Over the time the level design has made some nice transitions. The levels have gotten some nice lighting effects and especially some of the newer mono environments have a really nice mood.
But one thing that is missing completely is: Buildings.
There are no houses, huts, churches, ruins, castles, prisons, cellars and so on.
We get some pictures/textures of houses in the background of some areas. Sometimes we walk past buildings. But in general there’s no such stuff.
With chapter 9 there are some levels that go in that direction. Ma’jelka is the first environment that feels like a real settlement.
Everything that comes before that doesn’t transport the feeling of being a “real” place. Quest hubs during the story don’t feel like real places people would live. These places lack soul.
One cause of it, imho, is the lack of buildings. There are no town halls, forges (well, there are forges = big anvils standing around open-air), churches, living houses and all that stuff that belongs to the image (my image) of a village or town.
There are no taverns.
The few buildings we come along are just unreal, because we cannot enter. They are just pictures of buildings but without any function.
There’s nothing particularly wrong with all the places in LE. But the absence of the elements I listed above make the would of Eterra feel unreal and artificial.
Just play 10 minutes of Grim Dawn and you’ll know exactly what I mean.
It’s not that I’m suggesting to add fully fleshed out copies of real cities. But adding an abandoned settlement or farm to the maps where you can enter the buildings and search for chests or enemies, would add so much atmosphere, imho. Also these kind of places are nice for adding sidequest or just some environmental story telling.
Eterra is so flat and unnatural, it takes away a big junk of immersion.
This gets worse with the dungeons. These levels have no rational layout. Dungeons all have a unique story. But the actual levels have no connection to that story. They are just the platform for player models and enemy models to meet and exchange game mechanics. It’s hard to explain what I mean.
Just imagine you walk through a castle. You have an idea of what the purpose of a castle is. It has walls to keep unwanted people out. It has a prison, barracks, a kitchen, a room for the throne. You propably can identify these environments and tell what their purpose is. If you get thrown into a castle by a game, without the game telling you where you are, you would still be able to make conclusions.
Now imagine the game throws you into the Soulfire Bastion without telling you what place it is. What would anybody think of that place and what purpose it serves? Without context nobody would know. Because the place doesn’t have an identity. It has a fire theme. But that’s it. We get told that its leader commits dark experiments with souls. But we don’t see anything of this. z8nstead we’re running on platforms hanging above lava, running from dead end to dead end to reach a door that leads to the mutated twin of the first level. Are we going deeper? Or higher? Or just to the side? Having an entrance to the second level that looks exactly the same as the first level makes me feel the game has bugged out and accidentally reset the dungeon so I have to start over new. Theres no sense of transitioning to the next level.
In D2 were at least climbing down stairs to get deeper into a dungeon. In PoE we enter buildings or caves that have a sense of purpose. Many have different levels so we travel deeper into a dungeon or climb up to the top of a tower. There’s a feeling of moving through a building even if the level layouts also aren’t very realistic. But at least transitioning between areas and levels has enough realism to simulate the game version of a building.
This is not the case with LE.
I’m playing this game since early access. I’ve seen it evolve in many cases. The last big points like performance, mp and feel of combat get addressed currently. But the level design always bothered me. And I’m not seeing it evolve over a very long time. Maybe a bit, but not to an extend I’m satisfied with.
It’s a smaller aspect in an ARPG, where the biggest parts are the game mechanics and itemisation systems. I know that. It’s ok.
But nevertheless I wanted to, again, address that topic since this is one of the weak spots compared to other games. Atmosphere adds to the feel of a game. It’s a part of the gameplay. You memorize levels that stand out in a game, even if the game mechanics are bad.
Thanks for reading this.
