You seemed to suggest things can’t be compared because they can be bad. So, you can’t compare D3 and LE?
Umh… no? That’s not what happened at all?
Your examples came from different genres, so obviously people say ‘Yeah, that’s not applicable as a total’. You can’t throw D3 in and make it suddenly work without giving a specific example from it which was successful and didn’t have severe negative side-effects.
Keep in mind, LE is not a multi-billion franchise from a multi-billion company that brought out a game without competition for the more casual market filling it hence and bringing peole in. Currently D3, D4, PoE 1, PoE 2 and Torchlight Infinite are taking up the same market space, so LE needs to do either position itself in the spaces they don’t occupy or be better at what the respective competition occupying that space does.
Hmm. No? You were suggesting that just because certain things have common properties that you can compare everything freely. After all, this was the follow up that MOBAs, etc, don’t have stories, so a game doesn’t need a story.
You then followed that you can compare apples and oranges because they have common properties. I was just pointing out that, just because they have common properties, what is good for one isn’t necessarily good for the other. And this is because of the things they DON’T have in common. In this specific case, their flavor and how that interacts with being caramelized.
Which is a larger point to the fact that while MOBAs, etc, have common things with diablo-likes, they also have many things that aren’t common to both. So something that applies to one doesn’t have to apply to the other.
And it does tie into D3 not being comparable. I didn’t say that to mean that D3 is a bad game (I personally don’t think it is, it’s just not for me). I say that because D3 targets a very different type of players than LE or PoE. So the choices that might work to make D3 better could very well work to make LE or PoE worse.
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If somebody wants to play isometric ARPGs with strong stories, I would recommend Champions of Norrath and Champions: Return to Arms instead.
Or Diablo 4.
Wait, what did I say, why is everybody staring at me???
These games sound interesting, I had never heard of them. A quick Google tells me they are PS2 only, that would be why, I play only on PC. Oh well.
Not Witcher 3 or Baldur’s Gate 3 strong, sure.
But most diablo-likes have fun storylines to follow while watching your character evolve. Not very deep, I grant you that, but good enough to hold for a while the interest of anyone interested in RPGs.
Diablo 4, which has an excellent campaign and world atmosphere, probably sold more copies for the campaign alone than the entire PoE playerbase.
Back in the day, most people I know at least tried a little bit of Titan Quest, because it was a fun RPG and quite pretty for its time.
I am sure Sacred was played for its open world and campaign at least as much as for its mechanics.
I have showed the less famous Van Helsing to a few friends, and they enjoyed the great voice acting and the campaign.
That’s why I was saying not having a campaign at all would reduce the potential playerbase. (To clarify, as you seemed confuse, this is the ARPG playerbase we are talking about. I know a lot of other people play mostly Candy Crush or Tetris. Campaign or not, they will be hard to get.)
To further clarify, I am strangely rather in favour of a campaign skip, even if I wouldn’t use it myself. I don’t really see the point of forcing people to play if they don’t want to.
But I believe getting rid of the campaign would be a mistake. It would work, mind you, but on a much smaller scale. Chronicon is doing great (rightfully so) despite ignoring completely graphics and animation, but it will always be very niche.
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Champions were my intro to ARPGs and I still boot them up every once in a while, truly legendary games for splitscreen and online co-op.
Typically, the alternate leveling method is superior to the campaign, but the campaign is required to be completed at least once per season before the alternate method is available.
The dungeon skips drastically shorten the campaign, but aren’t the same thing as being able to just go straight into working on a new character.
Specialization slots being level locked is fine, but when lv 50 is 3/4ths of the way through the campaign, you don’t really even get to use a full build for very long before the campaign is over.
Edit: accidentally hit “reply” too early.
Ultimately, having an alternate way to gear up and level a character that’s not just “do the campaign until you’re geared enough for monoliths” would make the leveling process more enjoyable and less tedious. For example, I’d feel less bad about needing to use Vengeance for 15 levels if I could be doing monoliths the entire time instead of walking the same campaign path as the last 5 Sentinels did.
I’m definitely in favor of a campaign skip, once the campaign has been completed at least once.
- Grim Dawn let’s you pick any difficulty once you beat Normal mode, even on new characters.
- Chronicon let’s you go into Tinka’s Domain on any character as long as one of your characters has beaten the game at least once.
- Diablo 3 let’s you start any new character in adventure mode once you’ve unlocked it by beating the campaign at least once.
This is just three examples that I’ve experienced personally. Meanwhile, Last Epoch says “oh, you’ve beaten the campaign 6 times but want to try a new character? Don’t worry, just do it again! You can skip large chunks with the dungeons, but it only shaves off about 6 hours, but you’ll need gear to do this so make sure you’re not playing SSF!”
