This post is gonna be a list of suggestions on how to fix the campaign. With the pretext that I am someone who usually enjoys campaigns in arpgs. I played through torch light, cursed king, titan quest, grimdawn and a few others, but have hated the LE campaign.
The goal here is to fix it
Quality of Life
● campaign should allow for level scaling loot, and remove unempowered monolith entirely. You now join monolith at empowered 100 at end of campaign.
World tier 1: up to level 15
World tier 2: up to level 35 (0lp uniques) or max tier 16
World tier 3: up to lvl 60 (1Lp) max tier of 22 and miniimum of 17
World tier 4: up to level 80 (max 3 lp, min 1), max tier 26, minmum of 22
World tier 5: up to lvl 100 (4lp min 2lp) minimum tier of 28
The gear dropped by bosses is tiered like in grimdawn. And each boss has a rarity of monster infrequents precoded at each world tier.
● nemesis now scales with world tier. Tier 1 is always base. Tier 2 is empowered 1, tier 5 s empowered tier 3. Drops scale with world tier limits
● Campaign activities drop gold. And can only be used on those npcs. Used to buy gear by gambling at the end of time.
MAPS
Make the maps large and open world. Boring hallways dont do it for me. Each map should be a zone and should include 5-12 unique mini bosses and 2-3 dungeons and locations of interest. Each of them drop shards of premade drop table
Undead: drop shards for necro, warlock and lich
Void: drop sharcs for void knight, paladin, and forge guard
Plants: drop for shaman, beast master, and druid
Humanoids: drop for rogue, blade dancer, and marksman
Mages: drop for sorc, spellblade, and rune
Each zone has a world boss that spawns on live every 4 hours. On offline it spawns on an alter used by a player and is scaled to lvl 100 corruption 300. (Solo)
These drop guaranteed items of legendary quality. Meant to be as strong as 3lp slammed uniques of lvl 55 or above.
Side quests
I expect side stories and more rifts, each one has random modifers like grimdawn dungeons. Fully voice acted [fine with ai, go buy a membrship with elvenlabs and do it]
Man, you gotta cope with what we have. EHG has said already, the reason the maps do not persist after we port out is performance issues, now you’re suggesting them to make it a large open world?
I would like that, but that’s just not feasible atm.
I ain’t. Just listing what games that have proven to be successful for 10+ years have done and have made more money then any of us will within 500 years.
Don’t fix what ain’t broken. And that means changing LE
And do you know why they were successful? Because they had the temerity to try new stuff, change things & not necessarily appeal to the established order. Not doing that leads to stagnation and death.
Well, it’s weird to see you attack some of the foundations of Last Epoch.
Level scaling is something that strongly impact the feeling of the game, and choosing whether to implement it or not has a significant impact on the audience of the game. You are basically telling them to change their target demographic.
Making the game Open World is at the same time a technical decision that you make very early in the game and need to work on from its very start, meaning it’s not something that can simply be implemented in the game without a massive rework, and also something that strongly impacts audience of the game, meaning once again you are telling them to change their target demographic.
World boss spawn is something that is aimed at making games MMO-ish. That is also a massive change to the target demographic of the game.
This suggests that you have bought the game without realizing that it’s not Diablo 4 or Grim Dawn, and rather than asking for a reimbursement because you are not the intended demographic, you are asking them to turn the game on its head to fit your personal wants.
You are also suggesting a lot of completely unbalancing stuff that would immediately break the game.
You are suggesting increasing drastically the average amount of LP on uniques, meaning it will be easy to acquire insanely powerful legendary items.
You are suggesting a massive change to gold without properly looking into the impacts it’s going to have on the game.
The shard drop thingy would strongly limit the diversity of content players are going to try to play against, without even helping target farming whatever you actually need.
Seriously, a world boss that drops near perfect legendary items when killed? That’s in the realm of D3 acquisition of loot speed.
And don’t even get me started on the issues of using AI, as it is both ethically dubious and a possible future legal liability.
There’s basically nothing right in the entirety of your suggestion, so I don’t think it is unwarranted to believe that you have been making a troll thread.
Why would we follow the D3/D4 road and not PoE’s and get rid of campaign shortcuts and make the whole thing mandatory all the time?
Also, that is a very weak argument. With that argument we’ll get rid of loot filter (D3/D4 doesn’t have one), we’ll get rid of crafting (D3 didn’t really have crafting, D4 still doesn’t that much), we’ll get rid of skill trees and replace it with the skill twigs, etc.
