I 100% challenge you to L100 just doing Arena, Dungeons, and Empowered Monos.
Talk about Masochist mode…
No they weren’t. I like the D3 campaign, but I’m also not going to cost myself hours at league start. Players gravitate towards the most optimal path even if it isn’t the most enjoyable one. This us especially true in ‘league start’ environments where we’re all ‘racing’ from the start.
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So going through the same campaign for the n’th time will make that better? If you don’t like the end game then what’s there left to enjoy lol.
The whole point of these games is to get loot and improve your characters.
I would argue that getting loot and improving your characters is only part of the point of ARPG’s. The other points being to see the story, to fight monsters, to beat bosses, to explore dungeons, to find secrets and easter eggs, to invent and test weird builds and to have fun while playing a videogame, among many many other things I could think of.
Case and point - Why is the game not a spreadsheet? If the point is to get loot and improve your characters, all that really needs to be is a menu. You can put a button or a timer (or both) in Microsoft Excel with VB and simply click until the game gives you loot, and then assign skill points and loot to your character. If the entire point is merely to do that, Excel is already the best ARPG. We don’t need anything else.
If this was the entire point, people would also stop playing when progress towards those goals became sparse to nearly nonexistent, or start new characters. And yet, they don’t. The reason why they feel they have to keep going is not a sense of progress or improving their characters, but a psychological inability to stop due to the nature of the rate at which they see new loot. This is called a “schedule of reinforcement.”
You see, when your brain gets perceived rewards at uncertain intervals, and those intervals become further and further apart, you actually get more motivated to keep trying to get them rather than less. This is how we pursue things we need that we have to look for continuously even when we fail, or especially when we fail, like food, shelter, mates, etc. It actually can’t be any other way because this is how we survived in nature for thousands of years. It doesn’t work any differently for drops in games.
As I pointed out earlier in this thread, what happens when that progress is linear, like when you’re trying to level to 100, is that you get bored. I’ve already seen multiple people here report this and I’ve experienced it as well. When the progress is linear, the game becomes much less interesting… Which means two things; One, what you’re doing in the game isn’t that interesting at the point at which you’re grinding rather than doing unique and interesting things you haven’t done before. And two, if the progress was linear you wouldn’t want to do it anymore. Hence, the random rewards are what are motivating you to play the game still. You aren’t actually having fun or even really enjoying the loot. You’re succumbing to baseline human patterns of behavior. Call this the “slot machine” effect. Same thing.
This is something I’ve pointed out repeatedly over the years and nobody wants to acknowledge it because nobody likes the idea that what they’re doing isn’t actually fun at that stage of the game. And creatives and devs sure don’t want to deal with it. All of this to say though, the point is to actually do something that is fun for the sake of doing it. And if that’s not what you’re doing, then the least we can say is that you’re having a low quality entertainment experience for your money at that point. I would suggest starting a new character or playing a different game instead of letting “getting loot and improving your character” be the only thing motivating you to continue at end game.
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How is doing the same campaign going to play into anything you’ve just stated… I guess you guys hit the reset button each time you start a new campaign, cause I can already say all the lines by heart at this point XD
If you want to have a sense of adventure, improve the end game, make it more random, add more layers to it like achievements for dungeons, finding hidden items/zones in the monoliths.
Change the campaign so that it is random… That would also work although I think it would be a tall order to implement.
I absolutely agree that the game should not become a “slot machine”. But doing the tutorial over and over it’s not going to refrain the game from becoming that.
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Very hard to implement. However, if it could be done, IF you could add say 30-50 more zones and have a randomized branching tree for the campaign that WOULD spice it up a lot. Something to think about for sure.
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If you’re doing it on a new character or with a new build then you’re not doing it in the same way. If there’s new quests or content added, then the replay value goes up also. Other games like Path of Exile have realized this and started adding new items and abilities as well as modes and quests in an effort to add small reasons for people to play the content over again periodically.
In general, I’d say the point at which you feel you’re doing the same things over and over again is the point at which you’ve exhausted the actual content of the game though. If each character doesn’t have a unique or interesting way of doing things, and bosses aren’t experienced significantly differently between the classes or builds, then you really do just want to play the game once. I’ve personally played LE through to level 55 with every class and I’ve done all of Empowered Monolith with two different characters since 0.9 dropped and I’m not sure there’s much left for me to do at this point. I might, at some point, play a pure Beastmaster Primalist with friends online to clear it again, but that would only really be an excuse to hang out with buddies of mine who are interested in this game who haven’t done it yet.
But yes, there is such a thing as replay value. It just depends on how unique and interesting what you’re doing is when you replay the game. This is one of the reasons people come up with arbitrary goals like getting the fastest time possible in the case of speed running. However, a lot of what those guys are doing is being rewarded by trying to get good RNG on certain segments where the game randomly slows them down also. There is a point at which that’s the only thing they could get to obtain a faster time and yet they keep trying long past that point. It’s unfortunate in their case because the goal is even more clear as to what they’re trying to accomplish, so they know they can’t feel that it’s over until they get that theoretical time they want to get it. Luckily, the vast majority of people aren’t interested because it’s a high skill level type of thing. May also be age and vision dependent for some games, due to things like pixel recognition and reaction time.
