Launch Trailer : Tombs of the Erased

Announcements
81

Launch was ‘Season 0’
Abberroth+Nemesis was ‘Season 1’
Event is an Event, not a Season.
Hence we’re not entering Season 2 in April.

Ladder resets effect the least amount of people overall, but a fixed environment which resets the economy regularly should be a mandatory aspect for ‘freshness’. Agreed.

That’s why people argue so much about the 3-4 months period which hasn’t been upheld for now. A ‘empty’ Cycle without anything but balance-changes and the Event only in the respective Cycle would’ve been better then letting the game simmer for so long. In my opinion it would’ve been better received overall this way.

82

Fair enough if you like it. Preferences and all. But the more general consensus seems more negative than positive on them. Hence why they significantly shortened them a little while ago and why they’re adding a straight up skip now.

I don’t really see how adding a number of attempts would be that complicated. Before the “if the player dies, teleport them out” you just have a number of attempts variable that decrements on death and if it’s not zero respawn the player in one of those checkpoint rooms and when it is zero do the same functionality as before.

83

I’d definitely like to see the dungeons be both more interesting and have more compelling rewards, although I think it’s maybe worth considering if Legendary crafting should still be a part of Temporal Sanctum. The other two dungeons have some potentially enticing reward structures, but they’re just another way of getting loot and could be more worthwhile if they were more fun or had their rewards tuned. Legendary crafting is a core part of character progression with essentially no real substitute. So regardless if players like the different gameplay in Temp Sanctum, they’re always going to be forced to run it. That’s something that was kind of annoying with Lab in PoE. It’s so different from the rest of the game and if you enjoy that or like the recurring rewards, cool. But every character having to run it multiple times for a core part of their build was kind of obnoxious. They could make the dungeons really different and interesting, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be to everyone’s tastes.

So maybe give temp sanctum along with the other dungeons some more distinct, but not universally required, rewards like some cool bases, uniques, etc. Maybe Temp Sanctum can just have a higher droprate on LP uniques or something new entirely.

But then find another way to give players access to legendary crafting that isn’t a pain. Like maybe you do the dungeons once to unlock a the ability to do the crafting yourself or find some other way to give that opportunity to the player. It would diminish the thematic of it though. The idea of leaving the item in a cache to be transformed by the passage of time is kind of a cool idea.

84

Yeah, it can definitely stay. Much like alternative gems for PoE are handled with their Lab… unique outcomes for unique mechanics are generally a good thing to have. It’s why Temporal Sanctum has meaning still while Lightless Arbour is maybe mentioned by CoF at times but nobody ever talks about Soulfire Bastion, that thing could just be gone from the game and nobody would care. Outside of the boss-uniques it has absolutely no meaning.

Soulfire Bastion is less viable then a single Monolith… when you run it in full. At 200 corruption. That’s a baaaaaad state.

Lightless Arbour is detrimental to use for 50% of the potential playerbase, hence MG. Any use of Lightless Arbour actively damages your progression as a MG player.

Yes, and that’s fine in such a case actually.

The issue isn’t that people need the stuff, it’s that availability without personally doing it is simply non-existent.
CoF is the ‘SSF’ style for a reason. You have to do all of it personally after all, no matter if you like things or not. You can’t design around that properly as you need as much variety of play-style as possible in your game to entice as many people as possible to play it.

In MG? You instead could expect to buy the outcome of the rewards, which is the goal after all.
But well… you can hardly buy proper outcomes if the bases for creating those items are simply non-existent to a large degree. Rare T7 affix items barely exist and are so expensive that putting up a legendary crafted unique with the right rolls on it would go into the billion price-range easily… which is close to ‘breaking’ the maximum amount available by the system after all. So they are extremely rarely seen to be sold. You just ‘do it yourself’ which MG is supposed to avoid after all. You pay others to do shit for you… not to do things yourself which you don’t enjoy so much :stuck_out_tongue:

Which is why I’m so regularly speaking about MG and Gold as well as the state of crafting in the game. You can’t have it both ways after all, you need to put your feet down somewhere.
If EHG wants to bring a large variety of returning players long-term into the game then they need to have a broad variety of activities… so if one gets boring another one can take the place. And if one isn’t to your liking then you can avoid it and do something else simply.
But a design through CoF as the main focus actively disallows that by default.

