End of the linear campaign in Last Epoch. Hack and slash + roguelike

Feedback and Suggestions
1

Greetings Travelers,

After yesterday’s 6-hour session with Bladedancer, I thought to myself that making biuld in Last Epoch gives me a lot of fun, and yet I’m bored. I started thinking about it and looking for the reason and found it: the linearity of the game and the lack of meaningful challenges along the way. This, in turn, made me start thinking how to (hopefully) with a minimal amount of work make passing the campaign and endgame never boring again. Combine hack over slash with the non-linear progression of map after map that is in rougue games.

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Currently, the campaign in Last Epoch, as in other Hack and Slash games, proceeds in the same way:

  • First, you go through a campaign divided into acts, which in turn consist of linear rooms/maps, with minor branches, at the end of which a boss awaits.
  • To finally enter the end game and do random maps over and over again with increasing difficulty levels to grind our build.

This makes us want to run through the maps as fast as possible, and we are only interested in loot and levels. That’s why I suggest throwing the act system in the trash and introducing a semi-open world, where what campaign maps you run through first is dictated by your bild.

In Last Epoch, it can succeed because it has two advantages:

  1. the epoch system, where we visit the same places in different timelines.
  2. Item types and res that are assigned in the campaign to a particular biome.

The idea is to collect all the maps and regions of the campaign and combine them into one big grid of maps. The maps will not be scattered randomly, but will be grouped into biomes of a certain difficulty level in the centers of which will be the actual bosses.

Common items such as Cultist Blade will be more likely to fall out in the void biome, while unique items (chosen ones) will be assigned to a particular biome, and rewards such as extra passive points or statue slots will be spread around the world to encourage players to plan their journey in terms of the build they are currently doing. Some of the rewards could also be assigned to a particular boss to encourage players not to skip them.

Not every connection between maps would be available, but what are timelines and dungeons for? A transition between maps blocked in this era could be available in another. Such a system means that we will plan our journey for items, passive points and statues, in terms of the difficulty level of a given biome, possible map connections and eras. This will give an additional gameplay layer to the game for experienced players.

Of course, it’s also necessary to keep new players in mind so that they don’t get lost, so the first run of the new season would be more linear, in line with the campaign narrative and the developers’ recommended progression to get items from weavers in the endgame to change eras at any time and create spider bridges between maps that didn’t have them in the first run.

Such a connection system could be changed from season to season. Some of the roads would drop out, rewards would change their place, seasonal mechanics would add other profits that would affect route planning.

Of course, a route builder would also be useful.

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Where I think the feeling fails is there isn’t really an element of spectacle and anticipation for anything in the campaign (Feels too stickman-y, arbitrary and just not fun)…the closest thing I can compare to (personally - people may disagree) is D3 feel whenever I was closing in on a boss (You might throw in D4 as well - I liked the campaign there but that’s pretty much it).Is all this I’m implying an easy “fix” or would it even make sense in the space of EHG and their vision - not sure.But systems are not enough for a game to be in a long running contest for let’s say top3 arpg in this case - we need more emotions regardless how they are served and through which medium but the game imo definitely needs something

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Anything like this should always be 100% optional. Otherwise you’re forcing players that don’t like this progression style to play it to even access early endgame. Which they won’t, they’ll just leave.

This seems more appropriate for an endgame mechanic (PoE already has one like this) than campaign progression.

Campaign doesn’t need gimmicks. It just needs to be rebalanced so it’s not a snooze.

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4

It’s a fun idea (except that part of deleting my precious campaign xD)

5

The campaign will always be a snooze after you’ve played through it a few (# being dependant on the individual) times. Something like a build your own campaign or branching storyline would be more interesting until you’ve played it through a few times.

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6

Not necessarily. I still enjoy doing the D2 campaign and the only time it’s a snooze fest of sort is in NM difficulty.
I still enjoy GD campaign and I don’t feel it’s a snoozefest at all. Because my character keeps growing during the campaign and difficulty always feels adequate.
I still enjoy PoE’s campaign even though I’ve done it dozens of times already.

LE’s is the only campaign that I feel is more boring than the rest, because there is no challenge. You just run from point A to point B, mostly ignore all mobs attacking you. I often don’t even bother killing packs because I just want to get that over with.

But I would enjoy it more with some more balanced challenge.
I wouldn’t enjoy it, though, if I had to do some mechanic I don’t want to engage with, like town building or an FTL choose your course style.

To me, the point of a campaign is to give you direction. It can introduce alternative mechanics, like PoE does during the campaign by having them appear as optional things you can interact with, but other than that it should just give me a sense of progression while I’m leveling up before I reach endgame.
Which currently it doesn’t because clearing act 3 or 4 feels the same as clearing act 7 or 8.

It’s only when you reach empowered monos that it starts feeling fun again. And that is because you can have that challenge again which you should already have during the campaign.

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7

Agree 100%.

With veteran shoes recently (without nemesis, etc), the campaign was tough and took time. I did not go to optional areas, because the campaign was already lots of time consumption with me wanting progress.
Only when I couldn’t go forward, or wanted a break from challenge did I gladly go to the additional areas and dungeons. Those felt really good then! Optionals, how they should be^^
Simply put, the difficulty changed the feeling to not be a linear story. Just like DJ claimed.

The Idea of Niero is still fun, though :smiley:

8

Yeah, that would be the

Everybody has their boredom threshold for running through stuff, some people get bored running through a few times, others are happy to run through it hundreds.

Yeah, but I’ve got ~80 odd offline characters & a bunch of online characters, I’m bored of the campaign now. Would a non-linear campaign change that other than by being fresh & new? No idea, but it would give more choice & make it get old slower, regardless of difficulty.

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As I said before in my first reply to this post, as long as all that stuff is optional and not required to finish the campaign, I don’t mind.

The problem with implementing these types of mechanics into the campaign is that people that don’t enjoy them simply won’t play the game because there is no way to avoid them.
As opposed to something like PoE where you only have to interact with those mechanics in endgame and once you get there you get a choice on which ones you want to run, so you can avoid the ones you dislike.

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I’m not sure I’d call a non-linear storyline can really be called a mechanic and im nit sure it’d affect anyone who just wants to skip through it, they could just select the top dialogue option like they do at the moment.

Last I checked, PoE doesn’t have a branching storyline,.

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You’re not going to put an FTL style path on LE without each point of the path having different rewards and difficulty modifiers. Otherwise there’s no point to it. So yeah, it’s a mechanic.

And PoE doesn’t have a branching storyline, but neither does LE. So EHG would have to create branching storylines for all the variants of the path.
And if it’s random, that’s even more work (and if it’s not, then you’ll also run out of variants anyway, it will just take longer).

Certainly a lot more work than rebalancing the campaign. Which would have to be done anyway, otherwise the campaign would still be a slog, even with different options to run through.

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Why? It’s about having different events/story to experience not being able to tweak the difficulty. It’s not abput having an easier/harder path, though presumably different mobs would have to be involved which would be feel slightly different for different builds.

Apart from, you know, having a different story to experience for the 90th/100th time.

Is a branching storyline in a crpg a mechanic? No! I really don’t understand why you’re confusing/conflating league mechanics with a branching storyline.

Exactly, that’s my point & given LE’s use of time travel it would be thematically appropriate for there to be a branching storyline.

Yes, that was one of the points I raised.

They could just get rid of the storyline completely & you’d level through monos and get the various passive/idol unlocks every X levels, that’d be much simpler & less work than having a story, sunk cost notwithstanding.