Well then I need to use the search function because I was never confronted with this. last time I heared feedback about Lizards was the overabundence in tombs and that was far to much yeah.
I just ask myself one thing… if people who thing the progression is so important and noone should have “nice gear” in the campign befor the “From here on drops nice loot” point in the campign… do you people twink and if so do you use items from your main or is the complaining mostly coming from people who play SSF?
I guess you overexaggerated here. Most I ever had was a mage, a nemesis and something else I already forgot. I skipped the mage because who cares and did the other two things because they were on may path from A to B.
Yeah but as useual… if you add more possibilitys to get more stuff you’ll get more stuff. Like PoE Abyss for the first time. Went out of the first town had an abyss and a very exhausting fight and got a realy nice yellow weapon that carried me a bit. This felt deserved.
On the flip side: Why should I engage with added content that offers nothing to me? This would be a waste of time and I don’t have time to waste.
If you use anything but a belt, weapon and boots in the campign you have a power exploision. For me additions aren’t the problem. The foundation and the baseline of the game is a mess.
I get your point of view but isn’t it a normal thing over time? Every game adds stuff. Maybe D4 is the least offender here because they include their seasonal systems in existing mechanics. Like asmodan spawn instead of a bloodmaiden if you are in a helltide.
On the other hand I maybe have a far to strict lootfilter from the getgo and most likely don’t even have a full set of items reaching end of times.
I have a different question on this topic and I don’t want to make you mad with this and I don’t aim for a low blow. I’m just intrested. If you dislike all that stuff so muhc why do you even bother with the game? I don’t touch it if I have better stuff to do like watching paint dry. I’m just arround here because I haven’t lost all hope yet. To me what you wrote reads a bit like you realy hate that crap and you get a bit angry when you are “flooded” with whatever special stuff that isn’t baseline campaign.
To me it’s simple. Get the campaign done in as little as possible time. I take every advantage I can get because to me LEs campaign is worse then the Borderlands 3 campaign… heck even running PoE down is more fun then LEs campaign so i just want to be done with it. Sometimes I need days to finish the campaign because i can’t force myself to play it.
Reading this made me think of an idea. I’ve seen a number of posts that talk about how easy campaign is and people wanting a VETERAN mode or what not.
Maybe this is one way to implement both that and your concern. Make toggles that turn on each of add-on (for campaign only obviously.) You can turn them all on or one or anywhere in between for a more tailored ‘difficulty.’
Just a spitball idea but it would effectively kill two birds with one stone.
DISCLAIMER: I have NO idea how difficult this would be to code as I’m just a gamer so take it with a grain of salt.
Why does it matter? Because when I do maps I just want top do maps. That doesn’t mean I don’t want to do that other content ever, it just means I’d rather get keys or such and run those things in a chain when I’m in the mood. They just throw as much as they can at you in each map when they could pull them out into their own thing you can focus on separately.
I know some people complained about just rushing to the map objective and completing it, but I’m definitely not one of those people. If they want close to full map completion they could accomplish that, but they would need to make their maps more linear to avoid annoying backtracking.
They have addressed my issue slightly by letting you place web echoes in the monos. But honestly I’d prefer they be pulled out into their own thing. TL:I has smartly done this with many seasonal themes that are run in parallel to monos. And after seeing the way they did it, Last Epoch’s implementation just seems lazy and makes mapss more tedious over time.
Not sure if you remember, but there is a veteran mode of some sorts for campaign. There are a pair of boots in a secret area before you even reach the first town that does this.
Okay I get the wish for a different content implementation. That’s just a different taste I get. But smacking stuff into maps is as old as PoE and when they introduced Monolith I was already sure it’ll be the same way.
On the other hand my ability to just rush from A to B isn’t diminished. I’m very got in ignoring stuff .
You do realize that a company is in trouble vastly before the effects are clearly visible, right? The difference between action and reaction. When you act only when it becomes blatantly visible to the customer then you’re already at the brink of ruin with a dozen chances to change that beforehand.
Unlike most other companies GGG has a myriad of internal logs which barely any other company even takes into consideration. They got information of how many players start, how the playtime of those newcomers is, how many return, how long long-term people stay overall, how long they stay comparatively to former leagues and so on and so forth.
They even have logs related to how long every individual instance lasts and what’s happening inside, their logging is ridiculous and it has provided over the years some very interesting outcomes.
And the timeframe I’m speaking about has shown that new players didn’t traverse over to end-game as likely. Meaning the percentile of players stopping before reaching that point increased. It was also the same time when the percentile of people returning to PoE after ending a former league was reduced.
To find this information be free to check through the dev-talks happening during that timeframe and what is said by Chris back then. You’ll see a surprising amount of realizations related to their logging system.
