I think PoEs atlas system is far and away better than any other arpgs single end game system. It accomplishes so many end game goals, measured steady progression, long term progression goals, stretch goals like uber bosses, horizontal progression, customizing your gameplay experience, it all feels connected, each map has an identity, etc.
Do I think EHG could create a better system? Definitely. PoEs system is flawed and covered in a decade of bandaid fixes and strange design philosophy that sometimes can cater to the absolute top end players. What I’d love to see in LE is a system that is as fleshed out as the atlas and gives players just as many opportunities to experience the game in ways they want to. Right now it’s just shallow and repetitive.
I’m super happy to get your ultra useful feedback! What a contribution! My favorite part is that you didn’t read any of my original post or reasonings behind any of my philosophies or ideas before you decided I spent all this time typing 2,000 words just to be a troll. Spot on!
This is the beginning of Harbor bridge on two created instances. As you can see, it is not the same layout. Barriers, stairs, the width of the elevated portions - it is constructed from several possible tiles.
Even though these changes don’t have any significant effect on a practical gameplay level, like orientation of exits - always left to right with the boss area in the middle in case of harbour bridge - the subconscious pattern recognition will be fed with a bit of variety.
I am sorry to use PoE as an example to discuss how to counter monotony/repetitiveness in LE while you used GrimDawn and PoE in your OP to bring examples that could help to improve LE.
Map design plays an important role. A more varied map design can help with player retention.
If you’re going to write in all caps, I’m going to refuse to read it because it’s an eyesore. And reading your headings was enough to know that your ideas really aren’t different than how the game already handles these things …
The little of your all caps that I did read was so vague that it really wasn’t worth the effort…
“END GAME NEEDS LAYERED PROGRESSION THAT IS BOTH HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL. … IT SHOULD FEEL LIKE YOU’RE BUILDING TOWARDS SOMETHING …”
What does horizontal and vertical progression even mean? You’re building towards a more powerful character. You’ve said almost nothing in the majority of your post, you just complain that the devs have a different vision of the game than you do lol
They aren’t though. The only parts in caps are the titles/subtitles of each section, which I don’t think is unreasonable especially when they’re relatively few & far between and he’s even made relatively good use of bullet points.
That’s relatively standard terminology. Vertical progression adds more power, horizontal doesn’t (GW2 uses a lot of horizontal progression).
Vertical progression is the common progression of a character, hence levels or equipment, direct upgrades.
Horizontal progression is commonly used as a term for unlocking mechanics or advancing in those, hence the corruption for example.
Last Epoch is very very weak in terms of horizontal progression currently as we only have a singular one at the moment, which is corruption, we don’t do much else.
As for vertical progression, that one is middling since the itemization in Last Epoch is fairly weak currently, while some mechanics counteract that (Nemesis and Legendary Potential) the current issue still is that gradual progression is not as prevalent as in the competition on the market, upgrades for your character generally take a long time and are extremely substantial.
A movement towards more upgrades with less substance behind it would alleviate this to a large degree.
OP used the spoiler tag or something similar to make his text appear less like a wall of text.
Have seen this done in some other thread, the part of the text that you can unfold is shown as all caps.
Sshhh
You had this discussion with Gavryn in his first guide post in this forum, this poison bomber build.
So I’m kinda a different player when it comes to this subject, but I really like monoliths and the idea of alternate time travel with stuff being messed up. It’s very repetitive and I do agree, but it’s the best part of the game for me. I can play with my build and try new things and plow through enemies having fun with self discovery and just all around sit down at the end of the day and relax while listening to music.
I think it will only get better as new features come with patches, one thing I love about LE is there’s no level scaling,. I loved older MMOs (like vanilla wow,) finding out an area you went to was too high level and you had to go back to a previous area, level up more and then come back to the new area and find out you’re now stronger. The Idea of becoming stronger is the vertical progression for me, and the horizontal progression is the skills, which we will get more fine tuning in a later patch.
Choice would be a great thing, but I feel choice was embedded with our quests we complete, one thing to note is that attribute points/idol slots are gated behind quests and story. I have no problems with completing the campaign over and over, I enjoy it, I think the sense of not having control over the story is part of the story, the events that happen are going to happen no matter what to get us to the main feature, the monoliths.
For me, the echos feel and play like world quests in wow, I loved world quests and grinding for gear upgrades it was my favorite feature in Warlords, Legion expansion, BFA, etc. So for me it identifies with previous gameplay that I enjoyed before.
I don’t like dungeons at all, and never have in any game that has had them, they’re generic and hard on purpose with loot gated behind them and require groups or special keys to get to them. While challenging, I hate the fact that you have to do them - specifically Temporal Sanctum - I think a lot more could have been done with the forge we always have access too already, like upgrading it to be able to slam legendaries or gambling random legendary stats like from nemesis. Also, it would of been great to replace the gambler in the end of time with the soul gambler or have them both available there after an unlock.
Playing monoliths could be more rewarding, like upgrading the end of time base or having random quests like world quests that give you hope in what’s left of humanity, just hitting the wholesome note once in a while to inspire your characters reason to keep going in the first place. I like the idea of being able to reset and reroll echos, to me that’s a fun little feature to try to find in the web. I’d love to see the player be able to unlock temporary modifiers for themselves, but I guess the new shrines may be similar like that.
