New player here. First post.
So, before I get any impressions of the game, I thought I would outline my thinking of the state of ARPGs and my hopes for LE.
I have been playing POE since closed beta and still plays it regularly at a casual 5-10 hours a week. Before that I spend countless hours playing D2/D2:LOD. With POE being my main ARPG for almost a decade, many of my thoughts below will be a reflection of the current state of POE and what LE and other ARPGs can learn from this.
Endgame
To me an ARPG is defined by its endgame. Sure, there is a storyline and lore and all that. But the player spends 95+% of its time interacting with the endgame content. The one thing I absolutely love about POE, and for me is the big retainer, is that the endgame is so diverse. With more than a handful different types of endgame content it is possible to cater your endgame to your preferences. This holds especially true with the Echoes expansion from earlier this year which gives the player more choice/freedom in designing their own endgame experience.
Power creep
I think power creep is generally frowned upon. I see this as a misconception. A game basically needs some sort of ever-increasing power to retain players. This especially holds true for an ARPG in which the overshadowing purpose is to find better items. If players get to a state where it is impossible (in the strictest sense of the word) to improve their build I have a hard time see players stay around for very long.
Power creep comes in many forms including: 1) stats power creep, i.e., higher tiers of existing stats 2) “more” power creep; introducing new stats to supplement previous stats, e.g. a stat to deal more of a certain damage type on top of existing stats 3) mechanical power creep: the introduction of more mechanics that raises the ceiling through a set of new interactions.
Over the lifetime POE has had massive power creep, especially over the last couple of years. Almost all of this power creep comes from 2) and 3). I completely understand the design philosophy behind this, but I think 1) is an equally reasonable way of increasing the power to combat new and harder content.
Complexity
ARPGs of the past was basically a one-click stat fest were scaling of a couple of mechanics were the best way to approach the game. Maybe as a reaction to this, POE has gone in the complete opposite direction. POE in its current state is basically a showcase of how complex a system you can create without making it completely uninteractable (is the even a word?). In that sense POE resembles a very heavy Euro-style board game. In both cases players needs to dedicate a lot of time to understand how all the things work and interact with each other in order to achieve their goals in the game, whatever it is to complete the hardest content, farming efficiently, making new builds etc.
I do no take this level of complexity as a prerequisite for a good ARPG. I definitely think that it is possible to create the same player experience and replayability in a less complex context. Continuing the board game analogy; it is often not the most complex games that see most playtime but rather the ones which are slightly less complex but are still equally rewarding.
Randomness
Many ARPGs are constructed around the thesis that the dopamine release players get from getting a very rare drop is what retains players, i.e., a sort of gamblers addiction. While I certainly agree that getting a big drop once in a while can keep you motivated at least short term I do not think that is the only viable way to retain players. The main issue I have with randomness is the it can be very hard to interact with and thus reducing the impact of the choices made by the players.
On the flipside the main issue with determinism is that it can transform the game into a simple state where all that matters is the time put into it and nothing else. The game simply becomes a “job”. A constructed example of such sort of “bad” determinism: Imagine that instead of getting that big drop, e.g., Mirror of Kalandra in the case of POE once every five thousand hours on average (or whatever the mean time between drop for a Mirror is) you simply earned a very small fraction of the item continuously and then after five thousand hours of playtime you will get the desired item deterministically. Even though this should, from a purely economic perspective, be better for players, as people are usually averse to randomness, I think this would make the game experience extremely bland. So, it is probably not optimal to strive for complete determinism either.
A hotly debated topic in the POE community is how deterministic item acquisition through crafting should be, especially in context of the state of the harvest crafting mechanic in the 3.13 patch. Again, the same principles apply; player agency increases the level of determinism but at the cost of the excitement that only randomness can give.
From a personal perspective, I really enjoyed the meticulous planning that harvest crafting required including 1) figuring out which items were efficiently/easy to craft and which were not 2) finding the optimal way of crafting a certain item. I even wrote some software that could simulate different crafting methods and their associated expected costs 3) the interaction of harvest crafting with other crafting mechanics, e.g., metacrafting and certain currency items 4) the fact the imperfect items actually had a value as it could be used as an input to the crafting process. As 3.13 progressed I grew more and more annoyed with the harvest crafting mechanic. Besides being vastly overpowered and overshadowing all other content it very quickly started to feel like a job where I just needed to put in x number of hours to complete my objective. I knew how many different crafts I would need on average to completely my different crafting projects and even though it felt good when a craft hit a 1/8 chance it was basically in such a controlled environment that it did not feel good in the “right” way. Ironically you can say that my meticulous planning to make the crafting process as efficient and deterministic as possible was the bane of my involvement with the crafting system itself.
This may be the Achilles heel for many ARPGs. It is apparently extremely hard to find a good balance between determinism/player agency and randomness/excitement when it comes to item acquisition. Leaning too much to one side makes the game feel like a casino and leaning too much the other makes the game feel like a job.
My hopes for LE
Overall, I hope that LE becomes something different than POE. I see no reason (or commercial space) for two ARPGs with the high requirements that POE has in its current form. Rather I hope that LE tries to fill out that space “slightly below” POE where players still get rewarded for investing time and mental resources into the game, but not to a point, where the game is basically balanced around knowing 100s of mechanics and interactions and spending dozens of hours each week to be in a good spot vis-a-vis the game content. I even think that the game should focus its balance more around an SSF playstyle rather than balancing around a trading environment.
I also hope that LE will embrace the power creep and allow/plan for a continued progress both in terms of current and future content. In POE you can basically only farm content up to mid-80s and on top of that the game applies a large XP penalty in order to control the speed of levelling to the level cap. I think this is a band aid solution rather than trying to address the fact that players tend to play a lot which instead should be met with having the content, both monsters and items, scale accordingly all the way.
I am sure that I will have a lot of fun exploring LE and digging in to the mechanics, items and content and following the development of this title over the next years. Hopefully a few years down the road both POE AND LE will stand as prime examples of ARPGs done right, offering different but equally rewarding long-term experiences.
My apologies for this wall of text. I hope that at least some of it made some sense.
/D7