The main difference between all those games is that none of them are live service games. They’re all single player focused and they get expansions every 2-3 years or none at all. The game won’t change for long periods or ever again in some cases.
This means that there are very few people these days actually buying a GD copy. Which means Crate is getting very little money these days from GD. I expect there will be a small surge in sales when they release the final expansion, but mostly it’s a “dead game”.
Basically, this is simply a SP/MP issue and you also see this in FPS games, for example. If you provide a SP FPS, then you need to deliver a good campaign and players will praise it if you do.
But if you release a MP FPS, then the campaign is ignored by almost everyone. Many MP FPSs have died fast that had great campaigns.
Personally, I prefer the campaigns myself. But you can’t focus on just the campaign in a live service game.
And by now it’s too late to change directions as well. The amount of development required to change LE into a SP game model like GD or TQ would see no return in investment, especially because most players that would stick with LE have already bought it.
Why though? Just because nobody else has? LE already has a good campaign with town hubs to see other players and their shiney MTX. Even if they just allowed you to play it through multiple times and earn Blessings from the campaign bosses, I would still probably play that more than Monoliths. I’m not saying the endgame should be purely campaign but it would be good to at least have a choice.
Would it really be that hard to put some Mono bosses in secret side areas(we already have those with nothing in them). This would allow you to get your blessings without running mono’s.
I’m just saying that following the way PoE does things has not worked out that well for them so far, so why not try doing your own thing? LE is starting to feel like mini-PoE and I cannot see they can survive doing that.
I am 100% not saying do that. As has been discussed above, include more stuff, or even put some of the Monolith functionality into the Campaign on subsequent play throughs. That would not hurt the live service side and could even improve it to get more people playing.
Because lots of people don’t like doing the campaign over and over again (as can be seen by these forums, PoE forums, Blizzard forums, etc).
The reason why PoE keeps attracting people is because they provide options. Don’t like delve? Do ritual. Don’t like Abyss? Do Heist. Don’t like Ultimatum? Do Sanctum. Etc.
You need to provide several different endgame activities, otherwise you’re simply reducing your playerbase drastically right at the start.
Also, for campaign to be a valid endgame activity it is mandatory that you’d need some sort of level scaling, which is something most players dislike.
That would mostly be because there are still very limited endgame options. Everything still revolves around doing monos over and over and over again until your eyes are bleeding from doing thousands of similar echoes.
The main difference between PoE and LE in regards to this is that PoE mechanics are something that you start interacting with in maps and then have an extension outside of it. You get a whole new area to keep engaging with the mechanic at a deeper level. If you decide to push it further you actually spend a lot of time outside of maps, even though maps are how you get fed the resources to farm it.
The bigger thing is that you have a host of different mechanics that all feel distinct and have their own reward types.
Nemesis? makes me equipment.
Mages? equipment
Beasts? equipment…
Omens??? Corrupted equipment… though the corrupted idol stuff and idol altars are cool and neat.
now lets look at poe, I have farmed blight, what did I get? A material that improves items i already have and generally does not give them to me.
Harvest? lets me make equipment.
Ultimatum? I get catalysts to improve my gear, that is distinct from blight.
So like take an SSF experience, I want to make a really big life amulet, okay i go heist farming for the base, okay cool got the base. okay I need to craft it now, I craft it with harvest juice so i start harvesting. okay, I want to annoint it now, I farm blight. Okay, I have crafted and annointed it, lets catalyze it. okay I have farmed catalysts and done that. Now I need to blast maps fast af to find a reflecting mist, do that, now I reflect it. okay im done, I have an item that has interacted with atleast 5 systems all intertwined to make it.
And in last epoch? I want to make a 1lp item. okay i am ssf/cof, so i do 10 prophecies drop 100 amulets, then pick up the 1lp one. Then i do prophecies and get 100 purple amulets and then i go to julra and slam it. now i corrupt it wooo done.
What about mages? no experimental affix on amulet so, i dont click them. What about nemesis? i click them, but they dont help me here. Beasts? Not a primordial item, so I ignore them and dont interact with them.
omen windows? yeah sure nothing to lose.
Based on the type of item you are going for, a ton of LE systems just no longer are needed.
God forbid you wanna do set item stuff, You cant lp it, you cant corrupt it, beasts dont interact with it, and neither do mages. You literally cant do shit.
This likely improves with more mechanics. but for now its very dry.
like especially sets, I am playing with the new bee items and its so sad that you cant make a t6/7 sharded set item, then slam the set shard onto a unique. them trying to keep sets separate from legendaries I dont think is going to work in the long run. Every set I look at I would only not use the set item, if I can use a unique instead. most of them are better then a generic exalted/rare with the shard on them frankly.
To me the game went downhill from 0.8 at latest. At least to my taste EHG is constantly messing up since then starting when they ignored people telling them to take their time and not to release a bug riddled unfinished mess. Well we all have seen where we got from there.
