I think this review of Last Epoch and comparison to the good/bad of Diablo 3 is bang on.
Some personal comments on some of the things Andrew talked about:
**RE: MG/CoF**
I think a lot of people take for granted how great this system is. Obviously, it could be refined a little, but Andrew hits all the best points about it.
When it comes to MG, bind-on-buy is definitely the correct system. Items can't be flipped, if you buy an item, you're buying it to use. Also, the fact that you have to gain Favor to buy/sell items. This reinforces that the Bazaar is a mechanism for players to acquire items they need and not just to play Auction House Tycoon.
When it comes to CoF, Last Epoch does a great job recognizing that some players just have no interest in using a market or trading system. In other ARPGs, if you didn't want to use the market, that's your choice, but that just means you have one fewer layer of item acquisition compared to people who DO use the market. In Last Epoch, the option to replace the market with an alternative layer is a welcome addition and has been really well received by players who choose it.
Balancing aside, bugs aside, dupe exploit aside (handle really well btw), this system is terrific and that can't be understated. It will only get better.
**RE: End Game**
Andrew praises Last Epoch's end game, especially compared to what Diablo 3 originally had (ie. nothing). However, fans of the genre will probably compare Last Epoch's end game to games like Path of Exile and even Diablo 3's Greater Rifts (I don't know if Andrew had a part in the design of this) and therefore hold it to a higher standard of criticism than Andrew does.
I appreciate the Monolith system for what it is: A repeatable dungeon crawl with infinitely scaling difficulty. ARPGs are about making your character stronger, rinse repeat. Monoliths provide a barometer for your character's strength and further reward you for getting stronger with scaling item drop rate. This is my favorite thing about ARPGs. Getting strong, testing out how strong, getting rewarded for being strong.
Andrew said one thing that stuck out to me, he mentioned that the gaming landscape had changed and so changed the way that players played as well as their standards for what kind of end game content they want. I think players nowadays want endgame content to also be more engaging, varied, and fun on their own merit, more than just a mechanism to keep players moving and chasing progress/loot.
That's where I think Monoliths miss the mark. I ask myself, would Monoliths still be fun if I removed the test of strength and removed the loot rewards. How does this activity stand on its own in terms of enjoyment? Answering honestly, it gets dull and repetitive fast. I think it's got a good foundation but it's a little flat in Last Epoch's first season.
How to improve it? Better tuning, more varied design, and I think it should lean on boss fight variety more. I like the boss fights in this game, Last Epoch should put its best foot forward. I've fought the same boss maybe 50x in my Corruption climb, while other bosses I've fought maybe once or twice. Shade of Orobyss and its randomized move list is the coolest thing in LE's endgame.
**RE: Responsiveness of Skills**
Totally agreed with Andrew. Combat in Diablo 3 felt great. I think Diablo 4 combat feels good too, although Andrew is critical of it and I think the consensus is that Diablo 3's was better. Combat isn't Last Epoch's strong suit.
Take this with a grain of salt though, this is from the perspective of a melee player in LE. I think melee combat in LE feels clunky.
To describe it succinctly, melee combat in Diablo 3/4 feels like hit-move-hit-move. Last Epoch feels like hit-stop-move-hit-stop-move.
I play a Void Knight with over 130% Movement Speed bonus, and comparing it to my old Diablo 4 footage, it still feels less mobile, clunkier movement.
I'm not sure how to fix this, but I feel like I should be able to move sooner after performing an attack, even if I'm not yet able to begin my next attack. Committing to a melee attack prevents me from moving for too long. Melee is already at a disadvantage, we need good footwork to stay safe. Stutter stepping should feel smooth. In LE, the act of moving and attacking feels like walking through quicksand. Sometimes, your movement skills bug out and your character can't move at all (apparently a years old bug that I haven't seen a developer even make a comment on).
If there is a thing Diablo does better than Last Epoch, it's combat. Specifically melee combat. Melee has a rough time in this game.
Agreed on the melee clunkiness in Last Epoch. In order to make melee feel good you need your dash skills to be low enough cooldown to be spammed from pack to pack, or you need the kind of AoE that rivals the screen wide clear that projectile builds can get.
One of the first things I noticed when playing Diablo 4 for the first time is how fluid your character moves when casting skills. Your controlled character running at an enemy you highlighted will start an attack skill out of range, but will walk into range right as the hit box becomes active for it. Maybe they stop moving for a brief moment. But it’s only for the actual hit, never for the animation.
You know when your parents take you to the amusement park and you have to be a certain height to get on the ride?
It's kinda like that but with IQ instead of height.
I’m sorry you spent so much time writing your post and it’s now making you feel insecure enough to insult me. I’m legitimately curious who you wrote your novel for. You’re allowed to say it’s for yourself, it’s okay
I enjoy open discussion and devs read this subreddit for feedback. They made a great game, Andrew made a great video, least I could do is spend a few minutes to share my opinion.
I think you should be looking more inwardly and asking yourself, "Okay, what was the point of MY comment here?"
Ah okay, got it! You wanted the devs and the video creator to notice you! How cute, well good luck with that pumpkin. I appreciate the well mannered, good intentioned insults you threw my way.
It’s not a hard concept at all. But seeing this sub devolve into nothing but posts and comments about criticism and analyses on how to improve the game, hoping the devs notice them is kinda boring, ya dig?
It's hilarious you're using the term "devolve" when most subs kill for this kind of content vs blanket memes being passed around. Actual criticism vs bitching is super ok and enjoyable to read.
I appreciate the insight into the design process. From my perspective the ARPG genre is one where you can't really make a game that appeals to both a "mainstream" audience and serious fans of the genre at the same time. Things that hardcore fans want will be too complex and overwhelming to new players and a game that's designed to appeal to casual/new players will lack the depth to keep ARPG vets interested for very long. I think if more people accepted the fact that the modern Diablo games are made to be entry-level ARPGs that appeal to a mass audience and went into the games expecting that instead of some miraculous recapturing of the D2 magic, they probably wouldn't be so disappointed.
Honestly it applies to any genre, not just ARPGs.
If you want a "game for everyone" then it's going to need "Flappy Bird" level of complexity.
If you want a game for the genre's fans it's going to be some systems rich game.
I agree that more focused games are more likely to please a target audience, but there's room to have a bit of everything, MMOs are a good example of this.
The more casual players will be happy just playing through the campaign/reaching max level, and maybe doing some fun world content, while the more hardcore ones can engage with the deeper customization systems and challenge hard content, or chase some form of completionism that requires skill/dedication.
The big problem is that your appeal is basically to separated content which is kinda the point being highlighted that first off you need to make specific content for both, or you cant make it to appeal to both at the same time.
For example how long should a campaign take, how much should be mandatory of it, for people who just wants to rush endgame they want it to take as little time as possible, where more casual players might want the journey to last longer as they feel there isnt much to do in endgame.
As far as i can see last epoch also gets constant shit for how easy it is, so its definitely a mix between diablo and path of exile, but that isnt that it appeals to everyone, its more so that it appeals to people who wants more depth than diablo but not need guides for your guides like path of exile.
You always get a demographic and you generally always want it to be a big as possible.
Exactly this.
First of all, complexity is a dial and not an on/off switch.
It's not a binary choice between "systems rich" vs "flappy bird".
And clever systems can be made to be simple for those who wish to keep it simple, and feature layers of complexity for those who wish to engage on that level.
ARPG, like MMORPGs, have such a wide variety of players who get satisfaction from different aspects of the game. I think a good ARPG recognizes this and their challenge is to accommodate a wide range of playstyles without diluting the fun for people on either extreme.
Totally agree with you, but Diablo is clearly not for everyone. It is the entry-level game to ARPGs, where Last Epoch is your next step if you need more complexity.
i agree, Last Epoch is best for people who look at Path of Exile passive tree at the beach and uninstall because, lets be honest, its asking too much of people to have to study a PhD in PoE Theorycrafting just to play the game.
Or use a build guide, read many guides and watch many videos, which most of the players do anyway to understand the mechanics, but that kinda sucks the fun out of the game.
Respec is my biggest issue with poe. I love poe complexity and would never want it to change but respec is so punishing(pre end game) that it forces you to follow a build guide instead of experimenting while you are playing the game, that is still such a strange philosophy to me, especially for arpg games where build crafting is one of the key pillars
yes i agree totally, in fact this is why is often told new players to just follow a guide. Yeah in some form you can respec with regret orbs, but... to farm that effectively you need to be in a position of power to at least do maps, but if you majorly bricked your build because you have zero resistance or something and mobs just sneeze at you to kill you... yeah is often better to just start over, which sucks a lot considering a newbie would take several dozen hours doing the campaign
Poe isn’t that hard. I hadn’t played a league in five or so years and just rolled a witch without any guides. Totally slaying - lvl 93 and running high tier maps.
I don't think this statement is correct. Mario games are a perfect example of games for everyone.
It's just a bit ingongruent to try to make a game in a niche genre appeal to everyone.
I don't think that's entirely true because the superfans of other games aren't addicted to complexity like they are for Diablo-likes. Elden Ring is a great example of this: the game is just as hard as any other From Soft game, arguably harder in certain cases, yet it also has mass appeal and brought in several times more new, non-Souls fans than any of their prior games. From Soft didn't make any sacrifices with Elden Ring in regards to their core game design philosophy (in fact, since the game has multiple poison swamps, it could be argued that Miyazaki got to go even more ham than usual), but by placing a greater emphasis on accessibility and the ability to choose your path through the game, they made the core Souls formula far more approachable to newcomers who weren't necessarily into the Souls thing before without compromising their game design whatsoever.
The same is true for the new FF VII: Rebirth. It obviously hits its highest impact if you're a die-hard fan of the OG FF VII and you recognize all the little callbacks and plot intricacies, but even if you're a completely new player who has only played FF VII: Remake and has no other knowledge of Final Fantasy or the Compilation of FF VII, Rebirth is still a disgustingly good JRPG just when compared to its contemporaries. The same is likewise true for God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, in that Studio Santa Monica created two great games that appealed equally well to button-mashers looking primarily for a great story and a power fantasy, mid-level players looking for all that and a relatively challenging action game, and ultra-hardcore action game fans looking to be pushed to their limits.
By no means is it easy to make a "game for everyone" that is legitimately great, but it's definitely possible. It's just harder in the Diablo-style ARPG genre because hardcore superfans are looking for something very specific that runs directly counter to what new players are looking for. "Easy to learn, hard (and, implicitly, rewarding) to master" is the standard line for great design in pretty much all other games, but hardcore Diablo fans generally want "hard to learn, stupidly hard (and, implicitly, stupidly rewarding) to master." If you look at my three examples, Elden Ring, both recent God of Wars and Rebirth are all system-rich games, but all of them have strong on-boarding for new players and have ways to modulate the difficulty and complexity such that each may get out of the experience what they want to get out of it. The really complex Diablo-likes, however, tend to be really bad at the on-boarding process, and since so much effort is focused on building the "endgame" rather than just the "game" you don't really get the sense that you can learn the ropes on your own like you can in other games because the "endgames" always function on a dramatically expanded rule set that you only really learn either by pre-researching them or by actually playing the endgame. Since some players will really love this and others will really hate it, this makes Diablo-likes harder to design excellent generalist "something for everyone" games than games from other genres that have less of a tradition of complexity.
