I like to create new chars. Playing monolith for a few days on a single character, creating a new one and starting over feels like a relief. This makes me realise how “empty” the current monoliths feel.
I haven dozens of dozens of very promising characters that might or might not have the potential to clear empowered in a decent high enough corruption level.
My LE play record is very long. I’ve joined since the EA and have - as a more casual player - invested around 1.6k hours. There’s no other game I ever put so many hours in (vanilla WoW maybe). My next steam game sits at 400h.
The main time sink for me was creating new characters. I like the monolith on every character only for a few hours. Around characterlevel 90 I lose interest. In my whole playtime I didn’t bring a single character to level 100.
I’ve plenty in the 90s, highest is a 97 VK. I tried to farm corruption, but my highest corruption is around 180 on this character. I think no other characters corruption level comes close to this. Most of my characters barely make it to empowered.
It’s not because I’m bad in building characters. When we do our community challenges I’m doing fine compared the time spent. I’d say I’m playing relatively effective.
But the incentive to play a certain character just drops at some point. All my highest/best characters are the one I created during the challenges when there was some kind of competition that pushed me. But I did not really feel like playing these characters after those challenges (they last around 1-2 weeks real time). I feel exhausted after it and need something fresh. Often this is when I start a different character then. Sometimes I also take a LE break.
Here’s what i think the reasons are:
- Charakters feel good to play untill they reach a certain level. Around 70-80 there come several things together:
- Gear progression gets a lot slower
- Build is somewhat finished (Skills are maxed, the most important passives are there)
- The difficulty curve gets flattened as you are too strong for normal timelines, yet you haven’t access to empowered
- When I reach empowered it feels a bit refreshing for a short amount of time
- Difficulty gets more challenging
- Loot and monolith gets more interesting
- But I have to force myself to get to that point
- There’s “just” the to reach empowered or a certain corruption level to show off
- What not happens to me is that I just play a character for the gameplay and for the fun. I’ve never had a monolith play session where I lost track of the time and though “oh, so much fun, just one more echo” where I’m surprised at the end how far I got. The exact opposite is the case:
- I look a the echo web and I see boring stuff that I have to do to get to that targeted corruption level. Everytime I kill a Shade and the web resets I’m kind of pissed because I need to regrind the web and start all over.
The solution may seem very easy: Stick with one build and push it. This way I wouldn’t need to repeat all the grind to empowered so often. But playing a single character for such a “long” time is just not for me. And if I have to force myself to do something to reach certain goals, I think there is something missing.
Warframe does things very similar and is grindy as hell, too. Propably even more grindy than LE. But in Warframe the actual gameplay was/is so much fun to me that I don’t pay attention to my goals. I know what my goals are so I choose the content to maybe farm a specific item. But the way to that item, the moment to moment gameplay is so much fun that the time playing is the reward. The drops common top.
In LE the endgame doesn’t feel the same. Echoes are hurdles to overcome and progress. You don’t finish an echo and say “Oh man, already over? It was so much fun, I wished it lasted for an hour!” Despite we all rush through them as fast as we can to make the main gameplay to last as short as possible.
Why is that so? Maybe when the moment to moment gameplay would be much more exciting, more crunchy and impactful. But still then, the monolith concept is not to spent much time in single echoes. It’s to complete as much echoes as possible in the shortest amount of time. Everything else feels like wasted time. And isn’t it remarkable when the actual gameplay feels like a waste of time?
Wow… this sounds so negative. Why am I still playing this game? Maybe because I already spend so much time and don’t want to admit that this might have been spent better in another game? Maybe I also see the potential of LE in the future.
I’m really looking forward to MP. And I hope for some interesting Arena mods that make playing it in a party a lot of fun. Maybe corruption pushing in a group is more exciting.
But there has to happen something with the moment to moment combat and the sense of progression around level 80.
If killing monsters in general would add something. Like I put a special item on and while I kill enemies a progress bar (or faction reputation) fills up. At the end I can choose rewards like adding a flat amount of corruption to a timeline 8f my choice. This way the the gameplay element of killing mobs would get a bit more rewarding and would not be seen as an obstacle between you and the end of an echo.
Cheers!