Also you gotta take the upsides and downsides of mechanics at the respective timeframes into consideration as well. Things like elder/shaper ping-pong which burned people out (and hence was removed over time for that reason), archnemesis changes, divination removal and so on and so forth. It’s very hard to see the effect on the game from distinct areas without taking that into consideration.
The weakest ‘era’ of PoE’s campaign (which still made it go well but culmulated into more and more issues) was - if I remember right - right before Betrayal and during Harvest specifically.
Before betrayal incursion was prevalent and Abyss available in Act 1. People complained heavily because you were constantly pulled out of the gaming loop. It was the timeframe when people started to say ‘Don’t do league mechanics before reaching maps’ to beginners, which wasn’t a notion heard before commonly but became prevalent at that point.
It culminated with Harvest specifically because at the beginning it was the most time-intensive and ‘different’ mechanic available in the game, with inexperienced players often needing more time in the Harvest field setting it up then playing an area or a map.
This all led to a serious mental burnout towards the game for many. While Harvest itself - after initial changes - was well received by players usually not pushing deep into the game (because it got a lot more reliable to get good gear) it also led to the same people praising it highly to stop playing after 2 weeks… people which usually play for 1-2 months of the league.
Similar things happened for different reasons with different mechanics. Be it the tedium of ‘properly’ setting up Betrayal itself. Be it the annoyance of the memories in Synthesis, be it Sanctum… all things which take intense amounts of time away from the core gameplay loop. And back then also always ‘you missed out’ when you simply bypassed it. The choice hence was between less loot or mental exhaustion in most maps.
This was also officially acknowledged by GGG in devs talks a few years ago, which ultimately led to the implementation of the Atlas passive tree system we see nowadays, as well as the initial implementation of scarabs during Betrayal and changed a relatively short while ago to the current ongoing system.
This has taken away the mental exhaustion from ‘switching pace’ without it being a personal choice to do so substantially, and it also showed results in the numbers back then… and nowadays as well with how well received those systems are. It allows ignoring content which pops up without ‘missing out on it’ as without personal investment they are not valuable to do, hence not putting mental pressure on the player.
And this is in direct correlation with the perception during campaign, hence when Abyss for example was available early. It pulled you out of the gameplay loop, you had to follow a line towards somewhere, often backtracking, and you couldn’t simply ignore em since the rewards of the eyes was so powerful comparably to anything else that people did it even when they got exhausted.
Always?
LE was funded at a time when there basically was only PoE and D3 available. They always had the notion of becoming ‘the next great ARPG’, which is hence directly competing with GGG and Blizzard.
That was always clearly conveyed.
Exactly! That’s the point, now you got it!
But yeah, core is a big thing, but core is only the position of something being placed in the direct progression line.
Or depending on usage the differenciation between timed and non-timed content.
Once again, dual meaning for the same word, which makes it a mess to see what exactly is meant.
Then don’t argue for it!
EHG wants to add content to the campaign… it’s not doing it a favor… so why do it? Makes no sense, you’re right.
Btw I did the same, saying that the progression of Nemesis and loot lizards is negative. Loot lizards being fun, sure… but progression wise bad. And Nemesis shouldn’t even exist in the campaign at all. I mentioned that in quite a few posts with the topic.
You’re combining ‘first experience’ and follow-up characters together. I cannot give an answer to this properly.
The notion is that a campaign should be good that you don’t even get the urge to try and ‘boost’ a character in some way to ‘get it over with’.
A bit like - as example - how Runescape is set up. People don’t ask to skip things there commonly because the game clearly conveys the progression itself is the content. Which is why people are willing to spend friggin 50 hours mining for a single exclusive drop from a single area to fulfill a single collection despite nothing else providing anything of value there.
We can talk about secondary characters… but even then a skip is a stop-gap measure for non-optimal design… and since that’s common (and kinda hard to achieve getting even remotely right) it’s viable to provide. You cannot expect excellence in finetuning this specifically as it’s mostly luck to achieve properly without intensive knowledge.
But the first-character experience is mandatory to get ‘right’ to a degree at least, which enforces the quality to be respectively high.
Yeah, the hyperbole was kinda the point of taking the argument to the extreme
Would it be fun? Nah.
So hence the line for it to be ‘too much’ can be a lot less for different people. That’s the notion behind the comment.
And now imagine instead of forcing it into the core gameplay loop you instead get a sort of consumable allowing you to enter a place which is abyss-based, where you got to follow those rifts and get your loot.
It’s still more content… but it doesn’t enforce to do it now or never. That’s a important thing. One is mentally exhausting (which includes lizards, mages, nemesis in campaign), the other is not even remotely as much.
