No, it was a genuine confusion as to where the line was (for you).
I did it for Valheim, it really wasn’t difficult. I paid for the server (from a list of companies that did Valheim servers) & eventually figures out how to start the game up & that was it. No installing or configuring or anything. That’s why I was a bit confused.
And procedurally generated content, the ability to tweak monoliths a bit via the Weaver faction stuff, a load of “improvements” re legendaries, uniques & what to do with spares (of both). Oh & set crafting/shattering.
It’s really not, you can chill in baseline empowered monos easily enough & be able to do the majority of the weaver echoes.
Yeah, but TBF, D3 & 4 are the Fisher Price of the aRPG genre.
If you’re going down that route then you’re being ridiculously disingenous with your explaination of crafting in LE. If you did the same with PoE then you could describe it as:
Get currency
Get base
Use currency on base
Profit.
GD’s crafting is about as basic as it gets, with the exception of D2’s crafting.
That’s where we disagree. This isn’t complexity for me. Complexity involves making decisions which can lead to different routes that all lead to the same outcome, with more or less chances for success.
In GD you clearly don’t have to make decisions (other than what to use, but that is more a gearing process than a crafting one). In fact, in endgame, once you’ve gone through all zones 3 times already, you’ll likely not even have to search for any component because you’ll have plenty of all of them.
Hrmm… well, that’s not quite how complexity works though? It’s a common misconception around it though, so I get where you’re coming from there.
Complexity is purely related to the ability of information retention. If you got to retain loads of it to make something happen then it’s a complex thing. As examples… everyone can cut a board into shape… but making a long-lasting outcome needs you to know the type of wood, how grain affects the movement of it long-term, the moisture of the area it’ll be put in, the moisture of the working space where you create it and so on.
And in terms of microelectronics… everyone can easily know how a single transistor works… but understanding the interweaving interactions between millions of them in a modern chip is a completely different ballpark.
That’s ‘complexity’. The more venues the more complex as you need to retain more information to make a proper outcome not based on luck but on informed decisions.
Depends, they have rarities. Same for crafting materials. So you can be re-running a zone 10+ times to acquire that even when 100% playing through all available content related to the specific difficulties. GD has a very long-lasting end-game.
It’s not tough.
Wiki: “Complexity characterizes the behavior of a system whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, leading to non-linearity”
Cambridge dictionary: “the state of having many parts and being difficult to understand or find an answer to”
GD doesn’t have many parts, it’s not difficult to understand or to find an answer to. It’s also pretty linear. It’s not complex.
Before all the nitpicking about what ‘complexity’ means took off, this comment resonated with me.
It is a symptom of what the louder parts of reddit and youtube maintain (stemming from PoE?) is the priority for ARPG’s: campaign is to skip, ‘real’ game is in endgame.
Personally, I think this largely misses the point of the ARPG experience. People complain the campaign is boring to repeat with each character, but instead skip to endgame to… repeat the same ‘maps’ over and over again with little variation in experience.
The campaign, to me, is important because:
it is a mostly static, clear and learnable path for character development
because of this, you can easily gauge your build’s relative performance as it develops and make decisions as you go (i.e [quote=“Houlala, post:69, topic:77188”]before you feel any need to look for a guide[/quote]). Of course the difficulty balance needs to be decently tuned to allow experimentation and sub-optimal efficiency to still succeed (as most ARPG’s do, annoys me that people want the campaign to be ‘hard’ straight out of the gate)
it can create clear and learnable player ‘checks’ to ensure your character is building in the important things, e.g. specific resistances, debuffs, CC, etc by new monster types or bosses
I hope LE implements more campaign content, because for levelling repeatedly through campaign to work, it has to be interesting:
side-quests with good rewards
farmable items that support specific classes/builds/damage types or are required for crafting
secret areas with above-average loot or uniques
challenging bosses
extra difficulty options (i.e. D2 Nightmare/Hell, PoE’s old Cruel, GD Elite/Ultimate/Ascendant, etc)
Ok I’ve gone on enough, I’m just triggered from the constant demands of endgame, endgame, endgame and the attitude that campaign is pointless, with much whining about boring endgame after skipping the interesting bit…
It’s not like there aren’t interesting things in the campaign, just… EHG never comitted to it.
You get a lovely little mini-entrance kinda-hidden away in Act 2, with some chests for loot. It tells the player ‘look out for secrets!’ and then? Well, it’s never used again, a complete waste of a nifty small mechanic which causes intrigue. Could include a variety of interactables and secrets which provide viable amounts of loot if you start to remember em… but simply not used anymore.
Or the notion that we get mini-puzzle things with the Bridge controls in Act 3… and then never again. Could provide side-areas with small puzzles to solve to get rewards. But also, never seen again.
