I love having this in poe. Perhaps one day EHG will give us one
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I would love that. I don’t even need it in the game. We could have a profile page in EHG site, much like PoE has one, and you could dump all sort of stats in there:
-Profile stats like total amount of time played, number of characters created, a breakdown of how many characters for each class, etc, etc. Lots of stats could go there. You could even have some tabs that show them for all time, cycle 1, cycle 2, etc.
-Character stats for your individual characters (the ones you currently have, it doesn’t keep the stats of old chars you had to delete to make space for), with stuff like time played, highest damage, highest corruption, etc, etc.
It feels sad to me that no ARPG has done this before (to my knowledge).
D3 had some of that.
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I wasn’t aware of that. Though, to be fair, I did play D3 only for some time. Or rather, I played a couple weeks, stopped playing. Returned after the expansion (:cough:GameFix:cough:) and played until season 4 or 5 before quitting for some years.
I started playing again just for fun the last 2 seasons before D4 released.
I don’t think we had that early on and when I returned I didn’t really look for something like that, mostly because you were mostly done with the season in a week anyway 
It’s a very modern approach.
Exactly the same reason why teachers don’t use red ink to do corrections anymore: we don’t want to traumatise the kids. 
I got used to it, I just delete my dead hc characters.
But I agree that the deathless tag feels redundant.
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The below is what I have in my head, and doesn’t currently fit in the Last Epoch game (but kind of does, if you think about it, at the end of a season/cycle, your character(s) go to Eternal, so they kind of ‘die’ in that sense).
The cycles would be what they are now, defined (afaik) largely by PoE; new ways to play in a seasonal format. All players start with a fresh character. The additiosn here would be 1) there are modes of play that net the player/account “resources”, that could only be spent in Eternal 2) the season is a rogue-like, if your character dies, they immediately go to Eternal (or, this could be a game-mode, like hardcore. I think that roguelike characters should generate more resources, higher-risk, higher-reward).
Eternal would have a “builder” experience, where the player spent resources acquired via seasons to build things that 1) are cool to build (Valheim and Torchlight 3 infected me, I discovered that I like to build stuff), 2) provide character ability bonuses (like D3’s paragon system, bonuses apply to all characters).
I see two problems with that:
1- Not all players want to build things. I personally don’t want to, which means that I would never play legacy. So you end up with 2 game modes that are significantly different. That means that you have to maintain 2 different systems and that players that prefer legacy simply stop playing between cycles or when they’re done with the current cycle, as opposed to going back to legacy for a while.
2- More importantly, you’d have to keep the game balanced for cycles. If you get a bunch of bonuses in legacy, that means that eventually all content becomes super easy for them.
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What @DJSamhein said, though additionally, you appear to be using “Roguelike” in a way that doesn’t include RNG/procedural generation? Would the skills/passives available be selected by RNG? Would the maps be procedurally generated (not a bad thing)?
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I’ll never understand this mindset. I forget which game it was, but there was a bunch of hardcore players who wanted +magic/gold find for playing HC…because “meh, it’s harder”. I thought that was the point of playing HC, because you can stroke your epeen, while bragging about what a great player you are, compared to the carebears in SC. Not because the game is “harder” by giving you more resources and better loot. derp de derp.
League/Seasonal play should be just because players like that thrill of a fresh-start, combined with the race/ladder, where everyone starts at the same level. Not because there’s some additional reward/mtx/in-game status granted for playing your preferred playstyle. Or, we could just forego the ‘Season’ or ‘Cycle’ tag, and just call it Have-Your-Cake-and-Eat-it-Too play-mode.
I mean, where do we draw the line? Maybe non-meta builds should be rewarded 400% magic find, because they are harder to play? Greater-challenge, greater-rewards!
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The point of playing hardcore (for me, obviously) is to get a thrill: you have to be a lot more careful, because any fight could be your last. More adrenaline, more focus needed, and you tend to use all available mechanics a lot more than in softcore, like crafting, elixirs, shrines, defenses, whatever…
I play more softcore, but I sometimes enjoy the challenge of hardcore, especially in a game like LE where I know the campaign like the back of my hand.
I completely agree that it shouldn’t give any bonus reward. Kinda defeats the purpose.
Furthermore, I believe no added difficulty should ever give bigger rewards. If anything, difficulty should come from getting LESS rewards.
Or you end up like Grim Dawn, where everybody plays Veteran because it actually becomes easier than normal after the first few chapters, while still giving more rewards.
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What I don’t understand is why some people think hardcore is harder when it’s actually more punishing. Masochist was harder because you took more damage and did less damage. If hardcore had additional mechanics to deal with or less loot or something, that would make it harder.
