Infinite scaling is bad in most things, especially in modern times, because for some reason people expect things to be balanced infinitely,. and that’s just not a reasonable expectation. Given enough scaling, even small differences in power can result in enormous gaps of pinnacle achievement.
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But Shattered Realms is more like Arena, surely? Crucible is a fixed difficulty.
And Delve is pseudo “infinitely scaling”, in the same way as corruption is infinitely scaling. Corruption will also have a cap based on the type of integer used to save it.
Agree ARPGs are about loot hunting farming and build diversity. When you have infinite scaling and huge incentives to push corruption. You now have 5 META builds for the season that 60% of people play because they want to enjoy the game and do ALL the content.
I’d much rather them cap corruption at 500 and really focus on creature AI and balance (overtuned 1 shots and Aoe). Get 90% of builds to be able to farm 500 corruption. This leads to really fun gameplay where you get to do the repetitive content with a huge variety of fun builds which drastically increases replayabillty.
If you want to introduce more Ubers okay… coolzies sure the meme builds and less can do that content but that is no different than D2 where you have Smiter Pally’s and those builds that farm Ubers for other characters.
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Well, kinda, but also not really?
Crucible is pretty much like an arena that is capped.
Shattered realms is kinda of a crossover between arena and echoes, tbh.
There are so many things that D2 and Titan Quest have that current games have lost that it would be enough to write a book and that is the reason why D2 and TQ are eternal classics.
But the truth is that what bothers me the most is that everything in these current games has become a trap, nothing is in the game to be usual or fun, everything is a barrier and a type of trap, that is, everything is governed by RNG. LE does not have unique items because a “unique” item can drop with 10% or 100%, that is an idiotic margin, besides of course the LP that is once again RNG in the drop, RNG in the craft, so the infinite scaling is a way to disguise that these games are empty, they have NOTHING besides the grind, I think LE is a little less tedious but D4 and from what is shaping up PoE2 are Grind to Grind games. where you need to grind 100h to be able to Grind more… And this can be cool for the whales, it can generate content for the streamers, but honestly it sucks for the PLAYER, that’s why BG3 (a game focused on CONTENT) has 100k active players 3 years after its release without adding ANYTHING new, meanwhile modern aRPGs die 2 weeks after the season opens.
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I don’t mind infinite scaling, so long as the devs have a clear statement on what their ‘cap’ is for balance.
Grim Dawn is a good example: Shattered Realm is infinite scaling, but they target SR30 as their balance cap:
- no better rewards are offered above that level
- balance changes (nerfs and buffs) are performed based on being able to reasonably attempt SR30 (or Crucible mode clear speed at Crucible L150)
This works. Players can still attempt higher levels for self satisfaction or bragging, but the rewards don’t scale to force people to go higher…
Personally, I think corruption should be changed slightly to go up in clear 100/200 jumps. It’s then easier to gauge if you can do it or not and makes clear balancing points. I believe the devs have said ~300 corruption is the design max (?), but that needs to be clear and show in how builds balance out, builds shouldn’t be easily hitting 1000+ if 300 is the balance target and I would expect more nerfs.
But to make the nerfs, it has to be clear the rewards have a ceiling that players aren’t losing out from by not going past it. Also, make it 500 or 1000 corruption, it’s a nicer number and should take a while to achieve.
You can then have uberbosses in the game, just make sure they don’t require ridiculous corruption clears to get there (again, Grim Dawn does this well with hidden superbosses within the campaign map)
Actually, that would be the design min. They’ve said that they consider a build that does 300c as successful. Meaning that builds that do less aren’t.
So 300c is the floor. Not the ceiling.
And they’ve placed Uby at 500c (and with effective difficulty much higher), so they clearly intend builds to aim higher.
They haven’t said anything lately about the intended ceiling (it used to be that 1k+ was unintended and a mistake on their part) with the new added stuff, though.
There is a soft cap at 500c and another at 1000c. So you get diminishing returns between 500c and 1000c and very diminishing returns after that.
