Alright, guys. Thanks for everything. I think I'm out

[Kulze]

@Yuri_Yslin

I never understood the idea of playing one game over and over, honestly.

I could pick like 200 games from, say, 1998 alone that would contribute to thousands of unique hours of fun.

Well, I for example enjoy survival games with a building focus. Formerly this has been Minecraft mostly since it was the most modded game with the highest variety. Since ‘Vintage Story’ came out I traversed over to that since it’s more immersive with more detailed building.

So I’ll play that for 1000… 5000… 10000 hours.
It’s a ‘forever game’ for me.

Last Epoch currently is my ‘off league’ game for PoE, with potential to become the main game.
Why not the main game? Because the execution of the mechanics aren’t top-tier, they’re ‘mid’ at best, and ‘atrocious’ when it comes to MG for example.

So no, those 200 games all together probably provide me with 300-400 hours of gameplay fun while Last Epoch could potentially provide 10000 hours. Path of Exile already did 9000… so it would be a potential option.

So I don’t see the reason to ignore the ‘game as a forever service’ part, given that the bad aspects of the live-service model are removed, which are too large.

[Yuri_Yslin]

@Kulze

So no, those 200 games all together probably provide me with 300-400 hours of gameplay fun

1,5-2 hours per game? Unless it’s 8-bit era, your estimation seems a little short.

[Kulze]

Not really given I’ll put aside 180 of em completely after 10-20 minutes testing at best

[itspomf]

@ApacheVE3D

When I first started playing Lagon was the hardest encounter in the world. Oh, the humanity. Why would EHG ever put in such a hard boss? Today it’s a trivial encounter.

I’m always baffled by people who screech “L2P!!1” when they themselves experience a cliff-face of a challenge. People are so quick to forget that experience of having to climb it with what littel gear they could get through the early campaign, before returning with meta-builds capable of wiping the floor with a boss originally touted for his absurd kill-count after release.

@ApacheVE3D

The ones that got me with goofy damage numbers are Kalidan the Needler, the self-destruct from a possessed Immortal Eye got me once, Possessed Siege golems do goofy damage, especially when you run into like 6 of them at once and there is literally no safe space on the game floor, lol. Void meteors out of nowhere from a Void Shade of Orobyss that I didn’t see spawn in a map I was doing has gotten me (like 12k damage lol). The steam screenshots are a gallery of destruction.

Or this, and your latter comment about awful crafting rolls. The game has very obvious balance issues, but it’s fine because you’ve … what, gotten powerful enough gear that you can ignore most of the mechanics?

The whole corruption flex doesn’t help, either, since it only really proves the point that the infinite scaling begins to fall apart without the necessary gear rolls to back it up – and OP and others (like myself) really don’t have the time or energy to deal with the masochism and grind of fussing through all of this just for the chance to maybe get a decent upgrade on some gear.

[LLScayJ]

Go play Grim Dawn. There is even an expansion coming fairly soon. But seriously, It solves pretty much every issue you mentioned. Fantastic game.

[nllsq]

Each time I quite for the season (or of a while) is after a death, usually a one-shot. It make you feel weak and wasting your time. The rest of the game if quite intriguing but those one-shots as you go up in corruption kill any desire to play.

And before somebody says “don’t play high corruption,” good luck with that. When you present a difficulty in a game, no matter how option, is feels (to many if not most) as a natural thing to progress to. And here is where infinite progression fackfires. Diablo 3 became better when the Rift 150 became normally achievable and thus the game became finally truly “beatable.”

[Heavy]

But whats the corruption level you play around usually?

While I don’t agree with the entiretiy of your statement having a rough corruption range in which you play helps put your feedback into context.

Because if 1-shots are what keep you from playing or enjoying the game it does matter a lot if those are happening on 150, 600 or 2000 corruption.

I never understood the issues people have with infinite difficulty scaling. I personally find putting some arbitrary cap that the devs come up with worse than having an open end, while having an “intended” difficulty range.

[Kulze]

@Heavy

But whats the corruption level you play around usually?

It doesn’t matter in that case if it’s 150 or 1500, the argument was about the infinite progression system combined with direct rewards attached to that (rarity = more loot) providing the issue. If you play at a level where you die regularly but still progress even if slower the rarity might offset those time-losses and be more efficient even to play this way.

Which is a problem.
Psychologycally humans are very very bad at using the optimal route, generally the route with the most directly perceived reward is taken, which obviously is high corruption hence.

This can all be alleviated via a fixed progression system up to Uberroth and then traversing over in a pure challenge-based progression system, optimally with a unique type of reward available there which starts to scale but is not build-defining but still something someone wants to achieve. Options for that are resources which then can be used to create something else (hence no direct reward but a 2-step process, alleviates the urge to go beyond the skill level) while the former corruption is more fixated and provides clear cut difficulty layers.

@Heavy

I never understood the issues people have with infinite difficulty scaling. I personally find putting some arbitrary cap that the devs come up with worse than having an open end, while having an “intended” difficulty range.

This ‘intention’ needs to be directly visible to the player, otherwise it’s no intention.

It provides the same issue as T17 maps in Path of Exile then, meant to be between bosses and uber-bosses but they were so ridiculously designed that you needed builds far beyond that level to clear them.

Which obviously isn’t good.

