Argumentum ad populum is a known fallacy.
In the limited frame of reference (profit), D4 might be the better (more profitable) game, but that is a metric usually only important for those who want to maximize profit.
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Which is a mistake in my opinion. Arpg fans wont support the game as they are a fraction of a fraction. Even if 1000 people where to buy a mtx for 6$ to support the devs, this is insigificant to what 200K people would bring with a single 30$ expansion.
We do NOT MATTER. Why i keep saying to yall in various posts. The 15K people who voted in polls DO NOT MATTER. The devs are litterly speed running the games death by ignoring the ONLY audience that matters.
Now normies, dont care about end game. They dont care about mtx, they dont care about Pinnacle content. What they care about is the first 10 hours of content that they see on launch on first day of a new release.
What EHG SHOULD HAVE DONE. Is easy, visible, front loaded changes. Its why normies also love bg3, and warframe, and witcher, and dos2, and poe. These games are front loaded.
No one cares what some new faction locked behind 50 hours of grinding does for the game
POE which clearly caters for a hardcore ARPG fanbase is now on the cusp of releasing POE2 - a game that looks extremely wellmade and polished. If this is what success might look like for EHG, as a game depending on the support of a small core ARPG audience, that is fine by me. Much better than the superficial trash D4 currently is.
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Dafuq? PoE is free to play and by your logic the worst game because noone bought it? I’m so eager to read the rest of your post now because it starts like a promising joke.
Oh my share your wisdom with me and tell me why it’s the worst. You can for sure back this claim up all isometric hack and slash games in mind.
As far as I understood it EHG wanted to make a game they think is fun first and secondly involved some feedback from their players. Looks like this worked out pretty fine. Sure it’s no major success and it most likely won’t be from my point of view. I’m even 80% sure the next season will completly kill the game for me.
Because there are people who like to do that kind of stuff.
Sadly so.
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I understand your point. And it is unfair to compare PoE to LE in terms of endgame because of the time PoE had to develop it.
However, as Erasculio pointed out, for gamers what matters is how the game is right now. And right now, when you play LE you have less content to keep you engaged in the game than PoE does.
What I think is unfair is making quality comparisons between them (i.e., PoE has more endgame so LE sucks).
Endgame is simply mechanics to keep you busy for a long time when you finish with the static content (in this case, the campaign).
Actually, hardcore players are more likely to buy MTX regularly over time than casual players. LE will make more money from MTX than they would from an expansion model, which has inherent diminishing returns.
None of those is an diablo-clone. The diablo-clone genre is a niche genre to begin with. It attracts a small percentage of people that like (or even tolerate) RPGs.
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Thank you. Arguing quality based on sales is soo stupid that I can’t find nice words.
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I love that we’re returning, at least to some extent, to the Betamax versus VHS conversation with a dash of ‘what is art’ thrown in.
EDIT
I do want to say, it doesn’t matter how much your product is embraced by the aesthetes, if you don’t profit enough from the sale you eventually have to stop selling. I don’t get the feeling that this applies to this game at this time.
What I do think might apply to this game is that your artists simply get tired of creating the art and want to do something else. Five years is a long time.
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That is actually a very good example, since it was generally considered by all the experts that betamax was the superior (“better”) format, but in the end VHS won. And that’s not even the only or the most recent example.
I know that this is an impossible task to measure quantitatively, but a metric I’d really like to know is which game has the RPG class “feel” better than other games. People love going on power fantasies, and things like campaign and endgame are just the vessel through which the characters reach their preferred power level. Also, are there enough interesting equipment throughout the game that people would love playing through the game multiple times with different variants of the same class.
For example, I think Last Epoch has, by far, the best “Beastmaster” fantasy where both you and your nature companions are in the heat of battle. So many abilities and skills reward the player for attacking while you have a companion (such as Summon Crow’s having enhanced fighting capabilities if you land a melee attack), and the Aspect passives are things that I dream other games have.
Though if you’re going pure minion Necromancer, maybe PoE has the better “dark minion” fantasy (I haven’t played PoE, so I have no idea of what it plays like), and I don’t know which game gives you the most skeletons to run around with (Grim Dawn + Grimarillion gives you around 32 skeletons if you go GD Necro + D3 Necro class, that’s a lot of bone boys to run around with).
Then there’s Druid transformations - the only ones I’m aware of is LE’s Druid class and Diablo’s Druid class. Once I can both afford to pay for Diablo IV and have a computer spec that can play it smoothly, I’d love to go through a detailed comparison of who has the better “rampaging bear” fantasy.
While I’m much more of a “summoner / companion” player, there are many others who love doing the Paladin spec, or a gigantic tank spec, or back-stabbing assassin, or master of the elements, or bow shooter. There are so many different fantasies available, and I’d love to see which ARPG does each specialty best.
That does directly against sheer popularity metrics, because if 1 million people love playing a “spin-to-win” knight against 100,000 who love summoners, the horde of people who thinks that PoE / Diablo have the better spinning simulator takes away nothing from the players who love LE because of its summoning / companion mechanics. But it would be a massive disappointment if the LE dev team doesn’t have enough funds to refine the game to make it even better for those playstyles because they don’t have enough money to fully flesh out their vision. Time will tell, I guess.
