Yeah I got into this game so much more than PoE just due to the esthetics and the delivery of the quests.
Donât think your image represents most ARPG players, but anyways.
PoE IS the fine chicken dinner because the QUALITY is there. The delivery is totally fine for where it is. Have you ever played Planescape Torment, Pillars of Eternity, or Divinity OS? There is TONS of reading to be done in those games, lots of wall of text moments. I wonât say that story is the #1 most important thing in ARPGS. However, if you want deep lore and story, itâs there in PoE and itâs high quality. How else would you deliver a deep story in an action-based game without reading? All stories canât be introduced through pure gameplay.
Anyways all Iâm saying is that the story, lore, and VA should be high quality and should be cared about. Again, as someone who does skip the story for the most part, PoE and D3 are worlds apart in terms of quality, and PoE having that quality did have an effect on the way I enjoyed the game. I remember when Synthesis league dropped and I was in absolute AWE of the voice acting and lore of Cavas. The synthesis areas themselves were so rich. You want this in a game.
There are lore series out there on youtube, there are even new posts hitting the front page of Reddit every league trying to guess where the lore is going next with a lot of people weighing in. Providing an experience like this for the niche audience who is going to read every line of dialogue and scour every fan theory is super important, not just for those people but also for the much larger group of people who like interacting with quality products and feeling like the world they are escaping to in-game is alive, evolving, and immersive.
Part of being better than your competition is thinking out the details and providing something more than what they do. If almost all other ARPG stories are shit, why would EHG be like âWelp, might as well not focus on itâ if they have an opportunity to provide a better experience, even if itâs just for a certain group of ARPG players? You can easily go âLUL Imagine paying attention to the story in ARPGSâ but maybe thatâs because an ARPG hasnât come along that changed the way we interact with stories?
When I think about some of the most influential games that left a long-lasting impact on me, Fallout NV, Last of Us, RDR, Witcher 3, BOTW, Morrowind/Oblivion, Chrono Trigger, Zelda: OOT, Majoras Mask, Baldurs Gate series, Diablo 1 + 2, Bioshock (all of them), Assassins Creed 2, etc. They all have 1 thing in common: An amazing and unforgettable story and world that kept me completely immersed until the very end.
Personally if I were a developer Iâd be thinking long and hard about the ways I could improve upon the genre, and story is a major one that is often overlooked and could quite frankly be a game-changer if done properly. Idk I kind of lost my point somewhere in here but I guess Iâm trying to say that story is more important than people think, even if they wouldnât normally pay too much attention to it.
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I think it does, very much so.
Canât agree with PoE having a story that many people know aboutâlet alone knowâoutside of that niche audience. Itâs not the kind of game where walls of text is an acceptable delivery method.
âWho plays ARPGs for the story?â is a meme, and for good reason, and though I agree that LE should seek to break out of that, the current delivery prevents that from being possible. What it needs if itâs going to do that is high quality, polished cutscenes, get as far away from the WoW-style !/? âquestâ system as humanly possible, use NPC companion dialogue during quests to offer more exposition, etc. The one thing D3 did really well for their lore was the voice acted lore books that play when you pick them up. The less you interrupt playersâ gameplay and make them stand still in town to âdeliveryâ your story, the better.
These things (and the lack of some of them) are why story in ARPGs are a meme, though. These games commit the same errors, the same way, for the same design reasons (especially with regard to time/cost). When I see that ! over an NPC I immediately know Iâm going to skip that dialogue as fast as possible with a groan and a âHurry up, donât care.ââand all my friends who play these games are the same way. You might say weâve been conditioned to react this way.
Hereâs something else I think people are missing. Not all âwalls of textâ are created equal. I donât mind it one bit in games like FF7, Chrono Trigger, Star Ocean 2, etc. In a game like Diablo 2 or PoE? No way. The entire point of the game is completely different. The distribution of focus and attention is inverse. ARPGs, and LE in particular, wonât get away from this by doing the same thing every other ARPG does.
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I can understand the reason why you want to just jump to end game, hell even I feel it at times, but once it becomes to easy to get the new thing you want you just dont want it once you have it. This was a problem in D3, want to make a new character, instant level 70 and fully geared up. Was excited to play the character and then 5 minutes later didnt want to because I had nothing left to work towards.