The same happens in last Epoch. We’re grinding for gear from a boss which is meant to be the last stage of progression (Uberrroth) and worse off… is positioned in a way that’s totally nonsensical with a power scaling that’s even more nonsensical and mechanics that triple down on the nonsense.

I’ll again compare it to other ARPG’s hence:

In Torchlight Infinite the end-boss is not ‘the end’. Normal maps have a scaling mechanic provided which allows you to empower enemies and ridiculously improve the drop-rate of things from there. Each usage of those items is a distinct step-up, but each usage also provides a clear-cut difficulty level, there is nothing arbitrary in the way it’s handled. Use 1… it’s a bit harder, use 2… it becomes decently hard, 3 is pushing the limits of someone which can kill the endboss comfortably, 4 and beyond is past the endboss by far.
This provides a reason to progress and push beyond finishing the game, the rewards from the boss have value.

In Path of Exile the same happens. Normal maps, bosses, juiced maps, uber-bosses, extremely juiced maps.
The end-point is not uber-bosses, it’s the part beyond. And that content is challenging for nearly every build existing, even the most broken ones can die from one second to another with small mistakes. It makes the loot derived from the uber-versions of the bosses valuable though.

Now let’s compare it to Last Epoch:
You go ahead and enter the infinite scaling mechanic. You get provided the first end-boss at at 300c, a point where your build will not be able to reliably kill that boss, that’s more in the direction of 500c.
How should a player know that? They don’t.

Comparatively you get the Maven in PoE you are at a stage where you can kill the Maven, since the fight needed to get to the invitation is quite hard and chaotic, the step up to the bossfight hence is expected accordingly. Normal content to provide the access to the content which provides the invitation. Normal to hard to very hard. Smooth!
The uber-versions are acquired from T17 maps, but by that time you’ll have done the bosses already, which means you know it’s a step-up again. So T17 providing that in the current stage of the game means that this content to get it is harder then the bosses, which then leads to even harder content beyond, the uber-bosses.
And the precursor to opening the access to uber-bosses provides a extra slot to empower content in maps even further to a ridiculous level plainly, which also showcases the expected difficulty coming up.

In Last Epoch you get thrown at Aberroth as fodder when you unlock him, nothing even remotely prepares you for that fight, people at 800c at times struggle against Aberroth.
At 500c people unlock Uberroth… which is more fitting at 1000c+ though power-level wise.
At 800 corruption there is a reward cut-off though, basically going beyond doesn’t provide you jack comparatively.

This is really really bad design overall.

[Unlovable]

D3 greater rifts are something I will ALWAYS praise as being the best thing for ARPG’s ever made. The GAME ITSELF had issues, and I even quit D3 because of the gear grind (the introduction to ancient items being just a “farm your gear again” mechanic). However, Grifts were peak.

1. Leaderboards were an option if you wanted a competitive goal, and they were separated by class.

2. JAILER used to be a huge issue, as it was a targeted one-shot mechanic. They “got rid of it” after it was probably the top request for a while. After enough tweaks to the bad enemy designs, Grifts became a matter of skill. The rest of the damage was avoidable if you played well enough, and your defenses were more so for the random chip damage you might take for free. So you were still defense-checked, but there weren’t one-shots. You ended up passing or failing a Grift tier based on being able to clear efficiently, and fight bosses quickly. You still had to try not to die, because things still threatened your life if you were careless. But everything was just so… proper. If you failed, it would be from a time limit, rather than from being one-shot by something unavoidable or nearly so.

Grifts were peak ARPG content. I will firmly declare this forever. It’s so disheartening that nobody tries to replicate this. Every company, in every genre, seems to always have their eyes on the wrong ball…

[DJSamhein]

To each his own, I guess. To me, GRifts were boring as hell. There were basically two modes:
-You ran it in a minute wiping things clear. This was for speedruns so you could level your gems.
-You kept aggroing 200 mobs at once so you could meet the time requirement. You kept kiting them over and over again from start to finish while trying to kill them. This was for pushing GRifts up.

Not only that, but when you were running GR150s, you only ever ran them if they started with certain zone layouts, otherwise you immediately left and started a different one, because you knew you wouldn’t finish it.

Also, if you think D3 had a gear grind, I’m starting to see what your issue is. D3 had the easiest gear grind of all ARPGs ever.
In 2-4h you had your set/uniques, so your build was already online.
In 4-6h you had all the sets for that class, so you could switch around whichever build you wanted.
In 16-20h you had all ancient gear on and your primal weapon.

There was never any reason to play D3 for more than a few days each season because there was nothing else to try to accomplish, unless you wanted to push leaderboards.

@Unlovable

It’s so disheartening that nobody tries to replicate this.

D4 has a similar mechanic. But mostly nobody tries to replicate this because not many people enjoyed it (much like most people don’t enjoy it in D4 either). It was extremely boring and it was always the same. It’s even worse than monolith echoes before 1.2.

You ran a GR120 and it was the exact same as the previous 50 GR120s you ran before. Bosses were pushovers that never mattered. All that mattered was clear speed. There weren’t even that many layouts.

Mostly, GRs (and pretty much everything in D3, even way more than D4) is content that pleases the casual player. It doesn’t need to be innovative, it just needs to be kinda braindead and easy.
Which is not a bad thing. It’s just something most ARPG players aren’t looking for. Mostly they want to make build decisions, do varied things in endgame and have a challenge, not just have a time run.