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. âVisionâ meant, âif we arenât punching the player in the junk, how can they feel joy?â
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. Iâm laughing even now thinking about Smedleyâs 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 canât speak for EQ specifically but I tend to not enjoy when games implement every community request possible and people labeling it as âQuality of Lifeâ, while in reality they just want to have access to stuff easy, fast and without much roadblocks.
The term âQuality of Lifeâ is something that I despise, because people stretch that term so much these days.
I think certain types of âfrictionâ is a good thing for a game, because it makes the successful moments much more meaningful.
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Some devs donât actually want to simply print money and theyâd 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 doesnât 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.
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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 doesnât mean it is from âlow qualityâ, quite the opposite. Mosts pop music is astoundingly well mixed, mastered and produced. (even though a lot of people that donât 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 âmainstreamâ viable, but yet are still high quality. Most of theses games I would name here as example are not really ARPGâs 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 donât 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 âsuccessfulâ (in terms of player numbers).
But a game (or the devs of that game rather) can choose to stay within a certain ânicheâ, even though something else would be more âsucessfulâ (player count, monetarily etc.).
Overall ARPGâs are not the biggest market in video games. Even if you exclude mobile games other genres are multitudes bigger than ARPGâs.
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Yeah, I wasnât 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 donât consider D3/D4 bad games. Theyâre actually pretty good games (well, D3 required RoS for that, but stillâŚ), theyâre just not for the type of player I am.
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Wouldnât it be simpler then to advise people to play until the moment when they stop having fun?
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Why is a dev having a âvisionâ of how they want to make their game âpompousâ or âself-serving sanctimonious bullshitâ?
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.
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Itâs not. My comments were very specifically for the EQ team. The way the EQ team cloaked every decision they made behind, âitâs not part of the Visionâ, was bullshit.
There is a very fine line between these two things;
- having a clear idea of what you want your game to be, remembering that you are creating the game for the players, and working with the players in aggregate to help you identify which parts of your design are good, and which are shit and need to change (even though you canât trust the player base to understand what it takes to design a game). This is peak-developer.
- having a massive ego that leads the dev to come to hate the players because they arenât evolved enough to appreciate their delicate dev genius. Developers are people too. Sometimes they are full of shit.
Hereâs 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. Itâs a Bach-like symphony.
Elden Ring is the best Souls-like game. Itâs a big, sprawling rock opera. Itâs the least difficult and most played (I think?). I love it the most of all the Souls-likes.
Iâm glad they both got made. Iâm glad EQ got made. It took WoW for me to say, âholy shit, those EQ guys were so fucking full of themselves and just flat out wrong about so many thingsâ.
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 âVisionâ to describe their idea for the game (and honestly, I think most devs realize this and thatâs why we rarely hear any dev using that term⌠but maybe Iâm just out of the loop).
But you guys definitely feel free to have whatever conversation you think youâre having. 
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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, theyâre successful.
So itâs not the massive ego thatâs a problem in itself, since they all tend to have one. Itâs how they deal with it and with the game decisions.
That is debatable. Itâs certainly the most successful and the most accessible for non-souls players. But a very large portion of the DS series fans didnât like it because of that and left the game and went back to DS.
Itâs 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 arenât fun. I was talking very specifically about EQâs dev team.
Agree.
Players arenât devs, and until youâve actually tried to design a game, you really donât 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 devâs to remember, â(ideally) someone is going to play thisâ. If a majority of your players are complaining about something, you didnât do it right. But what to do when itâs not a majority? I donât know, Iâm not a game dev.
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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. Donât assume everyone likes the same things you do.
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Itâs not debatable, itâs subjective. I say, âin my opinionâ, 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 itâs eminently, eternally debatable. I personally enjoy this type of debate very much.
I also think people saying that Demonâs Souls (or whatever) is the best game arenât 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 donât 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 itâs easier/more accessible and they donât 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 itâs just those two. Tetris has very little experience. Myst has very little gameplay.
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I donât have an issue with that. Itâs 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.
Itâs certainly an interesting debate. I think there is more to that. If you look at idle games, those donât 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 Iâll buy you a beer and we can debate that 
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See that little âimoâ? Yeah, in my head I thought I did something more clear like, âthis all is my opinionâ, but, as we all know, Iâm full of shit. I hope I get to Portugal someday!
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Yeah, itâs all good. Miscommunication happens in a forum because the written language isnât good at conveying tone, because people misread or mistype or simply donât express themselves like they wanted to.
Itâs all cleared now, meaning has been clarified, the beer is always waiting 
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Cold beer is always number 1
Itâs not a, bad game, or, I donât get any loot, simply the idea that we want to grind until our hands bleed is an outdated mindset/strategy
The joy of the game is progression, but when they force you to grind endlessly, with no results, thatâs where the chain jumps off
That really depends on the player. Many players still like this gameplay loop, as can be seen in these forums where some player will defend this with tooth and nail.
That aside, I think EHG actually does it right:
Basic gear is very very easy to get.
Baseline gear (to bring your build online) is very easy to get.
Decent gear is easy to get.
Good gear is kinda hard to get.
BiS gear is very hard to get.
This means that until you hit empowered monos and early corruption you have constant progression and it starts to fall off from there, as it should.