EHG made their choices and have to live with it but if nothing changes i guess the addon is the last thing we’ll see from LE sadly. Lets hope things get better but then again I don’t have high hopes.
and lots of people do like doing the campaign over and over as can be seen on these and other forums, including yourself.
I don’t see why this cannot ever be another form of endgame for those that want to do it. Just because the other big live service games don’t, is doesn’t mean it is the only way to design games moving forward.
I agree with your other point regarding different reward types, but I just want to point out that there are several different mechanics that actually pull you out of maps to do them like Delve, Heist, Ultimatum, Sanctum, etc.
There are also that pull you partially out, like Betrayal, Breach, etc.
These are enough to provide plenty of options to players and to let players that are getting bored of doing maps to do something else for a while.
LE doesn’t have this. You can do dungeons, but only TS is worth doing and only if you have something to slam, otherwise it feels like a waste.
You have arena, but most players dislike it, especially when a reasonable run will take you several hours to complete.
Everything else revolves around doing echoes over and over again. Even woven echoes are basically just echoes.
It can, if done properly. It’s just a matter of effort vs players affected by it.
If you add a campaign endgame system, players that already dislike the campaign are going to ignore it immediately. You already know that this mechanic will only be played by a portion of the playerbase and you know that even before you start working on it.
Whereas when you add a new endgame system (like omen windows) everyone can potentially enjoy it, even campaign enjoyers. Some will inevitably not enjoy it, but before you even start working on it you know that it can potentially appeal to everyone.
On the other hand, pinnacle bosses only appeal to a small part of the playerbase and they also work on that, so…
True, that could be an easy way to turn campaign into endgame with less effort. You finish it, now you do campaign again but with 100c. You’d have to turn off the quests (because you already did them) or change those same quests to give you different rewards.
Or, even better, each scaling would provide new quests, maybe even a different story. It would be more work, but it would be quite interesting.
As a final disclaimer, most of my arguments against campaign as endgame was on the assumption that you’d only have the campaign (or the campaign as the main endgame), given the examples of GD and TQ.
If campaign is a parallel endgame system, then I guess it would be doable in a live service game and actually a pretty good idea that I would support.
Ultimately, I think adding new endgame systems has a higher chance of having success, especially if they implement something that actually pulls you out of echoes.
But it would be nice to have a campaign endgame system.
Exactly, you could even explore some of the alternate timelines in the post-campaign campaign zones like you do with monoliths, but at that point it’s probably just monos that you access differently.
Sure, revamping dungeons to be actually useful would be a great start. Maybe even adding a new one or two.
Sadly, it feels like dungeons are just going to waste and that they’re even writing them off as not worth it. First they added the option to skip the dungon completely and then they added the option to get dungeon boss drops randomly in your echoes.
i prefer poe1’s mapping tbh. the monolith is a very interesting take on mapping which pushes players towards rewards similar to roguelites/likes.
but if i m being honest. i kinda dislike “infinite scaling/juicing”. especially for online games where trade exists, item drops are balanced around trade and on top of that the game will also have to be balanced around juicing content.
using poe as an example. you could do your own thing and struggle. your drops are pitiful and you barely have enough to get an awesome alt/aug spammed double top roll mods on an item. on the flipside, someone using a good build (most likely meta/following a build guide) could run overjuiced content and have so much resources that they can craft or buy really awesome gear.
the game is balanced around the existence of those guys that are doing well. they exist and theyre doing fine. if the game was to be made better for the “bad player”, it would involve making the bad player get more easier access to loot, but by doing so, that would mean the better players would gain multiplicatively even more massive amount of loot since they’re all juicing the hardest content.
grim dawn and older games do not suffer this too severely. in GD if you can run around difficulty 70-80 SR you’re fine, you’ll get enough loot and its a good benchmark. most scuffed builds can be fixed to run SR70-80.
in LE? personally to me, if you cant run corruption 300 at minimum the game isnt for you.
In the context of Last Epoch, I think this could work really well. Imagine if in our first try through the campaign we fail, then use the Epoch to go back in time and try again, using what we know about the “future” to direct the time line to a better outcome. It would be a story-driven reason to replay the campaign while having slightly different changes to the story and to the quests
Sure. You could also do it in a way where you don’t actually need different campaigns. You could create a branching campaign, where choices will lead to vastly different outcomes. Then you could use the epoch to go back and try different choices and different endings.
You could even have rewards for each ending. Much like you now get +2 attributes for finishing the current campaign, you could instead get +1% cast speed if you get to ending A and 2% movement speed if you get to ending B, etc.
Not game changing bonuses, otherwise it will feel mandatory to run all endings, but some decent ones that will provide you with an objective for those that like to run the campaign multiple times.
I dinnae agree. The slow speed of development is the problem. However, ye need to understand that the speed of development directly affecteth the quality of content. And great speed hath its price.
