There is, you have to go into the other person’s profile & select ignore. It’s there if you look for it, not sure if that’s ironic or appropriate.
Isn’t that normally the case for “live service games”?
I get where you are coming from & I both agree & disagree, this isn’t the 80s/90s anymore.
Was D2’s story complete with the original release or LoD?
Personally I think they should put certain info on the store page, that they’re going to be adding more chapters & various other features that they consider core in the near(ish) future. And while I do think it’s reasonable for a consumer to do some research, I think the amount of time we have spent on here wouldn’t be reasonable. So I don’t think EHG are hiding anything, they could make it easier for potential customers to find.
Nah, PoE are doing it (continuing the story, kinda, in the lore of the leagues & big updates they do). IMO.
TBF, it was significantly better than the crap they put out in D3.
I hoped it was Morditas (but Mike said on stream once it wasn’t) so now I’m rooting for Keeper Leena.
Why? Because she is the last known owner of the 3rd shard in the Divine Era (Grael gave it back to her) and that Shard we find on the Emperor’s Husk. Grael also learns about the Spear from going with you and I can’t see a reason the Emperor would not shield himself against a Traveler that he last saw wielding it. Lastly, we fight the Husk in Eterra’s Temple and the ‘living’ Emperor in Rahyeh’s Throne Room, which are both significant to Leena, while I expect Grael to stay in the North as Emperor.
If LE says “This is 1.0 the release version of our game!” then it’s 1.0 and the release version of the game. There is nothing to argue and nothing is missing. There is (was) more content planed that may or may not be added in the future. EHG is telling us what the complete release version is by stamping it 1.0.
If this is good or bad only the future will tell. If this a reason to throw a tantrum? Nah. Is this a reason to act… “funny” in a thread of someone? Nah! A lot of know that even Wolcen finished their storypart so I’m pretty sure EHG will as well.
In the Diablo 4 example, the questions about Lilith are solved. Sanctuary is not in immediate danger anymore. The story is rounded up. Not the entire story of the world, forever, but the plot we were talking about (Lilith).
I would argue that the story arc of the Epoch itself is what is being launched. The Traveler discovers it, gets sucked into the future, learns about the Epoch and then it gets taken from them by an agent of Orobyss as a cliffhanger. I could also argue that in D4, Mephisto has been manipulating you from the start and Lilith’s arc is as insignificant as Majasa’s. The fight between Lilith & Inarius is like that of the Divine Era Gods, it ultimately is a tool that the true enemy is using (resp. Mephisto & Orobyss)
Not to mention games like Grim Dawn or PoE didn’t launch with a complete story either. PoE originally ran the typical “New Game+” difficulty increase, like Diablo 2 did, then added Act 4 later on until finally moving to a single difficulty 10-chapter arc in 3.0. Even if you consider Act 4 as a ‘complete’ story, it was not there at the start and the initial release plot wasn’t close to being a decent story, imho.
As for the other points:
The identiy of the Immortal Emperor is in-game also a mystery. It actually resembles the Diablo 2 narration, where Marius tells ‘your’ story to Tyreal, except it’s only revealed in the end credits that it’s actually Baal in disguise.
Apophis becoming the Oracle is probably Chapter 11-12 stuff. Like not knowing where the angels went to in base-game D3 (and still have one missing in RoS, because Blizzard decided to not make the 2nd expansion) was part of the drive in the story to push you forwards.
Yulia / Zerrick / Horton are more winks to their other era versions and narratively only Yulia matters (at the moment). Don’t forget that we first encounter them as villains / neutral characters before learning more about them, so back when the story didn’t have a Chapter 9 yet, Zerrick was known as the annoying worm boss, not the OP Rogue following you around.
As for the ‘big firework conclusion’; the Epoch got broken by Apophis, Orobyss won (for now) and all the time spent working towards the Emperor’s demise didn’t even come close to prepare us for the power a mere agent of Orobyss could wield against us. You got smacked face first in the dirt. Time to “git gud”, Traveler!
I want to point out that not every story needs to end with defeating a villain and then the world is right again. The story pushes you towards the Monolith, where (the Shade of) Orobyss is not just a one-and-done enemy, but a constant presence, as we learn he has been present in all the Eras as well. The fight against corruption is constant and of all times, which is a more realistic story than stabbing Hitler in the face and suddenly rainbows!
From a development PoV, it also provides a better stepping stone towards future side-arcs or Cycle stories (e.g. new Timelines) and integrates end-game mechanics into the story rather than the “oh look, a hidden cave you missed the first 100 times you passed here, with yet another magical power that we forget about in 3 months!” kind of thing.
PS: Sometimes, mystery can add to the story and characters don’t need a completely explained backstory to be relevant. If you’ve ever read the Wheel of Time series, you’ld know that there is several books worth of story still left unwritten, but it doesn’t detract from the story of Rand. (Except a few details that Jordan never got to explain to Sanderson)
Boy, that is interesting.
This is going to be a long debate!