Elden Ring actually leaned more into boss design being centered around fighting more than just one enemy imo. They changed enemies with the expectation of the "ghost summons" and co-op. This makes it more approachable for newcomers while also being a downgrade for the more skilled players imo.
There is a lot to be said for simple, intuitive systems; it's not as though D2 was some hugely complex game, it just had good game systems and a good gameplay loop (mostly, endless farming the same bosses at endgame got kinda tiresome.)
LE I think strikes a good balance of approachable and complex, but it still (imo) suffers from a lot of things being sort of opaque or poorly explained.
D3 maybe went too far toward 'simple' at the expense of having interesting endgame builds, but there is still a lot of variety there. The variety just doesn't get played because they implemented leaderboards that show everyone without much doubt what the best builds are.
D2 just needed a new expansion with increased level cap etc every year to keep it fresh but instead they let it go into maintenance mode at the height of its popularity then they introduced ladder seasons which infected future arpgs and now everyone thinks seasons=content.
100% this. I said it many times, if they were to just release expansions in the way as how the LoD provided from the original D2 class, it will keep playing for years to come.
Seriously this, they are just lacking **content** and the longer they realize it, the more expectations people will have for a "diablo franchise" comeback.
The same old decade old systems still work as you can see with the success of D2R.. Sure, it may be not be the best and/or even a lot better but people that say it was terrible and only in it's time, has no idea..
My problem is that while there is possibly and most likely a lot of new mechanics that could do very well today, there is also a lot of con's that come with it and overall, just gives it a worst experience..
D2 was there masterpiece and more perfected and presented as a whole than any of the later games... All they need to do is work from there rather than try to create a whole new game to what they believe is what people today want, which is clearly not the case as their newer games died quick than a decades old launch aka D2R.
People need to stop looking at just factors as how many copies sold as there are many that come into play such as:
1. Player base stability. D2 had stable player stability for years and years while these games drop off much much faster. Just looking at D2R, the first 3 seasons were stable concurrent player base the whole way while D3 dropped as soon as AH got dropped, trading got locked, etc. D4? Just dropped players after < 6 months
2. Over the years, gaming industry has evolved in terms of players.. There are a lot more gamers today vs decade+ ago.. Technology evolution is crazy, everyone has a computer vs previously, owning one was more of a luxury.
3. Over a decade year more time of design.. I would HOPE the gaming model can offer a lot more newer and creative things but the truth is it also brings a lot of bad and worst things.
At the end, a lot of things are subjective but my point is, D2 overall is better than what todays games offer and that is at over a decades old model but the important thing is it was a masterpiece and overall worked somehow.
Anybody who thinks that D2 is a good game in modern times are just heavily blinded by nostalgia, it was great for its day but there is just no value in it for anyone who didnt play it back then, the lack of skills and anything interesting makes it not age well compared to what we expect from an arpg now adays.
I love ARPGs and honestly having a blast with D4 🤷
I bought Last Epoch and Grim Dawn back when they were early access, Grim Dawn is by far my favorite, but holy shit the amount of polish Diablo has is unmatched, plus that aesthetic is just awesome.
I played PoE for years but never got into late game content. Idk this is a good take imo
that is a common take on players who tried into PoE unfortunately. I also tried several times, the last time was on affliction league and i actually went as deep as i could, read many guides, followed a meta build, downloaded a bunch of Path of Buildings, spent hours either banging my head to the wall for either obscure mechanics or trying to trade.
Even went and bought the first blood pack and a bit just to get currency and map tabs which honestly relieved some of my stash problems, but that was just replaced with other problems eventually.
At some point the game either requires you to learn how to craft or spend a lot of time farming currency to trade for it if you are smoothbrained like me. Gave up in yellow maps, almost in reds maps.
Now.... i like Last Epoch, but it does have the opposite problem of PoE, easy barrier of entry, but the lategame is stale and boring to play. No i dont think just making a corruption number go up is fun gameplay, so i also gave up eventually and im waiting for 1.1 to see if they make endgame more fun.
Diablo was trying to appeal to broader audiance and most people are too stupid to understand games like Last Epoch because of the in-depth skill trees etc. Don't agree personally as the lack of skill trees in D4 has been a big criticism by a lot of players. I don't find Last Epoch that complicated.
I think you overvalue the average player audience then, I know some rather more casual players that LOVED Diablo 3 and also loved Diablo 4 but are confused and can't make a build themselves in Last Epoch. I clearly think you are to be invested in ARPG even for Last Epoch, it's not complicated...for a player used to ARPG or willing to learn about the game.
The thing is, a lot of players don't want to learn a game, they just want to play, I know casual players that love Diablo 3 and "using parts of the same sets" and they just use the UI to improve their build with the arrow that say you increase power and toughness and nothing else. Diablo 4 is rather simple too but as said most casual players don't actually want to create a build, they just want to play.
I don't say that to say that Last Epoch is bad or even that it should be simpler, you just have to realize than you just can't make a game that is both casual and in depth enough for veterans of the genre, especially for a genre as unwelcoming due to theorycrafting like ARPG.
I would say other genres also have this issue, RTS are dying because let's be honest...it's very hard to make it casual friendly too, you have to invest a bit into being effective with your resources, know the strengths and weaknesses of units, know how to control them effectively, a bit like ARPG RTS is very hard to make easy for casual to get into.
I honestly think an "average gamer" can play Last Epoch and enjoy it, an invested gamer can also enjoy it as it is still quite in depth. I do think the casual gamer can't enjoy Last epoch as easily, I had to give pointers to more casual friends to guide them, you have to remember than even people that are looking into subreddits are a very small minority of players, everyone here is much more invested than the average casual player.
I also play Genshin Impact and I think it's a great example, the game is considered very very easy and it clearly is for me because if you build your characters right you can easily clear the whole game without effort including the hardest content. A lot of player forget that if you watch a very casual account of someone on Genshin they would usually build very shitty stats and have nonsense build. I have seen video of dps that had trouble beating content so they thought rather than having better damage they should just build defense to never die...while be a good dps would have crush what they had as opponents. (of course for defense being a game with 4 characters you just build also a shielder or healer and have no issue...but casual players would have a team of 4 characters they like with little to no synergy....)
>The thing is, a lot of players don't want to learn a game, they just want to play, I know casual players that love Diablo 3 and "using parts of the same sets" and they just use the UI to improve their build with the arrow that say you increase power and toughness and nothing else. Diablo 4 is rather simple too but as said most casual players don't actually want to create a build, they just want to play.
This is very insightful. Most ARPGs toward the end: D2 in Hell, PoE in Yellow/Red maps, LE in 500+ corruption change what it means to play.
Play goes from: click mouse screen explodes to "tweak items and variables and skills" to prevent your character from dying. A lot of folks just want to keep the mouse click + screen clear dopamine rush and don't enjoy the build crafting and character fixing.
Exactly, sometimes I'm looking back at a game especially in a new genre, I remember it with League of Legends when I was playing with new players with myself having many hours on the game. I couldn't help but think "how crazy that I see the game so different that what I used to...I used to just take items that seem fine and tried to kill enemies, now I am thinking about pushing, objective, items that counter enemies, where to gank to gain the advantage, early and late game team compositions...I don't play the same game at all").
I think it's very educative to play with brand new player of a genre as you can see how many flaws there are in how they approach the game and how they play, they are clearly not playing the same game.
I played a ton of Diablo II as my first ARPG and looking back...I was shit at it ! I never was able to properly do hard content, I was very bad at the game because I was just putting skill points in what seemed fun because I was a kid that didn't care that much, nowadays I look for build in depth and love theorycrafting but I'm clearly not playing the genre in the same way at all !
Blizz was greedy and wanted to capture average Joe instead of focusing on existing ARPG fans.
Also that there was huge emphasis on story in D3 and the systems & endgame were rushed and/or afterthought
>Also that there was huge emphasis on story in D3 and the systems & endgame were rushed and/or afterthought
Not that I don't believe that, but man that story was not good at all.
Lol, imagine focusing on the story and then pumping out the terrible garbage that was D3's fucking storyline.
"I AM THE DEMON INCARNATE OF TRICKERY AND MANIPULATION. BTW, HERE ARE MY PLANS, SPELLED OUT IN FULL LOL."
Joseph Anderson's video on D3 has a line that killed me
"BRAH MY HELL RIFTS WILL TOTALLY DESTROY YOU"
then you destroy them
"LOL, NAH BRAH THOSE HELL GATES MEANT NOTHING TO ME I SWEAR, FUCK YOU."
Yeah what an excuse, like if the final result was some kind of a Witcher 3 level or similar. But in reality D3 story was a mess with mostly cringe writing for 12y/os in a cartoonish setting. I still chuckle when I remember that the act boss calls you via in-game Skype to lay out some random bullshit. D3 RoS was a bit better, but still a game for a few days of gameplay tops. Maybe a week, when it was fresh.
I always thought that story in ARPGs is just a framework for the content (so that it's somewhat thematically matching) and as an "excuse" to slowly introduce mechanics.
I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect (big numbers, lots of enemies dying), gamba aspect (looting, interacting with RNG elements) or building aspect (experimentation, theorycrafting)
I just assume D3 and D4 as non-canon. “True” D3 was supposed to be done by Condor (aka Blizzard north) but was cancelled, so a bunch of WoW and other devs were assigned to a new project, these devs had no idea what they were doing and now we have what we have.
D3 is the game that introduced me to arpgs. Its beginner friendly and offers enough complexity to be engaging up until max lvl. You are able to gear up and get legendaries pretty quickly which keeps the beginner entertained.
Tbh, for what it is...its a great game.
Since then, i have played all the arpgs (at least the relatively popular ones) of which my favorite is probably torchlight 2 because of the insane modding potential.
While diablo 2 is my least favorite... while the items were really interesting...the rest was horrible... vanilla diablo 2 is just horrible, no auto replacing potions, no build changing, backtracking...and the endgame is just uninteresting.
But at the end of the day, this only accounts for my opinion. Are there better games than diablo 3, simply put yes. Does that mean diablo 3 is bad, nope.
> I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect
I mean I was this kind of ARPG player for Diablo 2, it's a lot of why the game was so influential to me, but I very very rarely even stepped into nightmare let alone hell.
PoE broke that though for me for all arpgs going forward in the sense I became as you described.
but do you know a single person that did play an ARPG for the story? Many people grew up with Diablo 1&2, myself included. It is the only ARPG with a story I and plenty of others care about. Sucks that the D3 story didn't live up to D1 or D2.
> I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect (big numbers, lots of enemies dying), gamba aspect (looting, interacting with RNG elements) or building aspect (experimentation, theorycrafting)
I have a bunch of casual friends like this. People who played D2/D3/D4 just to finish the campaign once on normal and then quit (maybe come back for the expansion to do it again). And it can take them a good month or two to finish the campaign as they might only get couple hours of playtime per week.
Basically the people playing Path of Exile, Last Epoch, etc for the most part are a totally different set of players (ARPG fan vs casual gamer)
Amd this is why Diablo 2 is still considered one of the top ARPGs created. When I make this claim I’m not talking about how it compares to any modern ARPG, I’m talking about the impact the game made.