This, to me, is part of the problem why I usually don’t want a campaign skip. The first part, I mean. I enjoy playing the campaign. I was even an unofficial rusher in PoE. But when you implement a clearly superior alternative, like D3/D4 did, even people that enjoy the campaign feel forced to use it. Which detracts from my enjoyment of the game.
I’m all for a campaign rush, as long as it’s an equal alternative to it. That way, people can choose what they prefer to do and no one is ahead or feels forced to do something they don’t enjoy.
Picking a difficulty isn’t the same as a campaign skip. You still have to complete the campaign that way. What GD does is that it lets you level fully in the crucible and ignore the campaign altogether. This, to me, was a campaign skip done right. Crucible isn’t clearly superior to the campaign. It’s just an alternative way to level.
This, to me, is campaign skip done wrong. I didn’t enjoy adventure mode. However, I felt I was forced to use it, because I could get to level 70 in 2h, as opposed to several hours if I went the campaign route.
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Which is fine, absolutely! It’s expected to be a quickened pace, but for that some important things have to be taken into consideration.
One part is… how substantial is the storytelling or progression of a story to the game itself? With some it’s fine, with others? It’s a disaster. Last Epoch’s situation it would definitely be fine since it’s a rigid story without any choices or variable outcomes which cause your character to substantially change their course.
The next and more important one though is simply… play-time. How much longevity has your product and what type of game is it? A SP game with end-game mechanics? No issue skipping afterwards! A game focused on the MP aspect itself? Likely also fine still! But already with situations where you need to ensure competitive environments aren’t disrupted. A live-service game? Ok… now you need to be very very careful!
How long is your end-game actually viable? How diverse is it? How long are people expected to ‘last’ mentally before they clock out and do something else?
LE#s end-game is not good currently, the campaign also not but at least provides a story… and a roadbloack without respective preparation beforehand to cut it short even with the methods provided (dungeon skips).
Now does your game have specific possible ‘roles’ like they exist for example in PoE 1 and 2? Characters created for bossing, chars created for clear-speed, chars created specifically for group play, be it buffing ones or Magic Find ones? Now you can’t cut it short substantially as the effort to bring those up would be nearly non-existent, and in a cyclic live-service game it would cause the competition to snowball extremely away suddenly. ‘Ah yes, I’m one of the first to have a big clear-speed char and got some currency to trade! Let’s swiftly make a bossing char!’ and boom… 2 hours later ready for end-game bosses!
If it needs 10…20 or more hours then it’s time in which you loose the position compared to other people competing on the market. Items are worth overall less for early ones since supply rises while demand sinks a bit, your bossing loot also will loose value since others focused on that first. It comes at a cost hence. Without the limitation there is no cost though and hence you create a massive economic imbalance which slingshots your week 1 economy into a month 2 economy. So that would need to be a long-term stable one functioning top-tier outside of a cycle too.
Obviously for CoF (hence SSF style characters) it wouldn’t be a thing… but a substantial amount is not CoF and the game is not set up this way.
Which is why D3 also has majorly short-term players. Sure, many of them, which keeps them working well… but nonetheless they leave swiftly. Last Epoch doesn’t have such traction of a franchise name like Diablo though, hence given they don’t have those sheer numbers they need to make up for it in time investment some way, which either needs roadblocks (like the lack of a quick-progress method) or substantial amounts of content to allow implementing such a measure.
A good example is ‘Black Desert Online’ (ignoring P2W or anything else) which substantially sped up character progression over time since the uppermost achievable parts got further and further away because of strong power creep, hence reigning it in to allow long-term players to still have their fun but the players putting effort but a ‘middling’ amount of play-time in still could get sufficiently far, not pushing them away for ‘being unable to play enough to come close to finishing the game’.
But as said. I’m not against it, it just doesn’t fit the current situation of the game, and likely won’t for a substantial amount of time into the future. Being a detriment rather then an upside for now. And given there’s quality issues anyway it might solve itself by solving them.
Puting another dificulty level to campaign for “not the very first char” would be welcome. This way skip crowd would level up on lowest level getring to monos in 3-4hours and the rest could have some challange leveling alts “the old way”.
Entire campaign skip is totally bs idea imho, canceling rpg aspect i arpg game 
Just my 2 cents.
You already get to monos in roughly 2 hours on your second char if you use the current skip mechanics available.
No, I don’t.
Come to think of it, I also don’t give a hoot if people are stronger/faster/richer than me in a game. Which is why I absolutely don’t care about PTW mechanisms. I would just sell campaign skips or lvl 75 boosters and be done with it…
To each their own, but sometimes I feel sorry for the competitive guys. So many purely psychological factors reducing their enjoyment!
