Indeed.
Especially if you ever plan on having seasons like poe and d3.
Replaying the campaign , even if it would be amazing , is not something I like to do on my 5th character
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Or you know we would just want a choice… Granted there is nothing keeping a player from running the same zone over and over again…
Diablo 3 adventure mode leaves progression into the end game systems feeling hollow and one-dimensional. This is a HORRIBLE feature, whether you realize it or not. The goal is to progress a character, hitting milestones as you level and do the acts. If you take out that system of progression, what you’re left with is an empty leveling experience where you’re just trying to brainlessly kill monsters so that you can get to the monolith. This shouldn’t be a low-interactivity game. At some point, you have to ask yourself: “Do I like playing this game?” If the answer is yes, then you should have NO ISSUES moving through the campaign a second, third, or even hundredth time.
This isn’t a brain-dead mobile game with no inputs. You have to enjoy the gameplay loop of killing monsters and picking up loot, otherwise what’s the point of playing? Monolith isn’t some completely game-changing experience, it’s literally the same gameplay loop reskinned for end game. If you can’t bring yourself to kill monsters in a structured act/story system, maybe you’re better off just playing D3?
This game isn’t a love letter to d3. It’s a love letter to old ARPGs, and in most cases, this game improves on the bad systems those ARPGs had without sacrificing the integrity of the genre. At the end of the day, the diablo 3 adventure mode eliminates a part of what makes these ARPGs so great: That breath of relief and sense of completion at finishing the acts and beginning your end game journey. There has to be that sense of completion otherwise the line between starting a character and starting end game is too vague.
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Please don’t tell me what I do or don’t enjoy.
I enjoy the combat, leveling experience (character progression), and the grind.
I don’t enjoy the campaign with its empty spaces, unrewarding exploration, and its story.
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The goal is to progress a character, hitting milestones as you level and do the acts. If you take out that system of progression, what you’re left with is an empty leveling experience where you’re just trying to brainlessly kill monsters so that you can get to the monolith.
Your milestones might be calibrated differently from mine. I enjoy trying brand new builds “as advertised”. That doesn’t mean perfect T20 gear. It does mean using the endgame skills with advertised core synergies (not some generic “leveling skills”). For example, when I unlocked both Shadow Cascade and Synchronized Strike on my Rogue, I felt like I was 1) playing the “real” build for the first time. That’s where I drew the graph at “zero” and really began to enjoy that build’s progression with 2) better bases worth investing rare shards in and 3) more challenging enemies to test that build’s limits.
Following another player’s advice, I started leveling in Arena right after EoT to 50 and then Monolith to 65. It was a better experience on all 3 fronts above. And it powered me through the part of the game that was not. The only drawback was getting bored with a build and rerolling before empowered monos. I doubt I’m the only player who considers rerolls to be the unofficial 0.8.1 endgame.
Even this tradeoff will probably feel less stark in 0.8.2 as we’ll have more “mid-level goals”. Instead of “brainlessly killing monsters” in 10 regions to unlock the “official” endgame, I could slow down to see how just one interacts with my build. I could even see myself rerolling less often with more gameplay variation outside the build itself.
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Arena leveling after mastery is probably the best we are going to get after our 1st time through. I usually hit the arena around 24-25 and hopefully farm up enough keys to bail out once I wuss out to avoid deaths. I do that until I either have the right power Uniques/items/stats readied for the build and jump in mono at 48. I think the area level scaling is +/- 7 levels if I have observed correctly. You are mostly limited by gear level locks at this point.
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You are free to enjoy horrible things, like Diablo 3
Totally agree with OP. This is one of my biggest criticisms with a lot of ARPGs and one of the biggest causes of burn-out. Nothing makes me put a game down quite as hard as wanting to play another build, but not wanting to slog through an arbitrarily over-long walking simulator campaign.
Maybe an unpopular opinion (maybe not), but I would love an ARPG that had significant build depth and just skipped the campaign stuff in favor of lots of fun, repeatable content.