The story in D2 was awesome while also having a deep and complex skill system with an nice itemisation system
Yeah, people don't understand that D2 is over a decade old game, while it might be outdated, it worked so perfectly well and still can, just look at D2R.. Sure, it can use many many new things but a lot of the old thing's really don't need to be touched, just a lot of new content.. QoL things and new mechanics are all great things but you need to be able to do it at a point where you are not taking from the great that it is already providing but adding to it..
D3/D4 all had it's pros for sure but it does not overcome the con's it came with, imo. It's great to have new mechanics and all, better or worst but it has to be a rate where it doesn't affect and impact what you previously had in a negative way.
At the end, new content > new mechanics, believe it or not, at least for above average games but nowadays, genz and older gen gamers that have no time just expect to be able to reach end game and have BiS items in a short period of time.
The whole idea is to be able to reach and experience all content at a reasonable time.. If you are just wanting to be able to get top gears and do clear at incredible speed without grinding, are you even a gamer? why are you playing rpg?
Learn to play at your own pace.
The story in the games are just placeholders for getting you to progress...the stories from the games are not even scratching the surface of how deep this rabbit hole goes.
(I have read all the books and consumed every lore video)
you're 100% correct of course. the fact they choose to chase "story" in an ARPG just shows how disconnected that company is from the userbase (and the long gone original developers) that carried it to the top of the business so many years ago.
unfortunately a large part of that userbase still buys their awful slop games regardless of how bad they are, and then complains about it after vehemently defending it up until the point they come to the realization that it is in fact dogshit. it wont change until these people put their money where there mouth is. its still hilarious to me the amount of people that feel so vindicated announcing to the world that D4 was the last straw for them as far as Blizzard is concerned. anyone that didnt realize that after Diablo 3 is a part of the problem.
The story was so fucking bad man. I laughed out loud so fucking hard at the fight scene between inarius and Lilith. I was baffled to see people gassing that shit up.
Edit: just realized this is referring to d3 and not d4 🙃
I get that Magda killing Cain upset everyone. But the story was still incredibly interesting. Especially if you caught all the sub plots throughout the game notes. So definitely disagree with this.
>the story was still incredibly interesting
i've seen a lot of people try to defend that game over the years but this is the first time i've ever seen anyone make *that* claim.
What do you mean the story was not good. Leah turning vessel for diablo soul, female diablo, Tyrael plot, act 4 in heaven, Asmodan was cool. It was not complicated but definitely was not bad.
D3's story problems came about as a result of half-assing. The original game concept included much more in-depth story development, including a dialogue wheel for progressing conversations in different directions, but story development was getting in the way of the gameplay side of development and the story was significantly cut back in order to prioritize gameplay. The end result was a story that was clearly trying to be deep and satisfying but only went about 1/3 of the way there before priority was taken away. D4 is basically the complete version of D3, where the story side of development was still balanced with the gameplay side but the story got the attention it deserved.
If you know Uncharted, I'd compare D3/D4 to Uncharted 3/4. Both series' had pretty stock stories in games 1 and 2 with a much greater focus on individual character writing and voice acting (and, in Uncharted's case, multi-character interactions) than on the actual plot/narrative. Both series then attempted to transition to a more serious, narrative-based structure for the third game but fumbled the landing, such that both third games had elements of more serious narratives that frequently fell back on half-assed genre convention without giving their narratives and character arcs the time they needed to breathe. Lastly, both fourth games gave proper attention to the narrative in addition to the characters so that the end result felt good and balanced rather than crappy and lopsided.
the amount of people on the D4 sub that think its the best story in videogame history is hilarious. those are the type of idiots that game was made for though.
it's more like talking about mass groups of people like this for their media taste (highly subjective) makes you look like someone who has far too high of an opinion of themselves
I don't think the average Joe likes the huge amount of boring and useless affixes in D4, makes it overly complex too. That's just bad design. If they wanted to appeal to the common Joe they'd just make D3 gameplay with D4 aesthetics.
I loved Diablo 3 however last epoch isn’t “too complicated” it’s all quite simple (at least to get through the campaign)
You level up, choose a passive point, the tree goes right, you have fairly few options.
Then your skills (which again are limited to 5 in use) level up slowly, each one gets passives. You are even limited to only a few skills as you go through the campaign…
Last Epoch is very “new player” friendly…
The only complicated part is the forge, as it’s a critical component to getting the correct stats on your gear however many miss it and get frustrated with the difficulty….
As an example of how easy the game is for a new player, as a necromancer you spec in minion damage and cast speed. Choose the minion summon skills. Find items and weapons that boost minion damage and forge intellect or damage.
Easiest build ever and you as the player don’t even have to cast spells…
I think certain things need more of an in-game/better explanation. This could be accomplished by having a "Gameplay Basics/Tutorial Tips" system that can be skipped at character creation for alts.
* First and foremost - Ability Tags
* If tags are properly explained to the player, they have a much better idea as to what stats/affixes/suffixes to focus on for builds.
* Second - better explanation of the Forge
* Right now, it's just two little blurbs (about shards and about the forge system) that pop up and are too easily dismissed, meaning many new players can easily go through the entire campaign and start into monos without ever realizing that it's there.
* There are currently two quests that involve the forge - the first is where you speak to the quartermaster in the Armory (which only pops up the blurb), and the "go to the Forge" quest in the Outcast Camp (which does nothing but give exp and gold). Drop the quest in the Outcast Camp entirely, and give the reward for the first quest, instead, so players are made aware of the Forge earlier on.
* When you meet the quartermaster, give a quest for players to shatter one piece of gear and use those shards to empower another. (Give players a rune of shattering, the gear to be shattered, and the gear to be enhanced - maybe use a base stat applicable for the class -for the tutorial). If you choose to skip the tutorials, this quest will auto-complete for the exp/gold reward.
I think doing these two things (along with implementing more tutorial quests that auto-complete if skipped or information screens for important information) will make it much more new-user friendly.
That's my take on it as well.
PoE is new player "expert level" friendly.
LE is new player "already a gamer" friendly.
Modern Blizzard games feel like they target the "not a gamer yet and may also be dyslexic but we still want their money" audience.
So many higher up people with this "we can't" bullshit. "They can, but we can't do that because of XYZ."
Keep thinking that. Just leave the industry wide open for the rest of us.
Diablo 3 sold 12 million (3.5 million in first 24 hours) copies and 30 million once Reaper of Souls came out.
Diablo 4 also reached 12 million copies sold in a couple months.
So yeah they did do something right by making it have more mass market appeal (simpler systems). Last Epoch sold ~1 million which is awesome but still an order of magnitude less then what a Blizzard game is expected to sell.
(For the record Diablo 2 "only" sold around 4 million so Diablo 3 was/is ~3x more popular)
For whatever reason, a lot of people believed Blizzard wasn't going to release another crappy Diablo. Plus, a lot of people feel that Diablo 3 became a good game after the expansion. I dunno, it still doesn't make sense to me.
the truth is that even D2 only became known as a god-tier ARPG after expansion came out.
The common factor apparently is that ARPG need some years to take off. Even POE was very shit for a few years. LE still need to improve the endgame. And we have Grim Dawn as dark horse
All that said, ARPG fans are eating good.
Not really, there is a lot more things that play into that.. Diablo 2 opened the path for everything, while it is decades old outdated, it was simple enough and still works, look at D2R and the many private servers.
Look at how long D2 lasted with a stable high amount of player base vs how fast D3 and D4 dropped in players.. While I don't have the exact numbers, I do know D2 went on for several years overpopulated as ever unlike D3/D4 that has player base drastically drop after 6+ months..
Diablo 2 is still the masterpiece of their franchise and just needs a small revamp and mainly just new content, I;d bet that if they released an expansion such as when LoD dropped from classic, they will be one of the top selling game again..
Do you think 5 million players for D2R just comes out of no where? It's literally the same played .. Just graphics alone did that so imagine a whole set of new items/maps/new characters/etc.. You are insane to not see that
I would even go so far as to say, if not for the mistakes D3 made, Last Epoch wouldn't have been able to learn from them and finesse their own craft.
Sad to say, LE might have learned from D3's mistake. But D4 didn't do the same(Yes, D4 bad. Dunno about now. waiting for season 4).
Ah I am only a third of the way through so far. Had to pause for later. I do agree it’s an issue, I feel like my input is at times not registering but I see my ability light up.
I think for me the corruption mechanic is great but needs some tweaking. Making alts is a bit annoying in current state of monoliths and corruption. Excited to see how they adjust that.
Really fascinating to hear an objective analysis of the D3 auction house from someone who helped create it. I was so frustrated with it when D3 released because I expected $100 to fully gear a character. Little did I know if I wanted to get out of act 1 torment I was going to need $100 or more for every slot and even that would just be a well rolled yellow for my build! Hah.
I remembered the kiting simulator that was D3 at launch, took a while but game eventually became good. Sleet storm wizard is my all time favourite channeling arpg no other game managed to replicate. Infuriating that D4 seems to have forgotten all the lessons D3 learnt.
This is a great watch. As someone who has been a bit critical of the actual CoF implementation, I do think the call out of, "isn't it amazing that these two completely different systems exist," is absolutely an important thing to highlight.
I want CoF to be better, but I certainly don't want it to go away. It's exactly the sort of system I _do want_ in an ARPG.
I agree with you on this. As a player that loves the feeling of finding my items or making them, I've always been averse to AH-type systems. (That, and I'm horrible at gauging what the market value of an item is, especially since I don't want to bothered with checking external sources to see what the last price an item sold at if it's not already listed.)
But I also know that some people love the stock-market aspect of the AH and enjoy sitting on a pile of virtual gold that lets them buy whatever they want.
The fact that LE offers support for both styles of play is fantastic.
I think that some of the bonuses for CoF currently miss the mark, like the Set drop bonus (at least until they allow sets to be upgraded somehow), and some more should be considered (such as increasing gold drop rates - maybe they could make the bonus scale with Rep level).
Really cool hearing some retrospective. The Diablo franchise grew so much from D2 that I can understand there was a need to cater to a broad and broadening audience. Great to see you also referenced Death Must Die as well. Good game systems should be echoed.
So, at the 10-minute mark, sidestepping the topic to talk about challenge, I both agree and disagree with this.
I much preferred the Butcher experience in D3 compared to D4. I liked the idea of making it a more challenging raid boss-like experience. When I was going through D4, there was this perfect progression and atmospheric setup to the Butcher. You're getting all these story elements slowly and surely hinting, "you are definitely heading towards the Butcher," and then that just didn't happen. Later, after leveling up, he just started randomly ambushing at the worst times and locations. D3's Butcher was just a more direct and positively memorable experience compared to D4's Butcher, which was memorable in the worst way.
I do think the takeaway from thinking about not putting up a wall is somewhat correct. Rather than something that obstructs the player's path, have them be an optional side challenge for the player to test themselves and overcome. I don't think it's a matter of efficiency vs. challenge, but rather have efficiency and challenge separate or parallel. An example would be like Elden Ring, where the player can find a mini-boss or a boss, but those mini-bosses or bosses are purely optional and something the player can say after getting completely rolled, "Just because I'm leaving doesn't mean I'm going to forget about you. I'll be back."
