Leveling system

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I am compelled to chime in on this matter because I LOVE this game.
It is by far my most loved ARPG ever, as I have played many.

Most people always want to know what is the end-game & how do I
get there the fastest.

IT’S ALL ABOUT PERCEPTION & FEELING:

I think most people don’t really care about questing, going back
and fort to town to turn in quests, walking all over the place in
big zones searching for quest completion. I think this old-school system
of quest/zone design is outdated & people don’t have the patience to
play the game that way, especially since the game zones are so huge,
and there are many zones to go through. I think this is why the feeling & need
of another way to get to end-game is prevalent.

However, remember that the end-game is essentially the same as the campaign in the sense that you go from zone to zone to XP, find loot & grow stronger. There is constant PROGRESS.
Therefore, we need to make the campaign feel better.

I think it’s the QUEST SYSTEM that plays a psychological role in the players’ mind
that makes them want to “be done with it already”.

HOWEVER, for this game, designing a new way to level & get to end-game
would be a horrible mistake. Don’t waste developer time on a new system
that ignores the whole campaign (like Diablo 3). This game is beautifully hand-crafted,
and there is no need to do anything to undermine that.

SOLUTION:

  1. Redesign the QUEST SYSTEM to be more dynamic with auto-completion
    and the next story quest auto assigned. Eliminate the need to keep going
    back to town. Always move forward. Each town starts your adventure
    without having to go back; Instead, you are looking forward to the next town.

  2. ELIMINATE ALL SIDE QUESTS – the story is what matters, so make that the only
    focus with all relevant rewards.

  3. MAKE THE ZONES MORE LINEAR – smaller areas without so many directions to go
    the “wrong way” and make you feel like you wasted your time & your progress slowed
    down.

  4. ELIMINATE ZONES THAT DON’T HAVE STORY QUESTS – make each zone feel purposeful.

I love this game above all others. I think these changes would upgrade the game to amazing.
It would make the game feel much more efficient & the sense of progress more fun, without
the feeling that you need another system to level, like adventure mode.

FROM LEVEL 1 ON, IT WILL MAKE THE WHOLE GAME FEEL LIKE AN END-GAME.

Thank you for designing a great game! much success :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

I agree with you on the zones being more linear aspect. I often find myself running through echoes and just going “Why is all this empty space necessary?” However I like a well designed side quest, there just isn’t one in this game.

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3

There is one. The library quest where you have to go back to Ruined Era for the key, then go back to Imperial to get in. This is strongly reminiscent of Chrono Trigger and taking advantage of the timeline aspect of the game should be encouraged.

Streamlining some quests might be okay this way, but I don’t want it mean the devs don’t create more interesting quests using the model described above.

No. If they are going to do this, I’d rather skip the campaign entirely for a different mode like D3 or Wolcen.

No, this is very boring. Instead of, “This extra unused space doesn’t have a purpose, so let’s get rid of it,” we should be asking, “What can we do with this extra space?”

Time to eliminate echoes! You heard him, boys. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Jokes aside, for the kind of game you’re talking about, it sounds really boring. The closest thing to it is probably Dungeon Siege 2, but the quests and revisiting places you passed before is part of that game’s charm. The game I see you describing has no reason to use the timelines for anything, narrative or otherwise, and may as well be one of those 2D sidescroller beat-em-ups.

4 Likes
4

LE needs time to flesh out the world. This is a new game and a beta at that. So to expect a finished product at this stage is a bit out of touch.
Side quests are kind of broken after the 0.8.2 patch. Some of the boss fights were redone and changing the 30-45 leveling process. Those things impacted other parts of the campaign like passive points and idol slots, which everyone should be doing to maximize your character.

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5

I wasn’t implying they needed to do these things today, but I definitely don’t think that overly streamlining things to the point described in the OP is a good approach. We should ask for more complexity and depth, not dumb it down. That’s the kind of thing that does justify criticisms of “auto-pilot” gameplay.

6

Agreed, there is something rather unusual and very pleasant with this quest!

7

Anyone who has played Chrono Trigger is likely to appreciate. Dungeon Siege 2 had similar quest structure, just without the timeline aspect of the concept/narrative. I think it’s a good model to follow.

8

I never played Chrono Trigger and I remember very few of Dungeon Siege, but I usually like all stuff time travel.

9

If the zones became any more linear you’d be playing Darkest Dungeon. The vast majority of zones have 1 entry & 1 exit. Of the ~88 zones (including towns & the 3 ancient era zones), ~13 non-town zones have 3 exits (ie, they attach to more than 2 other zones).

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10

I agree all. Personally, I don’t care how many zones/quests there are. I take my time when I play & enjoy all the content. There are many people who are complaining and want an alternate method to get to end game. As I said, I think the reason for people feeling this way is because of how quests/zones are implemented. People are impatient & always in a rush; which doesn’t make sense since end-game is essentially running the same zones 100s of times.

I don’t agree with the complaints, but am giving the reason I think why they are complaining.

Essentially, it doesn’t matter how many ways there are to level if & only if that is what the developers want & are able to realistically provide.

1 Like
11

I honestly really like this. But I do believe there are certain people who feel differently. I come from D3 and Path of Exile and my interest comes from getting through the campaign and getting into that endgame grind to get stronger.

As much as I would LOVE all the ideas that you’re saying, there are people that will play this game for the story. They’ll play it for the quests. This kind of system doesn’t really care about those people imo.

