So, If all people that play ARPGs care about is the endgame, problem is solved. Just remove the entire campaign from the games and everyone is happy ever after?
Ugh… I’m sure that wouldn’t go right.
Imagine playing “map device” simulator… People are really strange.
I was just looking for gear in the tier 20s that scaled it. I kept getting a lot of variations but none on a weapon that I needed.
Blood splat basically needs a specific item sold at the gambler which helps level. I had a few shards I slotted into them. Once I did this I was not able to find any improvements for many hours.
I think having a pitty system would be nice. It’s not like I was looking for a T7 exalted blood rip damage affix. That would be cool thou. In my opinion gear upgrades should not be more then ma few hours of grinding.
Then you’re saying you could have just picked up another helmet or body armor with an open prefix + other good stats, and crafted it?
Because I have 14 of those affix shards, while never having shattered any of those.
While I don’t think it should be a pay-to-progress, I get the sentiment of your post and agree wholeheartedly with you. I just want the option to skip the campaign.
Somehow never had any. Not sure. Guess it’s just the nature of rng. Had a lot for harvest thou.
I didn’t speak in absolutes and it sure would be nice if you didn’t do so in order to straw man me either.
The fact is that the campaign is not what brings most people back each season. And those that really hate doing it over and over should be given an alternative.
PoE doesn’t let you skip campaign in any way, or even get shortcuts like in LE, yet its numbers keep increasing. Clearly it’s not that big of an issue for most people each season.
Also, if you look at achievements on steam, you can clearly draw a tendency that the vast majority (as you call it) do not dabble deep into endgame.
It’s clearly not enough of an issue for the people that play PoE or are playing for the first and second time. What I’m saying is that your sample has confirmation bias.
So, apart from, “people who don’t mind have continued to not mind so much that they quit”, what can we really say?
Blizzard could tell us what percentage of season players choose to play the campaign… but they won’t. So really, we don’t know much except for the opinions expressed here/on forums. Most players don’t visit forums.
And then there are people who say something like, “adventure mode is more efficient… so I’m going to grudgingly choose efficiency over preference… but I sure would like to force everyone to play campaign”. This last sentiment is the weirdest to me, I just can’t wrap my head around it.
I would say only a very small part of returning players will play the campaign because the campaign is not efficient for leveling.
I don’t think anyone feels that way. Which is why I said
So you can add an adventure mode that is on par with campaign (though not easy to pull off) and give each person a choice.
But if an adventure mode were to be implemented equivalent to the campaign the same players would still complain because their issue is not with the campaign itself but a desire for fast leveling to get to endgame faster.
Repeating the campaign multiple times or repeating an adventure mode that has the same leveling pace as campaign is effectively no different. Both have the same boredom factor. The reason why people like D3/D4 campaign skip is simply because it’s much faster to level up and reach endgame.
If you play table-top RPG, you must be one of those guys that only care about starting the campaign at level 10, and thinks everyone who enjoys the early levels, the narrative and the joy of developing their characters are just wasting time.
Stop that. The campaign is part of every game in the genre. It will not go away.
You can argue and ask them to make campaign more appealing, but there will always be a campaign before you reach endgame.
There are all sorts of players, so I don’t doubt you are correct. I wouldn’t complain, I’d just be so happy I had an alternate.
I don’t.
You want me to stop something I don’t do, based upon a person you just made up. I am laughing, it is funny. But I think you weren’t joking.
You seem to think that I’m arguing for the campaign to go away. I am not. I enjoyed the D3 and D4 campaign. After PoE was complete enough for me to understand just how twisted it was, I liked it… once. After that, I hated it enough to stop playing PoE. LE’s campaign is… not my cup of tea.
I just enjoy things differently than you, telling me to stop is not going to be worth the effort you’ve already put in.
The issue isn’t the end-game, at least not for me. It’s choices along the way.
I play D4 more than LE. Even though LE:s skill system is superior to D4 in all the ways, I just can’t stand to run the same campaign over and over again. The same reason I don’t play POE.
Even though I technically play the same content every single time in D4, it feels different each time, and that makes a huge difference.
Yeah, it sure helps me think that when you decide to voice your opinions on why you dislike the campaign on this thread, which is about paying 10 dollars per cycle to skip it. I’m pretty sure anyone who’s willing to PAY to skip the campaign would prefer if it didn’t even exist at all, so they could save money, huh? Sorry if it was not the case.
Anyways, what I meant on my previous post was this:
Since all games have campaigns, you’re not being forced to play the campaign if you choose to play a game. You CHOOSE to play the campaign, because the campaign is A PART of the game you choose to play… There is not a single game on earth that is made only exclusively by the end-game parts, where no one “is forced” to play the early game.
POE has had events where you could only play delve and leveling that way was sooooo much more enjoyable.(Those have been the only times I’ve return to the game in the last 4 years or so) They just gave you campaign rewards as you hit leveling milestones.
POE players love the endgame sooo much that they put up with doing the campaign on every character.
The vast majority of people counted in steam achievements aren’t those that return every season and buy MTX. So apples and oranges.
D3 and D4 have smartly added ways to skip the campaign if you choose. And it feels wonderful. Torchlight Infinite shortened the campaign.
Last Epoch’s campaign isn’t great as it is but at least it isn’t overly long.
You are speaking for everyone in this quote. You probably want to stop that. As much as you jump on others for doing it, you do it quite a bit yourself. I have tended to it in the past, so I try really hard to not do it any more. It’s actually kind of freeing to just say what I do/don’t like, rather than having to pretend I know what most people want.