And lastly, while obviously EHG wants to make money, that is not their main objective. It might seem strange to you, but some people want to make a work of love rather than sell out their soul. Some people would rather get less money but make a product they’re proud of.
Otherwise every single dev on earth would be doing P2W gacha mobile games.
Never played diablo so cant be listing what it did. I speaking from the other games. Diablo looked boring to me and have no interest in it.
Regarding the comment on tech problems, i not a coder. I have no idea if it would make the game unplayable. But from my experience pathfinder wotr uses unity and they made fairly large semi open world areas. Cant be more hard then that no? Same for Pillars of eternity.
On the concept of increasing the player power. I talked about it before. Its better more players feel powerful and keep playing then everyone getting bored day 1 of a season and quitting. The game should be fun first. Waiting hours for upgrades is not fun.
On the question of researching LE i did. I picked it up cause the gameplay looked neat. But neat gameplay wont fix and carry the game when its suffers from one of the worst content pacing i yet seen in arpg. There is also nothing to do past lvl 40. Open world content is what all normies can play and appreciate. Hence its easy content to make.
World tiers here is closer to old school challange modes. World tier 1-2 would be normal, tier 3-4 would be epic, and tier 5 would be legendery.
True, but given what you’ve said in the past, it feels like you’ve got your filter set to ignore everything that isn’t all 4 desired affixes on a specific base.
I’d imagine that they probably aimed to have it that way from the start? Switching from small-ish zones to large open world areas is a massive change & isn’t something that can be done in a few hours just because another game using the same engine does it like that.
So did D2 (in a more limited way, but still had huge open areas). But as you said, it was part of the design from the start (and they had their own engine).
tldr; Tiering was in D1, it’s not new. Mobs scaling to player level is probably bad. Torchlight portals probably need more attention/love. Devs should continue to try different things with mob scaling because there should be something better than “just static/per world tier” and “always dynamic, with all the downside that brings”.
I know you know this, and I’m sorry if it seems like I’m picking on you, but your sentence was easily quotable. The ‘tiers’ part of this thread is weird. Diablo 1 had world tiers (difficulty levels). Normal, Nightmare and Hell. Except it was called difficulty and you had to beat diablo to move to the next one. But it’s still tiering. Or tiering is just difficulty renamed. Tiering difficulty is something that has been in this genre since day one. It’s not new. Re-branded by Blizzard? Ok, sure, whatever.
Game scaling to player level is in direct response to the observation; having level-locked area’s results in ‘dead’ areas once the player has out-leveled them. Is it right/good? Jury is still out, to some extent, but I’d say no, it’s not great. D4 has just made everything easy in response to, “I can’t get a good drop, so I’m getting my ass kicked ALL THE TIME”. Which is a shame, because I actually really liked D4 beta as a druid, because of the difficulty. You know, up until I discovered that other classes/builds were just stomping shit.
Is there a better way to do it? I think there is, but I don’t think it’s in an open world design. I ride through D4 and think, “all this open world is kind of useless”.
I think Torchlight was on an interesting path with the player getting scroll drops that opened portals to other, increasingly more difficult, areas. The problem I had with Torchlight was that it’s combat was ‘floaty’, and it’s character/skill design was too shallow. I really wanted to like it, I liked it’s fundamentals, but it was boring.
If open world is the way to go, and players think that it provides a better level of immersion, then I’m surprised that no game has tried WoW’s world phasing (D4 kind of has with strongholds). Say, have areas near cities be easier, and as you work your way out (for a given area in the world-map), things get hard. And have major campaign milestones change the state of the area that you are in, increasing difficulty. But I guess that puts different players in different parts of the game, making grouping with friends more of a challenge.
I don’t know, it’s a difficult problem. I definitely think having large portions of a game’s assets unused is not a great thing. LE is trying to solve this with monos using campaign assets, but until AI gets really good at randomly generating maps/content that is engaging, hand-crafted areas are just going to be more enjoyable. And I say that as someone that loves random. Sadly, It’s the monos I find boring.
D4’s world tiering is almost idential to Grim Dawn’s. Normal/Veteran (world tier 1/2) are available from the start & interchangable as one wishes, Elite & Ultimate (world tiers 3 & 4) require completing a thing, killing the boss in GD & completing a dungeon in D4.
The main reason we are comparing it to D4 rather than D1 is that D1 does not have level scaling, which is the main point of the tier system.
It’s makes more sense to say that D4’s tier system is a descendant of D1’s difficulty system, but still a significantly different system, rather than that both are the same system.