Exactly! Which is why I chose MG. I dislike running bosses… but value outside of lucky boss-rewards are in the gutter. So I can only default to boss-runs as they provide the most by magnitudes, simply because fever people can run them and I can’t realistically grind up resources to a degree to afford those items otherwise.

That’s market balancing which is mandatory, it effects all other pieces of the game.

Which would be fine if we actually had the ability to ‘do what we want’ rather then ‘forced to do it all’ as it’s still currently the case.

1.2 will make the situation even more severe. Now for top-tier legendary crafts you want to have the fitting champion affixes after all. So… good luck getting those! Even worse when combining it with a champion affix + a experimental affix as both can be build-enabling to a vast degree.
They’ll be rare, hence extremely expensive, hence ‘normal’ items will be worth less, so all will pivot to champion affix items with exalted affixes as the top-tier… and that’ll be another ‘unicorn drop’ in the game and hence not available through MG… so you gotta do it yourself rather then saving up for it!

To allow choosing content we need a baseline ability to acquite reliable amounts of Gold without selling items, but since scarcity is so extreme you need hundreds of hours to acquire the funds through ‘simple grinding’ to afford a single base (not finished item) at the top-end, which is no guarantee.

In comparison if I farm for 20 hours in PoE I can afford a finished nigh perfectly crafted item for myself and farm for the next. LE needs simply a baseline system in mind to provide the resources to create your items in a reliable way, and since changing the base-drops will simply shift the ‘acceptable floor’ of what is to be equipped… the adjustment of the bases is what needs to change, hence the crafting mechanic needs a rework simply.

85

I wouldn’t speculate about the level of complexity, we really have no idea how much effort is involved.

86

Agreed. I just think if we want that choice and variety of gameplay, ideally you wouldn’t always need to do it on every character no matter what. Basically every build is going to use at least some legendaries. But if it instead dropped more cool uniques or some special bases or maybe was a way to target farm things more specifically then there would sometimes be a reason to run them on some characters in some situations.

But it’s kind of hypothetical anyway. As dungeons are now, they’re not meaningfully different from echoes, just with a boss at the end and absolutely atrocious layouts. If the redesign was just to keep them as basically echoes but with less obnoxious layouts, then I guess it’d be reasonable to expect players to spend some time in it, although that wouldn’t be super interesting.

On the other hand, if it were to be significantly be redesigned to have very different gameplay from everything else, but you were still forced to do it, I think that kind of breaks the expectations of what someone is looking for when they get a game of a particular genre. Like at the extreme imagine if you replaced Sanctum with a high octane FPS level. It’d be different… but too different an in a way that breaks your expectations. Players coming to an ARPG aren’t necessarily looking for a game that requires aiming and reflexes and would probably be annoyed at not getting to use the character they built up. Obviously there’s a spectrum between inserting an entirely different genre and just doing the same thing as everything else. The question is where the dividing line is. For me, something like Lab is past that line. It’s way too focused on timing and precise movement for a game that’s normally built for blasting entire screens of enemies. Plus the controls aren’t super great for that. A related thing: FROMSOFT needs to stop putting platforming segments in their games. The controls were clearly not built to handle that kind of gameplay well and it always sucks when you have to do it.

Right, but that’s partially a balance problem and partially a design issue with them just not giving anything that interesting.

As for the MG stuff, I can’t really comment since I’m CoF. What I will say is that I disliked how trade in PoE flattened all content into just optimizing what could give you the most generic currency value/time.

I think as long as the content is all reasonably well designed, it’s fine if the game asks you to occasionally go do something you wouldn’t do otherwise like if you wanted a unique or a base for your build or something. I just take issue with funneling almost all characters into specific pieces of content regularly when they might not like doing it.