This is not true for me. They don’t have the same boredom factor. Adventure mode is less boring and less… claustrophobic? constrained? Scripted? In the campaign I do what needs to be done in a certain order, and clicking/skipping through dialog is part of that. It sucks the joy out of playing the game. It breaks my immersion.
I absolutely think campaigns are important in these games. They give the world depth and color. In every Adventure play through I call back to the campaign. But that doesn’t mean I want to run it more than once or twice.
Yeah, that’s fair. But there are quite a few that do fell that way, because I’ve talked to some.
Also fair. I didn’t say you felt the same, just that it wouldn’t really solve the issue since, from personal experience only, I feel that quite a large number of people actually just want a fast skip to endgame.
Obviously some just want some alternate way of leveling that they enjoy more, even if the pace is similar and would be happy with that.
Honesly, I wouldn’t expect anything like that (it will never be paid for certain) until 1.5, if ever.
And Mike said they’re working on dungeons (rebalancing, changing procedural generation, etc) so they should be a much more reliable way to do campaign skips then.
A trend is still a trend. You don’t break the curve by analyzing a subset, the curve just becomes more or less accentuated.
So hardest content → less people doing it. So in a PoE league, there are still more people that just do campaign and easy maps than people that do red maps and other endgame stuff.
This is debatable. Because D4’s campaign was the high point of the game in my opinion. Which means that now I will never ever ever again play the high point of the game because it’s not efficient for leveling.
I actually think LE kind of has the ground work to have the campaign maps, but not have to follow the campaign, already. I’m sure you know this, I’m just speaking for context; if you group up, and your group mate has already gone ahead, they can skip you ahead.
I could see them doing something like that for alts, i.e. your alts get all the bind points you have (so they are account-wide). It’s not, “never do the campaign again”, because you’d have to do it once per cycle, but I’m not trying to be hard-ass about it. I’d just like some options (especially for alts). They would have to have a QoL adjustment to the exclamation marks to make sure you know which quests give passives/idols (or have an alternate way to get them).
It IS more efficient, but it’s something you can do now, so I imagine people are already doing this (although someone needs to do the campaign first to get it started).
If that’s the sole reason for the choice then it would mean ‘the campaign is a overall great experience’ even for a returning player.
This would entail the campaign to be on par or above the alternative or end-game.
The crux of the issue is that in many cases the campaign simply is either not rewarding enough or not engaging enough, sometimes both.
The earlier aspects of the PoE campaign for example do decently well, even as a experienced player you can run into some segments where you struggle a bit and need to actively put in some work to adjust your character, which is happening less for slower people since they get more loot in general as they’re clearing more.
But even in PoE the general consensus is that the second half of the campaign is a bit ‘drawn out’ to a degree, with too few segments inside which keep one engaged heavily, quickly going ‘through the motions’.
All in all I’m more leaning into re-using the campaign segments for higher difficulty which can be chosen as you move along and complete it or even providing a way to level up alternatively with a second character. Doesn’t need to be faster, just a bit more streamlined since the long running around and backtracking is often causing this mental fatigue.
If you play through the same narrative for the 10th time then yes, generally the agreement would be ‘why the heck are you doing that to yourself?’. One has to be especially dedicated to experiencing a narrative content repeatedly without any alternative routes or outcomes at all. You only do that if you really enjoy the premise, after all… very few people re-read a book, re-watch a movie/series or re-listen to a audio-book.
‘We have already done it so it must be the best’.
That’s generally a bad argument, if you can’t answer a ‘why?’ question related to it then that’s a ‘you’ issue and not a general one.
Despite the aspect that that’s not even remotely what was asked for.
And that’s one of the weirdest takes this month.
Congratulations on achieving that!
No, it’s not a positive thing, think about it why it’s so odd.
First of all the notion of the ‘10 dollar payment’ has a meaning behind it.
Secondly OP is more then right to voice opinions, who are you to deny that notion? If you actively do then you’ve no reason to be in a forum in the first place.
Thirdly, pushing the agenda over to ‘OP wants to get the campaign to go away because he would save money for a not-yet and likely never implemented function’ is not only hyperbole but abstraction on quite a few levels too many. It’s nonsensical to even think about.
Factually wrong?
Campaigns were a thing which got implemented with narrative focused games, which are a improvement for one-time experiences especially in solo-games.
For a game which is to be repeated for a focus on progression a narrative is at best a icebreaker for newcomers. Come for the narrative, stay for the gameplay. It enhances the experience and is by no means hinged on it.
Yes, also nonsensical. You play the campaign because the game gives you no other way to experience it. Especially in the diablo-clone community many players come in giving ‘0’ shits about the campaign, story or any lore. All they want it hack’n’slash fun with interesting loot, a well-paced progression and good boss-design through combat mechanics.
I actually do that a lot. Some books I’ve read more than 30 times already. But that’s not the reason why I actually prefer doing the campaign several times, both in LE and in PoE.
It’s because I much prefer the structure of “go there, do this” than “go wherever and do whatever you want”. The first keeps me going, even if it’s something I’ve done dozens of times already, the second makes me feel aimless and discouraged.
I’m pretty sure she was referring to all games in the genre. All diablo-clones have a campaign. Even most of the small indie ones.
If the subset consists of just the people returning every season then yes that subset is what matters for this discussion. The subset that play the campaign once and bail aren’t relevant. Those people are just waiting for a campaign update.
You are simply stating that nobody should have a choice because the new alternative may be more efficient. If the non campaign option takes a little longer but doesn’t require redoing the boring campaign, I’ll take that option. The fix is to eitehr may a fun and dynamic campaign or add an alternative that is more fun.