Grim Dawn gets recipes and hits GameSpy’s shutdown

Grim Dawn has added crafting. The early access action RPG from Crate has gotten a significant update with Build 18. The patch adds a new “veteran” difficulty mode, dual-wielding of pistols, and a host of bug fixes. Additionally, he developers included over 150 recipes to the game to give would-be monster slayers something to do between sword swings. Knit a sweater! Weave a picnic basket! Mix some potpourri!

On a less cheery note, Grim Dawn is one of the games that will be negatively impacted by GameSpy’s recent multiplayer server shutdown news.

We’ve made significant progress with multiplayer after having to rewrite a lot of the existing code that was originally written for GameSpy (which is shutting down). The last tricky component is designing a system to resolve differences in player’s quest progress and quest choices. Allowing people who have made divergent quest choices to play together is particularly difficult but we think we’ve arrived at a reasonable solution and have begun implementing it. We’re currently estimating that multiplayer may be ready in late July but we’ll have a better idea once we finish the quest syncing and do some testing to see how well it is functioning.

Grim Dawn’s final launch date is yet to be determined, but Crate’s projected roadmap includes content releases until late 2014.