Warning: this is going to be pretty long and a bit disjointed, sorry! If anyone actually reads it all, I’ll be impressed, but I felt like I had to get as much as I could written down before I forgot. So here goes!
I played the 1.0 release from the moment it started for roughly 3 months straight (pretty much every single day) with some very minor breaks in between, and then took a break to try out Diablo 4 1.4. So while I titled this post with “casual” it certainly comes with some caveats. I consider myself a casual player in a relative sense. Clearly I’ve put in a LOT of (relative) hours and thought into this game, but at the same time I’ve never fully leveled a character nor reached the real end of the current endgame. The furthest I’ve taken a character is the beginning of empowered, which I suspect more “serious” players may reach in a few days. In general, I do prefer the earlier part of the leveling process in these types of games, and more so the process of developing a build and watching it unfold and blossom. In other words, I love to make alts. By the end of my 3 months, I had just about one of each of the 15 classes built to 60+, and the highest somewhere in the 80s.
As I played through the release period, though, more and more I started to realize that my feelings about the game were not being shared by my friends as fully as I’d anticipated or hoped. I sincerely thought most of them were going to love the game nearly as much as I did, but as time passed it was clear that wasn’t the case. I have a core group of around 10 friends that I game with most often, and an extended group around 40-50 that I’d say I have mild influence with. These are all in general more casual (and older) gamers fwiw. Of all the people I knew that tried the game out, only a couple really played it as much as I did. To my dismay, a few that I was certain would be into the game ended up giving up fairly early, I think within the first few weeks. My group is pretty fickle so I probably shouldn’t have been surprised, but I was definitely disappointed. So as I continued to play on my own, I’d often find myself thinking about what might have given (or may give in the future) the game more staying power for my friends, and also for more other like-minded gamers in general.
I’ll take a moment to discuss game design/goal philosophy as well as the definition of “casual,” as I’m sure there are many ways to define and address both of these things, but in many ways the topics are intertwined. What are EHG’s most important design goals or definition of success? To create a game that fulfills a specific artistic vision? To get the best critical (or fan) reviews? To appeal to the most amount of disparate gamers as possible? To keep the most (or a particular subset of) gamers happy and playing for the longest amount of time and/or for them to keep coming back? To simply sell the most individual copies? To make the most money (which might involve selling cosmetics and/or expansions, etc)? Or to ensure the most amount of people are having the most “fun”? Obviously there’s no right answer and some of these goals may work completely against each other, and perhaps many within EHG have different opinions on the top priorities. Even amongst my small group of friends, we have very different playstyles and goals/desires. As an example, almost all of my group went with CoF, even though I kept pushing for MG so we could trade amongst ourselves easier.
In terms of defining “casual player” my definition is more in contrast to “serious/endgame player.” A casual would tend to never get to max level, and basically level much much slower overall, and is more likely to experiment with more alts (assuming they liked the game). Casual to me also means you are never in contention for a Ladder (though you might fantasize about it lol).
As for loot, here’s my example. I leveled a recent character probably faster than any I’ve ever done before (much faster than a truly “casual” or new player since I’ve done it so many times), and I just hit Rank 3 or 4 in MG where all the gear I’d like is Rank 6 and above. I think part of what I’m getting at is that in spite of there being plenty of content for a casual player, the design focus (at the moment) seems heavily tilted toward satisfying endgame players. Which of course gets back to what the devs’ goals and priorities are and how that influences things going forward. There’s nothing wrong with this emphasis, but I do think that that perspective may be limiting the game’s overall favorability in the broader market. Now a cynic might say who cares, because all they really need to do is get that one initial sale from as many people as possible, as there’s not that great an advantage of having even more people playing long term (except maybe word of mouth?). Personally I think it’s important to keep in mind there is still a significant subset of gamers that will come into an ARPG and only be focused on the story/campaign, and may only want to play through the game the one time. Maybe this game really just isn’t for them, but I still believe it can be.
Overall, I am personally pretty happy with the way leveling progresses in this game, at least up until the 70s and 80s. I still find I lose my patience around this point where it was taking multiple hours (which may end up being days) to get a single level, and the reward for the level feels less and less significant. For a truly casual gamer that does not want to refer to any outside sources (build guides, etc), the game can feel entirely different as they approach Lagon and harder content. I will say I think the very early portions of the game could stand to be a bit easier/faster in pace, in spite of many complaints I’ve seen about the game being too easy. Some classes just simply seem to need a couple more skill points sooner, but this may be more of a balancing issue. The thing to keep in mind is someone new to the game (or even the genre) may play the game very very differently than an experienced player. A few early deaths or one shots due to poor skill choices or not understanding gear may be enough to keep them from continuing on, which in my book would be a real shame. I understand this is almost impossibly hard to gauge, and might take some extremely dedicated balancing to get right, with so many class and skill choices and the unpredictability of what a given player might choose. Add to that, the player’s personal skill at dodging, aiming, etc. plus the randomness of what loot they may have access to. This is not a huge concern but something to think about if you really want to attract and sustain newer players.
