Yeah, I get it. I wasn’t thrilled about it either, but you could skip through all the dialogue and cutscenes. It really was more a question of whether it’s worth it to try to salvage it or start fresh on the alternate mode. I think they made the right choice for that game.
comparing apples an oranges, you play for a living
Actually he doesn’t, he has a proper job (which might even be a day job now if memory serves).
1 Like
Yeah, i also have this perception, from what i noticed in the recent online games trends what seems to be bringing the big bucks to companies (i hope that’s the reason) is giving players literal work to do daily.
The entire "online meta"of this new generation is centered around “daily objectives” that reward you obscenely more than any other activity in the game. That’s true for both pve and pvp games. So the current mmo meta is login, do your dailies and log out, and it seems a lot of players have been mesmerized by this system.
I believe the advance of marketing practices worldwide and better(not wiser) understanding in “human behavior” “corrupted” the gaming industry quite badly. We are almost at the limit of how much you can push profit over the quality of the product.
Personally i treat Arpgs like mini-adventures(which is why i prefer hardcore), min-maxing a character doesn’t has any appeal for me whatsoever. My mindset is enjoying the journey, and as long the journey is entertaining i will reach an interesting end anyway. So i would be fine with they allowing players to choose how they want their journey (do the campaign, do the arena, do monoliths, whatever).
And here i think is where i am completely biased but i feel like when you play in softcore, a lot of the elements that make the Arpg genre great are lost, for example:
1- The excitement from winning a hard fight(since in softcore you can simple try again over and over again with no real repercussion besides your time loss) .
2- The excitement of finding good items( since in softcore if you drop “item x”, you will have it forever, so every other “item x” that you drop will now feel bad.
And since Arpgs are mostly single player games by nature, once you lose your “adventure” and “reward” drive, all that’s left is some pointless grind to perfection(min-maxing). So most people in softcore tends to just rush straight to that end, and this creates the balance nightmare current online arpgs suffer, where if you balance things more around low-time investment players you get a shallow d3 but if you balance things around high-time investment players you get an obscure PoE.
In the end, for ARPGs we could even say that playing in softcore is playing for the destination, while playing hardcore is playing for the journey. And i believe for a singleplayer pve game, focusing on the journey has a lot more room for “replay ability” than focusing in the destination.
1 Like
Like I stated to you before. I think we need to give EHG more time to get things “completed” before writing the campaign completely off. There are breakpoints in the campaign already with the mastery being roughly halfway in.
There is a lot of work to be done, but the team did not paint themselves into a corner. They have a flexible framework with the epoch opening time wormholes into different parts of the game going forward. That can be done with an alternate chain of events to get to the end game.
Basically, you could talk to an NPC, it would recognize that the game account has completed all available content then give you the completed epoch and let you go on your way to level however you wish. Could be through a bunch of randomized story points told from a different point of view.
True, but the campaign is unlikely to change much in the near future (other than getting chapter 9). Everybody has a different threshold for how much running through the campaign they can cope with. I wouldn’t be surprised if some people play through it a few times & then get bored of the campaign & wish there were some other way to level up to get to the monolith.
It’s only roughly halfway on the assumption you get it around lvl 25 & finish the campaign around lvl 55. It’s probably around 20% of the time you’ll spend in the campaign though.
1 Like
For most it seems that getting the mastery and idol slots are all that are needed to complete the campaign, which I was loosely defining as halfway of the campaign, not the total amount of levels.
How is it a waste compared to just doing a “rift-like system”???
You’re literally doing the same thing: killing monsters for xp to level up. The only difference is that for the first few hours you’re completing quests at the same time.
I honestly just don’t understand this. It’s a game, the gameplay is killing monsters and getting loot. How is the fact that there is a story that you don’t even have to pay attention to bothering some people?
1 Like
probably because monoliths have clearing incentives like targeted gear or XP, while quests are on rails and force you to go through the inefficient tilesets, but don’t get me wrong, i prefer the story to the monoliths.
It’s mostly because it’s mandatory and meaningless (in current form, at least).
This is sad. People at EHG thought the story, wrote it, tweaked it. They wrote all the dialogues. They thought the environments, the location of important NPCs. They prepared side quests along the main story. They put many information everywhere, many elements about their world. And what did they do that for ? For “a story that you don’t even have to pay attention to”.
I may be that kind of “old fool”, but I remember times when stories mattered. Times when the devs’ work received more respect. Times where it was considered normal to read the information, to read the dialogues and not to skip everything in order to zoom zoom on the maps. And I miss some aspects of those times.
