Plans for a finished Story/Campaign?

General
1

This loot grinding simulator could have been amazing if there was anything more than that. What 8 years in , still no plans to finalize+expand a story mode ?

You got all this amazing idea at the base of the game, the visuals the skills the itemization is good but all of this means nothing without context.
The story might be seen as generic filler ahead of “end game” but actually it is what makes the whole game a success, be as it is.
At no point in this game do I feel connected to any of it, no character matters, no bosses matter at all, seasonal content/events have no substance, no real presence, they just more dungeon filler.
You could replace all the nemesis or harbingers or abberoths with training dummies and it would feel no different killing them because none of those world bosses have any real connection or substance to a story or a context they exist in. I feel 0 change in atmosphere or feeling if I enter a lvl 4 dungeon or 400 corruption harbinger fight or any seasonal thematic area for that matter, least that I hope I dodge the one shot hits this time around.

Even Diablo 4, as bad as it might be, if I start it the 200th time, I still feel am part of a whole universe with it’s own thing going, I feel different when I go fight some boss, there’s a connection to it, that guy matters , it is part of that world/area connected to it, every boss gives off a feeling, something.

Last Epoch is like…nothing seems to matter but finding some triple purple affix items for a slotmachine to maybe get 1 useful printed on another unique item once in a blue moon but that doesn’t change absolutely anything because there’s infinite scaling and there’s a tier above where your last 2month grind for a good item is nulified by arbitrary better monsters.

Please get this game a competent art/design team to tie the loose ends and do a proper story mode connecting all of it otherwise it is nothing than a cheap loot simulator with some cosmetics cash shop on top of it.

2

Nope, the greater part of ARPG players do not care at all about story. It might as well not exist (e.g. which it didn’t for PoE1). Most don’t even know what it is all about. Many want a campaign skip.

Only endgame matters longterm for a seasonal ARPG’s success. Of course having a good story would be nice to have, but first an ARPG needs to have good core mechanics. D4 is an example, the story, art and visuals are top-notch but the core mechanics are lacking.

3

That’s not really true, the story has been there in the original Path of Exile for a long time now.

If the story didn’t matter in an action RPG, wouldn’t there be a bunch without any storyline at all?

4

I confess that to undertake the whole campaign anew each season is wearisome. There should verily be an option to forgo the campaign, as in the days of Diablo III and IV.

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5

In PoE1 the story was tacked on after the fact and nobody cares. Another example is TLI with an even more basic “story”. A story / lore is only there to set a stage and potentially get a few non-ARPG players interested in the genre in hope they’ll stick around.

6

First of all: Factually wrong.

The initial plan was for 3 acts which resolves the baseline story.
Your character gets exiled, hence ‘Path of Exile’. That causes your character to want to get vengeance for it, so your character sets out to kill the person which got them exiled. This happens at the end of Act 3 by killing Dominus and resolved that he’s been a sort of Harbinger for a greater corrupted force.

This was a intentional setup to allow expanding the story but still having it as a finished cohesive one at once, like common storytelling tends to do when you want the option for sequels to exist without jumping through hoops.

Then as the game progressed the story was expanded onto the ‘full scale’, introducing Kitava, the god behind the corruption and everything going wrong inside of Wraeclast itself. Act 4 acts as the intro to this part of the Storyline, Act 5 as the presentation of the ‘grand evil’ so to speak and Act 6-10 the journey to resolve and beat Kitava once and for all.

So no, chronologically you’re absolutely wrong with your comment.

Also factually wrong.
Diablo 1 and 2 were solely storyline-based, as were the Sacred games and the Dungeon Siege games, all predating PoE.

The concept of a end-game only came up with Path of Exile actually, it was the first one - as much as I know of, could be very wrong there - which provided a very grand design to play on beyond beating the storyline which provides more variety then simply replaying the campaign areas.

You’re right with one part though:

Which is true.
It provides the setting, it provides immersion, it gives ‘weight’ to the actions.

There’s relatively good games out there which are genre adjacent which don’t provide this setup, and they’re universally doing worse.
Why? Because our brain loves to be given reason to be doing something, even if it’s not a real thing but a imaginary situation like a story.
People go out of their way to do things in game which aligns with what they wanna achieve or play for, be it solely mechanical… or aligning with a character.

And as little or much as you want it, this genre is still a RPG, which is a Role-playing-game, hence slipping into a specific role. Even if that’s been reduced manyfold nowadays. Why has it stayed? Because it’s doing well and provides people with more then repetition like Tetris, Pong or friggin Pacman does.

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7

I think Hellgate: London also had some endgame mechanic, but I’m not sure, as I’ve never really gotten into that game.

But Torchlight 1 had the endless dungeon as an endgame, that was before PoE.
I don’t remember if there were others with an actual endgame before that.

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8

D2 had endgame, we just didn’t call it that back then. The pandemonium event/uber Tristram was added in 2005 (PoE was 2013).

9

To be fair, that wasn’t really an endgame. That was just an event you could trigger every now and then. You still spent all your time farming the campaign, especially because the ingredients for uber trist were all in the campaign.

TL1 is the first I remember that actually gave you something to do after the campaign that didn’t involve going back to the campaign.

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10

Finalize? No.
Expand? Yes.

I am aware it makes absolutely no sense, but apparently, they are not.

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11

I kind of see what the OP is saying here, but I agree with whoever said that end game is really what matters for ARPGs. A campaign skip would be fine with me, but on the other hand, why not just run through it when you create a new character? It gives you the chance to really get to know your new skills on EZ mode and level up.

The LE team definitely has more work to do to polish this game. But for now, I’m content to just grind a little bit here and there and experiment while they work it out.

12

First character of every league/cycle: no
Second character: absolutely fine

Also to repeat what I said in what feels like a dozen topics by now:

EHG needs to provide more content (length of gameplay without serious repetition happening) before that becomes viable.
The content which feels like variety is too short. As for specific amount? We need 2-3 times as much as we have now.

The game has barely any retention cross-cycle because nothing new goes on and you’re ‘done’ with everything before. Build variety isn’t enough to make up for it. Variety of mechanics isn’t enough to make up for it. End-game is not fleshed out enough to make up for it.

The game needs to be fixed before we make it even less then it already is. Even if the part cut out - for successive playthroughs - is something which can at least be cut out then.

13

I hear you. In my recent playthrough of POE2, they did a much better job with the campaign, and it was fun to play through it. On the other hand, a great campaign like that makes you want to quit playing when the campaign is over lol.

14

Yeah, that’s a fair point, but any gameplay which feels great and then shifts away does so.

It’s not different for LE after all, that’s the whole issue we have here.

Campaign feels vastly different from end-game. Some hate end-game and don’t stay at all (and hence don’t write in the Forum likely as they’re not invested in the game, very few actually do comparatively), and those which like the end-game hate the campaign.

That’s my whole point. PoE 2 has the same issue, but at least with GGG it’s a rather clear-cut thing that they don’t stop working on the things which annoys players and improve on em with at times massive changes (or several reworks of the same system in the same time since LE released and hasn’t touched their screwed up ones at all). That’s just not something we’ve seen from EHG yet.

15

This discussion kind of makes me want to play POE2 campaign through again. I played a mage first time, I’ll see how it feels with a different class.

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16

Melee seems to be a bit messy still. I can recommend the mercenary though, it’s a fun class mechanically.

17

cool, I will check out merc then

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