This also ties into the ongoing discussions I often see involving boss difficulty (Lagon comes to mind) with one shot mechanics that are theoretically dodge-able - but this assumes players have a minimum threshold of reflexes to do so. I’ve had long discussions/arguments over the “Dark Souls” design philosophy; it seems like there are many players (and developers as well) who simply refuse to accept that there may be physical limitations for some of us in terms of reflexes and capabilities. This doesn’t necessarily apply to all older gamers, but the majority I’ve spoken to will admit that their hand-eye coordination and reflexes have deteriorated significantly over time, and this can affect gaming quite a bit. I’m in my 50s now, and I simply don’t have the same skills and patience I did 30 years ago, it’s not even close. In a game like this, the hope is that I can overcome this with enough gear improvements, but when that process becomes too tedious, I also lack the patience to keep at it. Which cycles back to the question of whether or not devs want to address these kinds of concerns or just consider them outliers. I have to say being killed by Lagon again and again is not particularly fun, I often feel like there’s a disconnect somewhere in the game when I reach him. Even in monos, I can romp through the same level content almost with no effort but suddenly I get to Lagon (this is more the lvl 75 one I’m thinking of but I suppose the argument applies to the campaign version as well) and I get killed in a millisecond. While I kind of like that it provides a good way to gauge your build’s survivability, it seems a bit overtuned in terms of difficulty. While the new dodge mechanic adds a nice layer of extra defense, as mentioned above, if the presumption is that someone is going to absolutely need the proper timing skills to dodge, that may kill a casual gamer’s interest then and there.
In terms of getting relevant gear from the economy, I only played MG the entire 1.0 and I will likely continue to focus playing this way. I really like the concept of being able to purchase more or less exactly what I want (or close enough) when I want/need it, with the only thing standing in my way being getting enough gold (and/or having enough Rank in the case of MG). I’ve accepted the fact that as a “casual” player I will never be patient or devoted enough to play enough to get the exact rolls to get the perfect set of affixes or the most rare uniques or whatever. I just don’t have that level of patience in me, but having the option of getting something close by earning enough of a resource over time is an acceptable compromise that I’m OK with, and even enjoy. In PoE it actually works out that the large majority of items I might want, I am generally able to purchase by the time I can use them, as long as I save up on all the weird currency drops. In LE it’s been a bit more mixed, what I want being gated primarily by the Ranks in MG. The rarest items were also gated by gold on top of that but that didn’t really bother me. As an example a lvl 70ish character would generally prefer to be using exalted and legendary items, but the first time I was there I was at Rank 4 or 5; things I could really use RIGHT NOW are all at Rank 6 or above and I really don’t know how long it would take me to get there. There are plenty of lower rank items that may help a little, and I do like that, but I also wonder if it wouldn’t be a more useful system if it was opened up significantly more and/or much faster. I guess the question comes down to what the intent of the Rank-gating system is, i.e. is it accomplishing something in particular that the devs desire, i.e. to keep casual players from getting access to too soon (whatever that means)? In my case throughout the 1.0 release I’ve consistently been multiple ranks behind what I actually wanted to buy. By the time I had reached the required Rank for something in particular, I had long moved on to a different character. Note even at the end of my 3 month stint and there few players playing, I hadn’t hit the final Rank. In other words it feels like the system as it stands is primarily a gate that shuts out casual gamers for whatever reason. Even if that wasn’t the intention, that is the effect.
As a thought experiment, I’m curious if the Rank system were completely removed, the limiting of item availability through Favor and Gold pricing wouldn’t simply fall into a more natural pattern based on supply and demand, i.e. the most rare and top tier items would just naturally be priced for the most favor and gold combination. So a more casual player may still be priced out, but at least they’d have the potential to save up enough, rather than be completely gated off from the possibility. In short, it’s one thing to see that I need to save up a million gold to get the item I want, but much more demoralizing to see I need 4 more ranks, which may mean a couple more weeks/months of playing to even have the opportunity. And since it’s very unclear how long it would take to get to a certain rank, it’s that much worse. I recall seeing a video of a guy saying he had to get to lvl 95 or something like that to unlock all the ranks, and at the time I think I was Rank 5 or 6 and definitely not getting the sense I’d ever get a character to that level. Needless to say it was a bit disheartening.
