Any plans for improving the core gameplay and story playthrough?

[terranu1]

This is not to be a rant but my own feedback on how to not have this game be abandoned and only played by the 3000 hardcore players left around in a year from now .

Months after 1.0 release this game still has a placeholder campaign mode that acts as an 8 hour long tutorial with a “skip it” button attached ,whilst the “end game” is the same infinite scaling grind made for bot-like players that like nothing more than afking the same broken builds to 2k corruption whilst being no more powerful relative to the difficulty they are in than they were at level 10, if anything the more you play, the weaker you get.

The reason D2 was such an acclaimed success even tho you could finish normal-hell within a day as an experienced player was due to the fact that the campaign was the game and it had a cap on difficulty so the more you grinded, the more powerful you became relative to the maxed difficulty and the entirety of the story. You were not competing against a separated modular infinite dungeon simulator that got stronger the more you did, but against the actual content of the game you started.

Are there any plans to not only finish the campaign but turn it into actual worthy gameplay ?
The reason D3 and D4 subsequently failed at anything but clickbait sales is due to the same thing, they baited players with the promise of the next level Diablo adventure and all they got was a campaign that wasted 10-30 hours of a casual player only to be told if they want to play the “real game” they need to quit their jobs and grind 8hrs/day for the sake of grinding since there’s no actual “real game”, it’s just a modular gear dropping simulator that might as well be sold separately as a game mode.

Out of millions of initial players, 90% are regular people that like to play in their spare time and feel their time invested matters to keep playing. They only get that through the campaign and if it means something. When you paid 30e or 60e for an RPG and invested some 20 hours into it , proud that you finally beat the last boss in those two weeks, you get told that was the newb tutorial and the real end game begins by reading 2 hours of maxroll guides before starting over, you feel scammed so you quit the game.
What keeps millions of players engaged is when they feel part of the game world even if they got 2 hours to do another faction/quest chain unlocker mission to get closer to a next boss.
You could have a campaign that integrates the monolith system where each monolith is the next/parallel story chapter with it’s own story and bosses in easy/normal/hard/insane mode whatever to beat and it can take an elite grinder a month to beat it and perfect his build or a casual 6 months with worse gear but the casual will still play since he always feels part of the same content and he’s not just a leftover abandoned in the tutorial because he doesn’t have a streamer career and doesn’t like reading maxroll guides with his morning coffee.

I sincerely hope this game will see real content ahead and it doesn’t go the same cheap route of investing all resources into trying to “balance and fix” builds and skills around an infinite scaling progression system , only to add “new content” that is only filler for more of the same grind.

[Kulze]

@terranu1

The reason D3 and D4 subsequently failed

I’ll disagree with your reasoning there.

D3 failed to take the spotlight because their build variety is basically non-existent and extremely railroaded, it was a step back from D2. Also their graphics were a lot more ‘vibrant’ instead of grim-dark which turned several people away from it. It didn’t fit the formerly created narrative and style of the franchise.

D4 is struggling because at first their itemization was hot garbage. They still don’t have a build-variety which is similar to how D2 managed to handle it and it simply wasn’t up to par with what one could expect from a ‘AAA’ company 23 years after D2, especially since they didn’t even include the QoL features already established in D3. Their quality was shoddy at release for what the budget was. Bosses had effects which vanished into the surroundings, clearly untested outside of the test environment hence or ignored, hitboxes didn’t align and a failed decision to make ‘chase items’ which need 50k+ hours of play-time to obtain, which is enough playtime to drop 6 raw mirrors in PoE.

The campaign itself was great though!

@terranu1

90% are regular people that like to play in their spare time and feel their time invested matters to keep playing.

Yeah, and from those 90% players you’ve mentioned there’s around 5% which actually care about end-game.
Path of Exile has a shorter campaign then D4 as an example, needing around 20 hours of play-time for a beginner. 20% of players reach maps and use them beyond tier 2, which was revealed by GGG.
And that’s a game which focuses on pulling in people which are fine with convoluted systems that are definitely not beginner-friendly implemented. In comparison LE’s campaign roughly takes 15 hours for a beginner and is much more accessible. So the number of people reaching the end-game is likely somewhere around 30-40% with empowered monoliths having likely around 15% if even.

