You hit on an interesting point. LE’s campaign is terrible. They need to do what the Wolcen devs did. Make it so only your first ever character needs to run through the campaign. All future chars you make can start in the end-game with all passives points etc. This is a brilliant evolution for the genre. It’s the future.
Oh I need to disagree with that statement. LE has full-blown skill trees for every skill you chose to level. No other ARPG has that (that I’ve played). Grim Dawn is the closest, but it is very basic in comparison to the way you can completely change how skills work in LE.
Interesting, haven’t played Wolcen. And maybe I’m in the minority here, but I actually like playing campaigns. Iterating on content you already know works best in an RPG, it can feel satisfying because as you learn and build better or make different choices the effect of you improving is tangible during levelling because you can relate and compare to something else. Feeling satisfied in your progress character wise and also in terms of efficency. You know how long it takes you to get to certain points in the game, and you can use that as a reference for builds etc. I kinda enjoy improving and knowing exactly where to go, who to talk to etc. And particular nice content is like coming home to familiar territory. “oh finally at chapter/act X, lets goooo”
The campaign also serve as levelling content, learning your class, finding the items for that class. It allows for race events, skill challenges and more.
I realize a lot of people are sick of it in POE for example, and perhaps my sentiment will be different when I have thousands of hours in recent ARPGs… but even thinking about it, Diablo 2 the fun is starting from 0 and playing the campaign.
So yeah, personally I hope that it does not become the evolution of the genre.
PS: New LE player, but been enjoying the campaign so far. Some surprisingly good voice acting. The time travelling touch is so simple but brilliant. If they keep working on it and voice all the main then there’s nothing so far I’d mind playing again.
You want to go through the campaign with every character? Really? I have 20+ characters just to put that in perspective for you. I am bored out my mind doing this campaign.
I would say this, if the devs are going to force me to do the campaign with every new char, then at least let me have fun and experiment with my build as I do so. Right now I cannot as during levelling, loss of level on skills I spec out of is absolutely game-killing. No way you can experiment with builds while levelling a new char. Net result: everyone follows a build guide and creative thinking is actively supressed.
Just to be clear here, in Wolcen it is an OPTION. When you make a new char you can do the complete campaign again if you want to, or you can skip to the end-game if you want to (you will get all rewards you’d have gotten from the campaign). Nothing is forced on the player. Wolcen is very very good right now, if anyone is curious.
Grim Dawn has gone a similar way with a purchasable item (whose name I forget) that lets you skip entire difficulty levels (in GD each char needs to do the campaign THREE times normally).
That is because in D2 the campaign is the end-game.
Well… yeah. I find that enjoyable. And if you look at POE that’s their whole loop. You make a new character at league start and you get to maps and you do the mapping. Your idea is that everybody would start at endgame taking a significant chunk out of the game and, in my opinion, part of the game (because of the positives I listed in my first post)
I also have started playing on HC so perhaps my attitude towards this subject is slightly different because of the, more or less, inherent “oh well crap, guess we go again”
Again comparing to POE the current respec system is rather forgiving. But as a new player, it has annoyed me that it in general is forgiving in passives but if you make a mistake in Skills you have to re-level. And I agree in general that ARPGs should be more lenient when it comes to respeccing, and I think you should be able to respec a point in skills and keep it (even if at a cost)
Well, ha ha, fair. The point I was getting at is that IS the game. The whole experience is just that. And when you have played it enough times you fastclick all the dialogs and know exactly what to do etc, but people kept playing it. Even to this day.
But will you still enjoy it 20 new characters later?
No, as I mentioned above, it would be an OPTION per new character. Same as Wolcen and Grim Dawn. You can chose to do full campaign if you want to, I can skip it if I want to. (The main advantage to skipping is that, just like Last Epoch, the enemy density in Wolcen’s campaign is very low compared to end-game so you level very very very slowly. I might feel different if the LE campaign was in any way challenging, but it isn’t. I don’t think I have died during the LE campaign since 2020. It is an exercise in tedium for me).
Eh? In PoE, you remove a gem (which does NOT de-level) and slot in another one. How is that unforgiving? It is entirely free and instant.
Imagine now if that gem reverted back to level 1 when you removed it. THAT is the Last Epoch style of re-speccing. Would you play PoE if that happened when you removed a gem?
That change skills most of the time very slightly. This is from my viewpoint as an player who played P&P RPG#s most of his life and RPG’s and hack and slays on PC. There is so LITTLE evolution in PC game no matter how you look at it. The gameplay functions and systems are mostly the same in the end no matter how many points you invest where or what kind of thongs your toon is wearing.