Also, sort of a tangent, but something with CoF: I kind of dislike getting offered prophecies to kill Jurla because it makes me feel like I’m wasting a key/my time by doing it without having a legendary I want to slam at the time. You could block dungeons, but there are quite a few things I’d want to block and you still really want to have the lenses to target farm or boost your rewards and you only have the 3 slots to work with. In general I really think CoF could use some reworks or at least some tweaks. There are a lot of elements of the experience that are just kind of annoying.

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Yes, but you’ll always need to do ‘some’ of them. And they likely won’t always align with what you personally enjoy to do.

If I need a %mana hybrid roll on my weapon in PoE I need to do Incursion to get it, even if I hate incursion, it’s only there. Or Heist when I need a cogwork ring. Or Delve when I need to the + 1 skeleton affix on a chest.

In LE we have the same. Some characters have tons of uniques, others… basically none needed to function. So Temporal Sanctum might be done after 1-2 runs, which is swift anyway. Otherwis you’ll need to run it 100 times.

Now we’ll also have the champion affixes on top, so if you don’t enjoy that content you’ll be out of luck to get remotely BiS gear, and you’ll need that stuff as the game progresses content-wise as you’ll need more power to deal with the higher ceiling of the content available.

Yes, which is why I dislike the way how Legendary Potential is included. It’s overall a good mechanic, but it should’ve been something to gradually improve your unique with a exponentially scaling effort needed to do so in my mind, to have variety from the otherwise pure RNG systems in the game. But that’s a ‘me’ thing for that part.

And more cool uniques is always good in my eyes.

And that’s a major issue too. They are simply designed to ‘annoy’ you, not to give you any reason to go for them. They could simply be the boss and be done with it and would be better received then currently as the time before the boss is purely well… a time-waste. A stop-gap to make it take longer with no meaning.

You mean like… having a tower-defense minigame in it? Like Blight?
Or a Pokemon capture style minigame… like Bestiary in the original form?
Or a puzzle-game style one to create your own layouts? Like Synthesis in the original form?

Diverting from a genre is good overall, but the core gameplay loop alone needs to always and without fail be viable and rewarding nonetheless. So no matter what you aren’t forced to run that other stuff.
It’s why I hold GGG in high esteem since they allow you to run everything but also allow you to sell special access to special content freely by now. Enjoy the Incursion mechanic itself in maps but not the temple? Sell the temple, let someone else do it, no need for you. Buy the results. You choose personally what you want to engage with. It’s all profitable as it’s all unique in what it rewards. Someone will need the stuff anyway in some way, but nobody is forced to run the stuff.
A few bad exceptions apply still, like Betrayal crafts (awful design) and the juice to run delve itself not being able to be sold. But otherwise top-tier in that regard.

LE needs to do something similar. Their core-loop of Monoliths needs to be able to be run endlessly while getting richer and richer and be able to acquire everything else in a viable way through at least MG.
Once more, as CoF you will be forced to do it personally. That’s what SSF-style means after all, no matter if you’re actually doing a ‘pure’ SSF’ by enforcing it or simply picking the faction which showers you with more gear in return for not having access to a market which lets you circumvent that stuff. That’s the reason for a market after all.

But they would love it if it’s done via having to hit/kill/trigger specific things to unlock your way or scale your rewards while you’re forced on a timer that demands you to react quickly and similar to a FPS game would enforce you to… if they’re not forced to do it but instead simply ‘can do it if wanted’.

Absolutely… but it does fit for example into ‘Guild Wars 2’. You ‘can’ do the jumping puzzles but by now way you’re demanded to ever do them.

Incentive, not enforcement is the name of the game.

You can do it that way, or you can simply focus on what you enjoy most. Nearly every content in PoE with a few exceptions is roughly on the same level nowadays.
I can do crowded levels with massive amounts of enemies by doing Harbinger + Delirium + Beyond so there’s hundreds of mobs on the screen… or I can do Blight maps all day long… or delve all day long… or do heist all day long.

Each of them provides around 5-10 divines per hour at the top-end commonly, some need more effort to reach that point, others less. But they do give roughly that amount, so variety has become the focus there.

