I mean, if you value efficiency so much more than you value playing the campaign… isn’t that the choice you’ve made already? Like if that’s your priority, then currently when you level a new character, do you really “play” the campaign? Do you stop to smell the roses? To see the dialogue, the environments, all the cutscenes, etc? Or do you just have a pre-planned route to hit all the passive points and idol slots ASAP and rush between them? Because if not what do you think you like about the campaign that’s different from playing echoes? What are you losing by not having to do that content again? Maybe just the feeling of starting out weak, but being weak isn’t efficient. You could give your character some powerful leveling legendaries if you want to be efficient.
You’re right that there are limits on what reasonable options are and that some designs will make the players optimize the fun out of the game. I just don’t think this is the hill worth dying on. You can already switch builds as long as that build happens to be in this specific mastery you picked 50+ levels ago. It takes a little bit to put the points in and level some skills, but that’s it. It’s not a real limitation on gameplay, just an inconvenience for the sake of it. It just seems really arbitrary.
Agreed. I wouldn’t have a problem replaying a campaign that actually had some replay value to it. Challenges, choices, interesting ways it might interact with different builds, etc. But if it’s going to stay easy and boring, there might as well just be a way to skip it.
I suppose if they wanted to keep the campaign easy as an introduction to newer players, they could maybe make a NG+ version you only unlock after beating the campaign once so you can choose to play the more challenging version. I don’t know whether or not I like the idea of it giving more loot or xp. That seems like it’d be the obvious incentive beyond it just being a more fun challenge, but recently I played D4 for the first time and I had the problem that early game when I played on the highest base difficulty, the game actually had a bit of challenge to it… until I completely outpaced the leveling curve and the back half of the game was a complete joke. So maybe giving more rewards for the harder version might be self-defeating unless it was balanced really well.
Although I do think having the base campaign be this easy isn’t great even if there’s a harder version. It doesn’t need to be a big challenge, but it’s job is to be a learning experience for new players, so if it doesn’t present them with challenges that demand they at least learn a bit about the game, it’s just setting them up for problems later.
Everything hasnt been revealed yet. We still dont know for sure if it will be a respec at will or cost anything to do so.
One thing that wasnt in the video that judd on reddit said. In Response to a question about slamming exalts on 3lp item or lp items in general. Was we are taking care of u in season 2.
Which means something sounds like its changing with slamming in season two. What? We dont know yet
If you complain that the campaign is too easy (which it is) and someone points out that you have the option to simply do the campaign naked and without using skill points, is that really an option? Does that make you feel better about the campaign?
What you’re saying is like saying to the above scenario that you value using gear more than you value game difficulty. It doesn’t make sense.
If the game is designed such that a certain way is optimized, then that’s the way the game wants you to play it. Of course you can always make it harder on yourself by going out of your way to inconvenience yourself as a challenge, but that is an outlier.
And if you don’t like the path that the game presents you is the “correct” way, meaning the path of least resistance, then why would you want to go out of your way to play it the “wrong” way? There are thousands upon thousands of games out there. If the gameplay of one game doesn’t appeal to you (or stops doing so due to changes), then you just switch to a different game.
In the case of D3/D4, that means you play for 2-3 days every season and get bored. In the case of LE, that might mean I’ll play 2 weeks before that happens when previously it was 2-3 months.
To be clear, I’m not mad that they made mastery respec (I would have preferred that it would have a higher cost so that you can’t just switch 20 times a day). I’m just kinda disappointed and it makes me feel a bit like this game isn’t really for me so much anymore.
Which is fine. I always said that EHG just needs to pick which kind of players they want to attract (like every studio does) and they’re clearly switching their focus to a different type of player than me.
I’m not raging against this change, especially because I know it won’t ever be reverted. And because that’s not my style. When I game stops appealing to me, I just quietly start playing less and less until I eventually stop playing altogether.
It’s not for the sake of it. It’s to prevent cheesing. It’s not inconvenient enough that it will prevent you from switching your build if you really want to do that, but it’s inconvenient enough that you won’t be switching your build from full clear to full single target because you’ll be fighting a boss and then back to full clear to do echoes.
