Diablo 4 sold over 10 million copies (I am one of the idiots who bought in for early access), the genre is not niche, its just the wrong games are getting all the attention and when they end up as shells of a game, it turns people off. Numbers be damned, PoE has held the crown for years, and PoE 2 will be amazing. It took GGG a decade to get to this point because they werent backed by billion dollar company from the get go.
All the great arpgs of now - Grim Dawn, LE, Chronicon etc, were made my small studios that didnt have the ability to have their main antagonist star in KFC commercials. This level of marketing budget is what it takes to bring the masses in day one. Sadly, for these smalll studios, if there isnt a fair amount of interest at launch, it will be a very tough battle financially looking forward.
I’ve been hearing old folks say this since the 1970s (when I was in my adolescence). People aren’t changing, you are changing. You used to be young. Now you aren’t. You imagine yourself to have been something your weren’t.
Just like my grandparent’s imagining themselves to be something they weren’t. Any they forgot all the twitchy, energetic things they used to be when they were young.
As far as no one having the patience for the grind anymore. What has changed is that now there are options. And many people choose the options that have less grind. And game companies want to sell to the most people.
Now all that shit I typed, I think, is mostly right, especially in terms of video games. But sometimes there really is a sea-change. Mobile phones and social media. That right there is some bonafide serious, “we haven’t seen this before”. Like birth control. Well, maybe not as massive as birth control, but still, a serious societal impact.
These days I don’t think that’s the issue. I think the issue is the other thing you said:
And the thing is that there are way more options than you actually have time to fully explore. So most people will play games for shorter bursts before moving on to the next.
Played 1500 hrs LE and much more POE.
Got bored a month ago by LE and switched now back to POE after a 2 years break and was wondering again how good PoE is and I see some fundamental problems for a long term success of LE.
What I really like is the characterization & itemization and skill system in LE.
#1 Playing/trying a few high end builds is much tooo time intensive.
If you dont play this few meta builds here, you have to spend a lot of time, you need to farm your items/uniques or buy them for a lot of gold. If you then get your high end 2LP/3LP item you mess it maybe up with the wrong stats. It is useless then. Also you cant trade it again. Just wasted a lot of effort for really nothing. PoE does this better. You can buy items and then u can sold it again if you get a better one or you dont need it anymore. Since release I tried 2 non meta builds. They sucked and I just quit playing because it took me so much time to get all the items which are useless now.
#2 Farming monoliths feels like work after a time.
This is also a big neg. point for me. LE maps feel ALL the same to play, literally. Poe maps feel so much more different and unique each. Reaching LVL 60 in LE, you just hit the same maps. Over and over again. And after a time this just feels like work and isnt fun anymore.
I think if you dont manage these points within a year and if you dont need for POE2 a phd like now, I cant see that much future of LE. If GGG resolves this issue it will slam all existing arpgs.
All the things I’ve said below taken together, having thought about it more, it may be more precise to say that a combination of increased leisure time with modern conveniences are what are really causing people’s attention spans to shorten and common leisure activities like games to become less complex versus earlier time periods. That’s the TLDR if you don’t want to go on the journey I took below. I’ve hidden it for the faint of heart.
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On the one hand, I agree and your point is well taken; We now live in a far more complex and difficult to survive in environment, just in terms of the IQ points required to do literally anything. Imagine trying to use a computer and you struggle to barely read as unfortunately many people do. Whereas you could get by being a farmhand or a courier in the early 20th century, now there’s barely anything you can do to employ people of less than a certain quotient. (I think this is a bad thing, to be clear. I’m very not-happy about it.)
But in general, versus today, the world of the early 20th century was way less convenient, maybe is the more precise way of putting it. There were a wider variety of things people had to know how to do and they spent more of their total time doing them. Even if you didn’t grow your own food, you still might have sewn your own clothes, built your own shed, worked on your own car, etc. If you think about how specialized the average person is today, we don’t know how to do almost any of that stuff. And not having to means we have way more leisure time to spend. In fact, our willingness to squander our free time is probably affected by our feeling there will always be more of it.
Now, I can imagine someone disputing whether or not leisure activities that were common or nearly universal back in the early 20th century were really more complex than what we do for leisure today. This certainly isn’t easy to quantify. But I’m pretty sure most people in this specific discussion would accept that mobile games and 10 second video apps are less intense mentally than learning a piece of classical music or reading Shakespeare, or something like that. So, I don’t think that requires much explaining.