However, since it’s too late for that for this game, an alternate mode to level in would be good (as well as ability to pick up the passive points and idol slots). Barring that, more control over the campaign would be nice. Something like the Skulls system from Halo where you can choose modifiers that add difficulty in exchange for better exp and/or drop rates. For that matter, adjustable mob density carries that implicitly and wouldn’t require extra rewards since the mobs already carry them. --Basically, make the campaign less boring.
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I am in favor of a shorten campaign or an exit point like I mentioned earlier. There are some areas in the first 20-25 levels that do not take long to complete. I have seen the opposite burn-out happen when completely disconnecting the leveling from the campaign causes burn-out in the other direction.
There is a delicate balance. Neverwinter is a classic example of too much content and bypasses the levels that those places are kept in for nostalgic sake.
This all assumes a perspective and attitude that many of us don’t share. You are trying to say that because you value certain things over others (and really the opposite things from what the genre is popular for, I might add), that the rest of us shouldn’t have a choice.
I also could not possibly disagree more about D3’s adventure mode. It’s probably one of the very best things I’ve seen in the genre, whether you realize it or not. It cuts out all the boring stuff people don’t want to do in favor of the fun stuff they do want to do. There is no “sense of completion” for finishing acts/campaign. There’s only a sense of, “Finally, this chore is out of the way.”
You can try to deride others’ desires to “mindlessly kill monsters,” but that is what this genre is before anything else. Hardly anyone plays them for the stories, the stories are usually a half-hearted afterthought, and the very few people who might care get a tiny amount of views on their lore videos on Youtube. Diablo is basically the only ARPG franchise with any sort of lore following, and again, many of us stopped considering anything after D2 to be canon because the writing quality is so poor.
The core problem is that the very nature of the gameplay is at odds with the way the stories are delivered–fast-paced action combat, suddenly halted by (often not even voice acted) walls of text. It just doesn’t work. It’s a waste of time and resources, but devs always feel obligated to put it in anyway. Fine, I guess, for both players that enjoy it. The rest of us are here for gameplay and don’t want to keep repeating a mostly empty walk-for-the-cause marathon for every alt build we wish to attempt. None of these games even have the decency to give us the pink breast cancer awareness ribbon at the end of it either (how insulting!).
Also, since apparently you love to tell people to “go play D3,” realize that the reason people don’t is because it lacks build customization in a meaningful way. Outside of that, this game looks and plays in many similar ways, so you’re either oblivious or foolish to deride that game (and people who enjoy it) while trying to act as if this game shouldn’t do the things that D3 did right.
This game has the potential to be that sweet spot between D3 and PoE, but if it makes the mistakes that both of them do, it will just end up like Wolcen.
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This is why it’s critical that it’s an option. Let people enjoy it how they wish.
While I love D3, I must admit leveling is a poor experience.
In Last Epoch I’d like to have an alternate system to level, but not the Arena. Maybe some early level monoliths or so. I would like the leveling steps to be impactful.
I think that is what the time portals to get our idol slots were originally supposed to be. Mini-echos. I sense that EHG is drifting away from that concept, or other more important things are being worked on to expand the player base.
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Funny enough, playing through the campaign, I didn’t even make the connection between those rifts and the idols. I’m not sure if this means I wasn’t paying enough attention or that the game wasn’t clear enough about the relationship.
In either case, I think they could look to Grim Dawn’s devotion system for some inspiration about how to handle alternate progression concepts (instead of forcing just campaign). Torchlight 2 Synergies mod also did a good job on this front.
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Now I could go one step further is to have random mini echoes appear that has a totally uber unique rare or mini-boss like the dragon that can have an alternate result than just normally going through the motions. I think that is what the key takeaway from this thread is.
Give us some surprises, enough of the mundane, don’t burn us out before we burn out in the end.
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Honestly? I don’t particularly like doing story mode. I’ve done it in PoE countless times across thousands of hours, and I do understand people not wanting to do it much. A love for repeating stories in ARPGS isn’t what drives me to make the comment, but rather a foresight for what will inevitably be degradation of a meaningful progression system.