Personally, I’d rather have more restrictive penalties to it. But again, that’s just a personal thing.
I didn’t reply to you to make you change your mind. That’s not my intention. You just wanted to know why someone would be against this change and I’m trying to explain my point of view.
The trailer shows an option on the respec NPC to respec your mastery and there is no cost associated to it. You can see the whole operation and there is no cost at all to it.
You might have to unspec your skills and passive tree at most, but that is not enough of a cost for me.
I mean, it comes down to what the game is about. An ARPG is about upgrading your character over time. If you’re not doing that, you’re not really playing the game. This isn’t Dark Souls where you can dodge everything and just whittle things away naked at SL1. Is doing a piece of story content that you’ve seen dozens of times before a core part of an ARPG? It really feels like it’s a stretch to argue for that based on anything other than appeals to tradition.
It’d be different if the campaign were designed to be replayable, but it clearly isn’t. This isn’t Dark Souls where your build radically changes how you fight the bosses or what quests to go on. This isn’t Baulders Gate where you can make different story choices to see all the different outcomes. It’s a game where you run around and hit things over and over until they die and then you rinse and repeat. The only thing that separates the campaign from the endgame is the story, but once you’ve already seen it, all the story becomes are bits that straight up stop you from continuing while you listen to dialogue. EDIT: Oh and also you don’t get to play your real build.
Humans are very odd creatures. We want to be challenges… and we avoid to be challenged whenever possible!
What will you pick? Starting off with Empowered timelines unlocked, level 70 character and a set of T6 exalted gear for a character of your choice… or doing the campaign and going through normal Monoliths?
You’ll likely have 500 people choosing to do the Campaign, and first-time players. The others will probably choose that option, play 5 hours and make a new character… repeating that a few times before waiting until the next cycle.
And next cycle they would make a character, try out the new content and decide ‘it’s not enough change’ after 10 hours and once more wait.
Those same people would play 200 hours otherwise. And you can’t run a live-service game on such a premise, heck… you wouldn’t be able to provide any game which you’ll talk about positively in such a manner at all.
People want to be challenged… but they don’t want to say that out loud. And actually actively try to remove those challenges until they get bored because they’re not challenged anymore.
We’re basically making life so cozy that it becomes boring and then we complain about having nothing to do
Human brains are hardwired for efficiency. If we can make something more efficient we try to do it. Unless we become used to something, then don’t dare to change that, even if it’s substantially better many people will do it badly nonetheless even if it friggin kills em!
I can only repeat… we humans are a very weird type of creature.
And that’s the issue right there, isn’t it?
‘I would rather skip it then have it easy and boring’.
Agreed! An option. The worst one though. EHG’s task is not to admit to failing, it’s to make their product good. We paid for getting a campaign provided that doesn’t bore us out of our mind the second we’ve seen the - fairly mediocre - storyline. I can read better stories online for free, and watch better short-stories on Youtube for free as well… I’m buying a game after all, not a mid-quality novel or barely acceptable movie.
EHG’s task is to make their campaign good enough to not bore us out of our minds when we re-do it a second time.
I luckily have a personal seemingly mentally in-built method of seeing if something’s acceptable or not. If I can re-play a game a second time without minding it… then it’s good. If not… then I know the quality is sub-par. Ori and the Blind Forest? Definitely Story and the beautiful presentation being the prime aspect. But I don’t mind replaying it. Why? Because the gameplay is solid, controls are crisp as heck, difficulty fits as well. Good well made game! Starfield? No chance… boring, repetitive, non-challenging, clunky and annoying loading screens with sub-par UI. As 2 examples.
And LE has a different issue. It has no difficulty beyond Act 1 when you’re utterly new. Only to suddenly throw curveballs that annoy you or frustrate you at Act 8 and Act 9 with the sudden heavily mechanical bosses totally unfitting for what you played up to that stage.
If the whole game would be as challenging as Act 8 and 9 then… great! But… that’s simply not the case. Act 1 is fine, Act 2-7 are a disaster simply, couldn’t be over quicker.