The only gripe is that GGG enforces map-running - hence their core loop - for some things still, like delve, even if it’s not much. Many people just don’t realize the state of the game and see ‘this seems profitable’ and do stuff they dislike heavily simply because it seems ‘better’ despite not really being the case.

Something similar should happen in LE as well. Variety incentivized but not enforced. GGG has come a long way in their design over the course of the years, those aspects are now rock solid, others are still massive gripes and detriments… but we need to take the good aspects of design from other games and use them in an applicable way going forward… not re-invent the wheel every damn friggin time without research into the design aspects of competition.

Ocassionally, it’s ‘stomachable’ then. Fine definitely, and could be an upside even. But also risky as it can frustrate people without providing the fun of success accordingly.

Reducing the negatives and providing as many of the positives is what has to be strifed for there, not enforcing those things for misguided ‘but it’s because xyz reason’ that could be solved with effort through some other way. That effort should - over time - always be invested.

Yes, the limiting of Prophecies to specific content types and areas should be far more easy, EHG needs to work on the prohecies in CoF still. They’re in a good place with how rewarding it is but some details - like that - still needs work.

Also quantity of experimental affix items or ‘special’ uniques like the laddle from exiled mages need to be scaled with the faction still, that’s missing and has to be included to make it ‘great’ instead of simply ‘good’ as it is now.

CoF is well off, MG currently is ‘barely acceptable’ still, it was a unusable disaster before the search-options but has gotten better already. But… it’s neither ‘good’ and not even remotely close to ‘great’ or even ‘fantastic’ (which would be going the extra mile).

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Yeah. I’m not entirely married to the idea of them having a lot of exclusive content. It just seems like a more appropriate enticing incentive than locking away a core build mechanic if they wanted to give you reasons to run them at all.

Yeah LP is kind of weird in that sometimes people will run a legendary even if they don’t care about the unique effect just because it basically acts like a good base with nice stats. That definitely doesn’t feel like it’s in the spirit of the system. If you want generic stats, exalted items. If you want cool effects, uniques that can be upgraded to legendaries.

Haven’t played PoE in a while, but from when I did, what I remember was that the most popular leagues were the ones with the simple mechanics where you just click a thing that spawns monsters and gives you loot. When they tried to get fancier than that it was usually just annoying. It also doesn’t help that GGG is just stingy with rewards so any of the mechanics that required more effort to interact with just didn’t feel worth it.

I don’t have a problem with that if you want MG to work that way as long as CoF stays as it is. The problem with PoE is that because they refuse to do something similar to CoF, if you want to do any special content to any degree that matters, you’re forced into the shitty trading system.

I don’t do SSF because it’s some greater challenge or less convenient. I do it because I think it’s the more fun way to play an ARPG as long as the game is designed to respect my time. So whatever the design is, I just want it to be a fun experience to play it that way and they can figure out the ways to tweak the content or rewards between MG and CoF to make both happy. So if I have to do it, it should be a fun part of the core experience, otherwise it should be relatively optional, but not pointlessly bad like the dungeon rewards outside legendary crafting current are.

uhhh… Sure. I’m sure there would be at least some players who would like that, but it’s not gonna be the norm. If you want that in your game, it really needs to be optional, but I’d also generally advise against spending development resources on something that isn’t your area of expertise and isn’t likely to align with what most players would want anyway.

Yeah those were fine even if they’re a bit odd relative to everything else. I think those MMOs in general work a lot better for that kind of stuff just because the movement is very simple/not weighty.

Sure. But from my understanding you still need to invest really heavily to make them worth it at all. Which of course means trading and it means limiting variety.

89

I mean just think about what are the necessary pieces of data and actions necessary to make it happen. You need a variable with an integer. Trivial. A statement that checks that number at a relevant time (death in the dungeon) and decides what code to run next based on a boolean output. Easy. Some code to decide where to place the player on spawn: Not sure how easy, but they already have to decide where to place the player anyway. They already have some fixed points that determine where a player will spawn in a given area, including in the dungeons. (The entrances to each floor) And if they can do the portal charm, they are already doing the task of choosing a location in the dungeon to spawn the player at.

