The lack of interesting exploration in LE IMO

Feedback and Suggestions
21

Exploration indeed is not a thing currently. But I also think these are different times today. People just want to be effective. If you put very good rewards in a chest and hide it on a map# people will complain that they are “forced” to explore the map. Especially when they play through the story for the “thousand” time to level their next toon.

If the rewards are meh I’d feel no incentive myself to explore.

I’ve made some suggestions to add achievements for exploring, a while ago. The rewards could be some rare cosmetics or titles, that are only obtainable this way.

Fortsetzung der Diskussion von Tweaks and QoL - My Wishlist:

2 Likes
22

I agree with you, i played a lot of D3 in the past, dropped a months ago because was too repetitive and already have every class on 70 but things like treasure goblin were really a spark of joy in the grindy nightmare that i was usually doing

23

You could use the example I gave in another thread: using portals instead of doors. I found the secret areas also, found them unrewarding and a general let down. If these “Easter eggs” ended up going to random undiscovered places in the current era theme that would be a bonus. This is going to turn into a roadmap/design philosophy discussion, which can get a bit heated. So lets keep our tone pleasant and respectful of each others opinions.

24

Achievement type content probably won’t come until sometime between the release of multiplayer and the release of the game. Framing exploration around this is probably not that useful or productive. Also, this just makes the exploration a one-time thing instead of giving people cause to continually seek out those side paths.

It’s all about the balance between making it optional enough for people who don’t care and don’t wish to be made to, and appealing enough that it’s exciting for the people that do want to.

25

Speaking of randomness I know Whymsedale (spelling?) in D3 was always fun/useful til you got to around P800-1200 (higher as seasons progressed). Everyone wanted to go in up to a point. Same for Bandit Shrines or blue goblins. If these examples werent mentioned that is.

26

Yeah, obviously it’s done if you explore a map one time per character on the playthrough. I don’t want a system that keeps me repeating campaign maps…

27

You might if there was a good enough reason to. Echos are just those same maps recycled, so it’s a matter of why you are there.

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28

The only reason you had to explore in Grim Dawn was to find Devotion shrines, One shot chests and god forbid if you did Treasure Trove/Nemesis runs

Nemesis was good in theory but godawful - incase you didnt know a random ‘superboss’ from a faction would spawn in 1-6 different spots in the world to encourage you to look for them and kill them. Yeah what really happened was you run to the easiest spawn point if the mob isnt there you just reset your game.

Pinnacle of gaming there almost as bad as PoEs challenges in a league you are forced to do to get 40/40

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29

The problem with shrines and chests done that way is that once you get them, there’s no reason to come back. As for Nemesis, I never intentionally sought them out. They just appear sometimes when I’m doing other things.

Don’t get me started on PoE’s challenges, lmao.

30

I do like your ideas of your wishlist.

Yes and no. Some people want to be effective. There are still people who love exploring,
there are just no options to do it to observe if people like exploring.

Beside this the devs nowadays are pushing people towards being effective in my opinion.
If something is not interesting enough i rush trough it so i get to the interesting parts.
Some posts were actually made about the secret areas on the forum. This means people like to see what that new thing is. I really thought maybe this has 20% chance to spawn this secret area, awsome! Other people might have not get this.
To my dissapointment it is there everytime, but hey i like that there is something new.
I would have preferred it having a random chance to be there. Trough a portal for example so it is easier to code maybe. Then i would check that area if i was lucky enough to get that portal.

I disagree with this. Why would they be forced to do it?
And why are they forced to do it while they can contain those powerful items in echoes aswell? If you would make a unique item that only drops then yes they could feel forced but isnt that the same thing for item drops of certain bosses?

I think thats the beauty of doing certain content and the good feeling of yes i killed that boss and iam rewarded for it were others might not be able to kill it so they cant get the item.
What is the difference in that?

People said a lot on those forums and videos on youtube that they miss chase items in LE.
So now chase items are a problem you are assuming?
I would love to see different kind of playstyles, the more explore type of player or the one that wants to rush. Now you have no choice but rush, yes you do have a choice but there is nothing interesting to search for or to explore in maps to justify it in my opinion.
That is the main problem of those games nowadays.

I know the time spams etc are different nowadays, that doesnt mean you only have to play into the cards of people that want to have everything quick and easy (like you mentioned something similar yourself on other areas of making the game easier regarding respecs and penaltys etc).