Exactly, unfitting for the overall gameplay experience. It should be balanced to ramp up from the start to the end smoothly. Not having a difficulty variance of letting me play normally as a new player at the beginning before I can move over to play hands-free and instead using my feet on my keyboard until Act 8 before I need to switch to sweatlord mode to progress. All over the place simply, rarely seen worse difficulty curves, made me nearly quit the first time pre monolith time as well, and that was quite a while back.
To be fair… the trailer also shows itemized Blessings and it was cleared up that they won’t be itemized to be put into the inventory. So I would take the stuff shown with a grain of salt detail-wise
Exactly… so why should we get the option to skip the campaign rather then gradually working our way up?
Exactly. And people that like making alts feel like this change goes counter to it. You want to make a golemancer? No problem, just respec your previous Lich and you’re good to go. Want to make a bleed hammerdin? Just respec your previous Forge Guard.
You needed 15 characters to try out different builds. If we assume that the average player doesn’t really like a 2-3 classes or that he mostly enjoys 1-2 classes, that is still 6-9 characters to level during a season.
But with this change, that drops to 1 or 2 characters. That means that once you’re done with your first character, there is less incentive to keep playing.
And sure, you could just make a new character for the same class. But that feels like a waste when the game clearly gives you an option not to do that. It’s going out of your way to make yourself fit the game, rather than the opposite.
If D3 didn’t have the armory, I would probably have played a bunch more than 2-3 days per season. Same for D4. But having easy respec and being able to be every single build with a single character removes the fun out of the game for me.
Especially when there are many games out there that cater to my preferences (and yes, I still play D2, especially PD2).
Personally, I prefer to level with a direction. I like having objectives that tell me to go this way and that way. Even if I’ve done it thousands of times by now.
Adventure mode in D3 was extremely boring and pointless for me. But I felt like I had to do that, otherwise I was just wasting time for its sake. D4 is even worse.
The end result is that I enjoy the leveling process a lot less and so I stop playing a lot sooner, because the leveling process is my favorite part of an ARPG.
That is fair. I’ll wait until the details are known, but I don’t really expect much from it.
I just don’t think mechanics built solely for retention should be in games. People should play as much or as little as they find it fun. There’s not a player-oriented reason to artificially extend how long people feel they need to play. That’s different than adding things that make it fun to play for longer. More content to aim for. More difficulty to overcome. More interesting progression systems, etc. Just forcing inconvenience so the steam charts show higher player numbers for longer or in hopes people spend more on microtransactions is one of the things that are wrong with modern games.
So you really have to ask: “Are people having fun doing this? Would they actually be sad/bored if they removed it as a requirement?” That’s a different question than “Will this make players play for less time?” If I get x hours out of a game that I really enjoy, that’s better than getting x+y hours from a game which I only enjoyed x hours of. Incidentally, this is also why Elden Ring is one of my least favorite FROM games. It’s got a good Dark Souls game embedded in a filler open world game. Not that I really think they did that for retention hacking. It was just a decision I really didn’t like.
But if you like the leveling process. That’s fine. You can do the campaign. You don’t need to force others to do it for it to be fun for you. If you can’t get over not being perfectly efficient even if it means not doing the content you like… I don’t know what to tell you. It’d be more efficient if I was playing some OP build that has thousands of ward and can kill Abberoth before he does a single mechanic, but I’ve never actually done that because I don’t think it’d be fun.
For me it’s the reverse: I play for less time BECAUSE of the inconveniences of starting a new character. I stop playing when the potential fun I can have from making progress on a cool build is outweighed by the tedium to make that happen. So things like needing to do the campaign, getting blessings, doing the easier dungeon difficulties to unlock the harder ones, pushing pushing corruption up to a point where things are actually challenging, etc every time just exhausts me. At some point doing all that makes whatever build I’d want to try next feel not worth the hassle. (The changes to blessings and corruption have sort of been nice.)
All mechanics are built to increase retention. Games are all about what restrictions you have. Without restrictions, you don’t have a game, you have a sandbox (although even sandbox games have restrictions).