This is all fairly basic and only the last one I could see being affected by really stupid spaghetti code.

90

Content variety and respected time are mutually exclusive for a loot-based H&S game though.
Loot-drops are mandated to be varied, highly varied, so getting the ‘right’ drop or even a base which can become one is effort. The more different content there is the more you’ll need to run to finish a build.
This is the issue long-term with CoF. On paper and early on a fantastic mechanic… but longevity-wise for the game a disaster.

Because if you need to run 10 different types of content each for 50+ hours to get your top-end build then that would make 500 hours. But if you can acquire resources in your mainly enjoyed mechanics you personally pick and acquire the items from the other ones then you cut it down to… 100 hours… or 200 hours, as you’ll not only be more efficient since you’re used to that type of content already but also you’ll have done the initial setup and scaled it high by that time to compound into providing more rewards.

The next bit is that if you ‘only’ enjoy 5 types of content out of those 10… you’ll have to spend 50% of your time in a play you dislike, which is not nice at all, the contrary. That shouldn’t happen.

But… if EHG needs to design the content in a way so every single thing caters to the core audience at any time… then all of it will feel ‘the same’.
We’re forced to run Temporal Sanctum. Dungeons feel like a Monolith but worse, because they’re ‘the same’. That makes dungeons a ‘sub-par’ version of Monoliths. With 5 or 10 mechanics you get… 7-8 at least which will feel ‘bad’ no matter what you do. So you can’t include them without diluting your game.

That’s a problem.

Yes, as isn’t the norm with Harvest, with Blight, with Delve, with Heist, with Sanctum, with Betrayal, with… each of them is only enjoyed by a miniscule sub-set of the players. But there’s over 15 different mechanics available, so it’s very likely to at least have 1 enjoyed in the mix. You ‘flavor’ of content.

But what happens when you’re forced to interact with those other 14? It sucks. But then all need to provide the same… so one’s superior. And the human brain is hardwired to take the ‘efficient’ way to solve problems. That’s how ‘optimizing the fun out of the game’ happens, which PoE had as a major issue for years upon years until GGG finally started to act on it a few years ago.

So to have unique viable outcomes through unique different content you need to have a way to acquire those unique outcomes in some secondary way. There’s currently 2 known options for that:

The first is to ‘dilute’ the content and cross-drop rewards. Like in PoE where Legion chests drop fossils from Delve, or items with Incursion affixes. That’s shown to be incredible detrimental over time as players once more swerve to the ‘most efficient’ solution rather then the most fun for them.

The second is… community based acquisition, aka trade. Acquiring something from other people so you don’t need to do it yourself, actively avoiding unliked content.

Both are obviously not compatible with each other.

But… there’s actually a solution for that, one which we haven’t seen yet: The combined method. I’ll come to that after the next paragraph.

The game needs to be developed with trade in mind, first and foremost for that to work, which currently… it isn’t… yet. But it’s mandatory for the future to make things not fall apart which we’ll see happening as more unique content gets implemented. Since you mentioned it already. ‘Doing dungeons is not fun since it’s a mechanic you don’t enjoy’. Those will crop up more and more. 1… 2… 5… 10 different ones, until the majority of time you wouldn’t have fun but need to progress through those mechanics in the future. It’s not avoidable when variety needs to be implemented for longevity and to engage people long-term.

So the combined method needs to be there. MG has the ‘common’ way. Normal loot drops and exchange through the community. But CoF needs to have a specific design element included, namely the ‘diluted rewards’ as mentioned above.
This would need to happen by picking the type of content drops you want through the CoF screen. Hence when you finish any unique content you have a general ‘pool’ of drops you would get, just that you don’t get the loot from the content you run… but from the content you pick.

As an example… let’s say we got this FPS style content and it provides special idol types you can only acquire there. During that time you can’t kill champions and get items with champion affixes on it. Now you decide for your build you need the FPS-style loot (which you love) and the web-type loot (which you hate content wise)… so you say ‘50% FPS loot and 50% web loot’ and drop that. You would get 4 special idols commonly… but now you get 2 idols and 2 items with champion affixes.