It’s like EHG has an idea, tests it and then forgets about it immediately after without ever committing to it, like the whole company has ADHD and just starts on ‘the next thing’ rather then playing into their strengths.
You mean like the Overgrown Alcove and those monoliths…
I like the variety in the campaign in LE, it’s just not very memorable in the end because there’s a) a lack of those ‘player check’ areas where you’re suddenly tested (except I suppose Lagon and Majasa), b) none of the enemies are target farmable for anything and c) there’s no cool secrets or boss uniques to come across.
Very well put (all your post, not just this sentence, but this is a key).
This is exactly how I play diablo-likes. I enjoy the first 50 levels far more than the endgame, because I have a lot of decisions to make and can test different things, slowly improving my original idea. My previous experiences in the campaign show me how my build compares with the ones I tried before, and what I need to work on.
I agree, but I would say that while it has to allow sub-optimal efficiency, it also has to be somewhat challenging, otherwise it doesn’t help you understand your build’s strength and weaknesses and improve it. Titan quest, Grim Dawn, Diablo 3 (at launch. Now it is pathetic.), Diablo 4, Undecember, in fact most diablo-likes, are alright in this respect, to be fair, as you mentioned. Easy enough to experiment and still progress, but can still kill you once in a while if you have weaknesses.
But not LE, where everything is too easy to give you a feeling of the areas you need to improve. And you find super-powerful gear way too fast, again harming the feeling of progression. Then suddenly you reach empowered and get demolished, because the campaign made you wrongly believe your build was super strong.
That’s why I stated earlier that the “endgame only” policy of LE or PoE strongly encourages using build guides. If you jump straight to the hard content, there is no progression, you need to be efficient straight away, and, well, to be efficient without progression or experimentation, you need a guide.
That’s a bit sad.
I agree in principle. A game with infinite scaling is like having sex without a climax. You never have the satisfaction for actually having beaten the game. Path of Exile, to an extent, handles this issue well but they dropped the ball terribly with player progression, drops, and solo mode.
Sadly, infinite difficulty scaling has become a crutch to prolong player time. My view is that a player better play for one month and leave satisfied, with plans to come back, than having him play for two months and leave frustrated. I’d like to see the game offer a max difficulty, which with proper approach and time commitment can be beaten by a couple of builds per subclass. (if a damage skill can’t be used for that, then why is it in the game to being with?
In that regard, there is not glory in having just 1-2 viable builds per season total. The satisfaction in such a scenario is the same as copying somebody else’s homework. Player joy comes from players being able to discover working builds. PoE2 did this well on release, before “the vision” changed the game. Players were happily commenting how they could make a build that works without replying on 3rd party sites for a first time in years! Sadly, this state was short lived.
This was the lesson no one took out of PoE1. PoE1 works reasonably well to level with all sorts of builds through the story. The reason you need guides anyway is because respec was prohibitive and the scaling of monster/map affixes leads to ridiculously spiky end-game balance all of a sudden, so all of your sub-optimal choices (or things you don’t even know/learn about) suddenly cost you big time.
As with LE, you’re not tested ‘properly’ along the way, so your build is full of holes at end-game because nothing makes them obvious. That doesn’t mean campaign should be hard - in terms of being a slog, it just means it should be dangerous at certain times depending on your defenses (I think LE in particular needs to make CC felt a bit more by the player).
I think in some ways infinite scaling content is a symptom of poor balance leading to the players ‘searching’ for a difficulty cap, because if balance isn’t good (which is a live-service symptom too), you just try to over-level it all until you hit the ‘absolute’ limit. Your build is tested so randomly in end-game that you don’t know what the actual limit is for your build: one ‘map’ it’s wiping screens without a care, the next, insta-ded. You don’t see a wall approaching and do targeted rework, you just keep moving and hitting random walls.
Yeah, which is why I don’t get why LE isn’t more ‘stringent’ in terms of progression as it goes along. After all the limitation of respec is not holding the player back.
So on top of that leaving progression difficulty itself early on so utterly and entirely brainless that the first asks for help from someone who hasn’t understood anything about ARPG character building comes up when they meet Lagon at best… is kinda weird.
That’s an interesting metaphor, I’m not entirely sure I completely agree. It’s a very destination/end-point focussed viewpoint, but sometimes, or for some people, the journey is more important and more enjoyable.
I agree that “infinitely scaling” content is likely there mainly to keep the player on the treadmill for longer, but I don’t agree with your premise that a game has to have an end point for it to be enjoyable.
To give them the benefit of the doubt here, perhaps before release player numbers were never really high enough to test the balance of progression fully, so it’s been left on the easy side. But… we should be at a point where that balance is in now and the difficulty gets tuned. I hope they’re not waiting for all the ‘reworks’ to be done first.