If you have higher player numbers, people are having fun. One is a direct correlation of the other. If people aren’t having fun they leave and player numbers go down. So that doens’t make sense.
But there is a very relevant distinction that devs need to answer for their game. Do they want a higher peak of players that falls down really fast (like D3/D4 where lots of players join but most leave after a week because the game has no retention) or do you want a lower peak but a higher retention rate (like PoE where the retention rate keeps a very sizable number of people playing after a month).
The first will have a higher number on steam charts but for the majority of the season you will have a lower amount of people playing.
The second won’t have as high a number on steam charts but you will have more people playing for a longer time and the time spent with minimal players is much smaller.
And studies have shown that most of your MTX sales come from the first month on a new season, especially with discount sales like PoE does. A week is too short to take advantage of this properly.
Where have I said that I want to force others to do it?
Like I said before, games have target audiences. D3 and D4 are targetted towards casual players that like all those “QoL” features where you can skip campaign and can respec with barely any cost at a whim.
PoE is targetted towards a more hardcore player that likes to zoom zoom and grind.
LE was targetted more at the altoholics.
I don’t enjoy D3/D4 (other than the occasional 2-3 days every now and then) and I don’t enjoy PoE anymore because it burned me out.
Like I mentioned before, forcing yourself to waste time because the game doesn’t fit your playstyle isn’t a good feeling. It just leads to having less fun, which leads to leaving the game.
If anything, you’re the one that is trying to force others to conform to your playstyle because you wanted to change the game where that option didn’t exist.
Like I said before, I’m not asking for mastery respec to be reverted, nor do I think it should be. Much like I don’t go to FromSoftware forums asking for their games to be easier to accomodate me.
If a game doesn’t match my playstyle, I just stop playing or play it in small bursts.
Again, you wanted to know why someone doesn’t like mastery respec. I was trying to give you an insight as to why this happens. That’s all.
When done right, story-driven content offers another satisfying hint or marker of your progression.
"Look mom! I’ve found this creepy Cathedral in the very far end of the Tamoe Highlands! It was soooo far ! "
It was true for me when I was a kid, it’s still true today (but differently). Going through a well-crafted itinerary where environments and enemies are slowly changing is a form of progression. Traveling, seeing the landmarks, preparing for some bosses that I know have X weakness and X elemental attacks (while I’m not full-omg-maxed with layers of defenses). Journeying for the first time or for the 100th is for me a “Core part of ARPG” (to use that expression from Darthelmet). With experience comes efficiency, and I like that zoomy “let’s kill Kitava in 3 hours” experience too. I feel rewarded for my knowledge of the game.
But yeah, there is many things that harms that campaign experience for me (and many others it seems) in LE : lack of difficulty, accumulation of loading screens (some zones are tiny and you have to load-in / load-out so frequently), lack of purpose, uninteresting npc (like that blonde guy that I always forget the name because he just don’t matters, is useless and is there to gives exposition). There is also a lack of polish in some areas, like the infamous “Begone!” cutscene. I was hyped by the arrival of new cutscenes between acts, but that was short-lived since they are quite the bare minimum effort (it’s like a 4 images slide-show with a voice line that don’t really bridge acts together).
I really hope they don’t gut the campaign and instead build upon / tweak it. A much higher difficulty, some rework to alleviate the permaloading, maybe some mechanics that helps make it more unique and memorable (fighting with badasses npc like in the second zone but better; defend an objective / hold-the-line; infinite resource against an overpowered boss, etc). Also, I think they should create more apprehension for some of the big bosses. It’s often a succession of zones and oh! surprise, a boss! The exception being Lagon with Liath warning you. I think npcs should also gives tips for the coming bosses, like a way (other than coming on forums or watching videos) to know that Lagon eye’s glow before he unleash a huge beam in front of him/in a spray pattern, and his attacks are cold+lightning+phys.
Anyway, the reason i’m saying all this is because I agree with others in this topic that fear that the mastery respec is the foot in the door for more “arcade changes” (autopickups, skippable campaign, armoury, etc.), which is really not a direction that I like.
The issue is you are speaking as an experienced arpg player.
