Maybe it is obvious in LE then, I don’t really remember, didn’t play it for a long time.
If a game enforces you to read… then people read. And the miniscule amount of people ignore it and complain.
You’re acting like the grand majority of people are shit flinging monkeys and can’t do anything beyond. And… while I would often agree with many many people not being the sharpest tool in the shed at least a bit of basic acknowledgement is given from my side 
It’s shown that those methods definitely do help.
It’s a well researched topic that the brain deasl with facts vastly worse then with stories. So implementing facts into the stories makes your brain retain them, long-term.
Secondly, handling it directly through gameplay does cause the immersion to become higher as well. So even if it has no grand functional effect then still it shouldn’t be in the handbook.
Basically a handbook is meant to look up details, not grand concepts. It’s why in Factorio people struggle with trains the most while everything else can immersively be learned. But trains… no beginner that doesn’t look in-depth at mechanics handles train signals well there, they all have one utter mess instead. But their layouts for factories can be great… their logistic system can be great, their ratios… great! But the explanation of train behaviour is only in the handbook, hence that is the biggest bit which causes trouble.
For example, but that’s a small tell in a chaotic situation. Which skill did the damage for example? One tell to ensure you subconciously realize what did the worst is for example when you have your screen border change colour when hit depending on damage type. And the stronger the chance the worse the hit comparatively to your overall health… as an example.
A good one showcasing that - and able to do it without interfering into gameplay majorly - is ‘The Bazaar’. When you get items frozen for a long time your screen turns blue and frozen at the bottom, flames lick over your UI when you burn heavily and a sickly green-ish tint is there for poison. You know ‘shit’s bad’ when it becomes intense.
There’s a myriad of ways to deal with that that have been found out. A single tell usually isn’t great, but combining several of them without becoming overbearing in some way is how great design nowadays does work. Simply because we found out how our brain reacts to specific stimuli over time.
Do they? I wonder how many people actually read the whole campaign story.
Most people aren’t playing an ARPG for the story. They want to kill stuff. I would argue that most people just click through all the text from NPCs, but I have no real data to support this.
No. Just that people playing an exile-like (
) aren’t usually in it for the story but for the gameplay. Reading all the NPC stuff gets in the way of actually playing the game.
1 Like
Yes! Just let me kill stuff 
Idk if LE story is actually bad, didn’t try to read it, because every ARPG has the same story about saving world from the evil, I just don’t enjoy stories like this. Like, in the last 50 books I’ve read, not a single one has this story, Idk why every ARPG do.
Basically none because the game doesn’t enforce you to take in that information. If early on you’re presented with game-changing information that does help you forward… and the game keeps on regularly doing it then you train your players to actually listen to the words being said.
Obviously if ‘empty words’ are said which have no relevance to your gameplay at all then you don’t listen… because why should you? It’s like listening to the guy jabbering on and on and on about his private life during Poker night without any tells when all you wanna do is play a game of Poker. But when the relevant topics are interwoven with bluffs or tells… or even faked tells then you’ll suddenly put very very much effort into taking in all that guy says. And he can speak about whatever and it will be interesting to listen.
Agreed!
So you need to give them a reason to see that those things influence their gameplay. And yes:
It does!
Because you can utterly and entirely ignore and and you miss… nothing.
That’s bad story to gameplay design. The story-heavy games focus on giving you information which you need to recall in some way later on to progress or not get into trouble.
H&S games don’t implement that aspect a lot, at least modern ones don’t do that. Sacred 2 did do it, and was held in high regards because of it. So many easter eggs in the game that you could only get with listening to what people actually told you.
I think good story can be very cool for ARPG, because then you would kill monsters in much more interesting world. But story should be actually good. I remember story I liked in the video game only once, in Mass Effect.
1 Like
Like skills being coloured based on their damage type? Sure, that sounds like a good thing to do. Maybe LE should do that.
A) They don’t & B) I thought you didn’t want people to be “forced” to read something?
Then that’s a player skill issue, they should try to manage the situation more effectively & not zoom through the map pulling several server loads of mobs that are going to try & kill them at the same time. If the situation is chaotic, there’s no way to tell the player which skills are doing what damage short of it being turn-based.
Except if the situation is chaotic wouldn’t that make the edges of the screen start strobing? The game would need more warnings for people with epilepsy! And why should the edge of the screen change colours if the player’s focus is on the centre? And, and, your example is only going to work in non-chaotic situations, at which point the incoming mob-skill’s colour also works. What if there’s a big fire hit (strong red/orange tinge to the edge of the screen) but a metric fuckton of small poison damage (which is what your resists suck towards so this is what’s going to kill you)?
Like colours of incoming skills? I’m sorry to come across like a dick, but what you’re asking for is already in the game. Some people will just stand in stupid & then bitch about how they didn’t know it was stupid.
Like, by killing you?