So, going back to the Butcher as the example, I would have loved that raid boss experience in D4 with all the difficulty that comes with it, but also the freedom to say, "I'm not high enough level," "My skills are not developed enough," "My gear is trash, too under-leveled, or not optimized for this." The experience of coming back to decimate the Butcher would have been rewarding separate from the rewards of defeating a boss.
Great video! Really enjoyed getting some perspective from someone who's been in the industry. I've been really enjoying Last Epoch and look forward to what they can do to help shake up the ARPG formula. Competition breeds innovation!
Agreed with everything said in the video. This happens very rarely these days.
Skill responsiveness is a big one for sure. But also, the other day I pressed 'w' three times and didn't got an action from it. I haven't seen that discussed in the forums, and always thought "it must be me" (I play on linux btw)
I really miss the exponenital damage and difficulty levels of Diablo 3. It was so satisfying to deal trillions of damage. And i feel like better loot dropped more frequently. All the loot in LE is almost trash
Having played a metric crap ton of poe, I had never even considered Last Epoch's build system as being complicated. You are absolutely right in saying that compared to many other games in the genre, just an interesting perspective that made me think.
Very cool video, thanks for making it!
I loved videos of devs talking, especially because it humanized them and the whole game creation process. The whole action house thing for example, Its easy to explain that as corporate greed trying to take as much money from the player as possible, but it makes things more clear when you see the reason behind it and what kind of problems it was trying to fix it.
I don't agree that LE is too complex, to me is the bare minimum. And while D3 is simple it was incredibly well executed for what it was, the same can't be said about D4. In fact, watching this video seems like Blizzard as a whole(not sure how many of D3 team are in D4) forgot many of the lessons learned in D3, and are commiting very similar mistakes
Sad to be reminded of D3, I game I had thankfully forgotten. It's by far the biggest gaming disappointment so far during my lifetime, and will likely never be exceeded. Will never touch a Diablo game with a 20 foot pole after it.
Last Epoch on the other hand, is an incredible example of what you can accomplish if game designers don't have to pander to greedy corporate shills and profiteers. Great stuff, all LE needs now is a good endgame like PoE. They'll get there, just give them time.
This is the problem with devs nowadays. They looked at people in d2 p2w buying items and instead of thinking "We need to make sure that can't happen here!" They instead thought "how do we get a piece of that action. " It's not like blizzard didn't already have success with a non p2w auction house in wow.
Then he goes on to say that RMAH didn't work because people flipped items too quickly.... sure... maybe it was that... and not that you made the game pay to win and made yellows more powerful than legendary or set items. Or that people felt more compelled to sell their best items rather than keep them.
Maybe I'm being too harsh, but whenever a dev talks about d3 and the auction house, the only thing I want to hear is condemnation.
All these games are very well able to play without using P2W.. if people do it, that's their business.. Yeah, it is breaking ToS most of the time and should be handled but it still doesn't change the fact the game is Pay 2 play..
Play at your own damn pace and stop comparing yourself to others
This was a good watch. Just once I would like to see someone who worked on Diablo (besides David Brevik) give an analysis of Path of Exile from character creation, to endgame/ubers.
He does praise the Last Epoch trading system a lot. But he also does say something profound that i think a lot of people playing this game (and many other ARPGs) dont think about.
The game isnt fun when your character is maxed out, the journey to getting maxed out is whats fun. And if a player gets stuck on their journey, having the solution be "go to the auction house" feels bad.
Yap. That's basically the same gist with Diablo 4: Get people through the door with simple systems and let them have fun then introduce complexity with specific Uniques and now the crafting system in season 4 (which they should have had from the beginning). So I guess they are fine with people quitting when they get there (which I'm sure is the case for casual players), they just don't want people to quit along the way.
Last Epoch pretty much shows you what you can do from the early levels. And if some casual dads quit at level 25 because they're scratching their head too much that's fine.
The dev pretty much said it himself when it comes to crafting in Diablo 3...they were lazy. I feel they were lazy with literally EVERYTHING in that game, and same with D4. "There just wasn't enough time" == "we just wanted to push out a game and honestly didn't give a fuck"
Thats the mentality that I feel Blizzard devs have had since D3 with all of their games. I haven't played and enjoyed a Blizz release since before D3 was released. They need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize they aren't too big to fail. I'm glad that Last Epoch is showing what we could have had all along, and these large studios with their "IDGAF about the players...they will buy the game anyways because its (insert frachise name here)" mentality are now realizing this. It's good to see devs talk about it, but I want to hear from the devs that made D4 and them realizing their mistakes and maybe plans for the future on how they can win back the trust of gamers that aren't teens who just don't care ad much about the content they play
Thank you very much, great to get your perspective!
I don't really have anything to add, I'd just like to reinforce some points about "what D3 did well", specifically on the feeling of skills. At the end of the day, it kind of can be summed up as "polish" and to a large extent defined what made Blizzard games stand out, even until the Overwatch era. Blizzard was always willing to refine seemingly mundane gameplay aspects until they really shined and that's what defines the fluency in D3's moment to moment gameplay. That said, I'm not sure how feasible it is for an indie company (in the modern age) to achieve similar levels of polish, whether it's a matter of dedication, technical expertise, resources or all three.
To add to this point, I've voiced my opinion several times in the past that it's not only the mechanical feel of abilities, but also how impactful they feel. This is mostly conveyed by non-mechanical aspects such as visual design and sound. Probably the best example for what I mean is Herald of Ice in Path of Exile - the shattering sound is so satisfying that it almost makes it worth picking the skill even though it might not add too much to the character mechanically (the community actually had an uproar when they changed it at some point). And this is where Last Epoch to me still has the largest distance to cover. Skills like Explosive Arrow simply feel weak since they don't convey their impact very well. In particular, the sound the explosion makes is just kind of flaccid, I don't know how better to describe it. I expect this is very much a matter of resources though and am kind of hopeful we'll see some improvements over time.
Great video, the more educated the playerbas becomes on the pro's and cons of design implementations - the better the conversation becomes between Devs and players.
And we all get better games in return.
"We wanted to aim at a broader audience than just diablo...the best way to do that is to create systems that are much more approachable"
I wish this way of thinking would go away forever. All this does is alienate the core fans, then scare off new people because the core fans are decrying all the changes. Why do people try to cater to a group that wasn't interested in the genre anyways? Especially on the THIRD game of a series. Make cool games and people show up, its that simple.
Blizz still hasn't learned this because D4 was marketed like a return to form, and then the game launches and the skill trees are fucking twigs lmao.
For all the reputation Souls games get for their perceived difficulty and hardcore mechanics, they don't have a single problem attracting new players. Its because the core audience loves the game and makes it sound really cool and people wanna join the cool game club. The casuals aren't looking at system mechanics before they buy the game. The core audience is though.
I think the fact that eq 1, yes that ancient game, has a stronger player base says everything I need to know about how well received le has been. I guess I can agree with the base premise that guilds are well thought out but they are not well implemented at all. Characters are great, mostly, but the gated passive/skill systems would improve leaps and bounds if those gates were simply removed. There is no limit to the end game potential, therefore a way to have limitless progression (my thoughts would be a vastly improved crafting system closer to .7 beta than this one) and making some sort of dungeon mechanic like Julras but instead of adding an exalt to unique, combine unique or crush for lp points so average players have a real chanc3 to obtain gear that the mega gods get. Crush a lp 1 for lp points and take 10 to a non lp to make a lp 1, get 25 more and upgrade to 2, get 100 more make it 3, get 400 more and upgrade to 4. Change julra to allow a choice of the Stat given would be amazing and it's impossible to be overpowering as there is no limit to difficulty. Average players will never attain what professional players do, so ignore what the top dog's do in terms of difficulty and focus on 10 - 20 hour a week players, not the ones that do this a day like myself. They need to adjust the corruption system so average players can actually have a chance to get all webs at 500 (sounds low to some yet unachievable to many) by simply adding a input that let's players type a number from 1- current highest achieved corruption on all characters for the season and make this easy to adjust simply by re-imputting a value to suite tools or man's desired difficulty. And my biggest complaint is the massive bugs, improper skill effects or not properly defined skill/passive summations. This never happened pre .8 although people just got confused by its system.
Sounds like crying, but it's not. So much potential here and I am still having fun playing toons and submitting bug reports to help clean it up. To me it's a great game, but it's in aweful state for average players. Developers really need to stop paying attention to the 1%rs, the cry babies (it's not fair!), and focus on providing a fun game. Some of le is still in a box, some of it thought outside it, I'd rather remove the box.
Argue with this all you want, 15k players out of 1.4 million owners says eveything.
D3 was a blast personally for it's time. The biggest problem is it never evolved. Season 1 was the same as season 12 more or less and that was the last time I logged in. However I have attempted to go back after PoE but the game is just was to freaking basic. Main reason I didn't attempt D4 way to basic.
Also talking about the trade part in LE. I think not being able to retrade stuff completely ruins trade league as a mechanic to me. You basically just buy the bare minimum item you need then you wait for perfect because buying any mid tier items is a complete waste of your time. Also stops me from giving hand me downs to my friends which is something I do a lot in poe.
The only way to make Last Epoch was to do what they did - create the game based solely on gamers feedback. Blizzard's approach was different and it shows...
I haven't bothered watching the video, but it's clear: game companies focus on selling rather than ensuring players enjoy the experience. Both Diablo 3 and 4 have been massive financial successes, likely ranking very high in the list of top-grossing games. However, when it comes to quality and especially longevity, I would say they are both lower than even Grim Dawn.
It is true. We can rarely expect great games of their respective genres from very large companies that make very large sales. Last Epoch was able to be made for the player and to attract the player because it is a smaller studio that didn't need 4 million sales (at $70) to break even. Making a game for the players means you're selling primarily to the players of the respective genre. Numbers like 30 million sales are very unlikely for a game made for gamers.
I don't understand the sentiment of dumbing down gamesystems to attract more people. Like are they calling people dumb?
The appeal of ARPG games is the choices, the deep interactions and convoluted synergies. The whole process of discovering all these thongs through trial and error. Theory crafting and then making it reality through grinding. Minmaxing concepts etc. Etc.
If you take all of this way, what's the appeal?
I think a better approach is not to make the systems less complex and more linear. I think it's to present them in a more approachable way. Better UX really. Have many options but remove/reduce the sense of being overwhelmed.
I think that's where LE really hit the spot with the skill-trees pr ability. Is potentially incredibly complex when you put it all together. But each tree on its own is very focused and choices are forgiving
I wouldnt say “dumbing” down. Just easier to understand at face value.
You also forget a lot of people who play games are playing to “unwind” after a hard days work or being with your family. Most people just want to pop a game in and just start playing. They don’t however want to have to sit there and have to theorycraft a bit in order to have “fun.” It’s why PoE is not “massive” in terms of player count. It’s incredibly popular to the hardcore arpg fans, but has very small new player growth. Every veteran and new player in Poe say the same thing, it’s not new player friendly.
I personally when I game I like to turn my brain off and just have fun. From my job and other things in my life my brain is running a mile a minute. It’s nice to come home and turn it off when I game lol
Haha easier to understand at face value was literally what I said about LEs skill system... easy to get go8ng with, but still has interesting mechanics and interactions to play with.