My friend with no experience in the genre will literally not play poe, he tried for days, and was dying on chain to cold enemies in act 1 poe. “i died to the crabs” he just wasnt able to be taught how to play quick enough.
Where as last epoch everyone ive gotten to try it, was able to do the campaign and had fun till end game. end game was the roadblock(as it should be) for most of the players who have tried it.
if you make a blisteringly hard poe style campaign you will drive off lots of hopefuls imo. PoE2 campaign is interesting because its actually really easy once you understand it, and come to it with fresh eyes, and not poe1 eyes. Which the devs even had discovered in their own testing! that veteren poe1 players had a harder time with the campaign then fresh players because their experience was wrong.
Campaigns are not meant to teach or challenge veterans but rather teach and challenge those new to the genre. Which I feel like LE does in enough spades. Hence why we still have people who struggle with lagon or majasa, as they are tough roadblocks for those inexperienced in the genre/building their characters.
id say they could maybe beef up chap 1 and maybe 3, but for the most part there is decent checkmarks for players to fight at most stages of the story.
This just isn’t true in all cases. Live service games, social media, drugs, etc. prey on human psychology to form addictive behaviors. There are design choices which are there to keep you hooked even when you are no longer enjoying the experience. You can just say to stop playing/scrolling if you’re not happy, but the reality is they do this stuff because it works despite loads of people expressing how these things make them unhappy.
Are ARPG devs acting that maliciously when they make you do some extra grinding… probably not… but it’s worth understanding that not every design that makes people play more also makes them happier. So you still have to evaluate whether or not the design actually does that.
Also, less sinister, but sometimes I will put up with parts of games I dislike because of the parts I do like. I played WoW for a long time even though I hated basically all the content outside of dungeons and raids. That doesn’t mean all of that other content that took up my playtime was making me happy.
Agreed. It’s just a matter of what restrictions are fun or which are the best way to achieve the desired goal. Not all difficulty is created equal and inconvenience is not the same thing as difficulty.
I like to make the distinction between what I’d call binding and non-binding obstacles in games. (Probably a better term for this, but it’s what I got.)
Binding obstacles are things which challenge the player’s skills and have a failure condition that will not allow for progress/success without overcoming the challenge or demand some choice from the player which requires sacrificing which they can’t easily get back.
Non-binding obstacles are things that slow the player’s ability to get what they want without any actual failure conditions or unrecoverable costs. There is no particularly notable skill that is tested. Rather, the only thing stopping the player from reaching their goal is time and inconvenience. The game is banking on the player’s frustration being enough to stop that behavior. Sometimes that works, sometimes people begrudgingly do it anyway because it’s optimal even if it’s not fun. Or they are just trying to artificially slow people down when they would otherwise quickly overcome the game on skill alone. I’d also call this design by frustration.
For example, take three boss designs: One is extremely difficult and you are likely to die a lot attempting it. One is less mechanically difficult, but has an enrage timer. The last is fairly easy, has no time limit, but has so much health that it takes you like 20+ minutes to fight it even though you’re essentially guaranteed to win. The first two are binding obstacles. You either need the mechanical skills to beat the first boss or you need to optimize your DPS enough to beat the second boss. The third boss is a non-binding obstacle. You WILL kill it if you go for it, you just have to slog through a boring 20 minute fight to do it. The first two are fun challenges I’d want to do. The third is something I might not do just because I can’t be bothered to do something that boring for that long or if I felt that I had to do it to get what I wanted, I’d be very unhappy.
Or another example: In some open ended RPG, you can spend as much time as you want grinding for power and you will eventually get everything. On the other hand in a roguelike, usually you have a limited amount of opportunities to choose upgrades before you need to overcome the final challenge, so you can’t get everything and are therefore forced to choose what to keep and what to give up.
In an ARPG, a LOT of what you do are non-binding obstacles. Leveling, grinding for items, etc are all things that WILL happen given enough time. That’s not always entirely bad, but there’s a limit to how much is ok before it’s not fun anymore and I’d much rather the game direct us towards binding obstacles rather than wasting our time needlessly. The key is distinguishing what is actually necessary and fun and what can and should be cut. Redoing content that was clearly not built to be redone? Pass. Making parts of the UI require extra clicks to do a task that could be done with fewer? Pass. Loot grind? It’s what the game is about, but it still needs to be paced correctly.