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It’s a matter of semanthics and perspective. The gameplay is more punishing, nor harder, but getting to level 100 is harder, not more punishing.
Yeah… I agree. Not to mention all the POE ‘hardcore’ players have their logoff hotkeys, while D4 has the ‘escape death’ scroll. Hardcore, now days, is just softcore with additional steps.
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I’ll take the bloat please. In fact, I do not find PoE remotely bloated. It’s model is perfect as far as I am concerned. But of course I was playing PoE (on Eternal) throughout most of its seasons so it all felt organically incremental to me. Brand new players may feel differently.
The bottom line is I would not want EHG to rotate Eternal in a way that some seasonal aspect gets rotated in, was incorporated in the build of one or more of my Eternal character, then that build gets trashed because that mechanic was later rotated out. (Example: if Blizz had moved the s1 Hearts into Eternal, everyone adjusted their builds to exploit their power, but then they get removed a few Eternal rotations later, invalidating all those builds. That would totally suck.
PoE never does that (or at least didn’t when I played), meaning the seasonal content that comes to PoE Eternal is always completely optional, and never build-defining.
I don’t want anything temporary in Eternal either. I don’t play seasons because I dislike temporary gimmicks. I don’t mind things being added as long as they stay. I want to be able to go back to characters later and continue them or tweak them, which is why I like the non-season modes.
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How is that different to the inevitable balance changes that GGG does though? If you believe t’internet it’s constant nerf after constant nerf (which it isn’t solely). Change, especially balance changes, are inevitable, even on “Eternal”, non-season doesn’t mean unchanging.
Actually, the best example of this is from PoE, ironically: when they changed the passive tree to include masteries (and change lots of paths/nodes) all characters on standard became broken and had to be redone.
Not to mention lots of builds that are no longer doable, like spellslinger builds.
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This has really gotten to be more about the game concept in my head, rather than focusing on the specific question, which is, EHG do you find having eternal and cycle play redundant? I do. I know many do not. But we’re all game-players, not game-designers. I was wondering whether EHG has any thoughts about that.
But, questions were asked, so here’s more babble.
Q: "What do you mean ‘roguelike’?
A: You create a character in the cycle and choose ‘roguelike’, and when that character dies it goes to Eternal. You can now play it in Eternal, but it has ‘died’ in the cycle. If I was making my own game, and to Llama’s point, I would make it more like D1 - the spells/skills (plus maps and monsters, ideally) you acquired would be random, so each character would play significantly different. And that would be the only way that you could acquire spells/skills for use in Eternal. You’d have to play in seasonal and roguelike would be the only type of character you would play.
The story concept is that your first character founds a ‘family’ that starts in cycle-realm, grows as much as they can, and ascends to the Eternal realm when they die.
The tension with the roguelike char is; the higher you get the char, the more everything (skills, resources, gold, items) would transfer to Eternal on death. Getting to higher level and doing harder content should be something you want to do. But you don’t actually lose any of it on death, you just take it elsewhere.
Q: "How is that different than a normal seasonal character or a ‘hardcore’ character?
A: A normal character stays in seasonal until the end of the season. The roguelike character would be given more resources simply because their time in the season could be limited by death (also as a way to entice the player to play in that mode)
A hardcode character is like current hardcore - if the character dies, it’s gone for good from all play.
(Note: I never play hardcore because I refuse to play ultra-cautious and I would have zero patience if I died due to lag).
That’s not how “modern” hardcore work. On death your hc character is transferred to softcore.
I am all for balances changes. In fact I would say that keeping your Eternal realm balanced is fundamental to any ARPG and should go without saying. Me hoping that all seasonal mechanics come to Eternal at season ends does NOT mean I want Eternal to become crazy unbalanced. That would be terrible. This is the precise reason you do not want to see a rotational model in Eternal, it would never be balanced.
A great question. I personally find season models completely redundant. I mean why not just add the seasonal content into Eternal every few months? Then everyone gets new content, Eternal players get to continue with those chars they’ve loved and nurtured for hundreds of hours, and seasonal-minded players can just start a new char.
There are really only a few reasons for a company to use the seasonal model.
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The Eternal base game is so bad that the seasonal model is the only way to keep players interested in the game, and almost none of the player base plays Eternal (this is the current Diablo 4 situation and the reason I quit that game).
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They are using the season to test the new mechanics and balance them, before unleashing them on Eternal.
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Leaderboards and seasonal rewards - some people like this challenge and enjoy having to start a new char with nothing.