And to be clear, when talking of difficulty, giving monsters more health and damage is not what makes difficulty good. Instead it needs to test different defenses to make sure we don’t neglect them, but not all at once. Do it with monster variety: different CCs, debuffs, specific damage types for elites that hit harder, ground effects, telegraphed slams (but not in the middle of high density), specific monster defenses that must be countered, etc.
I don’t mind infinite scaling. It is simple, easy to implement and maintain. I rather have infinite scaling and set my own personal goals and “end” instead of having finite scaling “ending” way too early for my liking. And since tastes in that regard are a huge spectrum it wouldn’t make sense for the devs to lock it down to whatever they consider “good enough” and alienate players in the process.
Also, this isn’t a modern phenomenon. I started playing games when pretty much everything was infinite and only limited by tiny data structures and memory. The artificial limitations came way later.
No ‘benefit of the doubt’ from my side… there was more then enough feedback related to it before release and the rework of Act 1 and 2 was a major success since it handled the start better. We just never got anything which was fitting for Act 3+ in terms of difficulty and boss-changes to align properly with how the game is supposed to introduce you to the more mechanical fights as it goes on.
But yes, there’s so many construction sites for the game left which are ‘big’ that it might take a year or 2 to even be tackled… and if it’s tackled earlier then other things will be left aside which are as problematic. The campaign difficulty isn’t fitting… but the itemization progression is also problematic, specifically how the item tiers are set up. Lemme explain what I mean with that by providing Torchlight and PoE (1) as examples.
If we take a basic affix like ‘Health/Life’ into consideration then we can compare the progression rate between tiers.
For boots we got as an example 12 Tiers in Torchlight through the craft, 9 tiers in PoE and 7 Tiers in LE.
The percentile in which one tier to another improves reduces in PoE and Torchlight for each singular step beyond T1 (I’ll work numerical upwards to fit with LE, so T0 in Torchlight would be called T12 by me here, just for clarification, same with PoE)
In Last Epoch it’s roughly similar. a T2 is roughly 1,5 T1 affixes in value. A T7 is roughly 1,5 T6 affixes in value. Straightforward but not a good design actually. It means a T7 is worth 4,5 T5 Affixes… and that’s massive in disparity, enforcing you to focus on a singular Affix first (which is easy) before bringing the others up to par to get the most out of it.
If we take PoE the scaling actually is different, by a lot. T2 is nearly 300% of T1, T3 is 150% of T2, T4 is 130%, T5 is 125%, T6 is 120%… and so on.
You see? The numbers get smaller and smaller in percentile for how much power compared to the former upgrade it provides. This allows lower tiers to sustain value, makes individual upgrades less important but overall has a big outcome still.
This ensures that a spread of fitting affixes has more value comparatively to having a singular Affix on an item and nothing else. The fitting spread is harder to achieve so it’s rewarded accordingly. In LE it’s the other way around currently.
This is an issue for progression, the balance needs to be done related to the potentially highest tier you can have in a singular affix… not the total count of affix tiers you can have on a specific item at a time hence… since that’s a low impact comparatively.
That’s how someone knowing LE simply rushes through content while a beginner won’t. It feels unintuitive to not spread out your gains and create a fitting well balanced item instead of one heavily leaning into a single stat, leaving the people not understanding that yet at a weaker state. And that’s purely a design-choice done… not something which is positive in any case (or at least I haven’t found a single case-situation yet where it would be for overall balance).
Exactly.
As a reminder for EHG itself: It’s also to enforce mechanical handling into it. Mini-bosses need to enforce a smaller arena before Lagon. The cadence of ‘avoid instead of tanking this attack’ needs to be increased gradually towards him as well.
The Wengari in Act 7 are one-shot prone instead of enforcing large-scale repeated avoidance. The jump of death and the icicle-rain are the 2 most powerful attacks… and they are very limited in scope. The Frostroot Warden also is extremely limited in mechanical scope. This leads to Act 8 being utterly out of the experience of the player then as a follow-up, Lagon is a menace since suddenly you got a mini-arena combined with very tight mechanical attacks that need to be avoided, nothing ever seen before.
Yes, it isn’t… but it’s also the baseline which should’ve been there since the beginning. EHG wasn’t experienced back then which led to those issues… but they’ve got to step up and learn from the design decisions of their competition by now. Even D4 does a better job with their boss mechanics (for those not repeating at least in the campaign). The difficulty in D4 is just out of whack, so you just stomp em, but mechanically they are decent.
It is, but it solved basically nothing. Steps have been skipped… you can’t slope the steps instead to make em connect, they’ll feel bad to step on then
Yeah, true… which is the task of any decent dev to create the situation not to happen though.
Or… using infinite scaling beyond the finite one.