To clarify… there’s only 2 types of mechanics:
Either they increase retention in some way or they actively frustrate you to pay so you aren’t frustrated anymore.
PoE manual trading instead of automated asynchronous one? Friction so people need more time to progress rather then having instant gratification, hence causing more retention. That was the goal at least with it.
Timers? More retention time.
Having a whole slew of gradual upgrades rather then a single ‘I win’ item? Retention.
Having 100 levels rather then 5? Retention.
Having an obnoxiously long timer? Money so you shorten it.
And so on.
All mechanics in a game are made to keep you playing. That’s retention. Retention can lead to fun, or retention can be handled by depriving fun after having much of it to seek more out.
It solely depends on how it’s implemented.
Welcome to ‘we are simple but yet complex creatures’ which seek out efficiency and gratification by rewards or increasing numbers.
Which types of mechanics ‘speak to us’ for achieving that is a flavor topic though.
There absolutely is.
Functional complexity is automatically extending how long you need to play, and very much player-oriented.
A sell-limit or listing limit for items on a market for example achieves the same, is no added content and is player oriented while extending the need to play. Not doing so is negatively affecting a game economy (unless otherwise regulated accordingly) since it causes progression speed for everyone to increase substantially. You could say not implementing such a mechanic deprives a player of a properly paced progression rate which optimizes the enorphine release.
Yes, that’s an important question to ask.
If it’s a ‘no’ then you nonetheless need to ask the follow-up question. "If I don’t implement it, would it negatively impact the fun of people?’ If that’s a ‘yes’ then we have still our need to implement it given. And rather often it aligns with ‘Will this make players play for less time?’ answered with a clear ‘no’.
Oh, but I absolutely need to. Not even for me, I don’t enjoy the leveling process after all. I enjoy solely the mechanical challenge and itemization progression myself. But I know a vast amount of people enjoy general progression, which includes the rise in levels. And to remove the campaign in any way or reduce it in a meaningful way does substantially reduce this process on how long it lasts in an acceptable manner time-wise.
So yes… yes I definitely do.
You can tell him that he has a very neurotypical behavior in that case!
Because it’s atypical to not have that inclination. It’s rather widespread to not have it when it comes to atypical behavior by the way.
That’s very good for you, and kudos!
But people usually can’t keep from comparing themselves to others, it’s a deeply ingrained survival instinct of our species. It’s so we copy what functions well and henceforth do it from then on. So if someone sees another player blasting through content they struggle with massively, or being 800 corruption higher then them… well… they kinda wanna have that too to gratify out internal measurement of success!
It’s completely and utterly normal behavior, which is why disparity of builds shouldn’t be too extreme and falls under important balancing issues. A problem LE has struggled with since… basically ever, but it’s gotten more severe over time with new content and new possible heights to reach in some areas.
Nah, you play for less because the campaign is a chore-festival, depriving you of any feeling of success, not rewarding you in any meaningful way.
Which makes it a bad campaign since it doesn’t challenge you in any way, meaning it has to be fixed rather then removed.
Very much agreed. And Blessings need a bit more of a nudge, account-wide for the specific cycle you’re in, also unlocks like dungeon tiers should be account-wide, corruption also needs work on handling it better, but the changes there have been substantial enough to at least reduce the issues a lot and making it much more of a non-issue.
That’s… not true.
By that metric D4 would be a better game then the majority of games out there. The only reason they have those numbers is because of massive PR and franchise name. Other games are substantially better but not as well known for example.
It’s a very good indicator definitely, but by no means a direct correlation.
Absolutely! I agree! And some places astonish one repeatedly.
In general though first impressions are the strongest. If I watch a movie the first time everything is exciting, what will happen next?
Watching it for the 20th? I can copy the actors. It can still be enjoyable to watch… but the curiousness to experience something new has left me after the first time.
