Stop changing offline experience

Feedback and Suggestions
1

I bought LE. And I can play offline, thanks. But why does my offline Version need to be changed? :thinking:
I don’t pay LE to change my already bought game. Yes, some changes are good, but other ruin experiences for me :melting_face: And maybe someday the full game I bought?

Here is a list of some changes that happened for Main Story:

  • Increased loot through new content
    → Finding Treasure Chests became less fun :frowning:
    → No need to power up in Dungeons, Arena
    = Story became more linear
  • Nemesis → Mostly fun, sometimes overpowered :slight_smile:
  • Exiled Mages → Rarely usefull, but challenging exp bombs :slight_smile:
  • Loot Lizard → More usefull items without challenge :frowning_face:
  • Arena Bosses → More exp bombs with more useful items feels too much :frowning:
  • Shrines became skill-based → Destroys immersion, makes no sense, never use those :frowning_face:

How can I stop a change in the game I bought? Will it become unrecognizable someday? In old D3 days for playstation 3, we didn’t need the internet either and kept what we bought!

Here are some ideas:

  • Have you ever finished a handconsole game and got the options to play with different mhh… Mods?
    How about making all the new additions in to options.
    => I would have payed for an Extension pack with Nemesis Option^^
    => I wouldn’t need to use the option for new Shrines :stuck_out_tongue:

  • Make only online Season get all new updates.
    Maybe when Season ends, people wanna ‘buy’ whatever was created for season and use it in Infinitum.
    (Also can solve the issue with offline player reaching content ahead of online player)

Maybe those Extension Packs will be added to the update of the Story in a big pack someday. It will be my Reaper of souls experience :heart:

Also, Weaver faction changed Endgame a lot. It was … good :slight_smile: But it ‘could’ have destroyed the experience for someone, right?
So, when next ‘season’ appears (which is not actually only in season), then it will probably change endgame yet again, right? Do I want that? … But, do I have a Choice??

Ps: I realized, I could ‘not update’ the game :thinking: But I do play with a friend sometimes and don’t know how to set all that up seperately :melting_face:
Then there are Mods, but those I wish might not exist :upside_down_face: And I prefere to buy and support LE :grin:
Maybe LE will even use some ideas for the online mode with my friend! :yum: I look forward what happens next, maybe everything changes like WOW new map :grimacing: You never know.
Just some ideas again :grimacing:

1 Like
2

Like you said, you can simply not update it.
I believe Steam still lets you download a previous version of a game. Try looking it up online.

As for having two versions of the game (an old one you like and a new one to play with a friend) that will likely make a mess of things, since both versions will use common files, especially for stuff like saves, filters, etc., and you won’t have a way of changing that.

P.S.: I just want to point out that they are not changing the “offline experience”. They have added the “offline experience” of being the same as the online one without needing internet.
The game you bought is a game that you knew would have constant updates over time.

The offline client is a bonus that games of this genre, using the seasonal model, don’t supply at all. EHG decided to let people still enjoy seasons even with crappy internet.

So you really only have those 2 options:
-If steam lets you get previous versions, switch back and forth when you want to play alone or with your friend (though that could cause issues, as pointed out, because of common files)
-Or simply stop updating.

3 Likes
3

personally i feel that the way d-likes currently handle seasonal content, to put it lightly is anti fun.

POE’s atlas system is a good step in the right direction to tweaking seasonal content

The weaver tree is akin to POE’s atlas.

POE2’s atlas is much more organic and in a way superior, where the more you run a specific content, and the more you excel at it, you get to tailor it more/make it more juicy.

But all of the systems i see fail to fully cater to player fun.

The solution that I want, is the ability to specifically CHOOSE what i want in every map/echo/area.

simple as that. choose a set number of mechanics and they will always appear in your maps. DONE.

for example i want nemesis, more champions and weaver areas to appear. these 3 content will always appear in every map i run.

OR i can choose 1 and have them appear multiple times. such as nemesis. i get 3 nemesis’s per area and nothing else.

4

Completely agree with you.
But it is not going to happen, too much money to be made with seasons.

I asked that from PoE many years ago, never happened.

