I always thought of Diablo 1 as a 3d Metroidvania style game. I wonder how many people know that term. Those games had a definite end. The end of the story was the end of the game. That is why I think the campaign (which used to be the entire game) has become what it is. It seems a necessity because it has been there from the roots of the genre. Now the aRPG genre, which is trying to fuse RPG, MMO, and Metroidvania all into one genre, tries to have unending playability. For that to work, there needs to be things to do beyond the story. It is extremely hard to do. The story was once the focal point, now it is just an ever shrinking part of the genre. What makes it even harder is that as the lifespan of a game goes on, the “end game” gets larger and larger, making the story smaller and more insignificant.
This is why I think the story of aRPG’s should be about narrative of the overall game and not a forced campaign. Like a puzzle. All the pieces go together to form a large, intertwined narrative (story) of the world in the game. You can solve the puzzle starting from any piece really, and end on any piece. What matters is that you put all the pieces together to get a complete picture. This makes it easier to expand the game and include additional story and lore.
My favorite part of the LE story is the Ruined College. I thought it was so cool that you had to go back in time to get the key/badge to be able to enter at the later time. It was really one of the few, if not the only, point in the game where it seems they actually used the time travel aspect of the game in the story. I want more Chrono Trigger story parts where you have to know about the time periods so you can pop back and forth to get through. It is a puzzle that you have to figure out to progress.
I agree with most of what you say. The only thing i miss in a lot of stories in this genre is the actual feeling of exploration.
That in itself makes a lot of stories more boring. I feel less tension and excitement because everything is so streamlined nowadays. Iam from the 80’s and used to play games who wouldnt hold hands a lot of the times. Well in some degree it could be annoying not knowing what the heck to do or go, it made me search. Then i would find a cave and wonder if thats it.
The lack of actual exploration in those games are almost gone. Now if you explore, most of the time you just wasting time of reaching your goal. Instead of maybe finding something interesting that other players missed because they rushed threw it.
Nowadays you know that faster is better most of the time and devs play into this in my opinion.
Start pushing more interesting things in specific corners far of the road of the actual campaign section and people might find out it is actually worth it and fun/interestingto explore instead of straight walking to the goal.
Well said sir, i think endgame should be called maingame nowadays and the story an interesting introduction. IF NOT then it should be as interesting as possible.
Some people tend to forget that like you say aswell, the campaign was the whole game in games like diablo 1/2.
Yet they still compare it as it is completely the same as the games in 2021. Like i said many times, there used to be no section endgame. Yes replayabillity was always important but there was no seperate complete game (which we call endgame now).
So nowadays devs focus on 1 trying to make a long interesting story/campaign + making an interesting ENDGAME which the golden age games like Diablo didnt had.
I really dont get why stories are not becoming shorter but better. In the end those games focus on leagues anyway, why trying being diablo in the Story length when its clearly not the same situation?
Most players nowadays spend there longest time in endgame. In the longterm because of it the most time of develepoment goes into endgame to keep the game interesting…
Like you said games like Metroidvania and Diablo had an ending. Were the ending of stories nowadays are “only the beginning”
I feel for todays devs, its even harder now to please audience with so much different content. Its easy to lose focus if you dont watch out i imagine.
I think if LE were willing to reimagine the story, they could ditch the campaign. The Chrono Trigger comparison is particularly useful here. Having a starting point is obviously required, but these time rifts would be a great vehicle to allow more open exploration of the world through various connecting points that go all over the time scale, so the player gets to figure out what is where, how to solve the “puzzles” between them, and really make something of the time travel concept. This would actually be a powerful way to connect the story to the gameplay. It would also mean they could just scale each zone to the player so everywhere is valid to explore. Suddenly the former “campaign” world is the story, is the gameplay.
This would be perfect, I think. No predetermined path or end point. Just exploration and you set your own course to discover and complete everything. Farm where you want to. Do the quests you want to. All while avoiding the tired and often annoying sandbox of traditional “open world” games.