And even if detached from the core gameplay loop it can still be problematic. For example Delve in PoE is a prime example with the sulphite storage limit. It was also the same with Synthesis (10 memory limit), is a bit of one with Betrayal, with Incursion and so on.
It’s never about content existing.
It’s about feeling forced to use it at any moment in time.
The task for a dev is to create content in a way that the player thinks they’re making a personal choice at any moment in time. Not the game telling you ‘here you got a nice rewards… want it? Then you gotta do it now’.
It’s always about the how they add it though.
That’s the topic. ‘Inclusion into campaign’… not ‘inclusion into the game’.
Sunken cost fallacy likely, for me it definitely is a part of that.
Which counters itself a bit since I do enjoy discussions about the game itself. And the game not being ‘bad’… just not having the potential fulfilled which it has.
Surprisingly easy, it’s basically just a flag for content spawn. Be it a pure flag of it it exists or having a multiplier for it.
The bigger thing is time investment needed, which is going through the whole codebase to connect it to every single relevant position. Which is hard if proper documentation (which far too few companies do when coding) isn’t upheld.
The boots are such a awful mess… they really don’t count since it’s just an awful implementation. Outdated concept and a lot more viable options available to customize the experience nowadays.
That’s a good question.
I enjoyed LE very, very much in 0.8 (2021). At that time, I had high expectations.
Then I got more and more disappointed, and stopped playing completely after a brief 1.1 trial (2024). It was, IMO, much less good than 0.8.
In this respect, I don’t “bother with the game” anymore. It has been uninstalled for ages.
But as I have such fond memories, I cannot help coming back to these forums once in a while to see if it finally takes a “good” (for me, obviously) turn.
And I suppose that’s what makes me bitter, how good this game was at first and how bad it has become. After all, you only really get hurt by things you love.
I don’t use “levelling” items. One of the pleasures of progression is finding better and better items. If there are 10 item slots, 1 slot filled by an overpowered item is 10% of the pleasure lost.
In my opinion, D4 has a much more intelligent system, for two main reasons: 1. They do seasons. Meaning you get only one mechanic at a time, a fun addition for a few months, replaced by something else the following season. LE doesn’t do seasons (they just use the word season because it is supposed to make money), everything piles up and becomes a bloated mess. 2. The season mechanics are introduced by quests, helping you understand them slowly, and not jumping at you from all directions even in the prologue. When you meet them, your character is already a little bit defined.
Very few games add stuff from the start. Additions usually come later in the game.
I am not discussing new content, just the fact to add it from the very first act of the campaign.
To conclude, another point of view: how do you think new players see the game when they get special chests, mages, nemesis, lizards, all in the first maps, before their character even has yellow gear and more than a few points in skills?
If I discovered the game today, I wouldn’t bother playing past act 1.
From my past experiences I would consider it is meant to be this way and won’t think about it at all. Was there, done that. I guess it’s a mentality thing. i once reloged into Genshin Impact after a very long pause and was bombarded with 20 banners and currency popups and whatnot. Took a look at it and uninstalled it again after a few minutes. But having X ammount of cotent to play was never an issue.
The future looks bright! I cannot wait for more LE content. 1100 hours and I see no end in sight for my enjoyment of the game, but let’s get some new stuff boys! WOO
Yeah, that’s the exact point. As a player being ‘bombarded’ feels like crap.
Genshin is awful in that regard for monetization. But the same goes for being bombarded with content. It overwhelms… too much information at once is exhausting.
The content existing is never a issue… just how it’s provided to us.
And providing it to us inside the campaign… when players are supposed to learn the general gameplay and not be bombarded specifically is a bad move. Unless it’s a mechanic specifically designed to enhance the experience, which I can nigh guarantee… it’s not.
Once more, it’s not about the quantity of content, it’s about the position of it.
You can screw up easily with basically nothing… and you can also provide the world and not have it happen.
It’s solely on the ‘how’ it’s done. And LE is relatively bad in terms of the ‘how’.
Same issue as PoE had years ago before backtracking and fixing content gradually, exact same mistakes even which have been dismantled by GGG in dev talks as well.
I’ve said it a good while ago already somewhere on this Forum… as someone making a game in a genre you better do everything possible to learn from the wins and losses of your competitors, which includes researching their dev-talks specifically and that’s obviously not done (as a ton of mistakes visible wouldn’t even exist then since they’re directly mentioned in those dev-talks).
Yeah, I do. This could just be another added layer to it.
Although, that said, I haven’t run with those boots in a LONG time. I wonder if the challenge from them has gotten less challenging now. Anyone used them recently?
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