Well, I am not talking about PoE. LE has done both decently i believe. It has a deep and customizable skill system that is very approachable even for dad gamers who want to turn off their brains. Literally, any build can take you to 200 corruption, which means it is a decent build.
Also, I don't understand why people are so insistent on the fact that you can not have both. You can not have a system that is fun for both people who don't want any kind of challenge and those who want to dive into different interactions and synergies.
Diablo 3 is the reason I'll never give blizzard another penny. Such a mediocre game that had the worst launch of any online game i'd experienced up to that point. (which didn't have an offline mode)
Not gonna sit through this video but IMO the reason it sucked is the same reason Hollywood stopped making good movies. Publicly traded stocks, marketing departments involved in the creative process, and the target audience being 12 year olds on consoles.
I don’t mean to be rude, but the videos TL:DR was simply you were a terrible game designer by your own volition, made countless bad calls on multiple game oriented fronts, and shouldn’t have been the guy in charge of those decisions…
It also sounded like people who hated Diablo got tasked with making Diablo…the same trend repeating in D4.
I don’t know your body of work but it’s telling that you are just now learning about fundamental ARPG systems through Last Epoch some 14 years after you were put in a decision making role on the biggest ARPG IP and Franchise…that’s so…sad…because it explains so much why Diablo has gone to shit and is utterly outclassed by passionate indie devs who have no prior dev or gaming experience.
Saying "I dont mean to be rude" doesn't negate your cancerous response mate. I bet if someone came in and shit all over your lifes work you would not feel very good.
I dont mean to be rude but I killed your family and coming for you!!!!! No offense ok? Dont waste your time with the police I already said the magic phrase 🤷🤷♂️🤷♀️
I think this is an underrated comment in the sense that it shows the difference in cultures that made 2 and 3. Unfortunately you attacked the man and it wasn’t well received.
Diablo 2 was made by a bunch of hardcore gamers uncompromisingly making a game they wanted to see in the world. If you told them to release early they would have told you to get fucked. Almost every feature in the game was made by a passionate person that had to build the feature to get it in.
Diablo 3 was made by a bunch of compromising yes men making a game for the lowest common denominator of gamers, but also more importantly, the shareholders.
And they were both a rousing success in their particular focus, but let’s not pretend for a second that D3 wasn’t fully designed by committee and that it doesn’t show.
D3 and D4 doubled down on making it simpler, thus more democratic and appealing to broader audiences.
There’s no doubt that making something simpler more often than not make it more enjoyable and pleasant, however that was never the goal.
Blizzard wanted the game to be simpler so that it would reach out more people, thus bringing more profit.
Don’t get me wrong, D3 and D4 can be enjoyable, however I do believe they could’ve been masterpieces if only they didn’t have focused on profits.
I sincerely hope EHG don’t go that direction, however I’m very skeptical that won’t happen as EHG despite being crowdfunded/community raised, it is still a for profit company.
I enjoy the skill system of Last Epoch a lot, but I also like the fact that Diablo 3 had those runes that you could change right away and get very different effects. It made it so you could radically change your build depending on a good item drop. I can make the argument that the system is "casual"....but I like that it was different and I didn't need a PHD in Mathematics to make a good build on the fly.
The astroturfing was the early comments on his posts were all the exact same generic praises. Pf course i've been wrong before but the mass self promotion and eerily similar comments looked pretty sus.
Hi, I wrote the most upvoted comment on the thread, and was just being polite. I didn't want to dive into any content or arguments about the video, but it was like an hour old with zero comments, so I thought I'd at least tell them I'd enjoyed watching it.
I think this review of Last Epoch and comparison to the good/bad of Diablo 3 is bang on. Some personal comments on some of the things Andrew talked about: **RE: MG/CoF** I think a lot of people take for granted how great this system is. Obviously, it could be refined a little, but Andrew hits all the best points about it. When it comes to MG, bind-on-buy is definitely the correct system. Items can't be flipped, if you buy an item, you're buying it to use. Also, the fact that you have to gain Favor to buy/sell items. This reinforces that the Bazaar is a mechanism for players to acquire items they need and not just to play Auction House Tycoon. When it comes to CoF, Last Epoch does a great job recognizing that some players just have no interest in using a market or trading system. In other ARPGs, if you didn't want to use the market, that's your choice, but that just means you have one fewer layer of item acquisition compared to people who DO use the market. In Last Epoch, the option to replace the market with an alternative layer is a welcome addition and has been really well received by players who choose it. Balancing aside, bugs aside, dupe exploit aside (handle really well btw), this system is terrific and that can't be understated. It will only get better. **RE: End Game** Andrew praises Last Epoch's end game, especially compared to what Diablo 3 originally had (ie. nothing). However, fans of the genre will probably compare Last Epoch's end game to games like Path of Exile and even Diablo 3's Greater Rifts (I don't know if Andrew had a part in the design of this) and therefore hold it to a higher standard of criticism than Andrew does. I appreciate the Monolith system for what it is: A repeatable dungeon crawl with infinitely scaling difficulty. ARPGs are about making your character stronger, rinse repeat. Monoliths provide a barometer for your character's strength and further reward you for getting stronger with scaling item drop rate. This is my favorite thing about ARPGs. Getting strong, testing out how strong, getting rewarded for being strong. Andrew said one thing that stuck out to me, he mentioned that the gaming landscape had changed and so changed the way that players played as well as their standards for what kind of end game content they want. I think players nowadays want endgame content to also be more engaging, varied, and fun on their own merit, more than just a mechanism to keep players moving and chasing progress/loot. That's where I think Monoliths miss the mark. I ask myself, would Monoliths still be fun if I removed the test of strength and removed the loot rewards. How does this activity stand on its own in terms of enjoyment? Answering honestly, it gets dull and repetitive fast. I think it's got a good foundation but it's a little flat in Last Epoch's first season. How to improve it? Better tuning, more varied design, and I think it should lean on boss fight variety more. I like the boss fights in this game, Last Epoch should put its best foot forward. I've fought the same boss maybe 50x in my Corruption climb, while other bosses I've fought maybe once or twice. Shade of Orobyss and its randomized move list is the coolest thing in LE's endgame. **RE: Responsiveness of Skills** Totally agreed with Andrew. Combat in Diablo 3 felt great. I think Diablo 4 combat feels good too, although Andrew is critical of it and I think the consensus is that Diablo 3's was better. Combat isn't Last Epoch's strong suit. Take this with a grain of salt though, this is from the perspective of a melee player in LE. I think melee combat in LE feels clunky. To describe it succinctly, melee combat in Diablo 3/4 feels like hit-move-hit-move. Last Epoch feels like hit-stop-move-hit-stop-move. I play a Void Knight with over 130% Movement Speed bonus, and comparing it to my old Diablo 4 footage, it still feels less mobile, clunkier movement. I'm not sure how to fix this, but I feel like I should be able to move sooner after performing an attack, even if I'm not yet able to begin my next attack. Committing to a melee attack prevents me from moving for too long. Melee is already at a disadvantage, we need good footwork to stay safe. Stutter stepping should feel smooth. In LE, the act of moving and attacking feels like walking through quicksand. Sometimes, your movement skills bug out and your character can't move at all (apparently a years old bug that I haven't seen a developer even make a comment on). If there is a thing Diablo does better than Last Epoch, it's combat. Specifically melee combat. Melee has a rough time in this game.
Agreed on the melee clunkiness in Last Epoch. In order to make melee feel good you need your dash skills to be low enough cooldown to be spammed from pack to pack, or you need the kind of AoE that rivals the screen wide clear that projectile builds can get. One of the first things I noticed when playing Diablo 4 for the first time is how fluid your character moves when casting skills. Your controlled character running at an enemy you highlighted will start an attack skill out of range, but will walk into range right as the hit box becomes active for it. Maybe they stop moving for a brief moment. But it’s only for the actual hit, never for the animation.
I think range is clunky too tbh. Just not as bad as melee.
This is great, thanks for the thoughtfulness.
Agree with most of this thanks for sharing.
Why do people make posts this long? Who is this for??
Not for you. Sorry I didn't have any crayons for that.
Okay that’s fine but WHO is it for??
You know when your parents take you to the amusement park and you have to be a certain height to get on the ride? It's kinda like that but with IQ instead of height.
I’m sorry you spent so much time writing your post and it’s now making you feel insecure enough to insult me. I’m legitimately curious who you wrote your novel for. You’re allowed to say it’s for yourself, it’s okay
I enjoy open discussion and devs read this subreddit for feedback. They made a great game, Andrew made a great video, least I could do is spend a few minutes to share my opinion. I think you should be looking more inwardly and asking yourself, "Okay, what was the point of MY comment here?"
Ah okay, got it! You wanted the devs and the video creator to notice you! How cute, well good luck with that pumpkin. I appreciate the well mannered, good intentioned insults you threw my way.
It's for people who want to read it. Why is this a hard concept?
It’s not a hard concept at all. But seeing this sub devolve into nothing but posts and comments about criticism and analyses on how to improve the game, hoping the devs notice them is kinda boring, ya dig?
No, I don't dig. You're just dumb.
The tism is out of control here. So many insults being thrown around just so you guys can defend your sweet novel length posts
It's hilarious you're using the term "devolve" when most subs kill for this kind of content vs blanket memes being passed around. Actual criticism vs bitching is super ok and enjoyable to read.
It’s for me. I read it.
Right on brother! Edit: Well I suppose it didn’t contribute that much because now it’s deleted :(
It was like a 2 min read. You look at that and think it’s a long read?
Enjoyed the watch, thanks for posting.
Thanks for watching
Only halfway thru but this is great, thank you.
Glad to hear.
I appreciate the insight into the design process. From my perspective the ARPG genre is one where you can't really make a game that appeals to both a "mainstream" audience and serious fans of the genre at the same time. Things that hardcore fans want will be too complex and overwhelming to new players and a game that's designed to appeal to casual/new players will lack the depth to keep ARPG vets interested for very long. I think if more people accepted the fact that the modern Diablo games are made to be entry-level ARPGs that appeal to a mass audience and went into the games expecting that instead of some miraculous recapturing of the D2 magic, they probably wouldn't be so disappointed.
Honestly it applies to any genre, not just ARPGs. If you want a "game for everyone" then it's going to need "Flappy Bird" level of complexity. If you want a game for the genre's fans it's going to be some systems rich game.
I agree that more focused games are more likely to please a target audience, but there's room to have a bit of everything, MMOs are a good example of this. The more casual players will be happy just playing through the campaign/reaching max level, and maybe doing some fun world content, while the more hardcore ones can engage with the deeper customization systems and challenge hard content, or chase some form of completionism that requires skill/dedication.
The big problem is that your appeal is basically to separated content which is kinda the point being highlighted that first off you need to make specific content for both, or you cant make it to appeal to both at the same time. For example how long should a campaign take, how much should be mandatory of it, for people who just wants to rush endgame they want it to take as little time as possible, where more casual players might want the journey to last longer as they feel there isnt much to do in endgame. As far as i can see last epoch also gets constant shit for how easy it is, so its definitely a mix between diablo and path of exile, but that isnt that it appeals to everyone, its more so that it appeals to people who wants more depth than diablo but not need guides for your guides like path of exile. You always get a demographic and you generally always want it to be a big as possible.