Personally, PoE’s biggest flaw for me is the fact that you have to consistently go through the story each and every league. I really don’t like that. D3 does a good job of giving you bounties and the “endgame system” from the beginning. However, it is super boring and drags on when you’re not at max level (which makes people just powerlevel).

It’s really difficult to think about the best system for this game. As much as I dislike PoE’s system, I prefer it over D3’s because it feels a bit less boring to me. But it also becomes super stale. Having a separate system that gives you +bonus to exp and also is only accessible after beating the story once would be really cool.

I’m not super knowledgeable on ARPGs or game design but I decided to chime in with my thoughts :stuck_out_tongue:

1 Like
12

I strongly recommend it.

It’s an SNES era game, so I’m sure you can find it without too much trouble, also available on Steam., and it’s widely regarded as one of the best RPGs ever–up there with FF7 (and others in the seris), Legend of Dragoon, Elder Scrolls series, KOTOR, Baldur’s Gate, etc.

13

It’s worth mentioning that even back in the days of Diablo 2 that most people would play only a few characters through the campaigns before hopping into multiplayer where everyone rushes and powerlevels, boss farms, etc. D3 sort of just enabled this (rather than resisting it as many ARPGs tend to) and saw a resurgence and somewhat sustained playerbase as a result. There’s clearly a demographic that prefers this.

For my part, it just depends on how the game is designed and if it feels like it matches what the game is “telling me” through that design. So far, LE’s closest comparison isn’t PoE, but Wolcen. I don’t mean this as a put-down of any sort, though I’m aware of Wolcen’s reputation. I mean it purely in the context of the content available and how you’re encouraged/enabled to play. The difference is that Wolcen understands what D3 does while LE does not. That might be okay if LE want to go more the direction of something like Dungeon Siege or Grim Dawn, but everything said (and in design) so far points to it trying to be more like PoE, and a very common gripe against PoE is that it too doesn’t understand what D3 does for the kind of game it is.

I think the devs need to make a choice about which sort of game they want LE to be because this in-between thing it has right now is the worst of both worlds: It doesn’t have the narrative to drive the game as a story-focused game, and the form of the current endgame activity makes it look like that’s the important part to focus on, so being forced to repeat the campaign for passives and idol slots feels terrible; hence people asking for alternative systems.

2 Likes
14

To be honest, I don’t like that kind of games. I tried some of them (Wastelands, Baldur’s Gate, Final Fantasy X and some others) and I always found them boring. I’m too “old school” for this, for me RPG means table, dice, character sheet and other players around the table. I love the idea of RPG on PC, but I never found one that was not boring. And I can’t say how many I tried, considering I started to play in the mid-80s.

15

I’ve done quite a bit of tabletop too, but I don’t think video gaming is much of a medium for that sort of gaming. I know there are some tools out there people use to play these kinds of games, but it’s just not the same. That said, ARPGs are probably about as far from those as you can get while still roughly staying in “RPG” territory.

1 Like
16

Agreed. And I still don’t know why Last Epoch, Path of Exile, Diablo and others are called “ARPG”. I mean, we don’t play a role. These games are “hack’n slash”. We kill monsters in order to get stuff that will help us kill monsters. There is no role playing behind all that! These games are - or are supposed to be - pure action. At least when we’re not theorycrafting our build. ^^

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17

Well, traditional JRPGs do have you play a role, but few of them have much in the way of actual choice rather than a monorail of narration with some gameplay thrown in. Probably games like Mass Effect, The Witcher, KOTOR, Elder Scrolls, Fallout, and Cyberpunk are the closest to having an actual “role” you play, but I don’t see tabletop meshing with video games in any organic way until (ironically) we have sufficient AI that can tell compelling stories and world build in real time.

2 Likes
18

o I enjoy the quests as a break from Monolith Farming

o I’d like more town trips (not less), and I want those towns to be consistent, ie. always have Vendor/Stash/Forge, because there are long periods where my inventory is full, and there is noone to sell too when I pop thru town via quest or teleport.

o When people say Linear, think PoE, simple chapters/maps, you know where you are up to in the campaign… you cant get lost, there are only a couple of nodes per chapter… right now after 2 playthroughs, I still have have no idea where I am, I dont even know what chapter im in if im honest.

o Need to make the current quest and side quest locations easy to find, right now I keep moving through the map tabs trying to find a tiny gold or silver marker.

1 Like
19

Yeah this makes sense. But I feel if a game will… “enable” something like this. Why not just give them the option to automatically “powerlevel to endgame” on a new character. Is it because of the community aspect to find someone to help you powerlevel? Usually in D3 you’d just ask in chat, get plvl’d, and never speak to the guy again lol.

100% agree with this! An alternative system to get people into monolith of fate quickly with ways to get a basic build set up and also have every system unlocked. I would be down for that.

I’ve thought about something similar to arena that maybe scales with your level, which also gives you drops every certain waves to help gear you up as you go through the levels but as someone who’s not super knowledgeable on the intricacies of ARPGs I’m not sure how bad this would end up lol.

20

I’m well aware that having to repeat a campaign can feel repetitive and boring…

But is allowing you to skip straight to end game really the appropriate solution? I personally don’t think so.

I think this is a good opportunity to play with the time traveling story line… I know this is super basic but like; my future characters start in the future after I’ve already completed the campaign. shrug