The most fun I had in LE was in 0.8, so when 1.0 made the game considerably less fun for me, I also asked for a standalone unchanging 0.8 version. No luck.

Two reasons why I would even be happy to re-buy the game if I could get a 0.8:

  1. Simply, nostalgia. That’s the main reason. I like coming back once in a while to games I enjoyed and revisit my old builds and my old feelings. In PoE and LE, it is not allowed, because everything changes so much all the time, it feels like I have to learn a new game each time I want a replay.

  2. As you said, the loot and general power has become completely ridiculous, destroying the campaign into oblivion. Lizards and nemesis are absolutely dreadful (not in the concept, but because there are way too many and they come way too early). And the very strict rule of “any new or reworked mastery has to be far more powerful than anything seen before” has obliterated balance, and pushed power-creep to levels rarely seen in any game.

Sadly, most players seem to enjoy this state of permanent change and power creep. They like to come back at each season to a vastly changed game.
To me, it is the opposite: more changes make me less likely to come back. A lot. But I believe we are a very small minority in the modern diablo-like genre.

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5

Sadly, most players seem to enjoy this state of permanent change and power creep. They like to come back at each season to a vastly changed game.
To me, it is the opposite: more changes make me less likely to come back.

Well, it depends on the changes.
You remember replaying old good games again and again, right?
That’s possible to achieve even with power creep.
But the power Creep needs to be an extension and not a change in the already existing content.

  • To beat Oberrath with weak classes is an extension. An upgrade on the length of the game. I enjoy -that- power creep.
  • But the story was affected too. The replayability is bad. I don’t enjoy -that- power creep.

Right now I am playing hc ssf with veteran boots equipped and no smithing!
It gives back that lost feeling of Main story progression :heart:

6

i feel that poe at its peak was before maven’s introduction.

uber elder/shaper were hard. but it was a good enough pinnacle content that newbies can hope to someday conquer.

but once maven came along we got more ubers, we got stuff like the feared. so many tougher content.

i’ve been playing variations of my own build all the while. i felt i was getting stronger and making progress to finally killing uber shaper/elder. i thought my build was finally coming online/becoming viable. but every new content after that just kept telling me my build is shit and never enough. always getting more difficult.

and thats one reason why i quit poe. LE is on a similar trajectory since we have uber abby

7

You can, sort of, ignore the power creep. Don’t use nemesis, try to avoid the lizards (good luck with that), get the boots, do not use Julra before empowered, make sure to NEVER use the most recently reworked mastery (they are always broken and overpowered)… But if I have to ignore half the mechanics to enjoy a game… well… that is probably not a game for me.

Anyway, my point was more about changes. Yes, I do remember replaying old games. I do that all the time, I love it.
But in PoE or LE, I can’t. If I try to come back, everything has changed, the trees, skills, items, are all different. I may enjoy it more, or less, but what is clearly impossible is to revisit the same old game-friend.
The entire design forbids replaying the game I enjoyed a couple of years ago.

And that’s precisely where the problem lies.
In the long run, the game actively prevents you doing that, because each skill and mastery changes too deeply with each “rework”. Many times I came back to PoE to try and improve an old build… and found a blank character because the new tree is different. Dreadful.

Once again, only expressing my own feelings in support of the OP’s request of an unchanging version. I would LOVE that and would be happy to buy it.
I completely understand that other players have other, just as valid opinions.

2 Likes
8

agreed. and i think this is a problem inherent to d-likes specifically.

devs tend to like letting players have fun because an immediate nerf runs the risk of making players ragequit after their OP build suddenly loses most of its power.

an argument many people will make is “its a living game that evolves” which i agree. but on the flipside, if you let things remain the same for too long. then it will be a “permanent addition”. a sudden rework would make players feel upset as the longer you allowed the skill to behave that way, players may have spent TONS of hours and resources to make their build that is centered around that skill work a specific way.

and nowadays with so many skills at once. it just becomes unfeasible for devs to do so.

this is the crux that GGG has to bear with POE2. poe2 gave them a blank slate BUT it comes with the heavy burden of POE1’s legacy. poe1 has a gazillion different skills. POE2 Needed to have a gazillion skills as players expect it.

so even with a blank slate. the game quickly devolved into “just another POE” all over again.