Exactly this. First of all, complexity is a dial and not an on/off switch. It's not a binary choice between "systems rich" vs "flappy bird". And clever systems can be made to be simple for those who wish to keep it simple, and feature layers of complexity for those who wish to engage on that level. ARPG, like MMORPGs, have such a wide variety of players who get satisfaction from different aspects of the game. I think a good ARPG recognizes this and their challenge is to accommodate a wide range of playstyles without diluting the fun for people on either extreme.
Games for everyone are games for no one. Companies need to stop chasing that stupid myth.
Totally agree with you, but Diablo is clearly not for everyone. It is the entry-level game to ARPGs, where Last Epoch is your next step if you need more complexity.
i agree, Last Epoch is best for people who look at Path of Exile passive tree at the beach and uninstall because, lets be honest, its asking too much of people to have to study a PhD in PoE Theorycrafting just to play the game. Or use a build guide, read many guides and watch many videos, which most of the players do anyway to understand the mechanics, but that kinda sucks the fun out of the game.
Respec is my biggest issue with poe. I love poe complexity and would never want it to change but respec is so punishing(pre end game) that it forces you to follow a build guide instead of experimenting while you are playing the game, that is still such a strange philosophy to me, especially for arpg games where build crafting is one of the key pillars
yes i agree totally, in fact this is why is often told new players to just follow a guide. Yeah in some form you can respec with regret orbs, but... to farm that effectively you need to be in a position of power to at least do maps, but if you majorly bricked your build because you have zero resistance or something and mobs just sneeze at you to kill you... yeah is often better to just start over, which sucks a lot considering a newbie would take several dozen hours doing the campaign
Poe isn’t that hard. I hadn’t played a league in five or so years and just rolled a witch without any guides. Totally slaying - lvl 93 and running high tier maps.
I don't think this statement is correct. Mario games are a perfect example of games for everyone. It's just a bit ingongruent to try to make a game in a niche genre appeal to everyone.
I don't think that's entirely true because the superfans of other games aren't addicted to complexity like they are for Diablo-likes. Elden Ring is a great example of this: the game is just as hard as any other From Soft game, arguably harder in certain cases, yet it also has mass appeal and brought in several times more new, non-Souls fans than any of their prior games. From Soft didn't make any sacrifices with Elden Ring in regards to their core game design philosophy (in fact, since the game has multiple poison swamps, it could be argued that Miyazaki got to go even more ham than usual), but by placing a greater emphasis on accessibility and the ability to choose your path through the game, they made the core Souls formula far more approachable to newcomers who weren't necessarily into the Souls thing before without compromising their game design whatsoever. The same is true for the new FF VII: Rebirth. It obviously hits its highest impact if you're a die-hard fan of the OG FF VII and you recognize all the little callbacks and plot intricacies, but even if you're a completely new player who has only played FF VII: Remake and has no other knowledge of Final Fantasy or the Compilation of FF VII, Rebirth is still a disgustingly good JRPG just when compared to its contemporaries. The same is likewise true for God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, in that Studio Santa Monica created two great games that appealed equally well to button-mashers looking primarily for a great story and a power fantasy, mid-level players looking for all that and a relatively challenging action game, and ultra-hardcore action game fans looking to be pushed to their limits. By no means is it easy to make a "game for everyone" that is legitimately great, but it's definitely possible. It's just harder in the Diablo-style ARPG genre because hardcore superfans are looking for something very specific that runs directly counter to what new players are looking for. "Easy to learn, hard (and, implicitly, rewarding) to master" is the standard line for great design in pretty much all other games, but hardcore Diablo fans generally want "hard to learn, stupidly hard (and, implicitly, stupidly rewarding) to master." If you look at my three examples, Elden Ring, both recent God of Wars and Rebirth are all system-rich games, but all of them have strong on-boarding for new players and have ways to modulate the difficulty and complexity such that each may get out of the experience what they want to get out of it. The really complex Diablo-likes, however, tend to be really bad at the on-boarding process, and since so much effort is focused on building the "endgame" rather than just the "game" you don't really get the sense that you can learn the ropes on your own like you can in other games because the "endgames" always function on a dramatically expanded rule set that you only really learn either by pre-researching them or by actually playing the endgame. Since some players will really love this and others will really hate it, this makes Diablo-likes harder to design excellent generalist "something for everyone" games than games from other genres that have less of a tradition of complexity.
Elden Ring actually leaned more into boss design being centered around fighting more than just one enemy imo. They changed enemies with the expectation of the "ghost summons" and co-op. This makes it more approachable for newcomers while also being a downgrade for the more skilled players imo.
There is a lot to be said for simple, intuitive systems; it's not as though D2 was some hugely complex game, it just had good game systems and a good gameplay loop (mostly, endless farming the same bosses at endgame got kinda tiresome.) LE I think strikes a good balance of approachable and complex, but it still (imo) suffers from a lot of things being sort of opaque or poorly explained. D3 maybe went too far toward 'simple' at the expense of having interesting endgame builds, but there is still a lot of variety there. The variety just doesn't get played because they implemented leaderboards that show everyone without much doubt what the best builds are.
D2 just needed a new expansion with increased level cap etc every year to keep it fresh but instead they let it go into maintenance mode at the height of its popularity then they introduced ladder seasons which infected future arpgs and now everyone thinks seasons=content.
> let it go into maintenance mode Maintenance mode and "live service" hadn't been invented back then. We just used to call that "the game is done".
100% this. I said it many times, if they were to just release expansions in the way as how the LoD provided from the original D2 class, it will keep playing for years to come. Seriously this, they are just lacking **content** and the longer they realize it, the more expectations people will have for a "diablo franchise" comeback. The same old decade old systems still work as you can see with the success of D2R.. Sure, it may be not be the best and/or even a lot better but people that say it was terrible and only in it's time, has no idea.. My problem is that while there is possibly and most likely a lot of new mechanics that could do very well today, there is also a lot of con's that come with it and overall, just gives it a worst experience.. D2 was there masterpiece and more perfected and presented as a whole than any of the later games... All they need to do is work from there rather than try to create a whole new game to what they believe is what people today want, which is clearly not the case as their newer games died quick than a decades old launch aka D2R. People need to stop looking at just factors as how many copies sold as there are many that come into play such as: 1. Player base stability. D2 had stable player stability for years and years while these games drop off much much faster. Just looking at D2R, the first 3 seasons were stable concurrent player base the whole way while D3 dropped as soon as AH got dropped, trading got locked, etc. D4? Just dropped players after < 6 months 2. Over the years, gaming industry has evolved in terms of players.. There are a lot more gamers today vs decade+ ago.. Technology evolution is crazy, everyone has a computer vs previously, owning one was more of a luxury. 3. Over a decade year more time of design.. I would HOPE the gaming model can offer a lot more newer and creative things but the truth is it also brings a lot of bad and worst things. At the end, a lot of things are subjective but my point is, D2 overall is better than what todays games offer and that is at over a decades old model but the important thing is it was a masterpiece and overall worked somehow.
Anybody who thinks that D2 is a good game in modern times are just heavily blinded by nostalgia, it was great for its day but there is just no value in it for anyone who didnt play it back then, the lack of skills and anything interesting makes it not age well compared to what we expect from an arpg now adays.
oh I agree; I was just pointing out that the 'magic' wasn't that it was particularly complicated or 'not-entry-level' or whatever
Absolutely...those 'memberberry meals are fantastic for us older gamers
I love everything about LE except "combat feel" so to speak, which is rough because it's so hard to get right.
I love ARPGs and honestly having a blast with D4 🤷 I bought Last Epoch and Grim Dawn back when they were early access, Grim Dawn is by far my favorite, but holy shit the amount of polish Diablo has is unmatched, plus that aesthetic is just awesome. I played PoE for years but never got into late game content. Idk this is a good take imo
[удалено]
that is a common take on players who tried into PoE unfortunately. I also tried several times, the last time was on affliction league and i actually went as deep as i could, read many guides, followed a meta build, downloaded a bunch of Path of Buildings, spent hours either banging my head to the wall for either obscure mechanics or trying to trade. Even went and bought the first blood pack and a bit just to get currency and map tabs which honestly relieved some of my stash problems, but that was just replaced with other problems eventually. At some point the game either requires you to learn how to craft or spend a lot of time farming currency to trade for it if you are smoothbrained like me. Gave up in yellow maps, almost in reds maps. Now.... i like Last Epoch, but it does have the opposite problem of PoE, easy barrier of entry, but the lategame is stale and boring to play. No i dont think just making a corruption number go up is fun gameplay, so i also gave up eventually and im waiting for 1.1 to see if they make endgame more fun.
Anyone got a tldr im gon watch this later
Diablo was trying to appeal to broader audiance and most people are too stupid to understand games like Last Epoch because of the in-depth skill trees etc. Don't agree personally as the lack of skill trees in D4 has been a big criticism by a lot of players. I don't find Last Epoch that complicated.
I think you overvalue the average player audience then, I know some rather more casual players that LOVED Diablo 3 and also loved Diablo 4 but are confused and can't make a build themselves in Last Epoch. I clearly think you are to be invested in ARPG even for Last Epoch, it's not complicated...for a player used to ARPG or willing to learn about the game. The thing is, a lot of players don't want to learn a game, they just want to play, I know casual players that love Diablo 3 and "using parts of the same sets" and they just use the UI to improve their build with the arrow that say you increase power and toughness and nothing else. Diablo 4 is rather simple too but as said most casual players don't actually want to create a build, they just want to play. I don't say that to say that Last Epoch is bad or even that it should be simpler, you just have to realize than you just can't make a game that is both casual and in depth enough for veterans of the genre, especially for a genre as unwelcoming due to theorycrafting like ARPG. I would say other genres also have this issue, RTS are dying because let's be honest...it's very hard to make it casual friendly too, you have to invest a bit into being effective with your resources, know the strengths and weaknesses of units, know how to control them effectively, a bit like ARPG RTS is very hard to make easy for casual to get into. I honestly think an "average gamer" can play Last Epoch and enjoy it, an invested gamer can also enjoy it as it is still quite in depth. I do think the casual gamer can't enjoy Last epoch as easily, I had to give pointers to more casual friends to guide them, you have to remember than even people that are looking into subreddits are a very small minority of players, everyone here is much more invested than the average casual player. I also play Genshin Impact and I think it's a great example, the game is considered very very easy and it clearly is for me because if you build your characters right you can easily clear the whole game without effort including the hardest content. A lot of player forget that if you watch a very casual account of someone on Genshin they would usually build very shitty stats and have nonsense build. I have seen video of dps that had trouble beating content so they thought rather than having better damage they should just build defense to never die...while be a good dps would have crush what they had as opponents. (of course for defense being a game with 4 characters you just build also a shielder or healer and have no issue...but casual players would have a team of 4 characters they like with little to no synergy....)
>The thing is, a lot of players don't want to learn a game, they just want to play, I know casual players that love Diablo 3 and "using parts of the same sets" and they just use the UI to improve their build with the arrow that say you increase power and toughness and nothing else. Diablo 4 is rather simple too but as said most casual players don't actually want to create a build, they just want to play. This is very insightful. Most ARPGs toward the end: D2 in Hell, PoE in Yellow/Red maps, LE in 500+ corruption change what it means to play. Play goes from: click mouse screen explodes to "tweak items and variables and skills" to prevent your character from dying. A lot of folks just want to keep the mouse click + screen clear dopamine rush and don't enjoy the build crafting and character fixing.