I’ve mentioned it already, but stories are generally something to be enjoyed once, and then they’re done for. Visuals are to keep us excited to a degree, but won’t keep us engaged with that alone more then once. Gameplay… gameplay itself, the mechanics, those will keep you going for the 50th… for the 100th time. Otherwise you wouldn’t do more then a single Monolith before stopping. Why? Because the intial experience is gone and ‘nothing new’ is happening.
Which as you mention is the experience part, the personal improvement. A challenge against yourself to get better and against the mechanics to showcase the mastery over them.
I know Gaspar. Have I mentioned Gaspar? Are there other NPCs?
Also they’re extremely badly made. Tab out of the game during it and see what happens. Unless that’s been fixed. Animation stops, audio proceeds.
I’m for those actually. Why? RSI issues, simply a health-related thing and at times lack of value for things laying on the ground.
Resources namely, not individual items.
The LE campaign has a difficulty level that You can probably amputate all my limbs and I would still beat it with only my friggin face rolling over the keyboard.
It has to be sustantially harder, from a general gaming experience. The game provides a long-term gameplay process that ramps up into a difficulty level that’s challenging for veterans at some areas. We should at least be able to expect it to be beyond ‘Tommy’s first Hack’n’Slash’ game. There’s a good amount of entrance level ones available on the market which one can recommend. D3, D4, Victor Fran, Chronicon to name a few. But games Like PoE 1, 2, Grim Dawn and yes… Last Epoch are not in that category design-wise. Presenting otherwise is not doing the players a favor, it causes frustration and negative sentiments, not players enjoying the product long-term. Because for the players which are entry level they’ll get demolished at Lagon and going forward, endlessly. And those with experience will fall asleep.
Then start with another game of the genre first and get into the one for veterans of the genre afterwards. Names for good ones above.
I don’t start building a cupboard first as a carpenter… I first learn to make a straight cut.
That’s also a wrong sentimence.
Dark Souls is not meant to teach new players of ARPGs… it’ll demolish them, stomp them into the ground, grind them to paste and then do unthinkables to the leftover puddle on the floor. And… it’s a ridiculously well received and also well executed game-series overall!
Not every game is for everyone. You can’t push ‘Super Meatboy’ into the hands of someone having never played a platformer and expect them to have a great time. You give them Mario.
Every genre has beginner viable games… advanced ones (Last Epoch) and those for the experts (Path of Exile).
Everything does, otherwise we wouldn’t engage with it. Some do it better then others.
Some methods are very ethical since they allow it to do in a informed manner, others provide reliable and long-term positive results, others are at least not detrimental… and then we have those which are detrimental, addiction based behavior, deprivation of stimuli which have been experienced and you’ve grown a need to fulfill it basically.
That… and if it makes other players unhappy as well. And which group is the bigger one, while also aligning with the business model as well as the plans for your product.
You actively need to have parts in a game which you dislike to a degree, if your enorphin levels stay the same throughout you loose interest. It’s a very complex topic actually. That’s why things like underwater levels - which nearly everyone hates - are still seen nowadays nonetheless. Frustration or discomfort can properly used lead to a higher amount of enjoyment, fun and gratification of overcoming obstacles.
Yeah, I agree. New players needs a safe / easier way to learn the basics and all. But it’s weird to go all-in to ease the first 5-10 hours of potential new players, at the detriment of every other existing players (like it’s the case right now). “Great for the first 10 hours but terrible for the next 500-1000 hours” sounds like a bad slogan.
I’m not against two difficulty levels at all. But if we go that route, I think there must be a little incentive to choosing the harder version. It can be minimal and cosmetic-only, like an asterisk on the player sheet (like the deathless tag right now). Or it could be more gratifying, like an hard campaign with hard bosses BUT you skip part of regular monos, or you get some currency or whatever. As others said before, players will avoid meaningless difficulty and struggle if there is absolutely no point to it.
I hate the “difficulty item” that they put in the game, which is an identical solution as “Oh you just have to go through campaign naked or eyes closed and you will have your difficulty!”. To me, that item felt insulting. Like if EHG really despise players that wants challenges and just threw them a fake toy. Their next attempt was Abberoth. “You want difficulty, sicko? There; at the very deep end of the journey, you will have some.”