Ah ok, I think that’s a bit of the problem then. It’s great to have a floor, but without a ceiling my build scraping through at c300 still feels lame vs someone crushing c1500.
I think they need to pick one and make no better returns from that point.
- c300: you can start getting the best items
- c500/1000: you stop getting loot above this. GD again does this well, you can push higher than SR80 (now 40) but you don’t get loot, just bragging rights.
It’s not. They just considered those builds successful.
However the rewards past 300c are significant which is why people NEED builds that do 1,000c. They are compelled to play those builds. The rewards are drastically better after 500c and most people try to farm between 700-1,000c. Harsh cut off after 1,000c so techinically that is the cieling for builds and where the game is balanced around.
Which again I rather there be no rewards at higher corruption. Players play loot based games for that dopamine and rewards. They aren’t going to play 300c builds and waste their time. They want to do ALL the content and get ALL the loot.
Their intended ceiling used to be less than 1k. However, that’s never really been a reality, even before launch. 1.1 was a good step in the right direction, with less OP builds able to push 1k+ than in 1.0. But 1.2 is a step in the other direction, with more OP builds now cruising 1k+.
Uby also increases this, since you need to be at least 700c+ to have a chance at killing him.
Maybe when they’re done reworking all the classes and balance is a little closer we’ll get some fine tuning of these numbers, but I don’t expect that to happen soon.
I don’t really agree with this. I agree with not getting extra loot, but not with not getting loot at all. Unless you meant that 2000 would get the exact same loot as 1000, in which case I would agree with you.
Ah, this is the divide. I view this as a spreadsheet game. I’m not here for differentiated action gameplay, I play devil may cry for that. I play this game to get bigger numbers and chase stupid rare loot.
I don’t think LE, even with 10 years of development, will ever sate this desire for more “active” gameplay. If you will.
I mean, I could use your same arguement to say that the game isn’t that much different from level 1 to 100 other than you have more ways to push your numbers out onto enemies. I view a skill more like an extension of my stats. It allows me to deliver my numbers in novel ways. When I think like that, well, it makes me happy. I honestly don’t play these games for active moment-to-moment action game decision making, I’m playing a power fantasy spreadsheet simulator and I know it. Kinda like how EVE players embrace the spreadsheet.
Not saying you can’t just ignore the numbers and play it as an action game, but I feel like you’ll be disappointed. If they made combat in LE more like PoE2 for example (respect the vision) I personally wouldn’t be happy, I actively do not like PoE2’s vision. But I’m a very old school and slow player. I hate cycle content and only play legacy long form collection style. So I think LE is a biased topic for me, as it just feels made specially just for my desires. I also grew up on Grim Dawn and love it dearly! Great game!
Thank you for sharing your insights, cheers!
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I think a lot of forum questions are answered by this single statement… There are those of us that enjoy the gameplay itself, moment to moment, at a granular level. A love of the process. A love of the journey, not the destination. When that’s how you feel, you play for the sake of playing, and all the progression is just a bonus.
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I love the way you put this. I enjoy the process of playing itself. I don’t need extra incentive to enjoy the game. Great words friend. Thank you.
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Everytime I want to go back to LE, I remember why infinite scaling makes the game pointless and unninstall it after an hour or so.
The thing with “just push it as far as you can and play where you’re comfortable at” would maybe work if this was a complete game with an engaging story and not still in beta content wise.
You either sit at a comfortable corruption level and that’s about it, everything is one shotted and the chance of a gear upgrade factoring in the upgrade rng comes down to once a month and it’s pointless because everything already is dying too fast to matter while at the same time the next difficulty level will be so much different that the upgrade wouldn’t make a difference.
Build diversity , lets see. You got maybe 15 builds that work more or less up to what, 300 corruption ? anything beyond that, you got the one or two bugged&overpowered builds that work with that specific item that everyone rolls and that’s about it, 0% diversity for the chance of…not doing anything different than what you were doing before, least that it’s bigger numbers now.