That means the majority of players only see the campaign, also it’s your introduction to the end-game systems and the selling point for showcasing how your mechanics interact. Don’t undervalue it.

@terranu1

you get told that was the newb tutorial

Welcome to the genre! That’s why people are here, to have massive long games to grind in. That’s the literal selling point for them, long… loooooong term enjoyment where you can always improve your character somehow.

@terranu1

end game begins by reading 2 hours of maxroll guides before starting over,

That’s PoE, LE doesn’t have this issue, not even remotely.
Are you sure you didn’t missclick and wrote in the wrong Forum?

@terranu1

You could have a campaign that integrates the monolith system where each monolith is the next/parallel story chapter

Monoliths are the next story chapter after the actual campaign is over. It’s barebones for now, agreed, but it clearly is building up to showcase that there’s more lore and story inside of it, the Harbinger System is one example of that. Just that unlike the campaign a end-game story is catered to the dedicated people and not the ‘masses’.

[terranu1]

That’s why people are here, to have massive long games to grind in .

hence why you see 200k on launch day and then it drops dead next month.
I went through the patch notes and all I saw being added was a new boss spawn within the same content that already existed and a several new unique items.
The whole idea of “end game” has killed more games than we can count in the last decade. Where companies focus only on providing an “end game” whilst ignoring everything up to it since it doesn’t matter for “the real gamer” .And by “end game” all they come up with is reusing the existing assets for rng scalable maps and endlessly “fixing” the builds people come up with. I hardly consider monoliths “part of campaign” since there’s nothing there that has any further consequences, it would have been the same if I’d just farm the campaign maps the same, to get the act bosses to drop the blessings and such. It would actually feel as if you progress because you get stronger ,not weaker the more you progress.

[DJSamhein]

@terranu1

hence why you see 200k on launch day and then it drops dead next month.

50k+ is hardly dropping dead.
Anyway, the outlier is the 260k players. Totally unexpected for a new game in this genre.
And like I said many times in other threads, half of those 260k players would never return even if LE was the best game ever.

@terranu1

The whole idea of “end game” has killed more games than we can count in the last decade. Where companies focus only on providing an “end game” whilst ignoring everything up to it since it doesn’t matter for “the real gamer” .

You mean like PoE?

[Kulze]

@terranu1

hence why you see 200k on launch day and then it drops dead next month.

Show me a non-competitive game which doesn’t have such a drop happening, then we can talk on.
Or are you stating that PoE will be abandoned as well?
Has D3 been abandoned despite being overly casual and really badly received at the start?

The same argument happens regularly. It’s a lack of interpreting statistics properly as well as understanding of the underlying mechanics as to why such things happen.
For that you need to know about overall retention rate and the situations affecting them and which states are the ‘norm’ instead of outliers.

@terranu1

I went through the patch notes and all I saw being added was a new boss spawn within the same content that already existed and a several new unique items.

30 unique items which allows a chunk of new builds, hence expanding the ability to replay the game with a fresh feeling.

A dodge system which enables those skills formerly struggling with positioning and making them enjoyable to play rather then frustrating, which also increases the build variety.

A mechanic to circumvent Julra for those which dislike the dungeon mechanics… since they’re lackluster currently but not highest priority to be fixed.

A full roster of new bosses as well as a culminating boss on top.

I don’t know what you read but clearly you didn’t fully understand the implications of those changes they did. And that despite 1.1 being the focus on adjusting balance as a major aspect to solve long-standing balancing issues at least to a degree.

@terranu1

The whole idea of “end game” has killed more games than we can count in the last decade.

Oh, which ones?