LE has a ton of skills too. its not easy to balance. the thing that upsets me the most about LE is the game isnt balanced yet but the devs released aspirational content (uber abby).

the game being unbalanced is “fine” as long as being OP isnt a requirement. uber abby made it a requirement.

2 Likes
9

I’m not here to disagree with any of you, but in this genre it was a rare game that had this option.

Even games like GD changed over time. Even if you didn’t buy/install the expansions, there were constant patches that rebalanced the game, making some builds stronger and others weaker, changing some core parts of content like changes in SR, adding sunder, changing sets/legendaries, etc.

If you play GD now, even without the expansions, the game is very different from when it launched.
And this is true of pretty much all the games in this genre.

3 Likes
10

To some extent, yes.
But the degree and the rythm is different. Last year I replayed Titan Quest after 6 years away. My old characters were all still working, no respec needed. I was instantly able to enjoy the game. And I don’t remember launching GD and feeling like I have to relearn a completely different system because all my skills have changed.

If I try to launch PoE today, after four years, I am sure all my old characters would have a blank tree, I would have to theory craft again from scratch. And if I restart LE, after less than two years, I will have to learn entirely new systems, and won’t be able to use a bunch of my old characters.
The bread and butter of these games is to change masteries fully on a quick schedule. Which is fine, a lot of players like that. But I don’t.

An interesting side note: this is how balancing works. Set up a frame of skills, then slowly tweak and adjust to make them balance. Small step after small step, it takes time, but you get there. Good approach.

You can’t attain anything remotely ressembling balance by fully reworking a class.
As long as full reworks remains LE’s policy, it won’t be balanced. Ever. This is simply impossible.
Any thread saying “when LE is balanced” is delusional.
Note that I don’t mind unbalance, I don’t see the game as a competition. Furthermore, in a season system, people don’t truely want balance, they want a few shiny OP builds to have fun for one week or two then leave until the next one.

1 Like
11

For anyone interested:

  • Nemesis, Mages and loot lizards can easily be ignored ^^
  • Forging usually only unlocked at around level 15 → Balance without feels awesome
    → Every piece of equippment found matters :slight_smile:
  • Arena Mobs feel horrendous :frowning_face:
    → Bosslike DMG, HP and attack pattern …
    → follow around the map!
    → Feel out of place in main story
    → I am using portal to rather fight all normal mobs again instead of risking my HC run!

All in all, the difficulty is perfect (at level 18 for now^^')
The mobs are challenging and with a slower pace you actually look at the scenery. Ever looked at the last bastion background, when entering in ‘the slope’ (behind the council chambers) ?
Finding secret areas, caring about story … all that feels more valuable when taking my time.

The developer already gave us ‘options’ to play monolith different with weaver guild.
I hope they will care about Main story just as much and not destroy my offline experience :slight_smile:

12

That does depend on what gets added. For example, when GD introduced sunder in 1.2, many builds were nerfed simply from that, especially retaliation builds which aren’t as good anymore, because the point is getting hit, but now you actually have to avoid some hits, otherwise you die.

So I do understand your point (especially in relation to learning mechanics, where I agree with you), but even in more “static” games, your build can suddenly become worse and not complete the same content it did before.

I don’t think they’ll continue doing full reworks forever. They’re doing full reworks now because they are needed to bring older classes to the same threshold.
For example, Necro doesn’t have a single threshold node in its passive tree. Warlock has over a dozen.
Rogue is missing a bunch of skills as well.

So they’re doing a pass until all masteries are “finished” and kinda on par, and after that they’ll just do small maintenance.
I believe we’ll get new masteries/classes once the reworks are done.

13

your GD example is quite good at illustrating how an old game has evolved even tho its not live service.

and in 1.2 things are kinda significantly different. like what you mentioned. some attacks are meant to be avoided as they’re HUGE. and many of these telegraphed attacks my come with nasty debuffs to deter players who rely on super high defenses rather than actively avoiding damage.

but the key difference is the devs understand that all these new changes change the game in a very significant manner. being able to active dodge was also introduced. i kinda love this new direction that requires/rewards a more active playstyle. BUT i do recognize that for some people this is NOT what they signed up for. traditional D-likes tend to let players overcome their lack of skill or allow them to be lazy by stacking high defenses/recovery… part of their enjoyment comes from getting to that point.