That’s the only way I see how long-term EHG could develop their game. If they don’t enforce a distinction between the player-types in a hard way then nobody will be happy.
CoF won’t be happy since they’re forced to run content they hate.
MG won’t be happy because ‘everything feels kinda the same’ since you can’t make content which deviates heavily from the core gameplay.

They changed a lot. Scarabs are core drops nowadays. You drop them for every available content and specific content drops the scarabs for those types of content… if applicable. So for example I can throw in Harbinger Scarabs to enforce tons and tons of Harbingers, they’ll drop more Scarabs, and I can cause more Harbinger Scarabs to drop through the passives. I’ll nearly sustain them endlessly.
You also have 3 available passive trees for the content related stuff. So you can pick between 3 directions. So if I run out of Harbinger Scarabs I can instead go and do Legion instead… which I got from the Scarab running on the side. And when they run out I go back to Harbinger. No need for trade actually anymore, you can sustain special content now.

This holds true for most content in the game, exceptions apply. But I can actively run nearly every map with Incursion, or with Delve, or with Essences… and so on.

Something similar needs to come over time to LE definitely. The amount of content isn’t there - for now - but it’s a mandatory aspect for the future.

Very easy, you trigger that via a boolean as well. For example passed Room 1? Boolean for ‘Room 1 finished’ is set, if it’s set the spawn point becomes start of Room 2… and so on.

And spaghetti is fine as long as you have a linear progression. Otherwise you force a value to be set and cause the spawn point to be based on the specific value, which once more happens through area transition. Exit area sets spawn to new area entrance, you already need to be placed there anyway, it’s just persisting as the spawn place rather then the beginning of the dungeon in that case.

The biggest issue is with multi-area content that backtracking through other areas would cause persistent areas, which is something EHG seemingly hasn’t managed to handle yet.

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Not really. You can decide how you want to balance the acquisition time for various things. I just want a game that considers what that right value is for SSF play.

I still just fundamentally don’t get why people think the best or mandatory way to play a game all about finding cool loot for your build is to actually just not find the loot you want and then buy it from others from a menu, or worse in PoE’s case. Like I can get why some people might enjoy that as their preference, but the idea that it’s fundamental to ARPG design is just a failure of imagination. There are all sorts of ways you can design an ARPG to make the loot grind fun and at a rate that makes sense. Some of which EHG has already done. But it could certainly use improvement.

As far as making content that’s varied but not mandatory vs samey but mandatory: I don’t know that there’s a perfect answer. I do think that if you are trying to vary your content, it should gel well with the core systems of the game. As to the rewards, I think it’s cool when you can go after specific things from different places, but if we don’t want it to be mandatory, like you said we could just have those things drop anywhere but drop either guaranteed or at least in greater quantity in their specific content. But idk. There are different ways to do this.

Yeah I figure it would likely be easy as well. It’s just the only one where I can’t be 100% sure that it’s a one line of code implementation without knowing how exactly they spawn in characters and handle zone loading.

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Yes, but then you can’t have trade function properly.
Because if you got 10 different mechanics and you need something from all of them and the ‘right’ result is rare in each… well… you’ll need a ton of time, won’t you? Each needs to be scaled up to the stage where you can acquire those things, which needs likely time to do before you have a reliable chance to acquire your results.

In trade I don’t need to care about scaling up 9 out of those 10 mechanics, I can do it with a single one.
In CoF though I do need to care about that. So I’ll need twice… thrice… quadruple the time to achieve the same outcome. My time clearly isn’t respected anymore then.

If you base it on CoF playstyle though then you’ll produce a massive overabundance of items on the market, making everything worthless and hence allow players to rush through content in basically no time, which makes them leave as there’s ‘nothing to achieve’ anymore.

Because it allows the content variety which SSF doesn’t allow. Because of the aforementioned issues.