The way they set up the lore for how time travel works in this game includes multi-dimensionality, so having some cross-over cameos wouldn’t bother me if done tastefully. Hell, it might be cool if they could work with Square to have Crono as a playable character somewhere down the line (then again, this idea might suck, lol). All depends on what direction they end up taking the game and what sorts of themes/concepts they want to add.
No, probably worded badly. More like makig the campaign ‘obsolete’
personally I am more in favour of devs adding in unique items to make leveling faster
I would like a unique in LE that gave temporary +10 to all skills while equipped, Capping at 20 still. I posted about it about 2 months ago, this would mean you would level even faster, still progress but be extremely strong while also still doing the story
+10 would be insane. There’s no way that would be okay, lol. +3 would still be “really strong” without necessarily breaking everything. However, the problem with the campaign is that it makes itself obsolete when it has nothing to offer someone on their 2nd+ play through, so this band-aid wouldn’t fix the problem and really just points to how flawed the campaign actually is if the proposed solution is “trivialize it so you can rush it harder.”
To be fair we haven’t even seen the finished story or campaign to even know what they have in store. Just with this upcoming patch a lot is changing. In the AmA that Judd did recently, he spoke on how the quests and story are going to be delivered in a much different way. I wouldn’t put too much weight on what you see now in game.
I already posted the way the item would work a while ago.
its basically just a temp +10 skills still capping at 20, it just means you power through early game til about 70 then remove the item for something else as it wont do anything at that point, from memory you hit level 18 skill around 65? or so
it would be like Tabula Rasa essentially but you would want to remove LE’s item around Abomination or something as it would be a dead item at that point
im pretty sure a developer would rather a player powered through their content instead of skipping it entirely and one of the easiest ways to satisfy this is to add powerful early game uniques to make leveling more enticing but also doesnt disrupt end game
I don’t know. I also feel thet during ealry leveling (during the whole campaign), every skill point is important and significative. Your idea would be nice, but I fear it would break the way we discover skills. So it would be good for experimented players, but probably less for newcomers or someone who discovers a new class or skill.
Could be nice, yes.
I leveled about 30 characters in 660 hours, I could easily use such an item. But if I had it for one of the maybe ten first chars, I would probably not have used it wisely. ^^
I think it bears reiterating that it doesn’t solve the problem. That said, I think such an item might be okay (at like +3, lol), but would probably need to be tied to some fixed endgame goal and not a random drop–maybe like 1m gold or something from EoT vendor.
I was bored of the campaign after the second playthrough, the ONLY reason I do it is because it’s tied behind passive points and idol slots, if they weren’t a part of it, I would not be doing the campaign.
Can’t believe I was so invested in an NPC that only appeared for about a minute.
If the Devs are keeping score, I just wanna throw in my vote to the story/campaign. I have found it to be a nice pacing to level and explore (and re-explore) new chars/skills (thanks for the accelerated skill levelling!). There were times when I have thought I was getting bored of the campaign, but then I just zone out and imagine the map was a mono.
I only wish the time portals could be used for something other than just storyline progression. Not sure what that something is but I think the portal concept is quite cool and definitely has some potential.
Yes but the problem lies with the person who has the issue
I dont have an issue leveling a character because its just part of the game so I dont see progressing a new character a ‘problem’
I also love to completely respec characters to something else so before EGH can even entertain the though of removing the campaign they need to give the option to respec Masteries. Thats actually much more of an issue that I cannot respec my level 96 Paladin to a Forge Guard if I wanted
Agree about respec. Should have an option–even if expensive.
However, the campaign thing is a real problem in a lot of these games and it doesn’t help the genre when every game repeats the same mistakes. Again, this is something D3 did really well that it deserves a lot of credit for. Trying to make it sound like it’s just a personal issue ignores the huge numbers of people who have that problem. It stems from the design of the game, not just those players.
From what I can remember Diablo 3 had a team of about 400, with 80 of those being dedicated developers. EHG has a team of 50. I’m sure the number of developers they have is much smaller. Saying that they should be putting out what an established triple A game company with deep pockets has done, seems unrealistic to me. This is their first game as a team. Keep some of this in perspective. I’m trying to brainstorm ideas within the realms of possibility.
It fits the theme well