I’d prefer the campaign to be either optional or short as possible to favor other content. Specifically, what I want most out of an ARPG is a variety of endgame activities–and honestly, without a campaign, these would just be “activities” and a lot more ideal.
I’ll criticize D3 for a lot of things, but I give credit where credit’s due: the Adventure mode had a very strong foundation for a selection of content and gameplay loops. Bounties, Rifts, G. Rifts, all good things. The problem for D3 is it didn’t go far enough, it didn’t add more.
Grim Dawn had super bosses and endless arenas, also both good things.
Torchlight 2 Synergies had unique bosses with specific themes and target farmed loot. This is great.
While I find the mapping in PoE to get really mundane, Heist and Delve offer alternative modes of play. I just wish they weren’t arbitrarily gated by resources designed to force back into that horrid Atlas.
That said, Atlas has its place in that game too. I would still want it in the game–just not mandatory.
Sacred 2 has an open world that scales to you (if you’re above the default level for an area) with repeatable and target farmable bosses. This is good.
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Basically, the more things like these a game can offer instead of forcing every new character through the same boring chore of X many hours of walking simulator, the better that game is. The core problem with campaigns/story modes is that they don’t stand up to repetitive play very well, are much more expensive and time consuming to create (because it needs the gameplay AND the story side), and locking build/progression rewards behind it is actually a negative because it makes it feel like even more of a chore rather than somehow actually rewarding.
Having said all that, there are bunch of ways to try to make campaigns more fun/interesting, but ultimately it is just a band-aid fix for what is, at its foundation, a very dull aspect of the genre.