That’s essentially what D2 did, isn’t it? I thought that was pretty interesting. We have way more technology now, shouldn’t be that big of a deal.
A game I really like called Hades kinda does this also. I’m a big fan of that as a proof of concept.
D2 had some randomization in the mapping, not randomized quest paths.
Hades is the same – the maps change but not the quest/story itself
Last Epoch could be different as the maps themselves don’t change, BUT, as an example, the STORY itself could. For example, what if then entire Imperial Welryn chain CHANGED the second time you played through the game…
Orobyss says, “What is this? Another traveler through the ages? Let’s shake things up a bit…” and then Imperial Welryn is now covered in snow and Heorot has invaded so his minions roam instead of the undead of the Immortal Emporer’s. (Same map and quests, but with a much different feel)…
… or you could do completely new maps and zones and quest lines, because much of the LE main map is empty at the moment.
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While I’m not a massive fan of Path of Exile for other reasons, I think adding and randomizing some of the story content is definitely the future for these games. It would be interesting if they wrote a new story once in awhile and released it as an expansion as in the old days, with new bosses and loot in-tow. It’s not necessarily inevitable but as game development comes down in cost over the coming years, I really hope that’s something we see.
In fact, I’ve always questioned why that isn’t already happening; It seems like if a game had an enthralling story and a world people were nerdy about, the extra content around that would attract tons of people who aren’t normally interested in ARPG’s. It would be just like how Harry Potter got people into magic and wizards. Good writing goes a long way, and I wish more of the talent that can do that showed up for these games the way they did for Hades.
Are you not getting loot as you go through the campaign? Is leveling up and learning how to play or experimenting with a new character/build not improving it?
Besides levels, loot, and experience with new skills that you need to get into higher level/difficulty content, right?
I still don’t get why it’s such a big deal to you to spend a few hours repeating Thing X one time per character before you spend dozens more hours repeating Thing Y.
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How? The writing is so bad…
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Good writing is very subjective. What hits for some people definitely won’t for others. I’ve written 4 novels. I know.
Developmentally, cutscenes are what usually drives the story forward, with most players clicking through exposition text/verbal only dialogue. However, those same Cutscenes are HIDEOUSLY expensive to produce. Now you might be able to get the cost down with AI, but it’s not really available yet (I don’t want to see my Bowmage marksman rogue with 6 fingers and 3 collarbones…) but that will change in short order.
IMHO LE has amazing gameplay loops that have kept me interested longer than almost any other game I’ve ever played. However, the overall story to me is a little on the bland and mediocre side. The opening class scenes are good, but there is a real lack of emotional investment, in the feeling of high stakes. I am hoping that EHG gets better at that as time goes on.
Yeah, that’s fair, but I’d put D3’s writing at the level of the books I used to use to teach my kids to read. Act 3’s voice overs from Azmo as you progress through the act killing everything you put in his way are the most egregious example.
If you haven’t played Hades, you should check it out. The writing of the game and the characters, what they want, how they resolve their differences, how they interact with the main character, are all extremely well thought out and result in lots of neat plot developments that reward you for continuing the story.
Writing can be objectively good or bad on the level of, does the story convey verisimilitude with real life / real people, and does it have characters do things that are consistent and actually challenge us to follow their reasoning that either causes us to reach realizations we haven’t reached before or surprise us by turning an idea or a situation on its head in some clever or poignant way. We’re a storytelling creature because this is how we conveyed information we had learned from our lives to the next generation for ages prior to written history. We find it fun because we learn from it. This is how and why we detect quality in stories, even if we have a hard time articulating it explicitly.
Writers like Mark Twain and Charles Dickens were really good at this. This is why they’re remembered so fondly and are still mimicked today despite their works having come out much earlier in this culture and maybe not even appealing to our modern sensibilities. They had a great way of creating a train of thought in their work, which resulted in storytelling people found and still find compelling and interesting. If you haven’t read these authors, that’s probably the best place to start to discover great literature.
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Because I would much rather spend those hours in quality challenging content than through something that requires no brainpower whatsoever after you’ve done it a couple of times.
You can do all of that you’ve mentioned in randomized challenging environment. More fun, and you actually might improve at the end of it.
So, where do you draw the line? Are plain-jane empowered monoliths considered challenging enough? What about T1-3 dungeons? Arena sub-lvl200? I mean, how much do you want to actually skip? And, don’t answer “well right now… blah blah”, because this is a slippery-slope. Once gear stashes, and experience, make empowered sub-400 corruption “an easy tutorial”, you’ll be right back here again, asking if we can just skip having to grind corruption, and just manually selection the corruption # you wish to play in, because “…I would much rather spend those hours in quality challenging content than through something that requires no brainpower whatsoever after you’ve done it a couple of times”.
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I’ll dumb it down for you:
blah blah blah… campaign is static… blah blah blah… make it optional.
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Would you also be satisfied if it could be made more challenging? Like maybe a harder mode? Grim Dawn does this and I think it’s pretty interesting.
I don’t see a substantive difference in just grinding Monolith from playing the campaign if all you’re doing is fighting the same enemies. That’s what most people here are taking issue with, seems like.
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But you also talked about skipping the tutorial normal monoliths as well, didn’t you?
I’ll dumb it down for you: you’re moving the goalposts.
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