And it is this story, about Lilith and Inarius, that Diablo 4 is telling us. With a beginning, a plot, an ending.
That this story is just a part of a deeper, eternal struggle doesn’t make it less of a story on its own.
Moriarty is lurking somewhere, behind every problem Sherlock Holmes encounters, yet each case gets solved at the end of a story, the book doesn’t stop half way through. Even if we know the grand scheme of things is still ongoing, the story is coherent.
The story was too short and needed a new game+. But as I mentioned before, the story was coherent and had an ending. Not a good or deep story, but it didn’t feel particularly unfinished.
GGG had the decency to wait until they had 7 chapters ready, to avoid at any point cutting off at the wrong place and looking incomplete. It took years, then they jumped from directly from 3 to 10 chapters, just to reach a reasonably coherent ending.
The world is right again? Of course we don’t need it.
Defeating a villain is a bit more important in a game, because it is all about fighting. It is nice to have a fight at the end that feels more special than the gazillion other fights we’ve had on the way.
I entirely agree, and I think defeating Orobyss would be a bad idea, for all the reasons you mentioned (I said the same in my previous post). Orobyss is introduced from the start as an eternal, constant underlying influence, it is perfectly logical for the story NOT to defeat him.
The way I see it, Orobyss and the void is the universe, a setting within which an infinite number of stories can be told.
The Immortal Emperor and his followers, and their links to the past, is the specific story within this setting Last Epoch started telling us. And didn’t finish.
Absolutely.
A story has a plot, whatever that is. You need to explain enough for people to understand this plot, and for it to reach a reasonable conclusion. Keeping areas of mystery is great, it allows for sequels, expansions, for players to use their own imagination. As long as these mystery-areas are outside the main plot.
And Game of Throne, or Name of the Wind, are absolutely brilliant books, that end up feeling extremely frustrating because the story was never finished.
I think it all depends how you write your story: keeping some answers hidden outside the main story voluntarily is great; building the story with a clear direction but abruptly stopping in the middle for no apparent reason, at a random point, FEELS bad (emphasis on the word “feels”).
Beginning: The Traveler combines the Epoch shards and uses it to find the source of the Void
Plot: The mysterious Emperor is a likely source and needs to be stopped. You need the Lance and the blessings of the old Gods to defeat them and stop the spreading corruption.
Ending: The Emperor isn’t the source, it’s Orobyss. The Empire doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. You’re not equipped to protect the Epoch from Apophis’ doings.
The Emperor no longer matters in our goal to stop the Void, because they’re not the source. We assumed wrongly and now have a Beginning to the real story; that against Orobyss. End of Emperor arc. Yeah, the big fireworks turned out to be rained out, but it still ends properly, imho. I will concede on not ‘completing’ the fight, but rather being pushed away from it, but does it really matter? It’s a game with Time Travel, we can always come back more experienced to this exact moment and continue where we left off, we just got bigger things to worry about now.
Will we still end up killing the Emperor? No idea, their corpse survived until the Ruined Era, so either they got imprisoned or we just never actually defeat them. Yulra presumably dies after we escape, so there nobody left to record what happened for those in the Ruined era. The only reason to go back is to keep our word to Yulra (and also Grael, with Rahyeh) and banish the evils of their time. But none of that is currently core to defeating Orobyss, atleast so far we understand.
Except they didn’t. The initial story was 3 Acts, but the end of the Wraeclast arc (PoEstralia) was only in Act 4, released 20 months after the 1.0 release! (So you have until October 2025, EHG!)
I’m also skeptical of your use of the word “coherent”
I disagree, the Shades make a great alternative to a single fixed fight script. I always found in other games that this big end boss becomes either a hurdle, a benchmark or it becomes the single end challenge. To go back to D4: Lilith is the campaign end and is required for endgame content, so it blocks anyone not playing a ‘correct’ build from accessing half the game, because your character build doesn’t tick the right boxes. The only block LE has is that you have to pick a Mastery and I think you can even do Monos without it nowadays. Then you also have Uber Lilith, who is the endgame benchmark. At which point, your build is ‘complete’ and further Nightmare Dungeon runs only help you on Leaderboards, but provide no increase in power. There is no cap on Corruption and the challenge or reward it gives you, plus each Timeline has different sets of enemies, so there isn’t a single way to rank. Arena Leaderboards exist, but even those don’t have a fixed set of enemies, so there is always variance. Uber boss fights inherently don’t have that.
A big villain fight means an end to something. And I don’t like a game like this to have such an ending. It was how games used to be, back when they were complete out of the box, but LE isn’t a game like that. A game like that would be Baldur’s Gate 3. Complete story on day 1, no additions afterwards. There is virtually no feedback I could give Larian today that could change the game, because it’s already done. This isn’t true for LE / EHG.