The campaign and echoes could be so much more then it is now if they would add more interesting things to do and items to chase in my opinion.
I hate leveling most of the time in games. In LE i like the campaign more but it is still not my favourite thing. I remember loving playing campaigns back in the day and especially exploring the areas.
Guildwars 1/2 has certain events that you can attend to for example. Guildwars 1 wasnt full open world btw. Also you had to travel really far to get a unique skill in Guildwars 1. While heading there you could explore even more and stumble upon different mobs and other secret stuff. Man did i loved that experience.

I do get were you come from with adding to many unique items in specific area as an only drop space. Then i agree that the chance of people complaining that your forced to go there. I still find it strange however like i said before (with the only boss drops).
Beside that you can still drop better gear over there for example with a higher chance of items dropping being only rares with minimal tier 3 stats for example. Those would be great crafting items or just useful right away. Then the problem of the chance that some people are feeling forced to explore the map would be reduced since you can get those items everywhere in echoes and arena in LE.strong text

The options are there… now devs need to be willing doing that and believing that exploring still has an audience, but thats up to them.
I think it is a big loss of in the gaming industry in this genre but i think i made that clear :wink:

I hope they will try those type of things out as a test to make this game more interesting and areas richer. I also hope that EHG wont play it safe in those try it out departments.
I mean this in every aspect, not only the exploration aspect and making areas more interesting.

Agreed and thats the problem of most areas right now in my opinion.

1 Like
31

I agree with most of the things said in this post, but i think the only real thing they need to improve in my opinion is monster density on higher level gameplay, like the areas 60+, the areas are pretty much dead, not much monster packs, don´t mean that i want to have packs like POE, but they should improve like 20-50% the mobs density in the areas. This will make the players want to explore more the areas than just port out when the objective is completed.

2 Likes
32

PoE has the problem of the chase items being kill boss locked. I am soooo tired of doing cortex maps. The same map, no changes just to get my nebulus. That is why tying the uber-rare/hard or elite bosses to pocket portals that are spawn-able based on a level area and character level is a great way to go. Who knows you are running an empowered 85 echo and you find a rift that gets you something you want within reach. Just got to take that chance and risk it!

My monster spawn generator was not based on a static area level, rather a combination of three things into a challenge rating (CR): Your level and allotted skills, your gear score, and monster level. This allowed for dynamic spawning. If you are a level 50 in a level “1” zone then monsters generated would be based on that CR score, not level 1. IF you were tagging along a level 1 to level them up quickly, that is a no-go since the mobs will target weak or strongest first to eliminate them.

These types of chase items/mobs are never going to satisfy everyone because we all have different skill levels, experience, patience and drive to accomplish these things.

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33

Haha the grind gets us all.

I managed to avoid that aspect in poe for years. I only played HC and almost always SSF. I am in no position to think myself the elitist though even though I played this style. I usually would get to and red maps before dying. Repeat on several characters. Get 18-24/40 challenges. And find another game to play til next league. This would last me 1-2months depending on how much I played.

This league I actually went trade SC. And beat all the bosses I hadnt ever done. Sirus Shaper Elder etc. And within 3weeks I was bored out of my mind. I was already at 24/40 challenges. I was starting to look at the aurastacker builds. And then after hunting cluster jewels and getting like 4 of the right socket sizes of 50 or more I quit games for abit. That cluster jewel farm probably made me feel the same as the cortex hunt for a Neb.

For me no death and losing everything shrank the world to nothing (and trade).

34

Yes, now you get my position on this matter. Now imaging doing that same thing for leagues on end. An original Alpha under a different account that got hacked. GGG was nice and allowed me to restart my current account in PoE 1.2 (2014).

It’s not the lack of the goal but the grind like GGG’s name is all about. There becomes a breakpoint in that grind where the inevitable will happen 1) the item drops 2) give up due to time. I have said in earlier posts only play HCSSF until the last 2 leagues then I went in with a bunch of buddies. We all quit in 4-6 weeks just due to a plain lack of variety. In those 4-6 weeks we hit our goals, sold traded did all the things we wanted. In HCSSF it would never be that easy. It IS the CONSTANT grind in HCSSF I typically get one toon to 95+ in league. Not anymore, not until the quality of the leagues improve.