I can theory craft for weeks looking for combos and gear for my minion army build and buff micro …but why would I when a single helmet drop is working 10x better with one overpowered minion that I can get afk behind it ?
It’s not like hey if you work hard enough ,(we’re not playing anymore, it’s work), you could find stuff that further improves whatever build you choose and get to a higher tier. Nope, There’s the noob ceiling of 200-300 corruption where everything sorta works…but beyond that, you need to give up and just play the one build and gear combo that is designed to work there.
The game lets you have it with diversity and fun but in a setup where it all works as long as you don’t get out of the noob zone, once you try to, it forces you to give up everything you thought fun and use the cheat-builds that were designed for you.
I could maybe find it fun to grind for 2 months so that I can improve my archmage build slowly but surely…or my ninja skelly builds…but no, they are simply not designed to work beyond a threshold while at the same time there are one or two builds that are designed to work out of the box beyond that thresold like abomination or giga wraith, while the skelly/mage build would require insane amount of farming to make them work further, these later ones work with basically any gear, as long as you skill into it.
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If you mean 15 builds per class, then yes.
Pretty much every build can reach 300c comfortably now.
You have dozens of builds that do at least 700c.
Every single mastery has had an Uby kill.
Balance isn’t great right now, but build diversity does exist. And it’s not hard to reach at least 500c with most of them.
Yea, the thing is, what’s the point of doing "at least 700c’ with your favorite fun build, while it would take you several months of daily farming with extreme luck to be doable with any but the designed builds that work out of the box ? There only thing you’re rewarded with is that probably devs will come with a patch and nerf whatever made it work because “now it’s too strong, it should’nt be there” mentality. To that they added the “trade guild” , inevitably a gold hax would happen and people will try all sort of crazy stuff buying up perfect equipment which is the best QA you can ask for, people come up day 2 with imba stuff devs never thought of so they can nerf it on and on until the only stuff left working is what they decided it should work.
Want to make all sort of builds viable &infinite scaling ? then just make it so I can spec 40 points into whatever makes my skellies do stuff, instead of 10 or 15…I’ll pick what I want to improve and not be hardlocked into 10 points…that only gives me that, I might get 50% more out of it after 3 months and a lucky t7 double afix that even luckier won’t fail on that perfect 2LP …maybe if, otherwise I’m better just picking whatever the top tier build everyone using.
There needs to be some actual sense of being rewarded for getting stronger instead of …well I got to 600c , I got a nerf patch and anyway, there’s nothing special here, I go to 700c same content floors me with 1 hit, I guess I need more t7 double life affix and another 3lp to slap it on , to survive 700.
What about skill evolutions like whenever you breach a corruption tier, you can evolve one of your skills to be much more effective, it can hold more skill points, whathave you, ideas are there. Something to make your character feel meaningfull instead of just being a QA test character in this endless open beta ?
There is no real end goal here, the rng is way all over the place and whatever you thought you accomplished by finding some op stuff to get the one thousand corruption it either gets nerfed or everyone starts doing it so there’s nothing about it. Without a ceiling and the only content being reworked items and copy-paste bosses since 5 years, I can’t see this as a game anymore. Is rather a tech demo where one can endlessly pretend to try balance everything around an infinite scaling difficulty which means the company can pretend to be busy “adding content” for the next 10 years without actually ever adding a story/lore or more timeline maps and content. Good luck farming then )
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I hate infinite scaling too. The way it feels is bad to me because when you push higher, your character will never feel like it has reached the nice power breakpoint, where you have great damage and survivability, a build feels complete. Like, you find the best items, reach max level and push a certain corruption and no matter what you do, you will hit a wall. This is how i feel about it i guess, in d2 you had to struggle with low items at start, farm with low dps and survivability, but after some time of farm, you could just run around and 2 shot everything and that felt rewarding for the time spend. With infinite scaling there is no power fantasy completion.
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There is a difference between LE’s scaling and D4’s scaling, though. And that is that in LE you can definitely have that power fantasy and in D4 you can’t.
