yeah this was a surprise upon publishing this long ass post haha
For the release version, the endgame is normal. Comparison with POE is incorrect. And the diversity of content is only a matter of time. Moreover, the developers are good. This isn’t “Diablo is bad”. Just relax and wait, share by ideas with developers.
One thing I agree on is that the monoliths feel too similar. The monsters need to fit each mono, as it is you find nearly the same mons in ever place which makes every place feel the same.
To be entirely fair though and without holding back:
If you go into a segment which is heavily contested already with good products (D4 is not ‘bad’, it’s fantastic for more casual players, PoE is fantastic it’s the absolute opposite though) then you have 2 options.
A) Provide a ‘fresh’ experience, simply something which is not ‘those others’. Which LE obviously does! But… for the love of it… don’t do it in a live-service manner, ‘fresh’ only lasts shortly, afterwards you got to compete on their level or you fail and fall back, simple as that. It’s what we’re seeing already, substantial loss in numbers from 1.0 to 1.1, then vastly more to the reset since it’s not a new cycle… 2.0 will sit around 30k maybe.
B) Be ‘different’ enough to warrant a space on the market. This can be anything. For example ‘Ori and the Blind Forest’ positioned itself because of a fantastic presentation and good controls in the genre of Metroidvania games. ‘Hollow Knight’ did the same but a completely different direction and combat style, both are the same genre but entirely ‘different’. And Blasphemous… also same genre but utterly different to those other 2. Each has their own ‘space’ easily cut out. LE compared to D4 and PoE? There’s not ‘that much’ difference. You kill hordes of enemies, you drop tons of loot, you have some way of building the character which is a bit different and also some ways of adjusting your gear which are a bit different. D4 clearly targets casuals, PoE once more hardcore fans long-term. LE? Well… LE does ‘something’ but doesn’t know what it actually does there, it has no ‘unique’ mechanics which vastly differ in style or execution.
So nah, it’s not ‘wait for it’. EHG made the game the way it is, they released it, now they gotta compete like everyone else.
As long as they don’t differentiate themselves substantially from other games on the market or provide content depth on par with the competition they’re… well… no competition. Potential great, outcome ‘ok’ at best. Enough to be ‘fresh’, not enough to be ‘live-service quality’ because that’s a darn hard and competitive segment.
- While it’s objectively repetitive, whether that’s good or bad is subjective. I find it fun and don’t have issues with it currently.
- Subjective, again. I feel there’s plenty of vertical progress and there’s not really a way to add horizontal progress that I can think of without adding maybe enemy factions ala Grim Dawn?
- Subjective. What would be enough choice for you? There’s an entire web of nodes to pick from and you can choose the time lines you want to target farm for drops?
- Subjective. What kind of identity is good enough for you? The thought never crossed my mind while doing monos that there wasn’t enough identity.
- Finally! An objective issue! Yes, dungeons being forced as part of gear progression is an issue, thankfully EHG has agreed. Hopefully they’ll add a new function for dungeons and add more of them as an alternate endgame activity.
- And we’re back to subjective. What feels bad for you about this? It feels fine to me, but maybe I’m odd.
- Subjective. Corruption as an endgame scaling difficulty tool feels fine to me. It could be implemented better, but it’s not inherently has.
How about ‘parts of the story change when you pick something’?
I can understand this direction in a game like PoE where you as the Exile are thinking fairly one-dimensional ‘They did me bad, I kill them!’ which generally follows ‘this caused the bigger bad to appear, so I gotta kill them too!’ ad infinitum.
In LE though our character is presented as having substantial depth. Being a friggin diplomat actually and not a outright soldier… you should’ve some more ‘finesse’ in decision making hence then ‘Oh, guy wants something, lets do it!’.
Especially given the focus on having diverging timelines depending on the decisions made causes this to become a underemployed aspect of the lore which is what meaning is derived from for the player.
With EHG’s story setup the choice-aspect is not excusable with ‘it’s subjectively so’ because objectively seen we should have the mental capacity as the character to not be single-minded. That’s why we were chosen for the initial task after all.
How about ‘they distinct themselves in some major way’?
For a start. And I don’t mean ‘map layout is different’ but rather ‘If I go there I’ll have to deal with xyz and not zyx… so I’ll adapt accordingly’ would be a good start.
Alternatively mechanical differentiation is also possible.
In the current state it would make no substantial difference to have a single timeline, the full map pool and a choice for which timeline boss is tackled when we got enough stability. We wouldn’t feel much different outside of removed tedium for re-grinding timelines up for corruption.
That’s how bad it is, obviously it is ‘not enough’ differentiation. Which comes from making monoliths so darn generic.
It is objectively bad, not subjective.
Reducing a player to re-run content which gives substantially less rewards and has basically no challenge to overcome solely to provide a time-gate as your game has not enough available content is objectively a bad choice.
If you reduce player to a low area for some reason then it at least should’ve been done for a very very good reason. Lore-reveal, subverting design expectations of some kind to enhance subtle feelings henceforth or similar things. At a similar level to ‘the sanctity of checkpoints’ which barely any game ever diverts, those commonly for the reason of causing tension.
We don’t have that though. It offers no gameplay reason beyond ‘badly designed’ You could raise corruption with a simple method to the highest one otherwise or lower it accordingly with a simple method instead of ‘go through the web and waste time for a whole reset cycle’.
By that same logic, all characters after the first one should start at the highest level you achieved. Then give them comparable powerful items that the player’s best geared character has farmed.
After all, you only time-gate the player to reach that point again. Why not skip levelling at all? Most players, according to some people’s logic, are only interested in the endgame anyway. Why not make it the start of the game, then?
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That’s… quite the glorious way to miss the mark I have to say, seldomly seen it so far off 
There’s a quite obvious difference between ‘starting a new playthrough’ and it happening for a already existing character.
A very… very distinct difference and one which should be also fairly obvious.
This is all subjective. Corruption, at its core, is a system that allows for infinite scaling difficulty. This is not inherently bad and the players feelings on it are subjective. Same with the time-gating, it’s not inherently good or bad and entirely based on thep individual players perception. I, personally, don’t have an issue with the time-gating as I see it as part of the process. But I’d also be fine with them changing it. Objectively, it’s not good or bad. It’s a subjective situation
Perhaps I misunderstood your not very concisely formulated ramblings. 
- re-running content with less reward
- reducing the player to a low area
Sounded too much like having account-wide corruption scaling rather than character-based, which is one of the discussion points of OP.
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I hate choices in the campaign. I hated this in GD, where it forces me to be careful what I choose or I might miss something.
And PoE also has choices, they’re just not important. You get to choose on the bandits quest, although 99% of the builds will choose the +2 skills and you get to choose who gets to rule whatever it is, which I already forgot and which most people also choose the same person because it’s the closest to the waypoint.
Personally, I feel the story in a diablo-clone is the least important thing. It’s only there to give you some direction as you start, nothing else.
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Yesterday I watched a video about how the game Starfield failed in some aspects, where other Bethesda games executed perfectly. It was about content being procedurally generated versus being handcrafted.
The difference was that the game felt much better when each area was unique, because it was crafted intentionally and had some thought put behind it, whereas the randomly generated areas felt just like computer generated content made to fill up space. It lacks soul. Literally filler content
Also, it used to be possible to change that at will, to get another buff option from the bandits quest. So it’s not really a permanent, game defining, choice anyway.
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And they changed the quest and the rewards. You get 1 only passive point now, but another one for the fellshrine ruin quest that previously only gave respec points.
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