Also just an aside about life span, since that’s super interesting to think about: There’s debate about whether or not infant mortality skews the data of life expectancy dramatically. We do know it has fallen something like 90% since the turn of the 20th century, so that has greatly increased the overall life expectancy. (Despite disagreeing with the basic idea, nobody seems to dispute this statistical fact.) But it’s my understanding that if you lived to adulthood, you had a high chance of living close to 60 in the early 1900’s, and then even more likely every decade or so the century went on.
But similar to having more free time today versus back then, you could argue that the brevity of your life would probably mean that you had a longer attention span because you would feel a sense of urgency about time that would make you less interested in wasting it on things that were frivolous or irrelevant. Imagine knowing you’ll only live to 45 but spending all day on Tiktok. That’s probably not something you’re going to be inclined to do. You might decide spend all your time doing things you find meaningful and interesting. Or maybe you have only one intense hobby, one thing you’re passionate about that you pour all your energy into to create something special that you feel makes it worth having lived such a short and difficult life. Maybe that would just be being present in the lives of people you care about, like it was for many people.
This is why I think earlier generation’s willingness to focus intensely on more complex activities came from this understanding that if they wanted to do something, they had to do it right now. And if they were going to invest time in doing something, even a leisure activity, they wanted to do that thing well so that it would have been a good investment of their time, a good experience or memory they could create with the people around them. That’s at least what I perceive the culture of that time having been like.
Combine all of this and you get the weird result that although it requires more mental capacity to sustain life, the amount of time we have to spend focusing intensely on any particular thing is much lower. This seems to be causing our hobbies and interests to become more frivolous at a time one might think the case would be the exact opposite.
I think that’s a wrong conclusion.
I believe a huge part of these 10 millions were people outside the niche. And I also believe most of them were reasonably happy with their purchase, because the campaign is quite good and the writing / atmosphere are great. But this won’t bring most of these people to more niche, very technical games, they bought and played for different reasons.
Marketing is great of course. But you can put as many billions as you want on advertising Chronicon, people might buy it but most won’t play more than half an hour, because most games on my Atari 500ST looked and felt much better.
And despite all its qualities, LE’s writing makes Diablo 3 look like a nobel prize of litterature. This doesn’t help appealing to a wider audience, no matter how much marketing you throw.
tl;dr: playing only for never-ending, grindy endgame, studying number-heavy mechanics in depth, while ignoring completely the story and atmosphere aspects, is a niche process by definition.
PS: I would say Grim Dawn is at the moment the best. Good diablo-like mechanics, but at the same time decent enough campaign and environment to not instantly push away people who discover the genre.
I’m not so sure. Every single generation going back thousands of years has bemoaned the future generations (their children & grandchildren). This is normal.
There are more options & they are more focussed around shorter, possibly more intense bursts.
Yeah, I’d agree with that. And future generations tastes changing.
I agree that I think we are/need to be more intellectually specialised now. My dad worked for an insurance underwriter, he did the majority of maintenance on the car (until it became too electronic for him to do that) & he installed the central heating system in the family home (despite not being a plumber, I assume he got someone to put the boiler in) & that’s still working some 55+ years later… I couldn’t do that, though I could probably have a reasonable stab at doing the electrics. And my mum was more than capable of repairing clothes, though her parents did work in a tailors & I think she might have made my eldest sister’s wedding dress.
I don’t think that people “back then” were stupid or less intelligent, but they were less specialised I think & they had to spread that knowledge & skill over more things.
I don’t think they were either. I think the biggest difference is mostly the pace and pressure of today’s work environments vs 100 years ago. And yes, there were some jobs that were very stressful 100 years ago as well, but most had a more sedate pace because they relied on snail-mail.
The change to email made it so that most jobs these days require an immediate answer. You get a call and have 5 minutes to send an email. You get a complaint and have x minutes to solve it.
Everything is timed, everything is deeply analyzed and companies try to fully optimize those numbers. Which leads to call centers rushing your calls because they need to complete x calls per hour. And many similar situations.
And yes, there were plenty of stressful situations 100 years ago. But now they are the norm in every job and they happen constantly throughout the day.
I don’t think this has anything to do with generation gap but simply because of technology advances meeting capitalism greed and inhumanity.
This does mean that for many (most?) people, you reach the end of the day very stressed and mentally tired and can’t really be bothered to pick up something complex. It’s also why soap operas and reality shows have risen in popularity.
You just want something that is mildly fun and doesn’t require much brain power.
I laugh so hard when I hear Gen Z call old people “boomer”. We were the flower-child generation, we called the “great generation”, ‘suits’. It’s just so funny to watch every generation walk in the foot prints of their forefathers and imagine they are the first. It’s even funnier to watch the formerly-flower-child generation get all butt-hurt because a young person gives them shit for being old and uptight.
