That is my dream mode. They’d have to scale everything to the player from level 1 of course. This is exactly what Wolcen does and it is awesome. Grim Dawn also lets you skip large portions of the 3 campaign levels once you have done it with your first char.
Someone hit the nail on the head above. The campaign is just a tutorial, and making players do the tutorial more than once is silly.
It is, but let me explain why…
I have over 30 alts (offline and online) that have completed the campaign. I’ve done it 30 times basically. It was fun at first.
As campaigns go, it is not very good. I find the story rather meh.
It has very low enemy density so it is actually rather boring to play and you level very inefficiently.
There is little challenge. Apart from a couple of places where a weak build may fail, it is unlikely to challenge anyone. Again, adds to the tediousness.
You cannot even experiment with builds during the campaign because at low player levels it takes ages to relevel de-speced skills. It would be more fun and tolerable if you could do this (as you can in every other ARPG with little cost).
All together, this list makes it a real chore. On the plus side it takes less and 10 hours so it’s not all bad. I would compare it to Grim Dawn though. The campaign there is much longer with a really excellent story and even two further expansions worth of even more campaign. I have levelled more alts in GD than I have in LE and yet I never got bored doing the GD campaign. Mostly because all the negative points I listed above are NOT true in GD.
Chrono Trigger had New Game+, which let you start the campaign over again while retaining some stats. Since the game dealt with time travel, it made it so you could completely change the way the story progressed. You could even fight the end boss right from the start of the game, which usually took several new game+ cycles to be strong enough.
LE could do something similar. What if your new alt wanted to side with Rahyeh? I suppose that is supposed to be what the monoliths represent though.
Aww, that’s cute. A whole 30? Some of us have been around for years now. So spare the melodramatics. You don’t even have to complete the campaign to get into monoliths/endgame. It’s roughly 4-6 hours of play, depending on your leveling build and how much twink gear you have.
Most campaigns are not very good and lack a compelling story. Hell, I played WoW since beta and still have no fucking clue what the story is about. POE? There’s a story? Diablo 2 is the closest I’ve ever come to reading quest text, and I gave that up in Act 2. I think Grim Dawn had a story. Titan Quest…story? I thought I just had to kill everything ever mentioned in Greek Mythos.
Density ramps up. I’m pretty sure if the first couple areas were packed with groups of mobs, you’d be here complaining about how difficult it is to clear them without AoE abilities and decent mana regen or hp leech. The pretty much everything after Welryn has decent mob density and packs to keep you busy.
You want a challenge, but then go on to say you want the ability to experiment with builds. Not much time to experiment with anything, if you have to keep your stats/skills/gear close to optimal just to progress, right?
No, just… no. It doesn’t take ages to relevel anything. You get a min skill level as you progress, as well as a catch up feature to speed up leveling of your lowest skills. This has simply become the most boring and disingenuous talking point regarding this topic.
How do you experiment with skills, freely, in POE? All skill gems have level and stat requirements. So you have to delevel them, and then earn xp on them, all over again. That’s the difference in having xp skill advancement, and skill points earned per level. LE has both. You can freely move around passive points, but have to earn xp in your skills.
The devs have already moved around the passive/idol quest rewards so players wouldn’t have to complete the entire campaign every time. And the +1 stat reward from completing the current end-campaign quest is basically a novelty. I’ll concede that having to re-grind to unlock empowered monoliths is a bit ridiculous, but it’s better than having to complete the entire campaign to unlock maps, ala POE.
Why? I thought you wanted a challenge? Why should lvl 100 content be scaled down, just so you can skip the entire rest of the process to do it? Maybe they should scale it further, based on your hp and dps as well, that way you don’t even have to bother grinding for gear!!! #tehwin
I was in the same boat as you. Got my first char up to around level 70. Decided to try a different one and was disappointed to see that there is no way to skip the story. Luckily I have a friend who power-levelled me to level 60-ish in a day. I was just joining his empowered monolith runs and was breezing through the levels.
I don’t think I’d be playing the game if I couldn’t do that. The story is so utterly boring and slow that there’s zero fun in having to redo it just so that you can unlock the passives and idol slots.
To those saying things like “Plays ARPG and doesn’t like grind???” - there are different types of grind. One is the fun loot chasing grind when you’re playing the endgame and minmaxing, the other one is to be forced to replay the “story” mode which was even boring on my first run, let alone my Nth.
It’s peculiar that some people just can’t accept the fact that there are people out there who hate replaying the same boring missions for the upteenth time.
As for every game - do all games really need to be the same? Just because your beloved game X does that doesn’t mean literally every game out there should too. Lost Ark - a game that’s notorious for its grinding - offers a way to skip all the stupid story missions. I have 6 characters there and I’ve only run the story fully once.
Yeah that is awesome, good reference. That’s something I’ve often wondered why other RPG’s and games in general haven’t thought of doing since then. It’s amazing what great ideas are lingering out there that people haven’t utilized in 20 or 30 years.
I think the main issue is that the character walks too slowly, unless you are running a build with a LOT of extra movespeed you will take several minutes to get through each zone. It takes around 30 seconds just to traverse smaller sections of the map. Even builds with constant haste up feel a little slow.