If you got too much gameplay style variety you’ll use a substantial amount of time in content you don’t like. That’s not nice, you stop playing as it’s not fun.
The alternative is to make content generally ‘same-y’ which then leads to people picking the most profitable once commonly while causing the others to basically be ‘bloat’ similar to the state of what dungeons are now. You can’t implement as many varied features then.

It’s not. It’s fundamental to content variety though.
Like in an MMO, when you got 50 different types of activity then you’ll need to either invest a massive amount of time into each one to acquire everything from them… or you need to trade for it. It would be a challenge run more then anything.
It’s similar to what you would do in OldSchool RuneScape then for Ironman. And that’s not something for everyone playing the game, quite the contrary, only a small subset ever does it. You would need to go and craft your own runes before doing a bigger hunt, running around for hours to create them. Then go and do your own arrows, your own potions, preparing for 5 hours to basically hunt 30 minutes to acquire something new.
Or… you do it like most people and focus on one thing you enjoy, acquire funds through that and advance simply while then buying the necessary stuff for the next stuff you wanna do.

Yeah, but you can’t. If you make it gel well with the core systems then it’s similar to the core systems, with slight changes. Otherwise it deviates too much and has a very high chance to not be enjoyed by the majority of people. And since as a CoF player you’re enforced to do it to progress it causes complaints.
So you need to avert that happening, which is my solution I wrote. But the design methodology needs to be for trading because if you use the methodology of CoF then it’ll be a automatic fail-state for a trade system. You don’t create around avoiding unliked content for MG… that’s what the trade-system already does, it would be redundant and cause them to break. Hence you instead include a auxiliary mechanic into CoF to make the avoidance possible for them.

Yes, which would cause massive issues with MG. Since you acquire everything on your own then everything is worth ‘nothing’ basically. But if you actively try to avoid stuff then the things you won’t be able to acquire will have value to you. You need them after all.
This allows a functioning trade-environment. For trade there needs to be both demand and supply after all. No demand and it’s not worth anything, which is the majority of items on the Bazaar. And the others are so rare that demand is through the roof, but supply not. Managing that is extremely hard, which causes the severe disparity between item prices.

A perfectly crafted 4 T5 item for sale is 100k. A T7 rare affix uncrafted base item (which will fail to be a success to be crafted in 95% of the time) is 100 million Gold.

But no matter what… a CoF player will either be forced into content they’ll likely hate… or get side-drops from other content for them to be allowed to avoid it… which will cause them to default to the most profitable way of progressing, not the most fun, making the other mechanics mostly ‘bloat’ without a reason for existence.
There’s some people which will love to hated mechanics though and play those first and foremost, which provides the results to the market in MG… but CoF people will only see it as bloat as nobody will use it. A market allows you to gather profits from a unliked mechanic substantially more to make up for it not being as fun, which makes every mechanic with unique results a potential worthwhile experience while for a CoF player enforcing them into it would make it solely a chore as it wouldn’t be your personal choice to do it, the game would mandate it.

A game based on SSF acquisition can never have the content variety compared to a game which allows community based exchange. Same as in real life. Not everyone can handle working on a oil rig, but those which can handle it bodily and mentally get rewarded accordingly with a big fat paycheck making it all worth it. If they would be paid the same as a grocery worker then barely anyone would ever consider doing it. Same in a game, rewards make it worthwhile and allow the ‘odd ones out’ which aren’t 100% there for only the core gameplay-cycle to enjoy the product. Which is mandatory for a live-service game to provide to expand their playerbase.

93

That’s a lot of assumptions. You can rationalize it all you like, but I’ll leave it up to EHG to decide what the best method of solving the use-case was.

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This is literally why CoF and MG exists, so that one doesn’t affect the other and they can both be balanced according to the wants of that community.

I still don’t think you can just confidently assert that there is no design that could adequately replace trade for our purposes. There’s almost certainly some interesting things you can do.

Also, if you want extremely different gameplay… you know you’re allowed to play a different video game right? If you want an FPS you can load up Halo or Doom. You want to play a rythm game? Play Guitar Hero or DDR. Racing game? etc… there exists some boundary between what mechanics are and are not desirable to group together within one game. Where that line is isn’t well defined, but it exists. The question is what is different enough to feel like a unique variation on this game’s core mechanics but not so different that you ask why you aren’t just playing a dedicated version of that content?