That will depend a lot on personal preferences, but on that front I’d say D4 is better because it has lots of customization and you see your customization choices in the cutscenes.
If you mean “choices impact the story/character” then GD would be the best one.
Hero Siege.
What you’re talking about isn’t really the RPG fantasy, it’s the archtype fantasy. Minions, beastmaster, barbarian, etc, are archetypes. You can even have them in non-RPG games or just RPG-adjacent, like many FPS games do.
In any case, they’re still too subjective to be able to quantify. There are people that like GD minions, I personally don’t enjoy them much. I liked D2 necro (LoD, not D2R), didn’t like D3/D4 necro.
I like PoE and LE necros about the same for different reasons, since they’re done differently. Though neither surpasses D2 for me. Though I admit a part of that is nostalgia.
Are you talking about the ~500 different options regarding tattoos, piercings and facial hair here?
If yes, well, it’s hard to find something that I care less about in an arpg and I would not associate that with class feel. I think of gameplay: Are you the brute that dives into the fray and laughs at your opponents because you out-tank or out-leech everything they do? Or are you the chicken that dances around the map never getting hit by keeping everything at a distance? Do you go in and out?
I tend to agree with the sentiment that one game has a better version of class fantasy X and another is better at class fantasy Y.
Archetype, that’s the word I was thinking of, but yeah, I’m aware that there are many non-ARPGs that have these archetypes as well, but yes, I was primarily talking about “which game does things like turn off brain and smash things with 2H hammer better than other games?”
That is something that can be quantifiable, but I also agree with the sentiment that if the story is boring, it will stop players from wanting to reach the character’s maximum potential and have them create screen-wide earthquakes with unga bunga (or call lightning bolts out of the sky, or all the other archetypes I mentioned before).
That’s definitely true, but it’s also a personal preference, because people don’t all see the class fantasy in the same way. For example, for many people the GD minion is the best even though you only run around with 2-3 minions in most builds.
Overall, I’d say LE did minions best because they gave you all the choices: a big minion or a lot of smaller ones. A lot of permanent ones or a lot of temporary ones. They can be necrotic, fire, cold, etc.
Ignoring everything else that you have said here in this thread, because there are some really baseless statements among them, one thing stood out to me
It is totally ok if you don’t think LE right now has what it takes to draw you in enough, even if you overal like the game.
But saying that LE doesn’t have anything to set itself apart is kinda strange.
Even among all the people that have very negative opinions about the game, there is a very large consensus among many different parts of the community that some features are standout feature of LE and are its strong points, even though there are still things that are lackluster.
The three major features would be:
Skill Spec Tree System
Crafting System
Legendary Crafting
There are a couple more minor ones, but these are the standout features.
The legendary system might not be universally loved that much, but the other 2 are things I almost exclusively hear good things about.
On top of that LE has probably the best build variety of all ARPG, especially within the same archetype/mastery.
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I would also add the loot filter. Especially now that it will be expanded even more with 1.1.
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Would you like to try to create a weighted list of metrics that define a powerfantasy of your choice and that can be used to determine how good the different iterations in all the Diablo-clones are?
And can you then explain why this list is not subjective, because it is based on your biased perception of the powerfantasy?
I ask this more to point out that I think that there is not really an unbiased way to determine what the best iteration of a powerfantasy is, since that depends, as so often, on subjective preference.
Any list we try to come up with will be a reflection of our biases.
And the trade/CoF factions.
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I’d add the factions to this list. The choice of CoF/Merchant’s feels revolutionary in a game genre where progression, itemisation and economy (or availability - how we acquire said items) are so utterly important.
One of the reasons I struggle with PoE and it fails to retain me far into a league (as a fan of the game with 1500+ hours) is the economic bloat, the sense of having to engage in a sort of endless eBay account/Excel sheet of selling/buying, inventory management and fiddling. As someone who likes min/maxing and dislikes the FOMO of feeling a character is gimped by not engaging with particular systems this disincentivises me from really getting into endgame.
Last Epoch has ingeniously solved this in a way that I find remarkable. Allowing players who don’t wish to metagame a marketplace system to have a viable way of finding loot without it being a massive grind. Allowing SSF to feel not like a challenge mode where you inevitably end up with a far weaker build but just a different way of playing the game. And STILL allowing trade/marketplace for those who want it? It’s masterful and I applaud EHG for their innovation (the crafting and LP systems are fantastic too, I feel we’re in good hands with a company making these sort of design choices).
I used to play Diablo 2 single player offline and there were all these wonderful items, rare uniques and Runewords that were almost completely off limits to me. I had a near zero chance of ever acquiring them. Many builds were unavailable, avenues of creativity.
I looked at online players and wished I had access to the same loot, but without going onto ladder and engaging with the economy metagame and server wide trading I did not have the option. This felt inhibiting, and made me lose motivation, there was no way to realistically approach a close to maximised build alone or with a small group of friends. LE’s factions have provided an answer this this age old problem of bridging the gap between these different sorts of players that was hitherto irreconcilable.
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I’m an accountant, it’s not that fun. If I could buy a person’s cheap or consumable items (maps, currency, etc) via an AH style interface without having to waste an indeterminate amount of my time (& theirs, which is why they often don’t reply), I’d be happier with PoE’s trade.