That is because D4’s scaling is based on character level, whereas in LE you’re the one in control.
So, like your D2 example, you can have some difficulty doing 300c. But then you gear up and now you’re crushing 300c. You can keep going up in difficulty, but you can also always go back and crush previous content.
And that also means that, if you want, you still have goals to achieve if you want to push them.
Whereas in D2, you beat Hell, you’re farming meph or whoever and there’s really nothing else to do. You’re “done”. Your character is finished (outside of trying Uber Diablo or Uber Tristram, which most people don’t). There’s no more reason to play, unless you want to roll a new character and start over.
And I’m saying this as a huge D2 fan that still plays D2 on and off after all these years.
I’d like to counter that D2 wasn’t really made with rampant duping/RMT in mind, so actually “comfortably cruising through hell” actually is neither easy, nor accessible… unless you play ladder OFC.
And yes, in every game you reach a point where there’s nothing more to do. That’s because “infinite gameplay” is impossible. You can only fool yourself with the infinite difficulty stuff. However, infinite difficulty means that by default, the only builds that can actually reach the highest possible corruption are the top meta ones, whereas properly balanced static difficulty opens a lot more build viability without the “but it’s viable at 200c!” cope.
There is of course some value in challenging the player to find the top meta build… but who are we kidding here, we have maxroll, you’re going to know the top builds from day 1. And even if a player has restraint not to try, 99% of the community doesn’t, and the player with restraint ends up handicapping himself.
I’m gonna sound like a broken record here. Adding some back-end numbers for the engine to process in the background doesn’t really change anything. A player with 200000 DPS and 5000 EHP vs. enemies doing 100k dam and having 2000000 HP is actually the exact same experience as a player with 20000 DPS and 500 EHP vs. enemies doing 10k dam and having 200000 HP. I mean EXACT, to a T. It would be different if higher corruption/difficulty/whatever changed something else: AI, monster attack patterns, monster attack types, added hazards, added ailments, forced some strategy through resistances or immunities, and so on. The list of possibilities is very long and a developer can get very creative here.
But no, in LE (and most “infinite scaling” games) there’s nothing except the multiplier for monster EHP and DAM values.
Diablo 2 did the multiplier thing too, but it did change things upon selecting difficulty setting, for example:
- monsters would possibly get immunities forcing the player to have backup skills
- boss/champion packs were more common and could spawn multiple mods on the boss
That’s not much, but a 25-year old game could do more than just push the HP/DAM slider to the right in the background. We’ve made a step backwards recently.
I have to agree with this, since the implementation of procedural generation as well as enemy scaling rather then new enemy types games have become less… engaging. We just need to look at a prime example, Fallout 76.
You fight Super Mutants at level 10, you fight Super Mutants at level 50, you fight Super Mutants at level 1000. They’re the exact same enemy, just scaled up, nothing new, nothing exciting, nothing changing at all. A big ass universe where Cryptids, animals massively changed through radiation and whatnot happens and we got the same 30 enemies from start to finish, at best remodelled at times.
And then in comparison we get games like Grim Dawn, handcrafted, enemies are different specific to the area with background lore implications, you’re immersed from start to finish, everything has a ‘place’ and also it makes farming things all the more enjoyable. Wanna get xyz? Go to this place and you’ll drop it! You need those specific resistances, these enemies will be there, you can plan and don’t need to be able to handle everything at once all the time.
The regurgitating of content for big games like Path of Exile is a given to provide a long-term experience otherwise hard to deliver, I accept that, hence why we see the same enemies as we have in the campaign also in end-game, same for Last Epoch after all. Understandable! But plainly spoken the game should gradually progress through this face, they’re a placeholder after all, you implement them since you lack the variety which needs resources. So doing it is kinda important… but most games don’t anymore, they forgot why the reason to include it in the first place was there.