@terranu1

Where companies focus only on providing an “end game” whilst ignoring everything up to it since it doesn’t matter for “the real gamer”

Ah, you mean devs not knowing how a proper new player experience has to be done? Yeah, we got plenty of those, their end-games generally are as crap as the beginnings though. A culmination of low quality.
No sane developer ignores the progression which leads to the end-result supposed to be reached.

Heck… even PoE re-worked their campaign several times over the last years in different ways! And they’re notorious for being atrociously bad in terms of new player experience… and nonetheless even they managed to provide a far better experience over the years then they started out with.

@terranu1

And by “end game” all they come up with is reusing the existing assets for rng scalable maps and endlessly “fixing” the builds people come up with.

Obviously! Do you think they’re shitting money personally? Someone having a golden goose available in their closet to lay some golden eggs daily to afford the sheer magnitude of assets which would be needed to make a non-repetitive end-game system from scratch?

There’s a reason why developers dislike re-using the campaign to be replayed several times. Grim Dawn is one of the only games which managed to pull it off… and only because their farming mechanics were such a well thought out process that the downsides could be ignored… still being downsides though.
Namely that you need to do the quest progression for them again to stay coherent. Very few people enjoy re-reading a book, or re-watching a movie, it’s not what the majority derives enjoyment from. It’s a detriment. And it was also one in Grim Dawn even.
Hence those end-game systems remove that tedium and instead focus on the pure mechanical aspects. Since Last Epoch has no area-specific special drops like Grim Dawn has and instead focuses on building a character to be ‘one fits all situations’ direction it’s not only easier to handle that with the generic mechanics of spawning enemy types in a RNG manner but also removes every part of needing to mindlessly skip through already known NPC interactions which are solely meant to drive a story forward.

@terranu1

I hardly consider monoliths “part of campaign”

Umh… they’re not ‘part of the campaign’, the campaign is over after Act 9 currently (12 are planned, yeah, I deem LE a beta because of it and tagging it ‘released’ is a misrepresentation in my book). Monoliths are a pure means to allow people to play the game as long as they like while offering something extra on top. We don’t even have a storyline there, they simply provide some - once again able to be skipped after the first time - extra bits of lore for alternative ways it could’ve gone down. There’s no coherent narrative present, why would you think it’s a part of the campaign?

@terranu1

it would have been the same if I’d just farm the campaign maps the same, to get the act bosses to drop the blessings and such.

Yeah, but they’re not supposed to drop blessing at your first playthrough as it doesn’t align with character progression as planned.

So you’re left with either level scaling enemies - which feel shit in general - or repeating the same process again which is also a detrimental situation as explained.

If that wasn’t the case then sure… less work. Instead they put extra effort into their product to make something specific for ‘beyond’ while also offering the potential to make it a quite immersive aspect of the game going forward.

@terranu1

It would actually feel as if you progress because you get stronger ,not weaker the more you progress.

I think you’re mistaking something here… you clearly feel stronger the further you progress. You can handle harder enemies and at any moment in time when you go back to corruption levels before you’ll immediately have the feedback from the game that ‘yes, it’s the case’.

[DJSamhein]

@Kulze

@terranu1

I hardly consider monoliths “part of campaign”

Umh… they’re not ‘part of the campaign’,

Monoliths were designed as an extension to the campaign. Where you run alternate timelines to the events that happened on the campaign.

[Kulze]

Yeah, they’re the side-stories of the campaign. You can go and read them if you want when a story is told or not, they have no meaning for the story but actually give more in-depth lore or flesh out characters.

You could do without, in the current state.

Which doesn’t mean it can’t become an actual story expansion, PoE has done that for example very well with Shaper first… then Elder/Shaper… then Sirus (Sirus was crap) and now Maven.

[DJSamhein]

I’ve always looked at it simply as fan fiction

[Kulze]

Yeah, fits well, I love the comparison!

[Llama8]

This is the weird thing. Monos are the end game but they have “alternative timelines” as the thematic hooks upon which to hang the content, otherwise you’d have the monos we had before the current iteration (the echo of a world with a mono interface to pick one of 2 modifiers & it just went endlessly until you gouged your eyes out).