Some thoughts regarding the elephant in the room: Diablo 4. I had been skeptical when I started the 1.4 “Season of Loot” patch, I honestly thought Blizzard had finally lost their minds by making leveling too easy (basically giving the whole farm away so to speak) and I’d be bored within a few days. As it turned out, I started having a lot of fun, but more importantly the fun lingered all the way to multiple alts and max leveling. In spite of my relatively slower play style, I started pushing into the early part of the endgame and doing more and more of the “endgame” activities. It’s interesting because I thought in desperation they had pretty much thrown out their design integrity to chase good will, but it turns out that may not be a horrible thing. The endgame now feels much more accessible to me, and I’ve seen a lot of the same sentiment. The “fun content” is thrown at you pretty much immediately and uniques and better loot come faster and furiouser. Oddly as I played, it made me think more and more about LE. One of the big draws for me in LE has always been what felt like the much more accessible loot system (particularly fun uniques) and the ability to modify loot using the fantastic crafting system (compared to other games). It seems like the D4 devs really embraced that philosophy with their new loot system (using a combo of looser unique drops, “tempering” and targeted farming methods). The difference now is that they’ve accelerated the gameplay so much that even a casual gamer can get into the late game systems relatively quickly. I’m not saying LE should do something similarly drastic to the leveling pace, but I do think it’s worth taking a moment to consider that making so-called “endgame” loot/content more readily accessible to more players may be something worth thinking about. FWIW, I played the last season just about 6 weeks and in that time I got all 5 classes to level 100. A couple of them are in the mid-endgame phase as I’d call it, which is extremely rare for me. The question I pose is: how does this hurt anyone else? I’m not a factor in the economy or the ladder, but I was “allowed” to experience a much larger percentage of the game content, and have fun doing it. I strongly feel like there’s something Last Epoch can take away from this in terms of bringing casual players deeper into the game.
So going back to my thoughts on what might have kept some of my other friends playing longer, I wonder what if accelerated access to better loot was possible. Alot of the fun late/endgame builds and gameplay in LE aren’t experienced until a build really comes together, and often that doesn’t happen until you’ve hit at least level 60ish (and generally even later) depending on the build and skills/gear required. Which means a large portion of players will never get to experience many of the really fun items and gameplay, which is really a shame. And that goes back to the development philosophy discussion. For instance is it worth tweaking the game’s original “integrity” or vision in order to bring more content to a larger group of players? I thought I’d never argue for such an approach, but seeing how this has unfolded in D4, I’m starting to second guess myself. What harm is there in allowing more gamers to have more fun? In particular, how does easing restrictions to allow even a casual player to hit max level and at least start to experience the very late/endgame content hurt anyone? Particularly if it brings in more players, or keeps some players playing longer?
With all that said, here are some suggestions to enhance the casual player experience in the future:
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Polish the campaign up and finish at least the main story as intended, including cleaning up details like gaining access to teleport and forge multiple times. It was actually kind of funny/cute as it showed up throughout development, but now in a full release, something like that feels almost embarrassingly unprofessional.
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Make the campaign great again (har har)! For the most casual players, it may be the difference between them wanting to replay with a new character or not. For more serious players on their 15th alt, it would be nice if it didn’t feel like a burden. I constantly hear people complain that they have to redo the campaign, so here are a couple of ideas to make it better:
- Give significant rewards for completing quests, a lot more xp, more gold, maybe something special like a rune of asendance. In particular for “finishing” the full game (whatever that is) there should be a very nice reward.
- Give a boost to xp in general for subsequent alts doing the campaign, and/or a bigger boost to Rank points. This would give casual players an alternative route to improving Rank.
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As discussed above, change the MG Rank system to be more favorable to casual players. As mentioned before, I’d even go as far as to completely removing it, I’m really interested to see what that would do.
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This may be out of scope, but anything to improve the social systems would be appreciated. Even a simple Guild/Clan/Friends-only chat channel would be nice to unify friends. If you wanted to get fancy, guild goals/rewards and storage would be awesome.
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Consider some sort of method to enhance the casual experience to make it smoother/faster, allowing casual gamers to try out content they are completely missing out on. If not a general leveling boost, maybe some sort of xp boost the longer you are logged off?
Gold bots are a bigger problem on PoE than LE, by far. How do I know? Let’s just say a guild I used to be involved with got a lot of its “shared items” by way of RMT.