And the same goes with any sort of scaling, be it enemies, or difficulty itself, generally just there to divert the attention from an actual lack of content, even if the game becomes massive mechanically. Chronicon’s whole end-game is absolutely boring because you’re completely done making your build and it’s just scaling up difficulty with the same enemies and the same setup and the same maps even. And the same thing happens in Last Epoch. At least in Path of Exile each map is a unique layout, there’s over 100 different layouts available and there’s specialized thematic unique maps on top of that (which are mostly worthless outside of one completion but still, variety!), that’s what people want, the scaling is just there to allow it to work despite unique new content being missing partially.
So yes, clear-cut goals like corruption limits, cap unlocks, unique content set inside, more fixed map/enemy combinations and player agency to go through that rather then the procedural slob would be nice. More effort so I understand why it’s not done… but it should come piece by piece on the side at least rather then being ignored.
And yes, since ‘nothing new’ presents itself you stop engaging, because if 20k corruption is the same as 200 corruption basically then you’ve ‘done everything’. There’s a really small subset of people which actually are fine or even better with infinite scaling rather then variety of content to make up for it.
Which to a clear-cut degree… it should. If there’s need then there’s reason to do it, without a need the value lowers substantially, which is a prime motivator for our brain to do things.
Give things value in some way and they become worthwhile, the higher the value the more worthwhile. Mind you… with increasing value comes automatically increasing effort, and hence there’s a ‘golden line’ depending on each product type which is optimal to follow. PoE has a good one, LE has a decent one (spiky engagement, hence happy people become unhappy and unhappy people suddenly become happy… it needs to cater to a specific type, not shift substantially with progress), D4 has a atrocious one since even the target audience often speaks ill of the game… kinda not what you wanna have 
With high complexity comes a high learning curve. GGG does a bad job in countering that, which is their core issue.
But when LE becomes as large as PoE the exact same thing will happen as too many evenues to oversee properly - and take into consideration - will crop up. This is a natural progression of size.
A prime example is Dwarf Fortress, they improved their UI by absolute magnitudes when releasing on Steam, still… it’s a darn hard game to get into because it’s ridiculously complex.
Not really, they tried to reign in the numerical scaling issues they have in PoE 1, which goes out of hand with action-speed overall.
But they did crap in doing that with the generation aspect of generic content, the same random lifeless maps in end-game are still existing then in PoE 1, the same ones like in LE. We need distinct unique content, not regurgitation non-stop, the more there is the better it overall is perceived.
Grim Dawn is anything but and follows that exact example.
So no, it only depends on how it’s handled and is harder to achieve. Procedural generation and scaling mechanics are simply a crutch.
Yes, 100% agreed with that statement.
Which doesn’t mean ignoring it though, it means piece by piece gradual implementation over time rather then double- or triple-dipping down on the already existing scaling.
Yes, which means those systems existing on the highest level of content is no issue… but that needs to be a fraction of overall presented content, not ‘end-game’ which is the majority of play-time in total.
Having corruption based content available after 100-150 hours play-time is absolutely fine, no issue… but we sadly get into it at around 25-30 hours for a first-time player, and… 3-4 for a experienced player, and that’s plainly spoken ‘too little’.
It’s not about builds being online or not, that simply went off course there.
The point behind it is that you interact with content in a different way, procedural content or endlessly scaling content is not ‘consumed’ like designed content is. Those mechanics are to support other things, not to be the major aspect.
They’ve not without reason come under major scrutiny over the last years after all, and I’m also against ‘remove them completely’, they have their place. But the proper implementations are the goal to achieve.
That’s why Path of Exile has Simulacrum, empowered breachlords, empowered timeless challenges, uber-bosses, deep-delve, Heist content and so on and so forth. Even if no distinct new content is available there’s bits of content still available, hard to handle and something to strive to handle. 100% delirium maps for example at the basic game. Or juiced maps with ambush (strongboxes) being handled without constant chance to die from a second to the other.
It’s why people play it so long… corruption does that job too, but magnitudes worse, it gives solely a false sense of progression since there’s nothing distinct to progress towards, no reward for it.
And beyond I lost track of properly reading, so sorry for missing out on the other posts, but I’ll call for a change my post here
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