I personaly got temporarily bored of the campaign because I did it about thirty times in three months. Then I had to stop for a while and during the two following months I only did it maybe five more times. I’m currently doing it again, second time since the last patch landed. I still read many dialogues and guess what… each playthrough I discover new details in the dialogues, in the backgrounds, etc. The campaign is far more rich than it looks at first sight. And the whole world is very rich.
I agree, we don’t have to pay attention. But we should.
2 Likes
You kinda missed the point. I’m not saying I don’t care or pay attention, I am saying for these people who are “bored of the campaign” and want an alternate leveling method: “Hey guess what, just turn your brain off and kill monsters, you barely have to pay attention to the story”
I feel like there probably shouldn’t be a way to just “skip” the campaign, partially due to the reasons you mentioned.
I’m one of these persons who want an alternate way to level. I didn’t miss the point, all is related. But I will not continue to argue about this, it’s been a very long discussion here. The devs have read all and have already responded, I’m happy with the response.
This is really a lot to do with how it has so much in common with D3 and PoE, and those games have almost no emphasis on story at all with regard to the primary gameplay loop. You’re not going to get away from that mentality by being like the games that encourage it.
The story in D1 & 2 didn’t have anything to do with the primary gameplay loop either & they’re several decades old. The aRPG genre has always skirted a lot closer to the a than the RPG.
1 Like
Yeah, but there are games that have more of a story focus. Grim Dawn, Dungeon Siege 2, Divinity OS (though this isn’t strictly an ARPG in the normal sense). LE is strikingly close to D3 in how it plays while the devs are saying they want to use some of PoE’s model for the future development of the game. Seems pretty far removed from the story-focused games in the genre.
What would be nice is if key points in the campaign dropped class (and even specialty) specific, leveling uniques. i.e. uniques which are really good while getting to 55-60, but become obsolete after. Then, at least, you “graduate” to monoliths as a means to start the “real” gear hunt.
Just 2 cents…
I liked the item choices in Wolcen after completing quests. Already suggested to implement something similar in LE. Could be uniques or rates with 1-2 fix stats that help with leveling, all according to the class you play.
1 Like
I know you don’t think there is an emphasis on the story in PoE, but literally every league is designed with super in-depth lore and the story has had a TON of work put into it. Dialogue, voice acting, characters, and lore are like 11/10 in PoE if you actually take the time to dive into it. Diablo 3 is a different story. Careless dialogue, horrible cutscenes, bad plot, poorly thought out lore, poorly designed characters. It’s no wonder they added an adventure mode when the story is a 1/10 in terms of quality.
Think of a meal at a fine dining restaurant. If I order a roasted chicken dish, obviously the main focus is the chicken, but when there are some insanely well thought out sides with good flavor combinations that pair well with wine and the dish itself, it adds so much more to the meal than if a chef ripped open a bag of mixed greens and dumped some tomatoes and store-bought dressing onto it, and threw in some 3 hour old fries.
This is how I see the story of these games. Sure, maybe a decent % of people don’t really care about the story, but even as someone who glances over dialogue and story myself, when the quality of the story is bad it’s SO apparent. It actually kinda sneakily hinders my enjoyment of the game, as weird as that sounds.
A year or two from now I’d love to speak as highly of LEs story and lore and voice acting just like I do of PoEs. Wanting them to add some off-story content for bored people kind of undermines that. I could be wrong but I think EHG has a similar goal when it comes to quality. I can’t imagine they want to spend years developing this story just to then give players the opportunity to skip it outright. I know if I put in that much work I wouldn’t want that either. I’d try to be that roasted chicken dish with fancy-ass jus and vegetable and spice combinations that makes everyone wanna order it because it’s such a well-thought out dish.
1 Like
The problem with PoE’s story is its delivery. Walls of text (even though I appreciate them being voice acted) in a fast-paced game just doesn’t mesh well. It does almost nothing to dissuade you from just spacebar’ing every dialogue interaction and I’d honestly be surprised if even 3% of the player base has a clue about any of the story/lore behind the game. I have a vague idea, but that’s mainly from watching lore videos because again, the delivery in PoE is so poor. It doesn’t matter what might make it interesting if you can’t incorporate a proper hook in the first place. It also has almost no cut-scenes, and the few it has are very short and don’t add much.
I just can’t agree that PoE’s is this fine chicken dinner. If you want to use food analogies, D3 would be McDonald’s and PoE would be Dairy Queen–slightly better, but mostly the same.
This is pretty much the genre for most players:
1 Like