I like the idea of corruption and making everything harder to do, it’s a great test feature on your build and just an extra challenge to make things more interesting and finding greater loot. I would rather have a slider that allows me to set the corr where I want it but lately the newer corr progression mechanics have been great, glyphs of envy and getting corr quicker ect. I just wish there were more mechanics going on and maybe we will see those later as things develop and work themselves out. I can say that I do not enjoy Harbringers or Abberoth and have not felt the motivation to complete it at all.
The author edited their post after I complained about it being in ALL CAPS. It’s no longer all caps.
I know what vertical progression is, and I know what horizontal is too - I’ve played GW2 for 1800 hours. But I don’t know what horizontal and vertical progression combined would be. GW2 is an MMO that tried to handle progression differently than the norm, and so much of the progression is less stat based (vertical) and more utility based (horizontal), and another aspect of their horizontal progression is alt-character-related.
My main complaint with this thread, other than the all caps it was originally written in, is the vaguery of the suggestions … Horizontal + Vertical progression is not specific enough to illicit some idea of what OP actually wants to happen. Does he want mounts added to the game for horizontal progression like GW2? Or environmental skills that require you to accomplish some task in order to be able to activate them like GW2? I just don’t think there’s enough info to really act on in the OP. And I’m not sure horizontal progression should be a feature of an isometric ARPG.
I would argue that their suggestions are already in the game in some form, just not the form that they want … And I can’t tell what they want from their post, even after reading some of the suggestions that were edited out of all caps.
@Xceriis I’ll try to answer to your points individually:
Yes, the topic itself is good, but it needs to stand out reliably for that to matter. The divergent timelines in the monolith system are a good start… but the different timelines to choose from and run through… they’re basically solely a bit of a different mix of layout and enemies, but no direct control over it.
EHG needs to go either into more lore related content or into making the specific choices more important… optimally both.
I’ll say that choosing your layout or ensuring specific types of mobs are in an area goes a long long way already in creating player agency and enhancing that aspect.
Dynamic level scaling sucks, always did. Static level scaling can be a very good thing, especially once more… with player agency behind it. And yes, obviously with more features the current state will be improved.
There’s basically ‘jack-shit’ in terms of choice in LE, lore wise. It’s solely on character build.
Nah, not necessarily. It’s often done but is not a intrinsic aspect of a dungeon. And there’s good dungeons in the genre, Grim Dawn provides decent ones. But Dungeons are in a bad state, they’re generic crap with meaningless mechanics up until the boss where they suddenly become mandatory for survival in higher tiers.
They’re badly made in simple terms.
Yes, varieties of objectives/quests would go a long way, agreed. As would actual meaningful side-mechanics or overall variety of gameplay.
Nothing specifically against it, the way corruption is set up though is not overly good right now. Not overly bad either… ‘it works’. But that’s it.
Static scaling includes a vast variety of options.
This can be tier levels of areas which can be chosen. Quest outcomes changing the level of areas, sliders… whatever you wish.
That is strange, because I ran that area 5 times and it was always the same layout for me without any variation at all.
I guess that will depend on the player. To me those small variations do nothing to make it feel different. So much so that I actually thought they were fully fixed layouts even after running them hundreds of times.
If you have 4 square rooms in a row and you get a random pillar in the corner of some, that does absolutely nothing to make them feel different to me. I just run through them in the exact same way all the time.
Likewise, lots of maps in PoE’s campaign play the exact same way for me. I know the path because it never changes, I know where the exits are because they never change and I know where the quest items are because they never change.
So, for all intents and purposes, it’s the same map for me.
Technically, arena is in the same category. Even if less people play them, you also get horizontal progression there.
I can pretty much agree with you, I can see having specific monsters to target being useful, like on cof prophecies etc, that part seems very useful. Having some kind of effect after you “Fix” a timeline would be great. We can see some monoliths quests having a choice, but what it comes down to is just finishing both sides, its not really a choice just going back to do the other half of the quest choice like siding with the 1 tribe, then the other etc. There’s also no cause and effect from factions either, you just unlock core game mechanics that are gated behind rep grinds.
The DBZ effect is my favorite power gain, train, fail, and get stronger. In LEs case, build, get gear, get stronger - I love loot - but I also love skills and attributes and playing with them.
Very true, there’s like no hope to continue living in LE, why are we doing what we are doing over and over again? There’s no continuation with NPC interaction, besides the very depressed forgotten knight whos story isn’t even worth grinding. There’s literally nothing in her camp, its just a doorway to Abberoth.
Grim Dawn was definitely way better, the atmosphere alone was great and very challenging. Grim Dawn is def one of my fav arpgs that LE could learn a lot from, and I can’t wait to hit up TQ2.
I can’t say I’ve grinded high corr, I have been around 365 corr though and even tried 390 - to me corr just kinda gets ridiculous and becomes “Do I really have to do this to get better uniques I may never see?”
Hey actually no I didn’t ask for someone to come in, read only the headlines of ideas, pointlessly jump to false conclusions because of poor reading comprehension, then criticize me based on those false conclusions. I’m interested in having a discussion about end game systems and offering my ideas and design philosophies that I believe make up a good arpg, I’m not interested in the complete lack of substance you’re offering to the thread. Many other users have come in and had a discussion, maybe you should join them.
You posted on a public forum, welcome to the internet.
You will find specific criticisms of your suggestions in the couple posts I provided here. Try scrolling up. If you don’t like them, that’s on you. Maybe you shouldn’t accuse others of poor reading comprehension when you clearly haven’t read my responses here