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It’s genuinely hard to imagine how messed up your code would be to make at least the first 2 steps even remotely difficult. They’re that simple.

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Yes, but if you implement varied gameplay it affects CoF negatively since they need to do all the content which will lead - once more - to a lot of it not being enjoyable since it’s very… ‘unique’ in playstyle.

And if you implement it to focus on CoF then you need to make it feel fairly much the ‘same’ to a degree, which makes it detrimental for MG as everyone will do everything, which goes actively against causing disparity between supply/demand to cause a functioning self-regulating market.

The current implementation of CoF and MG doesn’t solve all cross-interactions miraculously, they still do interfere with each other. Game design needs to be done with both equally in mind. Hence methods to solve stuff needs to be done in a way that it isn’t detrimental to either… double the work.
Currently MG is screwed over still, has been since its conception. With CoF being the focus and trading seeming like an afterthought. That’s a very very bad game-state.

Oh, absolutely! No company to date has found any functioning though. Might be out there, likely is even.

In that case lets strip down LE to the core of what H&S is! Why not? We don’t need variety after all. We should definitely remove the spires, patrols and gates in Monoliths. Only Mini-Bosses/Bosses in Monoliths. Also Dungeon Siege 1 showcased we definitely don’t need quests either to make a good H&S. They should go, just unlock stuff automatically as you progress. Also the unique mechanics can all go. Just have random stuff drop from Nemesis which shows up randomly, the ‘egg’ can simply be a interactive thing where you can pick a unique and it immediately has a random outcome. Actually… the LP mechanic can go completely, we can just drop em sometimes pre-crafted, those are what legendary items are anyway, right?

You know… if you want any of those mechanics you can just play another game, right? :slight_smile:

Nope, they don’t. That’s a preconception. Otherwise we wouldn’t have the majority of games as we do them today. We would still play FPS games solely like CS 1.6 or Doom, we would still play RTS games without any overarching map like Total War or Bannerlords, we would still have platformers that go from level to level with no need for anything extra and so on.

Variety is the spice of life, and meshing game genres together provides exactly that. Doing otherwise only allows to hyperfocus which is what made gaming back then a niche hobby unlike today. Games have actually evolved beyond that stage for a reason.

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The timer on the Tombs of the Erased web page link is One day out.
April 2nd launch time is 32 days, 16 hours from now (accounting for DST), not 31 days 16 hours.

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There’s a difference between designing a game with a novel combination of mechanics and just straight up inserting a mini game that has nothing to do with your core game. All of the things you mentioned are fairly natural extensions of the core gameplay.

That’s what I mean. Whatever it is, you need a coherent vision for what the game is about and build around that. Going back to Lab in PoE: The vast majority of content in PoE is some variation on run around and kill stuff with the character you’ve built. Then you randomly need to do a whole avoid the traps area where you can’t kill the things that are hurting you and iirc the traps aren’t even mitigated by your defenses right? So for large parts of the gameplay, you’re doing something that asks fundamentally different skills from you and which ignores like 95% of the character you’ve been building. Nothing else in the game works this way, and yet EVERYONE needs to do it at some point on every character.

As for the CoF v MG: Yeah. They need to do more to keep them separate and then design and balance each appropriately. That’s it. It’s work, but that’s what is necessary for a system like this. At that point they make whatever content and distribute the rewards however they want to incentivize each gameplay type. If they think it wouldn’t be fun to ever force the player to do a specific piece of content in CoF, they can come up with alternate loot acquisition methods that are specific to CoF. And if they do want you to have to do everything, the content better be fun for most people.

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They are. Plenty of builds can run lab and just ignore almost all traps, running over them with impunity. Even with a different build, you can simply add some defenses and, more importantly, add a few flasks with affixes that help you run through it.

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Just to point out that Mike said in his stream today that champion affixes are only available in the sealed slot. So that limits it a bit, since you can’t slam them into uniques.

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