Basically the goal is to create as much hand-tailored progression scaling as possible before introducing generic gradual one which we currently have.
(but I am a little disappointed you weren’t fucking with me )
Got it. Guess I should have pulled the trigger on hosted-Valheim as that sounds pretty straight-forward. I have done app server installation/configuration as part of the my job in the past. So for me, doing it for a hobby fits into the ‘chef doesn’t want to cook at home’ category. I have done it as part of this gaming hobby, but I’ve very reluctant because it can become another job.
If you always fuck with people then that’s what they expect so it’s harder/less effective to fuck with people. I’m just at the min-maxing stage of fuckery.
Yeah, it really wasn’t difficult, though the host I chose wasn’t the best, there’d be a periodic lag spike which was frustrating.
Infinite scaling as implemented in LE is just a placeholder for “we don’t exactly know where to go from here content wise” and could be said that it serves as a QA testing for finding overpowered builds that should be toned down , however the same builds can be toned down if there was a ceiling and it skyrockets above that, simple as that.
The purpose of playing these type of game is to work your way towards a feeling of accomplishment over the game world and not over the RNG drops whilst the exact same content can one shot you a step higher on the scale of difficulty . You want to reach a point where you feel satisfied that you are nearing the top and sit comfortably there and might try something different now… You don’t want to reach that point only by following the mandatory broken builds that are slowly nerfed one by one, as they get discovered since that nullifies the idea of the journey.
The solution would be simple, just implement a limited tier system to this corruption mechanism that rewards you with meaningfull stuff that adds to your character, not the rng drops and introduces you to different content and keep infinite scaling above it but maybe rename it “test realm” or something for the nuts that would go above and beyond . But regular people also need to feel they’ve accomplished something ,beyond finding a t7 hybrid life affix once a blue moon.
Say Tier 1 corruption 0-200 up to T6 affixes can drop, rewarded +5 skill points (or hp/mana/whathaveu) , your mastery bonus is improved .
Tier 2 corruption 200-400 up to t7 affixes can drop, + bonuses, you fight new type of monsters and bosses and new map mechanics that are not present in previous tier
Tier 3 400-600 up to t8 affixes can drop …same …same , new unique monsters/bosses etc.
You want each tier to introduce stuff you can only find there, worth to grind for. Just grinding the exact same content with a measle % to find better gear feels that all your drops are pointless, you’re never the king of the hill where you’re at, just constantly grinding to die less.
Each tier could have a skill-tree like bonus system that you unlock as you progress the corruption level , you get a “welcome” bonus when you enter it and a final big buff/bonus when you beat it at which point you feel that belonging to a world on itself, you are Tier 2 warrior and master at it, you might try T3 when you feel ready or unlocked all that T2 has to offer and so on. You could also have unique bosses that you need to beat up until the final tier boss that unlocks your way to the next. This way every Tier feels like a realm in itself that you can master and be comfortable at and keep playing. You’re not constantly thinking yeah I handle 250 corruption but 280 still hard…that’s now a choice that you enter an upper realm with it’s own defined rules and lore and feel like a novice working your way up again.
There’s plenty of ideas to make this work , if only there was desire for it.
Most people playing feel the psychological need to have boundaries to define where they’re at to then set worthy goals . If they’re always between 0 and infinite difficulty and the same repeated content, they feel rather closer to 0 than higher since higher never stops. Even if they get godly drops, the feeling is the same, 900 is still just as far from infinite as being at 0 corruption. It’s just a chase for whomever has more free time to find a broken/overpowered build and play it before it gets nerfed.
I agree that a tiering system is simply better for the overall perception. Makes you feel like you actually work towards something which has meaning.
Could specifically work in 50 corruption ‘steps’ too, so it actually provides enough tiers which then unlock specific things… like you said, some kind of bonus for getting up, besides the core aspect of rarity… because rarity is a means to an end to get gear to tackle higher content… which only makes sense if there’s a distinct point to get towards.
And also a good point about the itemization in there with higher content unlocking higher rewards properly… rather then simply increasing the drop-rate.
I would absolutely enjoy the game more when exalteds only can drop in empowered… T6 up to 150 corruption… then adding T7… at 300 adding dual T6… then T7 T6, dual T7 and so on and so forth, a proper progression rate, obviously not exactly like I wrote it out but existing.
The same plainly spoken should be happening for LP. There is no need for LP items before empowered monoliths and all which they do is utterly destroying balance at that time. That type of content already was decent and has been made actively worse perception wise hence. Common and rare uniques with separate scaling… first common get T1, then uncommon T1 and common T2… and so on. Which would also allow proper balancing for the drop-rate as it’s reliant on progress and not always a possibility.
(but I am a little disappointed you weren’t fucking with me 
)