Thats impressive and also crazy. No way i am having kids. Never raise more devils then you can put down. My parents already raised one to many. I just live for my own fun, all else can be damned.
Three hurrahs for us few gen Z who find ARPGs fun over fortnite
You dont do yourself a favour if you play season games longer than 2 months per season.
Even if you’re really enjoying it?
if you enjoy it then play as long as you want but most people cant enjoy a season game for like 5 Months.
I hated EQ devs for this self-serving sanctimonious bullshit. So fucking pompous and full of themselves. “Vision” meant, “if we aren’t punching the player in the junk, how can they feel joy?”
Turned out that junk-punch-loving was true only for a small part of their playerbase because WoW came out with much more forgiving mechanics (well, compared to EQ), and printed money hats for 10 years. I’m laughing even now thinking about Smedley’s jealous rage. … MY VISION! lol.
Not entirely related, but I made a post in a different thread closely related to this.
Here is a quote from the post, but it is a bit longer
I think a dev having a strong vision about what they want their game to be is a good thing.
I can’t speak for EQ specifically but I tend to not enjoy when games implement every community request possible and people labeling it as “Quality of Life”, while in reality they just want to have access to stuff easy, fast and without much roadblocks.
The term “Quality of Life” is something that I despise, because people stretch that term so much these days.
I think certain types of “friction” is a good thing for a game, because it makes the successful moments much more meaningful.
Some devs don’t actually want to simply print money and they’d rather make a game they love.
EHG never set out to make an ARPG that was better/more successful than PoE/D3/D4/whichever. They set out to make an ARPG where they can have fun.
D3/D4/Wow/everything Blizz did after 2010 was basically pop music meant to sell, with pretty dancing women graphics and easy listening casual gameplay.
EHG doesn’t want to make pop games, even if they could make more money from it.
Most players/listeners just flock to the easy stuff, but some players/listeners prefer that kind of integrity.
I actually really like the comparison between mainstream music and video games. Never saw someone doing that.
Because, what is important in this kind of comparison is, that the quality of a game or music has nothing to do with how popular or marketable it is.
Pop music is very easy and straight forward for the most part, easy time-signatures, no whacky meters or (poly)rhythms. But that doesn’t mean it is from “low quality”, quite the opposite. Mosts pop music is astoundingly well mixed, mastered and produced. (even though a lot of people that don’t like pop music that much would say its mixed very stale and boringly)
The same can be said about blizzard to keep that example. Most of their games are very approachable, hence why they are so successful in terms of marketability to a wide audience. But they quality for the most part is outstanding. Combat feel, music, cut scenes, polish, bugfixing are all on a very high level, even though a lot of these games have very simple mechancis and features.
Also blizzad probably has the single best CGI trailers of any video game company in my humble opinion. Even though I am not a big WoW or Diablo fan, their CGI stuff is top notch and impressed me all the time.
On the opposite side of things there are games that are not really “mainstream” viable, but yet are still high quality. Most of theses games I would name here as example are not really ARPG’s though.
So staying with the ARPG comparisons I think Last Epoch and Path of Exile are the best to directly compare it. Both have qualities in their own right, but they are not really mainstream viable the same way Diablo 4 is. I don’t know the exact amount of player numbers, but I think Diablo has or at least had multitudes of playernumbers higher than both LE and PoE combined. Diablo has a huge fanbase and combined with the mentioned approach of blizzard making very accessible games this makes the game very “successful” (in terms of player numbers).
But a game (or the devs of that game rather) can choose to stay within a certain “niche”, even though something else would be more “sucessful” (player count, monetarily etc.).
Overall ARPG’s are not the biggest market in video games. Even if you exclude mobile games other genres are multitudes bigger than ARPG’s.
Yeah, I wasn’t trying to say pop music is bad. I have very (very VERY) eclectic musical tastes. I like death metal and I like techno and pretty much everything in between and around and up and down. And I also like pop.
My point was just that pop is easier to listen for the average listener, much like Blizz games tend to be easier for the casual player to enjoy.
I don’t consider D3/D4 bad games. They’re actually pretty good games (well, D3 required RoS for that, but still…), they’re just not for the type of player I am.
Wouldn’t it be simpler then to advise people to play until the moment when they stop having fun?
Why is a dev having a “vision” of how they want to make their game “pompous” or “self-serving sanctimonious bullshit”?
If people said that they wanted LE to be a TBS, or flight sim or a Lucasarts point & click adventure, would it be reasonable for EHG to pivot & rewrite the game to match? While community feedback is vital to the process, at some point the devs have to politely agree to disagree and make the game that they want.
It’s not. My comments were very specifically for the EQ team. The way the EQ team cloaked every decision they made behind, “it’s not part of the Vision”, was bullshit.
