Having played many ARPG’s, I realized they follow different design approaches/ philosophies. I’m curious about LE and where it’s heading, so wanted to ask this open question to the Devs: “what approach do you take?” as well as the community: “which approach do you prefer?”.
A disclaimer up front: my intent is not to insult anyone, I consider myself as much a developer as a designer and think both are super cool and praiseworthy professions. And, if I’m insulting people, I hope at least everyone is insulted in equal measure.
So, let’s say there are two approaches: the ‘sandbox’ approach and the ‘experience’ approach. The sandbox is when a game/ software is designed by developers (used to be called programmers, so people who when asked to design a GUI make a table with all the data and drop-down menus with configurable filters ): they want to have every (valid) combination of features and everything to be user configurable, The best (known) example of a sandbox approach is Path of Exile. With POE, this philosophy extends to the MTX even (you can dress your toon as a cowboy or a clown). The sandbox approach gives an almost unlimited number of solutions to explore, which is great. The downside is that balancing it is a nightmare and inevitably leads to pissing players off that explored that part of the solution space you do not approve of in retrospect (aka nerfs), leading to players getting overwhelmed by the complexity and/or annoyed with constant ‘meddling’ of developers with their build/ playstyle of choice, getting frustrated sooner than with ‘experience’ games.
The ‘experience’ approach is designing with end user’s experience in mind and therefore restricts the possible choices and configurations available in the game to the ones that the designer feel give the best and consistent overall experience. Think of the designer, who likes things to look pretty and feel ‘right’, and does not want to be bothered with ‘technical stuff’ but rather concentrates on how the players feels when interacting with the content . The best example I can give of this approach is Diablo 3. The upside is a smooth game experience, good balancing potential and consistent lore and gameplay. The downsides are the limited possibilities/builds to explore, cookie cutter builds on the leaderboards and people complaining the game is ‘shallow’ in places and getting bored with it sooner than with sandbox games.
So, given LE has recently introduced loot filters, that there are a large number of skills and passives, enabling a massive amount of combinations, I wonder: which approach does LE want to lean more towards: ‘sandbox’ or ‘expeience’ in the end? My impression is that sandbox is a better approximation of LE thus far, but I’d like to hear what you guys think?