One of the things I noticed when you make a new character and start a new game is how somewhat linear the starting areas are. They kind of herd you through to the next area and so forth. Is this just temporary for new players to learn the system? Will the areas eventually open up and be somewhat randomized? Just curious how expansive this game will get.
The great thing about the designers is that they know they will have 2 different types of players: New, casual, non-hardcore AND Powergamers, ladder-climbers, endgame-grinders
As we have seen with some currently released ARPGs, itâs best to try to cater to everyone and not just one side or the other to be successful and keep the game interesting for all. When you cater just to the top 1% of your player base, problems can arise.
To be fair LE massively caters to more casual gamers, than the oppoiste. Itâs really not that balanced between the 2 currently, and it goes further towards casual each patch. Thatâs okay, it makes sense for where Le sits in the current state of arpgs, but itâs not realistic to say that itâs pulling off some perfect balance, that balance is impossible for any game.
Anyway, no randomized campaign maps as far as we know.
Not really, no. All of the campaign areas are a)static & b)have set connections to specific adjacent zones. There are currently no random zones, though the patch today will start to add some ârandomâ content into the monolith system.
I personally donât need or want the campaign maps themselves to be randomized. Iâve found that a little obnoxious even since D2. Itâs not endearing to me to have a game completely change every time I play it. Stage layout and enemy placement is a little bit of an art that is going away because every game now is an RNG generated mess. Lots of experiences in a game should be planned so you and your friends can talk about how you ran into them and overcame them. Thereâs a common repeatable experience that makes us remember the game fondly, and itâs much harder to have or describe those experiences if theyâre not in the game for every player.
Moreover, if you play the game enough you start to notice that the only thing this really does is waste your time. The differences between the maps just make it where you need to spend the same amount of time again to figure out where to go. It doesnât increase the novelty of fighting the mobs on the way there. If every encounter has to be interchangeable in order not to randomly give the player too many mobs or the wrong kind of mobs to fight for that part of the game, then one or both of two things will be true: All the encounters will be equally bland because theyâre meant to be interchangeable - and/or - all the encounters will go up slightly in difficulty based on the playerâs current level and thus the entire game and all the mobs will be level-set rather than planned for a specific area. This makes individual mobs a problem because you canât level up to hit them harder, so the only option becomes to nerf them. This removes a specific type of challenge from the game that could otherwise exist, and that is the annoying mob that gets less annoying as you level up. So levels become fundamentally irrelevant and even more of an obvious time-padding mechanic, at least until you start fighting bosses which have hard level requirements.
This is only two of probably a hundred things I find annoying about totally randomized games. Iâm not saying they donât have their place. I, perhaps hypocritically, adore Hades, and that entire game is randomized. But it is too random for me. I would enjoy it a lot more if there were a 10-times-longer planned out campaign I could just play through and save my progress. It would be more interesting and memorable that way. It would have more story-beats that are tied into the locations and what youâre doing at the time also. I just donât need every game to be Hades. I like a classic adventure that I can go back and enjoy again if I want to. Thatâs what you lose when you scramble every game like itâs an omelette.
Frankly, I also donât understand the demand for this these days, except that maybe people are being conditioned to expect that content by mobile games? But you have to understand, this is a fundamentally lazy way of stretching content. Once youâve seen most of the components, the novelty wears off. Itâs just a way of taking relatively few assets and extrapolating way more game to play out of them. Itâs not catering to any specific desire for experiences and adventure that people have. Itâs not a territory, because itâs never truly explored. Itâs just a distraction machine, that should wear off after a certain amount of time but doesnât for other reasons Iâve discussed at-length here, having to do with schedules of reinforcement. I hope in the future people get back in touch with stories and planned content, and figure out itâs superior to this sort of thing when itâs done right. This is easy content, and people prefer it at the expense of other better experiences they could be having.
Amusingly with your comment about randomised mobs; Campaign maps arenât 100% the same for mobs every time, theres variety in there, and placement of rares also changes.
Thatâs part of the problem I describe in paragraph one, yes. Yes, it is not optimal to just throw random mobs all over a random map and decide thatâs the game, when you could be planning and creating common experiences for players.
Apt comparison would be a game like Titan Quest vs. any of these other randomized games. Thereâs memorable and interesting encounters and easter eggs you can explore and discover that you can then go back and tell your friends about and that exist the same way in their playthrough. Thatâs one of the charming things you can provide people when youâre not scrambling your game like itâs ham and eggs.
I think everything I stated in that entire post is noncontroversial. At least it should be.
Open up? Not realy but the endgame should be rendomized one day. Most of the time you have 1-3 choices what path you take and almost every time you end up in the same spot while you have a dead end from time to time.
Itâs one of the reasons people want to skip the campaign because sooner or later you know what mob spawns where and what way you need to go to get from a-b the fastest and autopilot through the whole thing.
Is this true? The spawners all are the same for the campaign maps. The teleporting bear in the undead area is there every single time I run through the campaign in that same spot by himself.
