To start, I do think EHG needs to consider more ways of enticing players to play Legacy, because there aren’t many incentives for that right now. There are some incentives but not as many as I would like. I know many folks on the forum have expressed interest in Legacy becoming more relevant.
I’m the kind of player that only wanted to play Cycle because Legacy seemed somehow irrelevant. I missed my Legacy characters but didn’t feel great playing them during a cycle. I think one reason for that is most of my friends were also playing cycle and I wanted to be able to play with them.
But this cycle refresh gave me the first incentive to play Legacy since Cycles came out. I’d ignored Legacy for months.
The main thing that happened was the Forgotten Knights faction rep transferred to Legacy from the refresh. And the fact that I hadn’t killed Aberoth yet and really wanted to accomplish that got me playing old Legacy characters again. I still haven’t killed him but I’m close!
The fact that I already had very powerful characters on Legacy, just waiting to be used, and that I only had to kill 3 more Harbingers instead of 10 (on cycle refresh) got me playing Legacy to accomplish my Aberoth mission. This is a great incentive, giving us some goal that’s difficult to achieve, where Legacy characters may have some leg-up or efficiency over cycle ones.
I’m not really sure what other incentives EHG can add to Legacy, to keep it relevant. But I certainly hope they come up with more ideas like this. Although my situation regarding my lack of interest in Legacy was a lot of coincidence because many players did kill Aberoth on cycle. I just didn’t quite get that far before I was distracted by other stuff.
It would be interesting to hear what incentives other folks would like to see added to Legacy to keep it relevant compared to cycles. Obviously, we know that gear, money, materials, and character progress are all existing incentives for why someone may continue on legacy versus cycle. But maybe there’s some new ideas from the community too…
It’s a value-dump, it doesn’t need any reason to go into it.
Quite the opposite, Cycle needs to have appropriate reasons to move into it.
LE is already an outlier in the genre with how they’re handling it, which makes the MG market problem a much more severe issue then it would be otherwise (still bad but affecting less people at least).
It stays intrinsically relevant since all acquired value throughout your playtime is there. Which means it gives you the options to do vastly more with builds then in a cycle as time progresses.
None, Legacy is supposed to be the core gameplay, not some special thing. And it should stay exactly that way.
Not quite sure what you mean. Do you mean that they’re pushing content to both leage & standard at the same time? That’s because they have a particular plan for “core” content which I’m not sure GGG had back in the day. Once they’ve done the core content then I’d imagine it’ll be more similar to PoE with league-specific content.
Well, you got to agree that not separating the new content to provide cycle a specific extra allure is non-standard to the state of the diablo-clone genre currently.
Whatever the reason for it and whatever the future holds, it causes Legacy to be higher valued then otherwise.
I mean, not really? D2 did that for years. And yes, D2 can’t be considered a part of “currently”, but there are still many games that don’t actually give you cycle exclusive stuff on cycles. Most obvious example would be the new season of Dwarven Realms.
I think what you mean is that the top ones currently all give cycle exclusive stuff. But it can also be argued that LE does as well: you have the fresh start and the leaderboards (which is what D2 thrived on for years).
You can argue that that’s not enough (and likely rightly so) to appeal players to make them play cycles, but there are differences.
D2 also happened quite a bit more then a decade ago and while some methods they used can still be taken as examples for modern games of the sub-genre the methodology they used there definitely is not a viable option for a live-service game… which D2 wasn’t.
Which is why with PoE as the first live-service game of the sub-genre that actually worked other games have picked the same functional system they basically ‘invented’ (not quite, but close enough at least) and went with it.
The current state of how EHG handles it works very well for a game which isn’t live-service, not for it though.
And leaderboards are not ‘exclusive’ stuff, they can as easily be implemented in a Legacy environment and are in quite the large portion of games. All-time Hall of Fame is a thing after all.
And well, the appeal for Cycles is currently to have a fresh economy, anything else? Not so much. The 1 week headstart for Aberroth was a slight thing… and it was as well used outside of those things solely because of a) Friends playing there and b) people thinking it worked similar to every other game of the sub-genre and simply going in there rather then Legacy, which will be staying for a bit longer surely until ‘everyone’ gets used to it.
The more Legacy and Cycle are distinct without being utterly detached from each other the more reason there is to make a informed choice on which one to play. That’s simply rather minimal which should - theoretically - default a vast amount of players to Legacy by design unless very substantial changes happen from one version to another, providing a good reason to start ‘from scratch’.
Whenever that might be, we won’t see that for a while yet if the current rate of progression is at any way an indicator.
Because what is all the ‘core’ stuff? I would say Act 10-12 are, the monolith re-work, their new mechanics… all of it in need of proper baseline polish surely as EHG has a bad habit of implementing things half-baked (dungeons and MG as prime examples) and needing a while to get them at least baseline fixed.
So… 2 years? 3? That’s a loooooong time as a live-service game.