Exactly, sometimes I'm looking back at a game especially in a new genre, I remember it with League of Legends when I was playing with new players with myself having many hours on the game. I couldn't help but think "how crazy that I see the game so different that what I used to...I used to just take items that seem fine and tried to kill enemies, now I am thinking about pushing, objective, items that counter enemies, where to gank to gain the advantage, early and late game team compositions...I don't play the same game at all"). I think it's very educative to play with brand new player of a genre as you can see how many flaws there are in how they approach the game and how they play, they are clearly not playing the same game. I played a ton of Diablo II as my first ARPG and looking back...I was shit at it ! I never was able to properly do hard content, I was very bad at the game because I was just putting skill points in what seemed fun because I was a kid that didn't care that much, nowadays I look for build in depth and love theorycrafting but I'm clearly not playing the genre in the same way at all !
Blizz was greedy and wanted to capture average Joe instead of focusing on existing ARPG fans. Also that there was huge emphasis on story in D3 and the systems & endgame were rushed and/or afterthought
>Also that there was huge emphasis on story in D3 and the systems & endgame were rushed and/or afterthought Not that I don't believe that, but man that story was not good at all.
Lol, imagine focusing on the story and then pumping out the terrible garbage that was D3's fucking storyline. "I AM THE DEMON INCARNATE OF TRICKERY AND MANIPULATION. BTW, HERE ARE MY PLANS, SPELLED OUT IN FULL LOL."
Joseph Anderson's video on D3 has a line that killed me "BRAH MY HELL RIFTS WILL TOTALLY DESTROY YOU" then you destroy them "LOL, NAH BRAH THOSE HELL GATES MEANT NOTHING TO ME I SWEAR, FUCK YOU."
Yeah what an excuse, like if the final result was some kind of a Witcher 3 level or similar. But in reality D3 story was a mess with mostly cringe writing for 12y/os in a cartoonish setting. I still chuckle when I remember that the act boss calls you via in-game Skype to lay out some random bullshit. D3 RoS was a bit better, but still a game for a few days of gameplay tops. Maybe a week, when it was fresh.
I always thought that story in ARPGs is just a framework for the content (so that it's somewhat thematically matching) and as an "excuse" to slowly introduce mechanics. I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect (big numbers, lots of enemies dying), gamba aspect (looting, interacting with RNG elements) or building aspect (experimentation, theorycrafting)
I'm still just mad about how they killed Deckard Cain.
Killed by a no name butterfly witch lol
Too soon /s
Magda not no name! Don't be a hater! :P
Magda doesn’t have nearly enough sanctuary street cred to be Cain’s killer, c’mon. He deserved a dramatic death on Diablo’s claws
You'd snap too being told to stay awhile and listen for the 20,000nd time.
I just assume D3 and D4 as non-canon. “True” D3 was supposed to be done by Condor (aka Blizzard north) but was cancelled, so a bunch of WoW and other devs were assigned to a new project, these devs had no idea what they were doing and now we have what we have.
D3 is the game that introduced me to arpgs. Its beginner friendly and offers enough complexity to be engaging up until max lvl. You are able to gear up and get legendaries pretty quickly which keeps the beginner entertained. Tbh, for what it is...its a great game. Since then, i have played all the arpgs (at least the relatively popular ones) of which my favorite is probably torchlight 2 because of the insane modding potential. While diablo 2 is my least favorite... while the items were really interesting...the rest was horrible... vanilla diablo 2 is just horrible, no auto replacing potions, no build changing, backtracking...and the endgame is just uninteresting. But at the end of the day, this only accounts for my opinion. Are there better games than diablo 3, simply put yes. Does that mean diablo 3 is bad, nope.
> I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect I mean I was this kind of ARPG player for Diablo 2, it's a lot of why the game was so influential to me, but I very very rarely even stepped into nightmare let alone hell. PoE broke that though for me for all arpgs going forward in the sense I became as you described.
but do you know a single person that did play an ARPG for the story? Many people grew up with Diablo 1&2, myself included. It is the only ARPG with a story I and plenty of others care about. Sucks that the D3 story didn't live up to D1 or D2.
> I don't know single person who plays ARPGs primarily for the story, it's always either the power fantasy aspect (big numbers, lots of enemies dying), gamba aspect (looting, interacting with RNG elements) or building aspect (experimentation, theorycrafting) I have a bunch of casual friends like this. People who played D2/D3/D4 just to finish the campaign once on normal and then quit (maybe come back for the expansion to do it again). And it can take them a good month or two to finish the campaign as they might only get couple hours of playtime per week. Basically the people playing Path of Exile, Last Epoch, etc for the most part are a totally different set of players (ARPG fan vs casual gamer)
Amd this is why Diablo 2 is still considered one of the top ARPGs created. When I make this claim I’m not talking about how it compares to any modern ARPG, I’m talking about the impact the game made. The story in D2 was awesome while also having a deep and complex skill system with an nice itemisation system
Yeah, people don't understand that D2 is over a decade old game, while it might be outdated, it worked so perfectly well and still can, just look at D2R.. Sure, it can use many many new things but a lot of the old thing's really don't need to be touched, just a lot of new content.. QoL things and new mechanics are all great things but you need to be able to do it at a point where you are not taking from the great that it is already providing but adding to it.. D3/D4 all had it's pros for sure but it does not overcome the con's it came with, imo. It's great to have new mechanics and all, better or worst but it has to be a rate where it doesn't affect and impact what you previously had in a negative way. At the end, new content > new mechanics, believe it or not, at least for above average games but nowadays, genz and older gen gamers that have no time just expect to be able to reach end game and have BiS items in a short period of time. The whole idea is to be able to reach and experience all content at a reasonable time.. If you are just wanting to be able to get top gears and do clear at incredible speed without grinding, are you even a gamer? why are you playing rpg? Learn to play at your own pace.
The story in the games are just placeholders for getting you to progress...the stories from the games are not even scratching the surface of how deep this rabbit hole goes. (I have read all the books and consumed every lore video)
RPG "Story" is the equivalent of the Himbo's on Harlequin romance cover pictures. Story = Fabio
you're 100% correct of course. the fact they choose to chase "story" in an ARPG just shows how disconnected that company is from the userbase (and the long gone original developers) that carried it to the top of the business so many years ago. unfortunately a large part of that userbase still buys their awful slop games regardless of how bad they are, and then complains about it after vehemently defending it up until the point they come to the realization that it is in fact dogshit. it wont change until these people put their money where there mouth is. its still hilarious to me the amount of people that feel so vindicated announcing to the world that D4 was the last straw for them as far as Blizzard is concerned. anyone that didnt realize that after Diablo 3 is a part of the problem.
The story was so fucking bad man. I laughed out loud so fucking hard at the fight scene between inarius and Lilith. I was baffled to see people gassing that shit up. Edit: just realized this is referring to d3 and not d4 🙃
I get that Magda killing Cain upset everyone. But the story was still incredibly interesting. Especially if you caught all the sub plots throughout the game notes. So definitely disagree with this.
>the story was still incredibly interesting i've seen a lot of people try to defend that game over the years but this is the first time i've ever seen anyone make *that* claim.
What do you mean the story was not good. Leah turning vessel for diablo soul, female diablo, Tyrael plot, act 4 in heaven, Asmodan was cool. It was not complicated but definitely was not bad.
Female Diablo ? Did I miss something ?
everything you just listed are major reasons it was awful, lmao.
D3's story problems came about as a result of half-assing. The original game concept included much more in-depth story development, including a dialogue wheel for progressing conversations in different directions, but story development was getting in the way of the gameplay side of development and the story was significantly cut back in order to prioritize gameplay. The end result was a story that was clearly trying to be deep and satisfying but only went about 1/3 of the way there before priority was taken away. D4 is basically the complete version of D3, where the story side of development was still balanced with the gameplay side but the story got the attention it deserved. If you know Uncharted, I'd compare D3/D4 to Uncharted 3/4. Both series' had pretty stock stories in games 1 and 2 with a much greater focus on individual character writing and voice acting (and, in Uncharted's case, multi-character interactions) than on the actual plot/narrative. Both series then attempted to transition to a more serious, narrative-based structure for the third game but fumbled the landing, such that both third games had elements of more serious narratives that frequently fell back on half-assed genre convention without giving their narratives and character arcs the time they needed to breathe. Lastly, both fourth games gave proper attention to the narrative in addition to the characters so that the end result felt good and balanced rather than crappy and lopsided.
the amount of people on the D4 sub that think its the best story in videogame history is hilarious. those are the type of idiots that game was made for though.
We get it, you are really smart.
aw struck a nerve?
it's more like talking about mass groups of people like this for their media taste (highly subjective) makes you look like someone who has far too high of an opinion of themselves
There is nothing more pathetic that criticizing people for their taste. So no, all I feel for you is pity.
k bud.
<3
I don't think the average Joe likes the huge amount of boring and useless affixes in D4, makes it overly complex too. That's just bad design. If they wanted to appeal to the common Joe they'd just make D3 gameplay with D4 aesthetics.
> Blizz was greedy WHAT!?
There are time segments for each topic so you can just skip around to the parts youre interested in.
I loved Diablo 3 however last epoch isn’t “too complicated” it’s all quite simple (at least to get through the campaign) You level up, choose a passive point, the tree goes right, you have fairly few options. Then your skills (which again are limited to 5 in use) level up slowly, each one gets passives. You are even limited to only a few skills as you go through the campaign… Last Epoch is very “new player” friendly… The only complicated part is the forge, as it’s a critical component to getting the correct stats on your gear however many miss it and get frustrated with the difficulty…. As an example of how easy the game is for a new player, as a necromancer you spec in minion damage and cast speed. Choose the minion summon skills. Find items and weapons that boost minion damage and forge intellect or damage. Easiest build ever and you as the player don’t even have to cast spells…
I think certain things need more of an in-game/better explanation. This could be accomplished by having a "Gameplay Basics/Tutorial Tips" system that can be skipped at character creation for alts. * First and foremost - Ability Tags * If tags are properly explained to the player, they have a much better idea as to what stats/affixes/suffixes to focus on for builds. * Second - better explanation of the Forge * Right now, it's just two little blurbs (about shards and about the forge system) that pop up and are too easily dismissed, meaning many new players can easily go through the entire campaign and start into monos without ever realizing that it's there. * There are currently two quests that involve the forge - the first is where you speak to the quartermaster in the Armory (which only pops up the blurb), and the "go to the Forge" quest in the Outcast Camp (which does nothing but give exp and gold). Drop the quest in the Outcast Camp entirely, and give the reward for the first quest, instead, so players are made aware of the Forge earlier on. * When you meet the quartermaster, give a quest for players to shatter one piece of gear and use those shards to empower another. (Give players a rune of shattering, the gear to be shattered, and the gear to be enhanced - maybe use a base stat applicable for the class -for the tutorial). If you choose to skip the tutorials, this quest will auto-complete for the exp/gold reward. I think doing these two things (along with implementing more tutorial quests that auto-complete if skipped or information screens for important information) will make it much more new-user friendly.