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35

Agree with you. Have a post about game’s atmosphere too. Now its looks like corridor passing and killing all the way. It’s not to hard imo, to fill world with different events and side quests and interactive objects. I dont understand why so many people just want to grind items and kill waves of mobs in different ways but in same time dont need good quest in filled world, maybe with multiplayer pve world activity . This game begun as more storyline oriented than grind at start i think. It’s still possible to make endless end game content like PoE and left big pack of mobs but at same time work at world and storyline filling. But in case of using leagues system, which i totally not prefer, big storyline will cause problems for replay possibility. I think must be another system in general, when you have a character and pump it from update to update instead of creating new and all from begining…

36

I would really like to see more reason to explore or not just rush to the end for everything in Last Epoch. You seem incentivized to rush through leveling to get to Monolith. In the Monolith you are incentivized to rush through the echo to get the chests at the end. You are incentivized to blast through the quest echoes to get the boss specific loot at the end.

Maybe some named rare spawns in campaign areas that drop special uniques or optional things to do in echoes with rare loot. Even letting the boss specific items for that Timeline have a lower chance to drop on any mob in that Timeline so you don’t feel you are wasting time in between quest echoes trying to get an item. Maybe a choice of one blessing from the Timeline from Shade fights in the timeline with a certain corruption or from the first two quest echoes.

Anything really to move most of the rewards away from the end and pace them out to incentivize the journey somehow would be refreshing.

3 Likes
37

As far as I can tell, there are multiple conflicting issues going on for something like this.

In no particular order

  • The game uses WoW’s lame !/? quest system (the “fetch-it” system). This inherently undermines making anything interesting because you have already told the player, “Hey, ignore the text, follow the quest marker, do the thing, collect your reward, don’t bother to know/care what it was supposedly about.”

  • If the campaign is going to be interesting, it won’t happen by being as linear as it is. They really need to hammer down hard on the Chrono Trigger comparison for this to work. It requires redoing several of the existing systems and a ton of new work to implement. Not saying that they can’t/shouldn’t do it (quite the opposite), but I don’t expect this until well after launch (if at all).

  • Focusing more on the questing and interactive side of things is generally not very compatible with the grinding/farming side of things, so the game would risk feeling/looking like it doesn’t know what kind of game it wants to be unless it finds some magical combination that nobody else has yet. ARPGs in particular tend to be more of the latter than the former.

  • Using a league/season/cycle system implies you won’t be using the same character/build from update to update if you are on the live Multiplayer servers. I don’t know how they plan to handle the Single Player side of this, but it seems like it’s up to the player to keep it interesting with new characters to progress through new content (like Grim Dawn when they release expansions) or the player does theirself a disservice by trivializing everything with some min-max meta build that just blows through the content.

  • If all the good loot and exp is in the endgame systems, pretty much everything you put into the campaign will be seen as trivial and pointless–an obstacle to the real game. They have to find a way to make the campaign have endgame functionality or it’s basically a waste of dev time/resources to put too much work into it. This plays into the 2nd point mentioned above.

I’m not saying I want the game to go full hard on the grind for grind’s sake like PoE does, story be damned, but it is an extremely difficult balance to strike. It’s really going to boil down to how they treat the campaign itself and if they insist on using one of the worst forms of questing that exists in gaming today in the long run.

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38

The issue is development time. PoE has 11 years of content, LE 2 years at most going on to 3 years. I am not sure when the Kickstarter officially launched, I want to say 2018. The Kickstarter did not fund all of the stretch goals, so they were shelved, then the pandemic hit. The EHG team has endured a lot to get where they are at now. Give them some adequate time to catch up.

2 Likes
39

Yeah, for sure. This is why I couch some of my suggestions or criticisms within the scope of something like, “I wouldn’t expect to see this soon or until after launch, at least.” I’m aware that what this game needs in the long-term requires quite a lot of development time–and that’s not even counting what I really hope the game does, which would require much more!

40

Maybe problem from of the begining, i expected this game will be like more solo/story line oriented like Sacred 1, without open world, but with leaderboards and good world coop/multiplayer. With perfect skill system and regular content updates.
If this game oriented on end game content now, so its faded campaign and as well boring end game system and for me unfortunately like wasted money. Very raw product for pay to play model, but it`s usual case for modern game industry. Really hope if they already choosed PoE game model, there will now appearence kits that destroys atmosphere or overloaded gamescreen and they make unique product with minimum limitations.