You find hardcore gamers everywhere you look there is no point at arguing there no matter what game we are talk about. On top of it I most likely need to ask @AndrewTilley if the devs at EHG ever mentioned what audience they aim at because they produced a very casual game because it’s simple as well as uncomplicated as well as mindnumbingly easy untill you reach a certain scaling that just makes it a slog to play or even impossible to porgress further.
I don’t think this is a fair statement for everyone but the geeks from the 90s . I lifed through a lot of changes in the gaming industry from people who made games in their garage to terrible A games (badam-tz). Since gaming is about money there were less and less very good games and those who made good games have struggled a lot (look how close Larian was to bankrupt for example) but it’s still geeky to play whatever game even when there are more people doing so because it’s it’s more videly and easiely aproachable.
Tencent pressed their take on WoW out into beta in 2 years while delivering a good “inspiered by” game and this is where it get’s tricky for me.
Let’s take Warhammer 40k inquisitor martyr as an example. in the beginning you had a slower game where you needed to approach stuff in a more strategic way. People cried how this is no arpg and they want fast paced combat and screenclear abilitys and whatnot. The devs gave in and made a very bad arpg.
The mainstream audiences of games don’t want change as I see it. Look at all the people who still play WoW while WoW isn’t that greate of a game. WoW does everything right the mainstream audience want’s to have. Same goes for D4 because they stick to stuff that worked for them in the past. Is this good or innovative? Hell no .
let’s get to indie games… there is hero Siege for example. A grindy 2D ARPG where you run arround and kill stuff from casualy “bind movement + auto attack + all skills on right mouse and just hold the button down!” kind of gameplay to more indepth builds that require knowledge, skill and a lot of gear grind to work.
They right now change their game into a D2 clone and from all the stuff they could’ve “stolen” as “inspiration” they choose for example to bring the D2 flask managment into a game in 2023.
There are good indie games and bad indie games as well as good modern day big studio games. Yet I treat both the same because if they make a game they make a game and if they are unable to deliver quality it’s fair to tell it.
Time will tell if the devs change stuff or if there is enough to make people happy and it’s just a “me” problem.
It’s been one of the names/synonyms for the genre for decades, alongside dungeon crawler, arpg & such.
That’s where the a in arpg comes into play. The roots of the genre were with “proper” rpgs but it (Diablo & the games that followed after) decided to focus more on the action while keeping the stat system & a bunch of other things.
It’s “getting back to its roots” in that regard after the backlash to D3’s colour palette I would assume.
If they thought they were replicating the charm of D1 or D2, I’m not sure these design guys really played those games. If they did, they didn’t take them to heart.
inoffically and officaly yes. I had a discussion somewhere else with an old gamer in the console museum where I life. Unofficaly arpg started in japan. You might find some stuff about it when you google 1up and arpg they had some articcles about it way back in the 80s.
Long story short Dragon Slayer by Falcom in 84 was the first official one. Western people may know some good old ARPG games like… Zelda . A buttload of games have been thrown into the arpg pot because you only need one part of real time action comabt in any way shape or form and RPG eelements no matter how redundent they are. (there was a shoutpark game where you throw snowballs on kids and because you had the roleplaying options to pee on the balls and throw them on the kids it could be counted as an arpg what is completely craycray in my eyes.)
Google might help you far more on this topic because asking that old geezer questions about games suck the life out of me and it took me 3 hours to get out of there because he never stoped talking and always moved on.
I love old games so I’m definitely going to end up playing Dragon Slayer. I wasn’t even aware that existed. Let alone that it was the first one. Good call out!
As an aside, it kinda figures what we now consider a western genre was invented by some Japanese guy. Neat gaming history, that.
Oh they were the same company that eventually did Ys also, that’s super interesting.
I feel completely opposite. Last Epoch just FEELS better to play. The moment to moment action is much more intense and interesting. Everything feels fluid, dynamic and “action-y” in LE.
However, Diablo 4 only feels okay to play, with a controller. Keyboard and mouse feels terrible in D4. The gameplay itself feels okay with controller, but nothing of interest occurs. There are only a few skills per class, there is very limited build potential, once you see the skill tree in D4 you have seen the entire game, basically.
I also cant stand the graphics in D4, they are completely devoid of colour. The entire game is gray and brown with little to no contrast, it looks terrible even though the graphics are “high res”
To me, LE is superior in every way, except that it’s not an MMO and I prefer that. D4 progression is empty, combat is blah, game looks boring.
We also have to remember, being fair to LE, that it is built around the Unity engine. So it is expected to have some optimization and performance issues here and there, which are making the game to run not as smoothly as it could be, compared to in-house game engines. I supposedly run the game, at max. settings, over the 100 frames per second… but I still notice small hiccups while playing.
On the positive side, it is thanks to Unity that we, Linux players, got the Linux port of this game.
I just read through the new season patch notes and did some quick googling to see players reactions…D4 is already trying to kill itself. How the mighty have fallen.
D4 is good for making you appreciate what we do have though ie LE, PoE, GD, TQ, Ghostlore, The Slorgmancer and Chronicon. Bliz wanted to do a quick and dirty cashout on the franchises name, and they have succeed. Good luck getting people to buy into whatever bullshit DD5 turns out to be though. Hope it was worth it Bobby you fat asshole.
Despite the drama, Last Epoch stands on its own, not only compared to the Diablos, but also to the other indie games of its genre. Its probably the game which better scratches the classic Diablo itch right now, which is something the actual Diablos no longer do.
I was initially skeptical of the ultra fast health regeneration, but turns out, it really works to streamline the potion mechanics and to keep the gameplay fluid. Perhaps the devs tune it down some more, and they get it just right.
20+ year old itch that falls flat compared to todays games? Don’t know man.
So I’ve read the D4 patchnotes and I see one big issue with it. They ruin eternal realm experience with the patch they made because they cut dmg in half and I bet it’s intentional. I think we see a lot more season where they make the seasons theme the actual powercreep while the eternal realm gets Fed more and more.
After reading the patchnotes I’m convinced (as usual) that Blizz lost touch with reality because noone can be that incompetent when it comes to numbers while working on job where numbers are important.
I mean recently. If I was going to design a game to be like another game, I would replay it during the process of designing that other game to see what I could learn from it.
My internet was out so I played some diabo II Resurected recently. It’s fun and nastalgic but pretty basic. I found myself wondering why is this feeling good to play.
When my internet was back I started playing Last Epoch and it once again just felt a little flat.
Then I adjusted the sound settings in Last Epoch and cranked up the volume on my headset. There’s no “default settings” but I just did some adjusting. Now the game feels more fun to play?
Sound is very subjective and being conservative is good when taking hearing into consideration.
Are the default sound settings in Last Epoch just a bit low?
I noticed the same. After i played D4 (which has good sounds for the skills IMO) i went back for LE and did notice that i needed crank volume very high and gameplay felt better.
It sounds like they should increase maybe ”base” audio level higher.
. I lifed through a lot of changes in the gaming industry from people who made games in their garage to terrible A games (badam-tz). Since gaming is about money there were less and less very good games and those who made good games have struggled a lot (look how close Larian was to bankrupt for example) but it’s still geeky to play whatever game even when there are more people doing so because it’s it’s more videly and easiely aproachable.