There is a very fine line between these two things;
Here’s an example of a game developer that actually has (imo) genius; From Software.
Demon Souls has the best vision and is the best experience. It was also kind of a pain in the ass to play, but just astonishing. It’s a Bach-like symphony.
Elden Ring is the best Souls-like game. It’s a big, sprawling rock opera. It’s the least difficult and most played (I think?). I love it the most of all the Souls-likes.
I’m glad they both got made. I’m glad EQ got made. It took WoW for me to say, ‘holy shit, those EQ guys were so fucking full of themselves and just flat out wrong about so many things’.
Sometimes a comment about a particular developer is just that, a comment about that particular developer at that particular point in time. My comment was specifically about EQ dev team. They should be a cautionary tale for all successful devs to understand. So much so, that devs should never ever use the word “Vision” to describe their idea for the game (and honestly, I think most devs realize this and that’s why we rarely hear any dev using that term… but maybe I’m just out of the loop).
But you guys definitely feel free to have whatever conversation you think you’re having. 
This is a 2-edged sword, tbh. Plenty of developers did this and had massively succesful games. For example, GGG. Each time the players ask for something, they usually just ignore it for months and months on end. Case in point, all the hubhub about Harvest.
And yet, PoE is a successful game.
Another case, the FromSoftware you mentioned. They have repeatedly refused basic QoL features from players for years. And still do. They have a vision for how their games should be and stick to it. And yet, they’re successful.
So it’s not the massive ego that’s a problem in itself, since they all tend to have one. It’s how they deal with it and with the game decisions.
That is debatable. It’s certainly the most successful and the most accessible for non-souls players. But a very large portion of the DS series fans didn’t like it because of that and left the game and went back to DS.
It’s like saying that PoE/D3/D4/whatever is the best ARPG game. Different people will give you different answers, and, in my opinion, none of them are wrong.
Agree. And you can tell when a design team is just phoning it in, because generally those games aren’t fun. I was talking very specifically about EQ’s dev team.
Agree.
Players aren’t devs, and until you’ve actually tried to design a game, you really don’t know wtf you are talking about. A big part of the fun of a game is overcoming challenges. Without the challenge, there is no joy. That said, some peoples challenge is other peoples mean-spirited punch in the junk.
Devs create games for players to play. I think this is the most important thing for dev’s to remember, ‘(ideally) someone is going to play this’. If a majority of your players are complaining about something, you didn’t do it right. But what to do when it’s not a majority? I don’t know, I’m not a game dev.
I dont think the devs made these decisions, as they are fundementally unfun. I have a suspecion that the coreloop and making things more grindy, more rng based, etc where pushed onto the devs by tencent to ensure some metric or another.
No one who played the game, [i assuming they play it themselves] would think the game as-is is fine.
EDIT: I like the game as is. If they abandoned the game right now, I would still play it for many years. Don’t assume everyone likes the same things you do.
It’s not debatable, it’s subjective. I say, ‘in my opinion’, once in a post and then leave it as an exercise for the reader to realize that all the shit I say about subjective things are just my opinion. I (and me and myself) think Elden Ring is the best Souls-like game.
I mean, friends can talk trash with friends about which game is best, so in that sense it’s eminently, eternally debatable. I personally enjoy this type of debate very much.
I also think people saying that Demon’s Souls (or whatever) is the best game aren’t actually talking about the game, they are talking about the world and the story (i.e. the experience). And I think they are full of shit, because they shifted the goal post (or don’t even know that there are goal posts). OR, and I hate this most of all, they are putting themselves in the position of aficionado, and dislike it simply because it’s easier/more accessible and they don’t like that more people have/can complete the game.
So there is an interesting debate. Where does the game start and the experience end? Is that all that is worth talking about, or is there more? I personally think it’s just those two. Tetris has very little experience. Myst has very little gameplay.
I don’t have an issue with that. It’s just that you simply said it was the best game, as an absolute, not as an opinion. That was all I was replying to.
There are whole essays written about that.
It’s certainly an interesting debate. I think there is more to that. If you look at idle games, those don’t have neither the experience nor the gameplay, but they are still games that appeal to a bunch of players (myself included).
But if you ever come over to Portugal I’ll buy you a beer and we can debate that 
See that little “imo”? Yeah, in my head I thought I did something more clear like, “this all is my opinion”, but, as we all know, I’m full of shit. I hope I get to Portugal someday!
Yeah, it’s all good. Miscommunication happens in a forum because the written language isn’t good at conveying tone, because people misread or mistype or simply don’t express themselves like they wanted to.
It’s all cleared now, meaning has been clarified, the beer is always waiting 