So you do want the game to pause & “self-insert” to break your immersion & tell you not to stand in the big firey pool of hot molten death? Or do you not? I’m confused! I wish somewhere the game you would tell me this!!!
Depends on the context there?
I’m all for the quick-skip option to speed through the game. Sp people can rush through the campaign.
I’m also for consequences of actions. ‘You don’t read? Well, you’re going to miss loads of critical information that might get you stuck for hours!’ which is fine.
But!!! I’m against ‘throwing curveballs’. If something like this is done then it needs to be done from the beginning and be coherent throughout the whole campaign. So the information intake is a part of the potential success for the player, and not something that comes out of the blue and screws you over because you never before had to actually do it.
Also, remind you… there’ll always be players which are beyond nonsensical, but we take common sense into consideration here. There’s people out there which skip all chat and then say ‘this game has no story!’… which obviously is the stance of a very dumb person then. But… it’s gladly not the norm, very luckily so.
It happens in boss-fights too, luckily less so. But majorly in the general content as you can’t always avoid chaotic situations. When a player is bombarded from afar by ranged enemies and got some off-screen enemies flying it at lightning speed out of invisibility things can tend to get kinda chaotic by design.
You only use the prevalent damage cause. So if 500 fire comes in but 600 void it is void. You also cut out the lower end of damage so normal small hits don’t register, only larger substantial ones. It’s a balancing act but has been done by other games already.
We’re talking about what killed you. That’s not so easy to discern often, that something killed you is kinda obvious
First of all… the game ‘self inserts’ itself all the time, but what you’re talking about wouldn’t happen nonetheless.
There’s a difference between enforcing itself in, like Clippy… unasked, at no time you need it and for the 20th time. Or… a guy warning you of the imminent danger, something you’ll know after the first time and hence avoid it in later playthroughs so it allows you to skip through.
You can also ignore it entirely, up to you, but then you’ll have to face the music, personal responsibility there.
Last Epoch is absolutely shoddy in story presentation, be it the lackluster NPCs you don’t even remember the names of most of the time… to them being utterly static and seemingly never doing anything (unlike the part with Heoroth, which is newer, it started to become better from then on, before it’s just ‘eh’) so you could exchange them with talking stones of rock and basically nothing would change.
If you provide immersive storytelling and immersive NPCs then people suddenly consume that aspect automatically. In PoE 1 people forget what the NPCs are as well, quite regularly, besides a few. In PoE 2 though that doesn’t happen, because they are intervowen story-wise with your character. They get meaning, you actually know bits about stuff suddenly, even if you rush through the campaign.
Last Epoch is sub-par in presentation to PoE 1 though, at least the newer aspects have become more… ‘dynamic’?.. dunno how to properly word it. But it’s a completely different feeling and you can see it rather well too.
Well, people have to get info about game mechanics from somewhere, preferable from some in-game source. I personally like when there is good in-game encyclopedia, where you can easily find different topics and learn all the details about mechanic. Many roguelikes have such things, it feels nice that when you are in the mood, you can open it and learn more about the game, but when you just started, you can just kill stuff without reading it until you want to.
1 Like
To be fair, I think LE’s in-game guide is quite good.
Certainly better than most, if not all, diablo-likes.
But very few people read it, sadly. Maybe pages could pop up when you first meet a mechanic, like tutorials do in many game?
I personally hate such pop-ups. Like, I know where to find that info, don’t need to get annoying pop-ups and trying to force me to read something when I don’t want to. If I can’t get through some obstacle, I will want to learn more about how it works and will open it myself.
Yes, the handbook/enzyclopedia and so on is a great thing to have.
But it’s simply a bad thing if a player needs to look up basics there, those should be presented in a immersive way of some kind. No shits given about the way it’s done, just that it is done.
And yes:
It is. But like PoE 1 they stopped at providing information beyond, something which is causing needless friction that’s not there for enhancing the gameplay.
I also play Vintage Story, they have a Handbook with all the recipes. You can access it by hovering over an item and pressing ‘H’ simply and then go to connected stuff there. Great, but they’re also turning towards implementing progression in a more immersive way instead so it doesn’t pull you out and push you into frantic search escapades through it. Which should generally be the way for games to develop over time.
Some - like PoE 1 - utterly missed that, hence creating a rather awful new player experience, while others - like Ori and the Blind Forest - shove the new mechanics into your face right away and enforce you to deal with it so it gets ingrained in your memory for the remainder of the playtime.
Why it’s bad thing if player needs to read it there but good thing if he forced to read it somewhere else? It can have section “Basics for beginners”, roguelikes usually have it, so when you have no idea what to do you just look there. Or don’t and die few times first, then read it whenever you want to.
1 Like
At the end of the tutorial: If you have any further questions reffer to the ingame guide by pressing the according button.