I don’t care about other players, but I do care if my play is being at least kinda effective. D3 gives me a choice “Do you want to run the campaign and get to endgame in 10h? Or do you want to get to the same place in 2h?”. The problem isn’t competition. It’s feeling inneficient.
To make a similar comparison, it would like if LE would give your a legendary forge in town. You could go there to create legendaries, but you still had the option of running Julra for it. No one would run Julra (except for getting their uniques) because it would always feel like an artificial waste of time.
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Fair enough, a good argument, the problem is not competition: it is what you play for.
To D3’s question, I would always answer “I want to run the campaign, and not run it in 10 hours but in 40, because I want to do all the side quests and revisit all the areas I have enjoyed in the past”.
Once my character has no more stories, and has really good gear, it is finished. No pleasure in playing him/her anymore. And if I like a game, I don’t want to be finished in two hours. This is, for me, efficiency (and I realise few people think that way): getting as much enjoyment as I can from the game. Other people will have different targets, and therefore a different definition of efficiency.
Levelling faster actually reduces my pleasure, that’s why I hate nemesis in chapter 1 and overbloated loot lizards.
Although, you made me smile with your second exemple.
Indeed, I wouldn’t run Julra, I would create my legendaries in town!
Not because it is faster, but because Julra’s dungeon is a bit of the game I really, really don’t enjoy (note that I don’t fear Julra anymore, I just find her and especially her dungeon boring).
Again, it is about what gives you pleasure. Having several ways to play is generally a good thing. That’s why MMOs can be so addictive, you can play them in many different ways.
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I completely agree with this. As long as they’re kinda balanced and they’re actually options.
My only issue with campaign skips is that plenty of people don’t actually want an alternative way to level because they’re bored of the campaign, they just want a power skip to get to endgame/high levels faster.
As I mentioned, I think GD did this properly. Crucible is an equivalent way to level. Maybe one is a little faster than the other, but they’re equivalent enough.
Similarly, campaign skips currently are balanced as well. You can get to monoliths much faster with them, but they mostly require (at least for now) some investment in your first character to get gear good enough to run them at low level.
So as long as they’re relatively equivalent, I’m all for having multiple ways to level alts. Althought the effort in creating those systems would only be worth it if they could be scaled into endgame as well.
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Well I am doing it slow way in 4h and it is ok, od course I would welcome longer campaign with open hands any day
I consider it Grim Dawn’s equivalent to a campaign skip, because you can choose to skip an entire campaign (or two) by starting in Elite or Ultimate. The crucible section is exactly what I’m asking for in Last Epoch. Let us level from 1 to 100 exclusively in Monoliths if we want (once the campaign has been completed once).
When I say “superior”, I mean that it’s less tedious than re-running the campaign. Doing rifts in D3 is actually about the same speed as the campaign, you can just never leave the town and keep going in and out of rifts, and the only actually superior option in kill-chaining is boring as hell but can be done in both the campaign and rifts.
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I think a distinction needs to be made between people wanting a campaign skip and those that want an alternative.
If D3’s Adventure mode takes as long as the campaign to get to endgame level, that’s an alternative. But there are people asking for this “alternative” because it allows them to skip X hours of leveling a character. At which point, that’s not a whole lot different than a campaign skip. In WoW, there are alternatives to quests (PvP, dungeons, gathering…) or you can straight up buy a literal skip with a character boost.
The first type of option is great, even if you don’t care for PvP or other people. The second part makes questing a significant longer route to max level. Luckily Blizzard charge an arm and a leg, and it’s a decent excuse not to buy a levelling skip, but if it cost less than $5, I can’t imagine not spending it on the majority of fresh characters.
That’s a fair point.
When I hear “campaign skip” it’s the “alternate leveling method allowing you to skip the campaign, often only unlocking after beating the campaign once on any character”: Crucible in Grim Dawn, Rifts in D3, Anomalies on Chronicon, etc.
I don’t want (and think it’s unhealthy) to offer a level boost/skip mechanic. Guild Wars 2 offers a lv 80 boost that boosts you to max level and gives you a set of gear, ffxiv offers a boost to the previous level cap.
For ARPG’s there’s not really a precedent that I’m aware of, but the reason I don’t like this idea is that even if it takes 8 less hours (using Kulze’s numbers from earlier in this thread) to do the campaign through the dungeon you still are leveling the character and gearing it out like you would had you just done the campaign, but isn’t viable as SSF due to lacking gear. So if doing monoliths from lv 1 was an option, even if it was 2-4 hours faster than the campaign for a SSF character I think that’s a fair trade as you’re still leveling the character and gearing it up just like you would have in the campaign, you’re just not funneled through the same story for the hundredth time.