To give a bit of background and to better understand what I’m asking here, I’m no more the “hardcore” gamer I used to be (in terms of regular commitment to a game) and I’m mostly a single-player gamer these days (because no commitment, you play when you want, you don’t have to rely people if you have an insomnia and want to play or if you want to have a quick game between 2 flights with no good WiFi).
I know that there is the possibility to play solo. But what I want to know is if the game will be balanced for playing solo or if with the MP coming, the drop rates will be lower / certain challenges will be doable with a party only (as much as I love SSF in PoE, it’s clearly a game thought for MP).
I know it may be hard to answer as there is no MP right now but maybe you’ve heard something about it.
i believe the devs have the intention that everything will be completable solo. currently solo mode is a challenge mode that doesn’t allow for muling items or gold between characters, and there’s been some discussion recently about whether that mode should have improved drop rates. the consensus of the community seemed to be that the solo mode should retain the same drop rates because those choosing to play that mode have invited the challenge.
we’ll have to see how the devs choose to balance things once MP is a reality. i believe they have the intention for no one who chooses to play single player to be unfairly punished by the existence of MP. i personally prefer to play alone and most likely won’t engage with MP, but i will try the mode out to try out trade once it’s available.
Thanks all of you for your answers. Llama8 not exactly (playable in solo is the bare minimum =/= designed to be played in solo which means that the solo experience is really good), but I’ve got my answers thanks anyway.
@VapingNeckbeard@Heavy thanks for taking the time to answer, these are very valuable information. Thanks a lot.
Have a nice day !
(Sorry, can’t mention more than 2 users in one post)
The good news for you (OP) is the game is currently being developed and tweaked very heavily toward the single player experience. And if you are really a “casual” gamer and just enjoy trying out new builds and skills, you will have enough content to last you pretty much forever. I’d argue even in the current beta build (0.7.10c) a casual single player has enough to do to last over a hundred hours plus.
While the devs have said that the game will be designed to be completely soloable. I hope the game give players good motivations to play MP. If solo is core to the game experience, I personally find it will be difficult to compete with POE as a solo ARPG experience.
Thanks @rittchard, rn, I prefer to wait the release as there should be a wipe/reset of your (beta) progression as I don’t want to be pressure to test everything I want to try before the release.
@Jerle I understand your worries, clearly we live in a time where the demand for MP games is far higher than the demand for solo games and even though I’ll be glad that the core experience is solo, I don’t think it’s a good idea (because I’m clearly a minority).
A solution would be to have slightly higher or current drop rates for strictly solo experience (with no possibility to play in a party / trade / access your MP stash) and lower drop rates for MP experience to encourage trading (even though you play sometimes without a party). The difficulty should be scalable too in MP according to the number of players. It may be hard to balance but you can’t tailor a perfect experience for both solo and MP without some adaptations.
This is the information that the developers have communicated thus far about wipes:
Basically, there are no planned wipes, but because everything is currently offline, all these saves will not be transitioned over the online-mode when it releases. However, your offline saves will still exist for the offline-mode version of the game. Your online saves will just get placed into a “standard league” at launch.
Though, there’s always the potential things could change, but that hasn’t happened yet.
