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.
I never played Chrono Trigger and I remember very few of Dungeon Siege, but I usually like all stuff time travel.
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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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.
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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 
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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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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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.
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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.
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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.
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
Its depends from player to player, i mean i want that because i love to test things and have to spend a lot of hours just to discover i really spend a lot of my time in a build that i ended disliking feels awful (happens a lot to me btw XD), for example, lets say i want to make my own hammerdin, but to get all the perks that i need and all the set parts/uniques/forged items for my specific build i need to spend like 50 hours of straight gameplay of content that i already did with my other 8 characters and except for the first time that i really read what the npcs and the story was about, all the next runs i just press skip and close tabs every time i could.
I think that when you already saw everything the story can show you and there is no more content to do with it, is not a good reason to force player to play that loop, again and again and again, thats why end game content needs to be engage and change so much in a lot of games, because you need something different to do when you are at the top.
The big problem of D3 is that the game even on hard the story is ridiculously easy even on hard and nightmare and torment just unlock after you finish the game and is not really worth for anything more than farming better gear, same thing you can do in GR anyways, also on my personal taste, diablo III is plain bad, a retcon mess with a lot of meaningless characters and a lore that now say that the main character is basically a Demigod so all your achivements feels really meaningless because you have the angelic and demon’s blood, of course you can do it easily.
If you want to force everyone to play your story with every character at least do an interesting story and D3 clearly don’t have it, thats why RoS came to save the game from his own disaster, because add content that let you skip that awful story.
In D3’s case, I’d prefer to just start at 70 because everything before that is actually irrelevant. For LE it depends on what the focus of the game is supposed to be. Current design says it’s all about endgame, so maybe that should be the way to go. However…
This would be my much preferred option, as alluded to with the Chrono Trigger reference. It’s important to note that this route is much more difficult and a lot more work, but I think in the end it would be much better for the game since we already have D3 and Wolcen doing what we discussed above.
The kind of changes I’d like to see to the campaign would look something like:
- Scale all campaign areas to player level (perhaps with some difficulty modifiers)
- Rewrite the story to be more open-ended. Move away from this linear A to B corridor simulator.
- The choices you make in certain quests alter the outcomes and choices available for other quests related to the timeline.
- Be able to choose sides with various factions and even the “bad guys” to influence the ending you get.
- Make some loot only target farmable in campaign areas.
- Only quest choice specific areas would be locked behind campaign progression. The rest would be open and available, the narrative largely dictated by which faction(s) you want to influence. This would make Multiplayer much more friendly (though still carry a few minor limitations).
- Eventually include very in-depth, long-term objectives for players to seek out (but not be mandatory).
- Move away from WoW-style !/? “questing” in favor of something more organic. Have changes the world show the results of your actions, NPCs that join you and talk to you while you progress certain quests, important enemies that you encounter several times through the campaign that react differently based on your choices, etc.
- Echoes should still be available fairly early on as side content should players prefer that, but I think a much more interesting campaign would see a lot less sentiment that it should be skipped entirely.
Basically, if LE was to be this kind of game, I wouldn’t expect it to reach this state for a couple more years at least–if they started today–but I do think it would carve out a truly unique niche in the market without having to sacrifice the thing it does best so far: build customization.
I think it also would open many avenues for incorporation of seasonal content, which right now is very narrow because echoes are basically the only thing players have to care about. Even in PoE, the community consensus when new stuff is added–even though it’s available during campaign–is something like, “Skip the mechanic until maps.” This is largely because of zone/enemy scaling and how rewards are tailored to it. If all the zones scaled to you, skipping it wouldn’t really benefit you, but doing the extra content might.
I’ve played ARPGs since they first existed and almost every variety of them. This would be something new and different. This would be something fresh in a genre filled with “rush to endgame and grind the same content until your eyes bleed.” I’d love to play this.
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I’m pretty new here, but far from new to this genre or gaming in general.
While I do agree to a certain extent on the linear aspect of zones, I don’t 100%. I think that all the quest related requirements could be funnelled into the linear part of zones, but keep the zones the same size/layout for the “completionist” type of player who feel the compulsion to completely clear out every zone. Maybe just add in some extra chests for those guys that aren’t on the linear questy path.
As far as not towning, auto completion, etc etc. I think that this leans a little too much into starting the speed running meta. This is a philosophy (speed runnning/zoom zoom) that has imho pretty much destroyed a similar game. Going down that road then means that the devs start to compromise other aspects of the game to counter the speed/zoom zoom and then the snowball starts rolling.
From my time playing so far, (absolutely love it btw) I think that the devs are completely on the right track in what they are trying to achieve. I think that us (as players) need to leave behind the idea of meta’s etc and baggage that we might have from “other” similar games. Suggesting mechanical tweaks is one thing, but the philosophy side of the game, I think we should leave in the hands of the devs.
I’m more suggesting that the game is currently caught between two opposing design philosophies and the devs should put some thought into which one LE should be.
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I see what you’re saying, and I kind of think that they’ve set their sail on which direction they’re currently moving towards, and that’s why the gameplay is so enjoyable compared to the mess that the “other” game has become.
Also worth bearing in mind is that the progress is currently stored locally on your HD, rather than on servers. Perhaps once the data is stored server side they might be thinking about a system for skipping most of the campaign for making alts? Maybe doing that once per episode/league, who knows what their plans are for that.
I think though, as we’re still storing progress data locally, this isn’t really one of those issues that is high on their list right now. I would imagine that getting to the point of enabling multiplayer and server storage is a much higher priority, and that in turn would unlock the ability to do many more things with the database/progress.
My own personal opinion… After many years of poe and seeing how that has turned out; I’m just really enjoying a game where everything is visible and understandable gameplay wise. No enforced zoom zoom, dodgy balancing manifestos, invisible ground effect nonsense, rng on rng on rng on rng, or having to deal with the most annoying thing of all - trading. LE is a welcome breath of fresh air and so I am completely happy to see the devs take as much time as they want to go slowly and get things exactly as they want them, one step at a time.
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This is mostly a community perception, but I agree that I hate how many mechanics are timed or peter out if your momentum isn’t strong enough.
Every dev studio has these eventually, whether they mean to or not.
I haven’t experienced this with PoE and I’ve played it for many years as well. Maybe it’s a settings/rendering issue?
Agree. Some can be good, but they go overboard on everything. You don’t have to Skinner Box literally every feature of the game. It gets tiresome.
This is on the way at some point, but I don’t think it’s actually required (just recommended) for PoE.
I’m not sure about this. They seem to be trying to do both but doing neither as well as they could if they would just pick one.