And as there are dozens of maps to completer per chapter, it gets tiring really fast. Plus most of the campaign isn’t exactly fun to play and every single quest is just “go here kill stuff then go somewhere else and repeat”
I really think base movespeed should be increased.
I’d accept it if any of you could actually explain why going through a short campaign once per character is somehow more boring and more repetitive than starting immediately in and spending a character’s entire lifecycle in the most repetitive part of the game. You keep saying this bit about how the endgame loot hunt grind is the fun part, but there’s no version of skipping the campaign where you’re starting there (unless what you want is to jump straight to a high character level and empowered monos) and you’re still spending time doing something repetitive that isn’t the part of the game you think is fun.
Monos and dungeons can be pretty sparse too. Why is it not a problem for you then?
There wouldn’t be any challenge in leveling from the necessarily scaled down monos/dungeons/arenas either. Why is that a problem for the campaign but not monos?
It does not take “ages” to relevel skills in the campaign. This is hyperbole in the extreme.
If you like rerunning the campaign countless times then I’m more than happy for you to do that. I don’t mind people repeating it if they like it, but at least give everyone else an option to skip it.
You’re making it sound as if the end game is the most boring part of the game and the campaign is something fun to do before you get to that mindless grind again. If you find monoliths so boring then why are you replaying the campaign? Surely to get to that endgame grind and try out new characters?
As for why I hate the campaign so much - because once you’ve done it, it serves no purpose apart from unlocking the mandatory passive points, skill levels and idol slots. The progression throughout the campaign is meaningless because all the loot you get is junk anyway and trying out new builds is hard because respeccing skills takes ages. The only goal is to get to monoliths so that you can start minmaxing at which point you get exalted items, you can respect skills at ease and just focus on the goal.
I have 3 characters at the moment and I’d be interested in trying out the primalist but every time I realise I’d have to grind through the campaign again I decide not to create it because I just can’t be bothered to spend several hours or days just to get to the actual game. Heck, I would’ve created 4-5 other characters over the last few weeks if I didn’t have to play through the campaign again but as it stands my play time is way less than it could’ve been.
What I said was that it’s the most repetitive part of the game, which is something I point out because A) It is and B) It doesn’t make sense to me to complain about repetition for content that is less repetitive and not have the same complaint about content that’s more repetitive, and by miles.
lol, how is that any different from the progression you get by leveling your character up in any other way? A system where you start a character at Level 1 and grind monos all the way up is still a system where you would feel the progression is meaningless, the loot is junk, and you can’t try out new skills.
I keep getting the feeling when people say things like this that you’re being a bit coy or dishonest, and what yall want isn’t actually just to skip the campaign but to skip most of the leveling process entirely and just poof, you have a character that’s already in empowered monos getting exalted items. And I get the same impression when you say things like this too:
Like, is that what you’re trying to say without saying it? What you really want is some system where maybe you check off a cheevo with your first character, and then after that you can just choose to make new ones starting at Level XX and plow straight into Empowered Monos?
Monoliths are far more fun than the campaign. As someone above said there are fun grinds and tedious grinds. You will level far faster in Monoliths because the enemy density is better than most of the campaign. If you are Monolithing at highish levels, you can respec reasonably quickly and do all that build experimentation I go on about. And the Corruption and node selection make it interesting. Even if you get the same map twice it has different enemies and modifiers that are often enough to make it feel very different from the last time.
But the biggest issue with the campaign is the obvious one… familiarity breeds contempt. The campaign is the EXACT same every time. The Monoliths are different enough to make them more interesting.
What argument? Some folks are saying they don’t want to have to rerun the campaign for every alt, and others are saying they don’t mind it, and one person said they like it.
It’s not an argument. It’s not a debate. It’s not a puzzle to be solved. It’s just a statement of opinion. Some people not understanding why others don’t like it (skipping the campaign) is like me not understanding why some folks like pineapple on pizza. Some people just like/dislike different things.
Eventually, when EHG is past 1.0 and other much more pressing matters, maybe they get around to;
Figure out if the number of folks that want this option matters to EHG financially (or maybe they devs just want the option themselves)
If the answer to one is yes, then they need to figure out how they’d like to support that, and where the work fits from a prioritization perspective.
It’s literally all of those things, because it’s turned into a request to make a major design change to the game to fit an opinion. That, by it’s nature, turns it into a debate, which results in a puzzle to solve, which leads to becoming an argument by all parties not in agreement.
Not disliking pineapple on pizza isn’t the same thing, because no one is asking pizza-makers to stop doing it. And, the simple solution to that “problem” is to just not eat pizza with pineapple on it.
I’m sorry you just want everyone to roll over and go “yeah, poor thing, you’re right, let’s change that for you”, but that’s not how the world works. Especially not in this day and age.
Yeah but they expressly agreed that they would rather have a system where you just start empowered monoliths at say level 60. The ability to do this would be unhealthy for the game. I’d like to see an alternate leveling path outside the main story, but I’m in the boat where redoing the story is mostly fine for me.