I’d say 2 things :
Good level design introduce monsters with deliberate flaws early on (think Fallen Ones and Zombies in Diablo 1 and 2), then progressively increases monster complexity, through more complex movement patterns (think goatmen in Diablo 1, which move in a circular pattern, to make ranged attacks more difficult), attacks that are harder to deal with (think ranged attacks, monsters that charge, etc…), special abilities, and so on.
While some monsters may be able to remain relevant at all times through numerical increases, and some others can be improved in later instances through slightly altered AI and/or added abilities, some monsters (and traps) will simply never be able to properly scale at harder difficulties, and as such will be better off not reappearing.
Most early assets should be reused in endgame activities.
It’s not about AI, it’s about setting up random generation rules that allow for interesting and sufficiently varied gameplay.
Many games, like Diablo 1, Path of Exile, etc… have very good randomized systems, mixing a healthy dose of randomization, rules that force the apparition of certain kinds of elements, and a little bit of forced handcrafted content. It’s a matter of effort put into making a good system.
Personally spoken… a good choice. Going through unempowered monoliths feels like a bit of a chore.
Given that the amount of content otherwise available stays same or more.
The min and max for uniques are to forget though. That needs to be a separate system, otherwise it feels like garbage.
Drop-tiering happens by content difficulty automatically already and should stay that way, no need for artificial limitations.
That’s a ‘you’ problem, not a general one. Not in need of any solution. It’s a pure flavor aspect.
Tagrte farming options like these are generally nice. More dedicated systems to make them distinct from each other is generally a thing I would enjoy to see in the game.
Given the time-travel topic yes, that’s a untapped potential. More lore and a focus on lore with those would be very much enjoyed.
Financial success through marketing is no indicator of the quality of a product.
Yes, I agree, and some of the points you mentioned are ‘not broken’ so no need to even talk about them.
That’s also factually wrong. There is a decent split between 2 types. One which is creative and makes something new and another which takes pre-existing stuff and executes it well.
The problem with the modern gaming market is that it’s flooded with a mixture of both, namely not creative but also not doing it well.
A system which lets you choose to raise former content higher up is tenable though, which is a proper level scaling mechanic.
After all corruption levels are also nothing else then a scaling mechanic. So LE already leans heavily into it, in the most boring way though sadly rather then a engaging one where you take distinct steps forward by player agency rather then fluid non-descriptive progression rate.
Which is not a negative thing. It’s what Grim Dawn does and what makes that game actually fairly special, choosing to farm where it fits you the most rather then enforcing you to have a ‘all doable’ approach.
Yes I know EHG wants to do that but it’s something which is severely limiting design space.
You basically explained how Diablo does stuff. 1 to 1.
It is, unless those hours become too much.
Which LE definitely struggles with.
So I know where you’re coming from and aspects of that should definitely be taken into consideration.
Yes, the progression rate is awful, which is the weakest point of LE.
Itemization needs a massive base-up rework.
That’s nonsensical, wanting to point it out, don’t even need to get into it though. It’s factually wrong.
Yes, the feel.
Engine-wise you can nowadays handle those the same way with proper loading mechanics.
Yes, ‘dynamic scaling’ though feels awful. A static scaling system makes more sense there and allows player agency.
Once more, flavor. There is no meaningful studies on open-world versus streamlined experience to be found to date. It’s solely how each of them is executed and which types of players it wants to pull in.
Some hate streamlined experiences, some hate open world. Simple as that for the current state. LE doesn’t need to be the guinea pig for that.
Yes and yes.
Difficulty problem by having the game not properly scale along with the character. The progression is in no way ‘fluid’ which is though needs to be. Gradually rising difficulty is a thing which is not properly done in LE.
Also many assets are re-used in the monolith mechanic, but it’s not done all too well, using the campaign itself - especially given the state of prophecies - makes more sense.
Which is not that hard to be fair. If you have a respectively large pool of pre-made areas interconnecting through the procedural generation then it poses no issue.
The issue is that barely any game with procedural generation actually goes ahead and ‘fills’ it properly.
Just look at what happens. How many ‘dungeons’ are in Starfield? 5? 10? That’s it, all feels ‘same’. No Man’s Sky had this a long time, and still does to a degree because it enforces repetition swiftly which leads to the player perceiving the patterns, especially since the world ‘types’ are only a dozen or so.
For a reasonably large game we need to talk about 250+ unique encounters at least, likely more. That’s a large investment to do and a side-project to create such a system as a secondary mechanic in a game. If completed though it’s basically groundbreaking as that’s the core issue with procedural generation.