I’m gonna condense the story part to this. Game of Thrones didn’t finish its story in a single book either, and it’s not finished being written. The show ran ahead to finish the overall story, but I’ve been told that the last season was terrible, because it was written by Netflix, not Martin. Yes, EHG is “releasing the show” now, but only ~6 seasons, (or rather 9 chapters) because the rest still needs writing. If that would’ve been better than the ending GoT was given, I leave up to the people that actually watched it. Or compare it to the first half of the Season being released, with more episodes later on, rather than a full binge-fest (again, see BG3)
The Wheel of Time also didn’t end each book with the killing of a Forsaken, sometimes it was just a big change in the world that would cause a lot of uncertainty. The mystery and speculation of things to come has given me as much joy as “stabbed a villian, had a party” endings. It also needed a prequel at some point to clarify things, so perhaps what you are looking for will be in there, more than in Chapters 10-12.
Is it cool to end a story with an epic battle? Sure, when appropriate. But that would also break the endgame loop from the story imho. If we had some big fight at the end of Ch.9, how would you connect the Monolith to the rest of the story? You could have an Apophis fight, but we sorta already had it (not the adds, but her corrupting Majasa) and doing 2 boss fights in a row wouldn’t work in game flow. Her somehow killing Majasa and then us fighting her for the blessing? Won’t work either, because the rest of the story requires her to escape.
To me, the Campaign right now isn’t a complete and finished story, because it’s not supposed to be. We learned about the Epoch, traveled through Eras, discovered our true enemy. Now it’s our “Rocky running up the stairs” moment of doing the Monolith and becoming stronger before finishing the fight with Orobyss. The campaign is just our “Beginning” and that doesn’t need a big fight to end, it needs a motivator. Losing the power of the Epoch is exactly that.
And that Monolith is one of the cores of the gameplay loop, and with all 15 Masteries finished, that loop is now ready to be released. I think for a lot of people, that is the full game. Sure, Chapter 12 isn’t the last released Chapter, but there is a decent expectation that it will (while we delve the rest of the lore) and I certainly hope that in the future, it won’t be the last Chapter again.
The Monolith is fully playable with all 15 Masteries, there are dungeons and a Leaderboard Arena, that’s the core system of the game. That is finished.
There are games that stop development at 1.0, but hardly all of them. World of Warcraft has been going for 20 years, has announced expansions 10-12 and yet, to date, exactly zero X.0 versions of the game ever contained a complete story. In fact, I looked at my Steam Library and I couldn’t find a single game with seasonal content that was complete story-wise when launched as 1.0.
Heck, the last complete story in the Diablo series was all the way back with D1, which had a completely non-canon expansion. All its successors were made with expansions finishing the story in mind. (Hence the incomplete D3 story, they never made the 2nd expansion they had planned)
I understand what you’re arguing for. But unfortunately, I feel those on your side is a minority in the ARPG space. At least, those that frequent ARPG forums, discord, reddit and streamer space, I think most of which are “blasters” or wannabes, and not roleplay/story mode enjoyers. Charan of POE fame is someone like yourself, and he’s had a love-hate (now mostly hate) relationship with POE.
When people talked about the nostalgia of D2, people don’t usually talk about it’s story (though I certainly thought it was a good one, and probably the best one when compared with later versions of Diablo in the series, POE or even LE). When people reminisce about D2, it is largely around the loot hunt, itemisation and replayability. Similarly, while most would agree with you that D4 has a complete story and even delivered it pretty well, why are so many players disappointed with D4? Because at the end of the day, what drives a typical ARPG player to play the game for 1000s of hours is not based on how compelling or complete the ARPG campaign story is, but by how strong its endgame item chase loop.
As such, for every thread like this that complain about how incomplete or incoherent LE’s campaign story is, there are hundreds more concerns around LE’s endgame systems and longevity. And I think the devs are right to call their 1.0 when they feel like they would satisfy the latter, even if the former is left wanting.
Plus I assumed that there may be people out there that thought of the same argument, but do care. My response was also for them, not just for you personally.
not only is wow still not finished their story, they charge you 15 dollars a month on top of 50 dollars an expansion! 4500 usd in and they still havent finished!
Not everyone that plays these types of games care about the story. Is it something they will finish in time? Sure. Should it be the highest of priorities? Nope.
And Star Wars is still bringing new spin-offs after much longer than that. Yet when the first movies came out I absolutely loved them. Never felt like they were unfinished.
Maybe I was too young back then.
Or maybe adding new, different stories to an existing universe has nothing to do with stopping narration in the middle of a story.
Oh no there’s no confusion. People interpret these ideologies within their own cognitive frame. We’re merely disagreeing about semantics regarding what a proper ending could/should/would look like in an ideal setting, and truth be told there’s not a right or wrong answer. I appreciate the lengthy responses but truth be told, most avid hardcore arpg players such as myself don’t get into story that much, and don’t focus on such narratives and lore in the games we play, we play to “blast” and to find loot and make interesting builds and the like. I always tell people if they’re story driven individuals arpg’s just might not be for them, not saying that they can’t be, but we open up a can of worms on a forum such as this and it devolves to nothing important in the grand scheme of things. The game will launch, they’ll finish their chapters eventually, and this will be long forgotten about. Wish you the best of luck in game!
for that