Even though respeccing within a mastery is fairly easy in LE.
The sheer amount of different builds you can do within one mastery is crazy with LE’s skill system.
If a player puts in the effort and time to level 10 paladins to play them slightly different, they should be able to do this.
Storage capacity is no real concern anymore in todays day in age. (Especially for something like characters saves, which do not cost alot of space, we are talking <1mb per character)
And how many characters do you suppose we have played over the years? (For me it’s easily in the hundreds.) How often do you think we want to repeat the same non-content, because in that game pretty much everything before maps is irrelevant by design. If you take 3 or 4 characters just to the end of the campaign, you’ve burned a day on just that with almost nothing to show for it. The campaign in these kinds of games only has value on the first (and maybe second) character. After that, people just want to play the endgame systems. This is because the campaign doesn’t offer anything once you complete it, so either you go the D3 route and acknowledge it’s basically pointless while designing the game for how players actually play -or- you have to go back and find a way to add meaning to the campaign so that it can be see as legitimate content by the players.
I am a PoE vet since beta. I have lost count as to the 100’s of characters I have played myself. What I am meaning is what is 5% of the playtime relative to the rest of the time spent on the build. It’s a drop in the ocean.
Too many players nowadays seem to think that the endgame is the beginning. That is like reading a story backward. Skipping to the end because you know the ending of the tale. What I am trying to explain from a gaming developer’s point of view is that you should start setting different goals in the campaign. I mentioned earlier a level 13 weaver kill on HCSSF.
This is just an observation that there are many impatient players. That statement is not meant to criticize your time or efforts.
I am attempting to determine what is causing this trend, beyond just burn-out, or boring, or just instant level from the character creation screen in WoW.
I have stated before, you have to have that hook in either the story or as a part of the engaging features of the game or it will fail to entertain. Each player will come to the result of entertainment differently.
I don’t think you are complaining just to complain. You have genuine concerns and like to see LE succeed where others have failed you in the past. You’re invested in LE and that is a good thing, but to spend a majority of the time on the negative brings your spirit down. This is making it more difficult to grow in many other ways.
I think there are faults in LE, sure I do, you have read plenty of them. However, this is not one of them, yet. Maybe after release, once things get stabilized in the MP 0.9 expansions. With the release of more content. After playing that content then that is WHEN I would bring your concerns up. I just think it’s a bit premature to keep beating the drum of a boring campaign when it’s not even finished yet.
It’s pretty much this simple. Asking players to create artificial goals, because the content lacks purpose inherently, isn’t the correct approach to the problem. It’s not a player issue, fundamentally; it’s a design issue. It’s a symptom of so many ARPGs thinking they have to start where D2 did, copy its base framework. They don’t. D3 showed one valid approach. Grim Dawn showed another. LE is in this in-between space where it does neither correctly. I don’t think it’s improper to think this should be fixed before release unless they just don’t care how well it will be received on release.
I am not attempting to have players create artificial goals. I am stating them because for many that is what drives them to achieve more. That does not work for you, so I won’t belabor the issue.
I think we can agree that any new game will lack content. So from that point. Let us take a little journey together.
It took at least two expansions in the gold box era of games to get to the end. Go back to the Pools of Radiance setting you are level 1 and try to go meet Eliminster in Pools of Darkness at that point you will be blasted to smithereens before you even thought about going into the planes.
So from a content perspective, there is plenty there but it took many years to get there. Pools of Radiance, Curse of the Azure Bonds, Secrets of the Silver Blades, and Pools of Darkness were considered the golden age for a reason.
Now fast forward to today, we demand more, in less time, perfectly done without taking any deviations, forgetting the developer’s vision, it’s about what I want.
Never played Gold Box games, so your point only makes vague sense to me, but it seems you’re comparing apples to oranges here. However, the issue here is whether LE’s campaign should matter or not. Current design suggests “no,” so this is why I say:
They need to decide what sort of game this is supposed to be. This limbo space won’t be acceptable forever.
I don’t think that’s completely the player’s fault.
Not speaking specifically about LE here, but ARPGs and MMOs seem to have shifted to where the meaningful content is at the endgame/max level with everything prior being just a means to an end to get there.
Okay, now I understand your point better. I was just having a hard time piecing together all the various points.
I understand that, I guess where did this viewpoint come from that endgame is the beginning. I know it was not the mainstay in things other than WoW or Blizzard games. I know in D&D the end was the end of the story / game that the DM had to tell.
I guess I am having a difficulty in understanding where this shift really happened, what caused it. Then maybe I could understand your guys points better.