I think you’re being pretty ignorant of what people like and what developing a game is like. You say almost nobody plays ARPGS for the story, but then why do the best ARPGs of all time have really rich lore and a good story? Titan Quest, Dungeon Siege, PoE, Grim Dawn, etc. Did the story just pop into existence? Why would ARPG game developers even bother creating a story mode if it wasn’t important? Why is it REALLY APPARENT when the story/dialogue of a game is lacking, even when you’re a player who barely pays attention to stories? Shouldn’t all ARPGs be just like Diablo 3 then? No substance, just immediate brainless grinding. Why even bother forcing players to do a story? All the time and effort and money it takes?
Here’s why:
Stories and rituals attach us to things. Without them, difficulty/tedium included, things feel a lot more meaningless.
Not to mention that the devs have spent this entire time, YEARS in fact developing this game’s story. The story isn’t an afterthought, nor should it be. It’s taken years of hard work, writing, developing, animating, and designing to get to this stage. So sure, you may feel like you don’t want to walk through a couple of familiar zones while loosely following a story (that you don’t even need to pay attention to), but if I were a LE developer, I wouldn’t want for players like you to just glaze over the VAST MAJORITY of what I had spent the last few years pouring all of my efforts into.
I tell people to go play Diablo 3 because it’s obvious that’s the experience they are looking for. Thank god these devs don’t feel the same way.
It’s funny how the only game you mentioned that had any semblance of a story (and not a great one, just kind of acceptable) is Dungeon Siege, but you want to overinflate their importance and quality.
As for devs spending that much time and money on it–I feel bad for them. It truly is a waste. I’d much rather they poured that passion and effort into the gameplay itself. This is why PoE, despite the issues it has, is the premiere ARPG of our time. They have story/lore stuff in the game, but they had their priorities mostly correct from a design standpoint. They knew what kind of game they were making and for whom.
As for trying to attach players to the game, campaigns do the opposite of this–especially needlessly long and boring ones, which is the vast majority of ARPGs (including this one).
That all said, I already acknowledged in an earlier post that it’s too late for this game to not waste time on this frivolous nonsense. However, they still have a few options that can still make the game highly appealing to a wide variety of players, and suggested some of them. At this point, providing the option to avoid the campaign is the best route. Forcing players through it over and over is a surefire way to undercut those same efforts you say you value so much, because it won’t just turn people away from the campaign; it will turn them away from the game as a whole.
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Kinda curious what you mean by this statement. How do you see content that currently presents no challenge as a meaningful progression system? I’ve found ARPG progression to be about the cycle of getting stronger to kill bigger baddies and get stronger loot.
Do you know what you should do? Become a game developer. Make your own ARPG and innovate the genre. Seems like you think you have a better idea of what makes ARPGs good than the companies who have sold millions of them.
It’s kind of perfect… This way you can just cut out that frivolous story nonsense. Fire up the game and your account comes preloaded with all classes and characters at max level. That way you can jump right in to end game!! Or in the case of your ARPG, just “game”, because end game doesn’t mean anything anymore. None of that nonsense feeling of “finishing” anything, just vegetative-state style grinding, just as the ARPG gods intended.
Finally, a game where countless players don’t have to sit with their head in their hands, crying out in agony from being forced to sit in their chair and click through a couple of lines of skippable dialogue for the 8th time.
Ah, this tired old straw-man and nonsense of “You should make one,” as if it’s an argument. If I had the financial backing to and/or technical knowledge, I would, actually. I guarantee it would be a blast to play too. Unfortunately, I don’t have those resources just as you don’t have a point.
Thanks for emptying the last few drops out of your credibility bottle.
Edit:
Actually, let me finish this nonsense off once and for all.
You keep talking about how “empty” and “hollow” the combat side of these games is. You find the core aspect of gameplay meaningless. Why even play games then? You should just stick to TV/movies if that’s your attitude. It might be different if it was actually in the game’s intent to make some profound point, like what NieR: Automota does, but ARPGs simply don’t. The genre isn’t well suited to it and everyone–especially the devs–understand that. The problem is that they haven’t yet caught onto how frivolous stories/campaigns actually are to the genre in general.
That said, given your disdain for the actual gameplay of these things, you’re the last person anyone should listen to about game development or design.
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