Crate recognized this, and actually gave players a way to enjoy "pre 1.2’ GD via an option in steam.

so in a way you’re right. even an old game like GD evolved significantly over the years. but the key difference that we must remember is the devs had the foresight/passion to give players a way to access the older version.

3 Likes
14

I noticed that Crate placed 1.9.8 as a Beta so you can play that version via steam options. But, to address the OP, if you want to play the 1.0 version and get the original experience of when you bought the game 10 years ago, you can’t. It’s either that version from 3 years ago or the most recent one.

And this is a game that doesn’t change as much over time. In a game like PoE or LE, that has big changes 3-4 times a year, you’d soon have dozens of versions as “betas”. And I doubt Steam doesn’t impose limits on that, or at least charge you something for that feature.

As I said before, Steam used to have options for you to load any version you wanted. You went to steamdb, checked the available versions and you could load whichever you wanted. I don’t know if this is still available these days. But it does feel more like a feature Steam should have than one the studios should provide, since Steam is the one storing these files.

And there’s also the issue of files being “shared” between versions. That is, both 1.0 and 1.2 will read from the same files in appdata. Saves, filters, etc. If you play a more recent version with a friend (as was the case with OP) and make a filter, for example, which now has a bunch of new options, then rollback to 1.0 and try to open the game, the same filters get loaded and will likely break the game.
Or you have an offline save file that has a Shattered Worlds and you try to load it in a previous version that didn’t have that unique.

Making sure that any changes you make don’t break previous versions is a lot more time and effort intensive than to simply work on the latest version.

So if Steam doesn’t provide the option anymore (I don’t really know, haven’t really tried it, I just know that they used to), I’d say the best bet is to simply copy all the files from whichever version you want and play with those in a separate location, being aware that you also need to manage the offline files on your own, in case they break the game.

In short: would it be nice to be able to play a previous version of your choice? Sure. But I think that should be more of a Steam feature (which they either had and removed or they still have) than EHG’s.

3 Likes
15

yeap. as much as i would like to play poe pre maven. its lost in the past with so many additions to the game.

and even if i did get pre maven poe, theres a lot of newer qol that i m too used to that i cant go back.

i think players HAVE to live with all the changes EHG makes to LE. but if it reaches the point where theres a ton of different extra content. i would really like to tailor my experience by directly selecting the content i want.

playing the game in an earlier state is… not too feasible.

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The biggest difference between PoE and LE in this regard is that PoE doesn’t have offline, though. So even if you had a way to load a previous version in Steam, you still wouldn’t be able to play it because you need to connect with PoE’s servers, which would refuse your connection due to the version.

Whereas LE does have an offline client, so there should be no issue with getting a previous version.
However, you point about QoL is a good one. There are a lot of QoL improvements added that would make the game painful to play without (I don’t think I could go back to not having shard auto-transfer).
Not to mention bugfixes.

Well, that’s kinda what PoE does with the Atlas tree. It allows you to focus on some of the content, block the rest and just have fun with the mechanics you enjoy.

I feel that’s what the weaver’s tree is trying to do as well, though in a very limited fashion yet.
Although the prevalence of trade in PoE does allow you to ignore most mechanics while still being able to get those drops, which isn’t something that happens in LE with CoF.

17

I can’t describe it better then that!

Weaver’s tree gave options for endgame. But currently Main story lacks such a feature completely.

Ps: Would be fine to close the topic with that.
Everything I wished for was mentioned and explained :slight_smile:

18

Ah this old chestnut. The category of Live Service Games is huge and ever expanding. Even “normal games” get updated after the fact now, up to a certain point. This ain’t something new or different. Even 20 years ago you could download patches to games.
I am very certain there are much much more people who expect to have the most recent content even while playing Offline mode. This is quite frankly expected.

The fact that Last Epoch even has an Offline mode is Really Really good. And its not a given. Last Epoch started as an Offline experience, but was turned into an online game because we the players wanted it so.