From what I understand, EHG wants to be the middle ground between Poe and D4, between complex and casual. But I feel like they are so afraid of leaning toward Poe that they slowly slide in the other direction.
Also, even for the easier campaign (or for the campaign right now) with new players in mind, as it was mentionned many times before for like 2 years now, the difficulty is inconsistent : The newer act 1 has a good difficulty balance, Act 2 can also be scary without void res, and then it’s a walk in the park until act 7 or 8… and Boom! Lagon and ragequits and forum laments galore. I think Act 5 and up should be slightly harder, even for new players… but with in-game Tips how to get better (craft your stuff! mind your resists but don’t overcap! Find other layers of defense because resist is not enough! check if you have good flat dmg AND source of “more”! etc.).
I had skipped this point previously, so I just wanted to get back to it.
It’s not a need to be perfectly efficient. It’s a need to not feel like I’m just wasting my time playing a game in a way it’s not meant to be played.
It’s like if I loved walking and someone was offering people 10 bucks to walk somewhere and 50 bucks to run somewhere. Even though I like walking and I don’t like running, I’d feel like I was wasting money if I didn’t take the running option.
It’s the same for games. I can definitely waste 10h+ doing something that the game lets me do in 1 minute, but that feels like a waste and an artificial way to inflate playtime.
Ultimately, it will just lead me to stop playing. Much like the reverse would lead you to stop playing.
There’s nothing wrong with this. We’re just 2 people that have opposing playstyles and objectives when playing an ARPG. There isn’t a solution that will satisfy both simultaneously, because we have fundamentally opposing views on this matter.
This just means that a game you enjoy isn’t usually a game you would enjoy and vice versa.
That is a fair point.
Fun is highly subjective though. Some people have fun grinding endlessly. Some people have fun fighting endlessly. Some people like to level dozens of characters and are happy to not delve too deep into endgame, and some want to push a couple to their limits and reach 5k+ or be #1 on the leaderboards.
Mastery respec is more fun for some players because they get the instant gratification of switching a build on the spot, for some players it’s less fun because there are less meaningful choices to be made.
Yes, this is the issue I was trying to make you see. Mastery respec (or campaign skip, or instant loadouts) becomes optimal and players feel like they are forced to use it, even if it’s not fun for them.
And again, I’m not arguing for mastery respec to be reverted. Just trying to show you why some people are against it and don’t like it.
In the end, it’s all about what kind of players EHG wants playing their game. Players that don’t fit their design choices as much just leave and others join. Neither design choice is inherently good or bad. It just changes which people play your game or for how long.
I agree with Darth’s point, but not yours. D4 attracts more people because of PR, but they only stick around if they’re having fun.
You might argue that other games might have more people than D4 if they had their PR, but I don’t believe millions of players are still playing D4 a year later just because of PR and not because they’re having fun.
They’re just more casual players and enjoy different things than you and I do. But I firmly believe they are, indeed, having fun playing it.
For sure, I love that kinda stuff personally, I love useless info. I love arpgs that track “steps taken” or other random junk its fun to just collect numbers tbh!
like I want a title for never having changed mastery even if its only viewable to me as the deathless tag, it just feels like a little treat for being true to my character identity.
Yeahhhh its a pretty bad bandaid, its just old masochist mode… which they said they didnt wanna have, but now you lose boots for it.
Tbf, the passive respec option doesn’t show a cost either, because it is a menu choice, not a confirmation.
Not even the “respec all passives” button has a cost shown until you click it.
Considering Mike acknowledged the risk of getting closer to D3 wardrobes, I’m reading between the lines that there is a cost there that (hopefully) will be large enough to not make instant swapping a thing, but rather something for when you suddenly get a 3 LP Lightning Jav spear on a Forge Guard and want to build around it without levelling a new character completely.
It also, very possibly, may be beneficial in later seasons if they have to do a mid-season nerf and people no longer wish to play that mastery. (or were playing SSF)
I certainly hope that the option is going to be expensive enough to make it a rare use, rather than D3-style identity loss.