I only know about said guide because I was there when it was implement. If this wasn’t the case I would most likely never heared about it. There is a loading screen tip iirc but I don’t read those.
If you like to but I don’t know what this have to do with the game or a new player experience. Some people may have never played H&S games and are a tad bit overwhelmed with what they see… just sayin.
Because the difference is in how the perception of players behave. If it’s included in the natural gameplay progression then it still feels immersive. You read it in a book there… it makes sense for a book to be in the game world. You hear it from a NPC, NPCs talk after all. It keeps you ‘inside the game’ primarily.
Anything where you have to open UI menus and need to rifle through information as factual statements (which the game needs as well to check up on stuff) is not good to have for a mandatory progression. So for example highlighting that you’ll have to go through a swamp and prepare accordingly will let a player know ‘Ah… swamp… poison!’ because it makes natural sense for that to be the case. We’ve been trained and it has been ingrained over decades that in-game swamp = poison stuff in a myriad of games. So you can deal with it.
And that’s also another major aspect. If there’s a guide… ensure that people friggin know it exists, throw that into their face
How much of a “curveball” is “fire damage is red-ish, void damage is purple”?
Oh, so the red-ish fireball doing fire damage isn’t too obvious. Ok. Good thing there’s a death screen then, though it’d be nice if it covered the last second of incoming damage. But that’s still in the game. You’ve not asked for any information that isn’t already provided.
Ok, but is there anything in the game that isn’t actively trying to kill you? And are colours still difficult to discern (colourblind people notwithstanding, obviously)?
Because there’s text to read? I thought that was a good thing? Though it’s an aRPG so the story is always going to take a back seat.
Then it’ll likely be an RPG, not an aRPG. I don’t want the game requiring/forcing me to read stuff because it’s an aRPG.
What tutorial?
So you not reading stuff is ok but everyone else not reading stuff & then complaining is a bad thing?
So you do want the game to “self-insert” & rip you out of your immersion. Ok, got it.
Ummm…
Yes, I guess if it fitted into storytelling nicely, it will feel more engaging this way and more fun overall. Ofc, it should still feel nice after you already progressed through campaign 10 times.
1 Like
Not visible enough and no proper guiding beforehand that this is a tell. For newer players it’s insufficient. For veterans it’s more viable. If you have experience it’s fine. Loads of red coming your way means focus on fire res… but without that knowledge of color design - which is lacking in many games - you have no way to know. Anything could be everything.
There’s other things. Melee attacks which don’t do physical for one. What type of damage does the yellow osprey attack do? Fire? Phys? Something else? Who knows without looking it up!
It’s about the type of danger, not that there exists danger. Once more. Everything kills you, but how is the point.
Are you starting to argue for arguing sake?
It’s because your character looses all sense of why he does stuff the second you exit Act 2. It’s because you get thrown around endlessly rather then having your character make decisions, you follow a story, you don’t write a story… which is kinda immersion-ruining overall for any type of interactive story.
You have no culmination of your actions at the end still since the story is not finished.
You are at the whim of other characters without any feeling of being able to do stuff on your own. (She escaped, I have to follow her! Hey NPC, I heard you know where she’s gone. Are you telling me?.. What do you mean ‘nah’ you’re not in the mood simply?)
I mean… it’s not hard to see why I say that, kinda hard not to see it rather.
I’m an avid gamer and reader. I’ve read over 1500 different books and played over 400 games with stories. Last Epoch is on the lower end of quality in storytelling. Still acceptable, but not even remotely ‘good’ despite the story itself having a lot of potential. Just the way it’s handled is sub-par.
Even worse
Nearly nobody reads the loading screens. And what about those with extremely powerful machines having basically no loading screen? Out of luck?
Those texts are there to provide something to keep your mind busy for a few seconds, nothing else, if you got a second screen it becomes far less likely that you’ll read that stuff.
Yep… you’re just arguing for arguing’s sake this time I see… not even the effort to get to understand what exactly I mean with it.
Which is why the speed-skipping currently available (press top answer and you progress or press ‘A’ on controller simply repeatedly) is still there. EHG wanted to have that option available, and it’s good. So you can at least skip past the stuff when you already have taken in the information.
After all when you know stuff already you don’t need to re-know it for it to be there.
Imho, new players don’t need this info right away and they will figure out when they will have time to learn it. But I don’t remember how exactly it implemented in LE, could be wrong.
2 Likes
No bro, the vast majority of exile-clone players just don’t care about the story, it’s not a LE issue… it’s an expected behavior for players of this genre, and the companies know that too. They know they can put every bit of information blended in the story and still 90% of the players will not be aware of that. Maybe that’s why most just don’t mind “enforcing players to take information” all that much.
I couldn’t even tell if any game does this at all, because I too skip all skippable dialogue (and curse the devs when they are unskipabble)… Never had any issues learning this or any other game in the genre…
1 Like