I think it has to do with whenever builds became the emphasis over the story, if I had to hazard a guess. From here add in loot chase, post-game content, dungeons/raids, etc., and it’s something of a snowball. Understandable that the beginning of this change would be hard to see. Maybe it was even with those “Munchkin” type players in D&D campaigns…
Thank you for expanding on your thoughts. The topic of the endgame is the beginning is a research project of mine. I have written more manuals, books, and games that I care to count.
I guess I am having difficulty in accepting the fact that players do not care about the three core fundamentals of gaming anymore. That is to have fun, be engaged (entertained) and share the experience with others.
Which could be what the OP is really trying to say is, I am not fulfilled by the original ARPG design any longer.
Well, if you want to drill way down, D&D started out as more or less a narratively driven game with combat mechanics added to facilitate that. Those mechanics evolved until they slowly became the game. Video games cranked this up to 11. D2 is actually perfect as an example because it’s the archetypal ARPG. I’ve played hundreds of different build ideas in that game and it was easily by the 2nd or 3rd character that the story was no longer relevant since the novelty is only good once and multiplayer was a big part of that game.
ARPGs seem to have different core fundamentals than tabletop games (or even other genres of video games in general). Builds and loot are probably the twin pillars at its foundation, then other supporting structures are usually crafting, multiplayer, trade, and challenging endgame content. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive to at least 2 of the 3 you listed, but they don’t always overlap that well either. However, I think the 3 you listed suffer from not really being about gaming in particular since you could say the same about nearly any hobby or social event. There’s something different about gaming, but pin-pointing what that precisely is may be difficult.
I know how D&D started. I still have an original brown box. So we can spare those details.
I do not know about perfect, but a lot of people point to that. I consider other titles that way. I guess like you are saying it’s a shift to the action side over the RPG portion into more of an action min/max optimizer pinnacle build over the story and the means to get to that end.
Wasn’t implying you didn’t know how it started. I was just providing the context for how that transitioned from being narratively focused to combat/action and, yeah, the min-max side of it–though we saw plenty of D&D players doing this back in the day anyway.
You could just do the monolith after act 1, when you get your class unlocked, might take a bit of time to get going, but as soon as you get those levels in it should go pretty fast =)
And if you feel like taking a break from it you can go unlock the rest of passive points/idols, with those level from the monolith you can just run through all the stuff pretty quickly o.o
The more I think about it. There is a lot of MMO expectations in ARPG’s now. Blizzard through either sheer genius or idiocy has reduced the mundane to a mouse or keypress to eliminate the decades worth of work in an instant. Then people are wondering why they are not satisfied. I recall finding my first Shako and hooted and hollered so much my better half thought I lost it.
Not sure what you mean by this.
The instant level up by paying money the player wipes out decades worth of work that the Blizzard team spent over the years creating and maintaining by means of the story, lore, and books, etc. I concede it was a different market verse what it is now but that instant leveling has put a huge damper on the RPG side of things.
Ah, yeah. That ones a complicated topic. The part that most relates to this thread, imo, is the question of whether it’s worth dev time to produce a campaign/story that players just rush through to get to the “real” game. This is where I think GD has the right idea, because the difficulty skip tokens might seem like they undermine the campaign, but in reality they enable it due to how enemy scaling works relative to your own level. Player prefer to farm on the highest setting because it has the best drops (and is honestly more fun in general). Rather than the campaign being meaningless and the endgame being focused around the arenas or “rogue-like” dungeons, most areas of the game have purpose due to the existences of MIs and player desire to target farm them.
D3 basically gave up on the story mode and willingly abandoned it in favor of a more coherent progression system that favored players’ natural tendencies. Was actually pretty smart.
I would rather EHG rework how the campaign actually operates in a few ways so that it can be as much a part of endgame as echoes–or better yet, a hard alternative to them. What a twist that would be for the genre! That said, until the campaign has some purpose to exist beyond the devs feeling its an obligatory element to the genre, I’d rather be able to skip it on my alts. It’s fine if the first character has to run it, but it serves no real purpose in the game right now and the idea of running through it over and over turns me off from playing more alts.
The campaign has always been a sore spot for me with PoE, but at least that game always had a lot else to drive me through it. This game is missing some of those elements currently. I really hope they fix it before release because I want this game to succeed as much as possible and I just don’t think repeating the obvious mistakes of its predecessors is pushing it toward that goal.
To be fair, the writing was utterly aweful, the characters had worse dialogue than the books we use to teach our kids how to read and the plot had all the twists of a pair of straight lines. Not subjecting the player to that every time they wanted to make a new character/season/etc was a Good Thing. I don’t have particularly high standards for story from an aRPG, but D3 failed to meet even them!