I mean… I get where you all are coming from, but what you are asking for is a niche within a niche. I’ve played computer games for 40 years so I know full well how much fun it can be to simply git gud in an unchanging environment where the variables are known. I just don’t think that represents gaming today… at all.

19

You can’t if that game is a live-service game model and has always been presented as such.

This is that case. This is a live-service game with a offline option. Not a offline game with a live-service aspect on top.

Yes.

And it was a vastly better time for the genre, agreed.

Yes, and it’s a fantastic model.
This has been phased out in live-service games though.

Why?

Because live-service games demand having a sizeable community to enforce the community aspect, be it through the MG market or shared experiences which relate to you from content creators. If it’s not available then interest dips substantially.

A game which did a fantastic job with modularity in the RTS genre… and is solely co-op rather the competitive is ‘AI War: Fleet Command’. It’s a masterpiece of a game. Shitty graphics, pure gameplay, from ‘everything is really easy’ to ‘even the best player world-wide cannot beat it under any circumstance’ it’s all freely chosen difficulty wise. It has an aspect of RNG for unit types even, has free choice for game mechanics to be included, each individual mechanic has a separate difficulty scaling, has several win-conditions which can be chosen beforehand to approach and go through and so on and so forth.

The difference is that while it’s a well made game… it’s inherently a single-player experience with a MP option.
It is not a live-service game.

Not only ‘could’, it with 100% guarantee did and we’ve seen those exact posts as well.
‘I’m forced to engage in those champion enemies, they wreck me, that never happened before!’ → experience ruined. Their power level of the character didn’t fit with the new content.

Not to speak of balance changes, your great character before could’ve become a bit weaker.

Or the change between the boss DR system and the boss Ward system, it changed entirely which characters fared well against different bosses.

It’s a common thing, not a ‘if’ but only a ‘how much’.

You cannot, Steam offers the option for developers to provide former versions and keep them on their servers. EHG hasn’t taken that as a option. It’s usually in the ‘beta’ category, but that has no entries.

Peak of player agency.
You can align a cost to it, but the reward for success should also be reliable and hence allow sustaining that permanently.

Yes, agreed.

It actually is with the current version. Gameplay is solid, QoL is decent for what’s provided and crafting has been streamlined enough with the new methods (like recombinator) to allow even someone without major knowledge to suceed.

But yes, the progression increase is a issue at times, albeit strong former character often can outpace the new content substantially, it’s why I’m playing Standard.

Not really, more to the model itself.
Seasonal updates change the core experience. In diablo-likes it’s just prevalent as the demand is substantial changes. But the same can be seen in other games, even highly praised ones like Warframe (great game btw.) or Destiny 2. Those games are in no way the same thing as years ago, they changed substantially and basically so much you can start from fresh and have a completely different experience.

Yeah, but the scale is entirely different.
You can’t compare a game which feels like a completely different game to one where I wouldn’t even realize anything changed for the first 5-10 hours of play-time, outside of maybe a new NPC or a new route being available.
The exception being QoL improvements… which… more then fine! Those changes are the always positive ones, more options.

Sadly only upholds until you reach monoliths, then it tapers off, becomes great to use for a short while before it feels like utter ass a bit further along.

Always did, near nobody likes that content. Rewards suck in monoliths. It’s good EXP but EXP are not really important in LE, it happens on the side anyway.

By the pace they’re going the reworks need to start from the beginning again at the current progression pace of the game, power creep is massive.
So it looks more like an endless cycle for now :stuck_out_tongue:

Steam has it, always. It’s at the hands of the dev to use that function accordingly, not on Steam to enforce it… albeit plainly spoken? It should be enforced.

20

Yes, devs can provide versions to become available via the beta menu, but I expect those carry costs or have heavy limitations.

Steam used to have an option where you could check any update version in steamdb and install that version. Devs didn’t need to provide anything. You just chose from the list. I know early on you used this with the steam console (I don’t know if the console even exists anymore).

That would be the ideal scenario, though I expect Steam probably got rid of it because keeping all versions of all games available would exponentially increase storage space required.