that cycle, and I think they try to keep it out of sync so you can play both games if you want to. This makes the games feel kind of like work for me tbh, and no matter how much effort I put in I just don’t have enough free time, I always end up feeling like I didn’t get to experience the season “fully”.
I have pretty limited free time these days. When I do decide to play something, I don’t want to feel bad that I can’t nolife it for a week. Just let me enjoy the game at my own pace jeez. I know people will say that I can just not engage with the seasonal stuff, but that’s like impossible when they dangle it in front of your nose the whole time.
Grim Dawn is the perfect antidote to this live service poison, none of that seasonal live service stuff. And the game is better off for it, people are still jumping in now in 2026 and nobody feels like they missed out on anything. It made me realize that while I love ARPGs, I actually hate live service, so now I’m pretty much only interested in games without that, or singleplayer ones.
While Grim Dawn is still the undisputed king of this, I’ve had some fun with Dragonkin recently, it was fun for a bit but I don't think I will come back to it. I’m also pretty hyped for The Dark West, my favorite GD characters all use guns and this is a fully western themed game so everyone uses guns, and the demo is really nice. It's also singleplayer so none of that live service stuff there either.
I love the feeling of logging into one of my ancient characters that I haven’t played in like 2 years and everything still works just the same, and I can pick up where I left off. I hate it when devs change stuff and suddenly your decent character is complete garbage since they nerfed your main skill, and that’s pretty much inevitable in the live service titles. Grim Dawn stood the test of time precisely because the devs understand what the game is and don’t keep changing it to “keep the players engaged” ugh.