An option Iâm thinking of could be make it so idols are saved as account instead of character so you could put some insanely strong idols you got on your main onto a new character to make the leveling easier without eliminating it altogether.
I didnât have this issue. I donât think itâs as universal as youâre making it sound.
I donât mind the concept, but the strongest idols are class specific. This would make almost no difference in leveling, especially since you have to unlock the slots.
I just bought the game recently during the steam sale and have leveled several characters through the campaign (or part of it in some cases) already. Havenât done much end-game stuff since I was mostly just trying different things out and figured I didnât want to do much end-game content before multiplayer was implemented.
I think the game should absolutely have an alternative leveling method or way to skip the story entirely. Path of Exile continues to make a huge mistake by requiring people to play through the campaign on every single character. Itâs a large reason why I skipped 90% of PoE leagues. I canât stand to play through 10 acts over and over again. As someone who tends to play a lot of alts rather than stick to one character for a long time, itâs a huge deterrent to wanting to play an ARPG if I have to go through a long story on every alt just to try something new. I donât care how fast speed levelers get through it, itâs still boring and is just an obnoxious barrier to trying out new builds.
If you consider how many of us played Diablo 2 in the early 2000âs (or some still today and many will be repeating it soon when D2:R releases), I think you can see why letting people skip past the story actually can increase replayability rather than reduce how long people play your game. In D2, especially back before they added the ability to respec, we leveled dozens of characters. We didnât do it because we wanted to repeat the story over and over again (though that option is always there for people who enjoy it), we just wanted to try different builds. Many people had all of their alts rushed and didnât play through any of the story at all outside of skill and stat point quests. We played the game a lot. We made lots of characters. If I had to slog through the entire game slowly without being able to rush on every character, I think I would have made a lot fewer and given up on it sooner.
I think there could be multiple ways of doing this.
- One way to implement this would be to add a consumable you can get from the monolith or perhaps even just buy it from a vendor in that area. That would mean youâd need at least one character already progressed to that point. Consuming the item on a character would complete all story quests and grant all waypoints (and give you all idol slots and passives from the quests). It wouldnât level you though. You could then choose to level yourself in story areas or via the arena. You could also remove arena keys so you could do this without having to farm any keys (Iâm honestly not sure what purpose arena keys serve, but as I said I havenât done much end-game content). You could give arena a significant XP buff for low levels as well to make it faster up to 40 or 50.
Doing this wouldnât require implementing a separate game mode or character creation options.
Perhaps as a slightly more controversial option, the consumable could also just level you right to 40 or 50. If people are at a point where the story is just a slog or a barrier to access the part of the game they view as fun, I think skipping right to it could actually keep that kind of player around longer. If the story or leveling process is just viewed as a chore, it wonât actually add any value any longer for that person.
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Another alternative would be to modify the arena system so that completing X number of waves automatically completed the story up to Y point if you hadnât already done so. I donât recall where the first arena entrance shows up, but you could add earlier access to it if needed and warn players upon entering that theyâd be skipping story quest progress. That seems like itâd be more complex to implement though.
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You could just have a check box at character creation that said âskip storyâ with a warning for new players to avoid it (or leave it inaccessible until they had completed the entire story at least once). The character would still start at level 1 (unless you wanted to just have an option to skip the story and start at level X), but would start in end-time with the entire story already completed, passives and idol slots automatically granted from quest completion and all story waypoints granted. This option also wouldnât require adding any new content or entire new game modes just to accommodate people whoâd like to skip the story.
In any case, I think you could fairly easily implement a story skipping method that didnât require an entire new mode just by somehow letting people auto-complete the story and using existing systems like arena as a power leveling tool (or just letting them skip right to level X).
Iâd also point out that in a game that is entirely themed around time-travel, it makes perfect sense to have a way to skip the story. That actually makes me think of another potential option. You could have an NPC near where you start on a new character. Talking to the NPC could have an option that would let you open a time portal and skip to end-time having auto-completed the story (and possibly some number of levels, but you could also leave them at level 1 if that was preferred).
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