I don’t think this is new. Penny Dreadfuls were a thing.
I’ve tried five times to read Moby Dick. I never make it through what seems like hundreds of pages of him (Melville) waxing philosophical about whether a whale is a fish or mammal. And I believe that there were tons of people back then saying to each other, “does is he ever get to a point?”, and other people saying, “yeah, just skip ahead”.
I haven’t even tried Joyce’s Ulysses. So, yes, definitely ‘options’ is the elephant in the room. But also, no, we haven’t changed, our remembrance of the past is hazy. Our brains just naturally edits out the boring parts.
This is massive. And what it did is vastly increase the number of people who had the time, energy the money to read, watch a play, etc. A sea-change.
hpmph. sea-change. Melville is laughing at me because I keep using the phrase sea-change while admitting to not being able to complete Moby Dick. … fuck you Melville, why didn’t you put that ichthyology/biology in an appendix?!
Especially this. It has always happened & will always happen, until people learn to be a bit less self-involved, perhaps? That they are special & better than everyone else?
When I broke my collar bone, I didn’t have concussion but I do hae a 6-8 hour gap that I can’t remember. The positive side, I managed to skip the 6-8 hours of boring waiting for the NHS to do stuff. I remember the interesting bits (a CT scan of my head, x-rays & blood tests), just not the boring waiting. The human brain is, weird.
Oh my god. Off topic but this reminded me of last week. I work in government contracting and was processing some contract modifications and I tend to get distracted, so I was ignoring my email as these were high priority mods. The director of my sector had sent an email on a different contract that was having some high profile issues (obviously, my director was involved) and within 15 minutes she had reached out to my manager to ask “is Scipo0419 working? I haven’t heard back from him”. So he called me, and I had to explain that I was doing other tasks and hadn’t seen her email yet.
My director is usually pretty chill, so I know she was just stressed because of how high profile the issue was on that contract but I remember thinking “it’s been about 15 minutes, if it was this urgent why didn’t you call me?”
You pretty much summed up the entirety of the KH2 fanbase. I just recently replayed KH1 and KH2 before my first playthrough of KH3. I remember loving KH2 as a kid even more than KH1 and that was without the Final Mix additions!
Replaying it? It’s the worst of the three! It’s a great game, don’t get me wrong, but the only really REALLY good part is the combat and the only time that shines is the post-game super-boss content. Everything else is done worse. The level designs are hallways, the story is all over the place (even for someone who is able to follow it) and you have to slog through 30-40 (50-60 with cutscenes) hours of booooooring to get to the good stuff.
Thankfully the good stuff is absolutely phenomenal, enough that the fanbase outright ignores everything else aside from particularly good story beats.
Fair question.
A few years back I used to work in hospitality, for a company with about 50 stores nationwide.
One day there was an urgent recall for a specific product, which was to be immediately removed from sales due to food safety concerns.
The entire recall process was, you guessed it, one email. And they expected all 50 shops to have read and actioned within the hour…
Reminded me of good old IT Crowd episode where the office is on fire and they send an email to the fire brigade, “HELP!!! FIRE!! FIRE!! Kind regards, IT department.”
Don’t let that smug son of a gun get to you, haha. Melville isn’t quite as charming or interesting as he felt himself to be. I imagine if you asked him which ARPG he thinks is a “Diablo Killer” he’d probably tell you he hasn’t released it yet. lol
You know, the crazy thing is, based on some of the research about how screens affect mental / neurological development, the amount of micro-plastics showing up in people’s brains, etc. they were probably more intelligent than modern people, on average. They would have been at least after the introduction of iodide in the food supply, which we believe greatly increased cognitive capacity. (Offset in some cases by lead in gasoline, which was also a 20th century problem, or CIRS which we’re still dealing with today.) We’re learning a lot of new things sure, but there are serious reasons to think we’re actually regressing in terms of intelligence right now.
You are one of the most dishonest MAVS I have ever seen, Necropolis was the WORST league in sales and retention since POE existed and the current league has less than 28% retention against more than 45% of Affliction (best league since Ultimatum). Your dishonesty is so much that you ignore the fact that POE has open data directly from the POE DB, anyone can go there and see.
I’ve been hearing old folks say this since the 1970s (when I was in my adolescence). People aren’t changing, you are changing. You used to be young. Now you aren’t. You imagine yourself to have been something your weren’t.
It’s fine, it could have been worse, I could have broken my collar bone and remembered all the dull waiting…