I haven’t found a “ground-breaking” game since Diablo 1 and Borderlands as well as WoW because it took a step back from genre standarts and defined new ones or in case of Diablo it was a breath of life to a new genre.
When you played to much stuff gets old pretty fast and how often do I hear stuff like “Hey look at this that’s exactly the same as in the other game!”.
There is a lot of untaped potential in the market because outside of oldy but goldy skills everyone likes like “Fireball of nuclear Winter” (Thanks Hackmaster) there are a lot of new possibilitys out there that are not as overused as a fan favorite like Spin2Win what isn’t a bad thing to have but booooring!
20 toons is nothing ^^. Let’s talk again when you are in your 50s and still then there will most likely be a lot of people who did it more often ^^. Sooner or later everyone is overfed with it but at release playing the story again and again should be a thing.
I think he was referring to the passive tree in PoE, not skill gems. On a new character with no currency, it costs a whole lotta regrets to fix any mistakes you made on the tree.
Oh I am in my 50s already. When I mentioned 20+ I mean chars that have actually finished the full campaign. Like I said if the campaign were challenging or there was actually a chance I could DIE, or even if respeccing was not prohibitively expensive that I could experiment freely with my build… then campaign would be more tolerable.
Plus the chap I was responding to was on his first character. I also enjoyed the campaign back when I was levelling my first few chars.
LE is UGLY. The skills are not fun at low level. Releveling skills is a freaking joke! The characters and armors are ugly.
The game environment is just plain ugly. It looks old and dated as hell.
In D4 I have access to fun skills within a few levels. In LE, it takes ages to get anything even fairly fun going.
The whole releveling skills is a massive failure in design. What kind of developer that actually plays this game could possibly for one moment think this is fun? It’s not, it’s garbage.
The characters look like plastic. Though this really isn’t relevant once you get in-game.
The armors are all just so… meh. Aesthetically a vomit festival.
“Falconer” is not going to change any of this.
These are MY opinions, and I don’t expect anyone to agree with me.
Not sure why you end it with “its my opinion,” I think that is obvious. You are entitled to feel as you like. Enjoy your fun skills in Diablo, I will as well. D4 is the perfect game for when I want to turn my brain off and just kill shit. Nothing wrong with that.
And obviously Falconer wont change how any individual may feel, but it will make me happy, ya know, its MY opinion.
I dont know what you are talking about? I made like 5 chars allready over all years and campaign is chore, linear run forward nothing else.
End game is joke, run rifts like in D3 over and over until your eyes will bleed. Arena sux hard, there are no rewards, few items drops which is poor reward for all the work. 3 Dungeons are not enough and they sux so badly you cant die and respawn which is bloody annoying. So you cant even play glass cannon build.
The world is bland there are no demons or nice monsters just some random animals and void and similar. Its not Diablo world and cant be compared at all, its very uninteresting and amateurish. Graphics are medocre at best even at 4k.
Skill trees and itemization are decent and its only thing which make keep playing, but uniques are such as trash, all niche to all super niche builds. there are hundreds of them so find something for you build is impossible, plenty of meta builds doesnt even use any which sux so hard.
Multiplayer is so bad, if you do rifts with ppl, the master is choosing reward and getting plenty of uniques and exalted nodes for him self meanwhile you are getting glyphs and runes and gold 99% of the time, I am so angry its so unfair, worst multiplayer system all the time. Anyway the game is so laggy with roleback then its unplayable anyway.
Overall I would rate the game 3/10 just for the skill tree.
Well I have 1500 hours in lost ark, its complex and pretty hard game, all LE bosses are really easy in comparison. D4 looks really promising the freedom is what LE lacks in questing but it has really bad simple skill tree so you cant have it all I quess.
I’ve got also a lot of hours on lost ark. The dungeons and the legion commanders (I played up to Valtan/Vikas) put D4 in absolute shame, leagues above any graphics/style/detail comparison between D4 and more modest ARPGs. The daily grind and all the schedules bested me in the end.
The skills trees and itemization are exactly what is missing from D4, and is a large part of why I feel LE is the more competent arpg. I, along with many others, hoped Bliz learned from their mistakes in D3. They didnt in this regard, I put as much thought into D4 beta builds as I did when I played Mineceaft Dungeons.
I say will it again for like the 190304 times, I will enjoy D4 when it comes out, it is competent, its just not the game I and others thought it and hoped it would be.
Actually I have to agree with this point. Co-op monoliths are very unrewarding for the person who is not the map chooser. They need to make the rewards the same for all players, and let Corruption changes apply to all players.
An endgame that is specifically NOT rewarding to play in co-op is not a good thing.
