LE design philosophy question

[LastBrat]

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?

[XLVI_carpo]

I’m not entirely sure if I could categorize my wishes for the game as I want so see things from both sides. Maybe call it a compromise.

I like it when games offer a variety of build options. This is what LE is doing right here. There are a lot of viable builds to beat the content. But it is also kind of restricted due to class and mastery choice. You can’t build a fireball throwing Primalist, you have to stick to the theme of the class. But inside the classes there’s a lot if variety.

Now this maybe seen differently by a 24/7 gamer that tries to be #1 on the Arena ladder. The higher you go, the more balance issues fall into account. So there will always be top tier items/builds if you are going for min maxing.

I saw a stream yesterday where one of our content creators was ranting about the current stun meta, claiming that “the whole LE community” has issues with stun locking everything. (He also thought me new phrases I could use in my next argument - but that’s another story). He’s of the opinion that EHG should immediately do something about it because it decreases the player experience for everybody.

So this is a none issue for me personally, because I don’t care for the best meta build. I often choose my builds by picking the exact opposite of what is op just to see if I can do something with it. This is the most fun for me personally in this kind of games.

And therefore I really like LEs “restrictions” that have me to build around something that looks like an obstacle for the build (like building a fire themed Beastmaster).

I guess the devs are always creating stuff with certain builds and interactions in mind. But you cannot foresee every possible result of things you implement. The thousands of players will always find that few broken mechanics that lead to the op meta builds. And you always will have people that just follow a guide to copy that builds, while you have others that take it as a challenge to create a non meta build that can compete with those meta builds (and becoming the new meta).

If devs want to prevent this and create an environment of a large number equally strong builds they would need to build in more and more restrictions. But then the creativity of people gets gimped as there are less and less possibilities to experiment with.

I’d rather like to have the 2-3 op broken builds that come with more freedom of building, than restrictions that streamline build diversity. Yes, broken builds also result in less build diversity because people will play meta builds (the more if they choose to take part in competition like ladders or races). But at least they have the choice to play something else. They choose to play meta builds or not. They are not forced into certain builds by the system.

Saying this I like the restrictions of the class identity. I favour this design over a classless system where you just can build everything everytime.

This may stand in conflict with all the stuff I wrote above. But that’s just how I feel.

TL,DR: I like a sanbox system with certain restrictions

[Shrukn]

I dont mind classes and restrictions however the end result though is a less deeper or complex game overall that isnt necessarily a bad thing

A good example - EHG will release a combat skill for say the Mage that does Fire damage and maybe within the tree you can conver it, you back it up with the Sorc/Mage passive trees- you already have a fair idea what to do

PoE is releasing 2 blood themed skills in 2 days and I cant decide which class to pick to pair it with. I have 2 classes but cant really decide on either yet, both are built defensively different and both can scale the damage differently - hit damage, crit damage, damage overtime. Can also convert the damage to elemental and ive seen them action for all of 1 minute

Testing that will take people some time, eventually after a month the ‘meta’ will appear which will be arguably the strongest setup because of online resources tracking peoples builds and sharing information

When a new skill releases in LE the same will happen but you only have 1 base class tied to the skill and the skill tree or gear will define other options, testing that will take far less time - I tested many of the Rogue skills on release and a few skills namely Detonating Arrow/Sync/Cascade after a few hours I was fairly convinced on what I assumed performed best and viewed them as ‘solved’ at approxlevel 80+ when geared

Imagine for a moment if there was a class in LE that had access to every class tree, every skill point but you were limited by how many points you had

Imagine a poison stacking class who had put 40? points into Beastmaster for Aspect of the Viper for increased buff effect of poison/chance then put points into Sentinel to get Warpath, then some Rogue points to get access to Shift and Acid Flask, dual Daggers and more poison then for some reason you stack intelligence from Mage/Acolyte - for Ward retention and wear some Last Steps/Exsang now you have a Low life Dual wielding dagger using Warpath poisoner