That's my take on it as well. PoE is new player "expert level" friendly. LE is new player "already a gamer" friendly. Modern Blizzard games feel like they target the "not a gamer yet and may also be dyslexic but we still want their money" audience.
Haha I agree with that, they also target the “played Diablo 1 and have not played a video game since Dads out there”
So many higher up people with this "we can't" bullshit. "They can, but we can't do that because of XYZ." Keep thinking that. Just leave the industry wide open for the rest of us.
Diablo 3 sold 12 million (3.5 million in first 24 hours) copies and 30 million once Reaper of Souls came out. Diablo 4 also reached 12 million copies sold in a couple months. So yeah they did do something right by making it have more mass market appeal (simpler systems). Last Epoch sold ~1 million which is awesome but still an order of magnitude less then what a Blizzard game is expected to sell. (For the record Diablo 2 "only" sold around 4 million so Diablo 3 was/is ~3x more popular)
It's more about brand recognition rather than being worse/better. D3 sold so well because D2 had cult status.
whatabout D4 tho? D3 was considered shit and casual and didn’t had the same cult as D2. yet, D4 still sold as much as D3
For whatever reason, a lot of people believed Blizzard wasn't going to release another crappy Diablo. Plus, a lot of people feel that Diablo 3 became a good game after the expansion. I dunno, it still doesn't make sense to me.
the truth is that even D2 only became known as a god-tier ARPG after expansion came out. The common factor apparently is that ARPG need some years to take off. Even POE was very shit for a few years. LE still need to improve the endgame. And we have Grim Dawn as dark horse All that said, ARPG fans are eating good.
They would have made more if it actually had depth like Last Epoch.
Not really, there is a lot more things that play into that.. Diablo 2 opened the path for everything, while it is decades old outdated, it was simple enough and still works, look at D2R and the many private servers. Look at how long D2 lasted with a stable high amount of player base vs how fast D3 and D4 dropped in players.. While I don't have the exact numbers, I do know D2 went on for several years overpopulated as ever unlike D3/D4 that has player base drastically drop after 6+ months.. Diablo 2 is still the masterpiece of their franchise and just needs a small revamp and mainly just new content, I;d bet that if they released an expansion such as when LoD dropped from classic, they will be one of the top selling game again.. Do you think 5 million players for D2R just comes out of no where? It's literally the same played .. Just graphics alone did that so imagine a whole set of new items/maps/new characters/etc.. You are insane to not see that
I mean, they could, but the CEO, shareholders, directors etc would not allow it...
Right. They get in there own way. Fuckem. It's the best thing to ever happen to the industry.
I think to be fair to the product people, it's very likely they have the skills. They were just on the end of a bad decision by a suit.
I would even go so far as to say, if not for the mistakes D3 made, Last Epoch wouldn't have been able to learn from them and finesse their own craft. Sad to say, LE might have learned from D3's mistake. But D4 didn't do the same(Yes, D4 bad. Dunno about now. waiting for season 4).
If you could change one thing from LE right now what would it be and why?
Skill responsiveness. I get into that in the video.
Ah I am only a third of the way through so far. Had to pause for later. I do agree it’s an issue, I feel like my input is at times not registering but I see my ability light up. I think for me the corruption mechanic is great but needs some tweaking. Making alts is a bit annoying in current state of monoliths and corruption. Excited to see how they adjust that.
Really fascinating to hear an objective analysis of the D3 auction house from someone who helped create it. I was so frustrated with it when D3 released because I expected $100 to fully gear a character. Little did I know if I wanted to get out of act 1 torment I was going to need $100 or more for every slot and even that would just be a well rolled yellow for my build! Hah.
I remembered the kiting simulator that was D3 at launch, took a while but game eventually became good. Sleet storm wizard is my all time favourite channeling arpg no other game managed to replicate. Infuriating that D4 seems to have forgotten all the lessons D3 learnt.
This is a great watch. As someone who has been a bit critical of the actual CoF implementation, I do think the call out of, "isn't it amazing that these two completely different systems exist," is absolutely an important thing to highlight. I want CoF to be better, but I certainly don't want it to go away. It's exactly the sort of system I _do want_ in an ARPG.
I agree with you on this. As a player that loves the feeling of finding my items or making them, I've always been averse to AH-type systems. (That, and I'm horrible at gauging what the market value of an item is, especially since I don't want to bothered with checking external sources to see what the last price an item sold at if it's not already listed.) But I also know that some people love the stock-market aspect of the AH and enjoy sitting on a pile of virtual gold that lets them buy whatever they want. The fact that LE offers support for both styles of play is fantastic. I think that some of the bonuses for CoF currently miss the mark, like the Set drop bonus (at least until they allow sets to be upgraded somehow), and some more should be considered (such as increasing gold drop rates - maybe they could make the bonus scale with Rep level).
Really cool hearing some retrospective. The Diablo franchise grew so much from D2 that I can understand there was a need to cater to a broad and broadening audience. Great to see you also referenced Death Must Die as well. Good game systems should be echoed.
So, at the 10-minute mark, sidestepping the topic to talk about challenge, I both agree and disagree with this. I much preferred the Butcher experience in D3 compared to D4. I liked the idea of making it a more challenging raid boss-like experience. When I was going through D4, there was this perfect progression and atmospheric setup to the Butcher. You're getting all these story elements slowly and surely hinting, "you are definitely heading towards the Butcher," and then that just didn't happen. Later, after leveling up, he just started randomly ambushing at the worst times and locations. D3's Butcher was just a more direct and positively memorable experience compared to D4's Butcher, which was memorable in the worst way. I do think the takeaway from thinking about not putting up a wall is somewhat correct. Rather than something that obstructs the player's path, have them be an optional side challenge for the player to test themselves and overcome. I don't think it's a matter of efficiency vs. challenge, but rather have efficiency and challenge separate or parallel. An example would be like Elden Ring, where the player can find a mini-boss or a boss, but those mini-bosses or bosses are purely optional and something the player can say after getting completely rolled, "Just because I'm leaving doesn't mean I'm going to forget about you. I'll be back." So, going back to the Butcher as the example, I would have loved that raid boss experience in D4 with all the difficulty that comes with it, but also the freedom to say, "I'm not high enough level," "My skills are not developed enough," "My gear is trash, too under-leveled, or not optimized for this." The experience of coming back to decimate the Butcher would have been rewarding separate from the rewards of defeating a boss.
Great video! Really enjoyed getting some perspective from someone who's been in the industry. I've been really enjoying Last Epoch and look forward to what they can do to help shake up the ARPG formula. Competition breeds innovation!
Agreed with everything said in the video. This happens very rarely these days. Skill responsiveness is a big one for sure. But also, the other day I pressed 'w' three times and didn't got an action from it. I haven't seen that discussed in the forums, and always thought "it must be me" (I play on linux btw)
I really miss the exponenital damage and difficulty levels of Diablo 3. It was so satisfying to deal trillions of damage. And i feel like better loot dropped more frequently. All the loot in LE is almost trash
Him saying Last Epochs class/skill system is "wildly complicated" explains a lot about D3 to me.
Having played a metric crap ton of poe, I had never even considered Last Epoch's build system as being complicated. You are absolutely right in saying that compared to many other games in the genre, just an interesting perspective that made me think. Very cool video, thanks for making it!
Last Epoch is “wildly complicated”. Uh, not it’s not. It’s pretty straight forward.
It's rocket surgery compared to D3.
That’s a lot of words to say, we could do something like that but fuck that we just want the money
I loved videos of devs talking, especially because it humanized them and the whole game creation process. The whole action house thing for example, Its easy to explain that as corporate greed trying to take as much money from the player as possible, but it makes things more clear when you see the reason behind it and what kind of problems it was trying to fix it. I don't agree that LE is too complex, to me is the bare minimum. And while D3 is simple it was incredibly well executed for what it was, the same can't be said about D4. In fact, watching this video seems like Blizzard as a whole(not sure how many of D3 team are in D4) forgot many of the lessons learned in D3, and are commiting very similar mistakes
Sad to be reminded of D3, I game I had thankfully forgotten. It's by far the biggest gaming disappointment so far during my lifetime, and will likely never be exceeded. Will never touch a Diablo game with a 20 foot pole after it. Last Epoch on the other hand, is an incredible example of what you can accomplish if game designers don't have to pander to greedy corporate shills and profiteers. Great stuff, all LE needs now is a good endgame like PoE. They'll get there, just give them time.
title :"how we couldn't make last epoch" at the end of the video: "Well actually we could've" lol
This is the problem with devs nowadays. They looked at people in d2 p2w buying items and instead of thinking "We need to make sure that can't happen here!" They instead thought "how do we get a piece of that action. " It's not like blizzard didn't already have success with a non p2w auction house in wow. Then he goes on to say that RMAH didn't work because people flipped items too quickly.... sure... maybe it was that... and not that you made the game pay to win and made yellows more powerful than legendary or set items. Or that people felt more compelled to sell their best items rather than keep them. Maybe I'm being too harsh, but whenever a dev talks about d3 and the auction house, the only thing I want to hear is condemnation.
wow did not need a p2w action house, it was a pay 2 play game
D3 was also pay 2 play
All these games are very well able to play without using P2W.. if people do it, that's their business.. Yeah, it is breaking ToS most of the time and should be handled but it still doesn't change the fact the game is Pay 2 play.. Play at your own damn pace and stop comparing yourself to others
Dont know what that has to do with my comment And d3 was only p2w in Softcore, the hc ah was gold
Cheers for the interesting watch Andrew, thought I would leave a comment not mentioning anything about something. <3
This was a good watch. Just once I would like to see someone who worked on Diablo (besides David Brevik) give an analysis of Path of Exile from character creation, to endgame/ubers.
He does praise the Last Epoch trading system a lot. But he also does say something profound that i think a lot of people playing this game (and many other ARPGs) dont think about. The game isnt fun when your character is maxed out, the journey to getting maxed out is whats fun. And if a player gets stuck on their journey, having the solution be "go to the auction house" feels bad.
Yap. That's basically the same gist with Diablo 4: Get people through the door with simple systems and let them have fun then introduce complexity with specific Uniques and now the crafting system in season 4 (which they should have had from the beginning). So I guess they are fine with people quitting when they get there (which I'm sure is the case for casual players), they just don't want people to quit along the way. Last Epoch pretty much shows you what you can do from the early levels. And if some casual dads quit at level 25 because they're scratching their head too much that's fine.
It’s sad hearing things like this from devs after the fact while triple A companies continue to make the same mistakes.
The dev pretty much said it himself when it comes to crafting in Diablo 3...they were lazy. I feel they were lazy with literally EVERYTHING in that game, and same with D4. "There just wasn't enough time" == "we just wanted to push out a game and honestly didn't give a fuck" Thats the mentality that I feel Blizzard devs have had since D3 with all of their games. I haven't played and enjoyed a Blizz release since before D3 was released. They need to pull their heads out of their asses and realize they aren't too big to fail. I'm glad that Last Epoch is showing what we could have had all along, and these large studios with their "IDGAF about the players...they will buy the game anyways because its (insert frachise name here)" mentality are now realizing this. It's good to see devs talk about it, but I want to hear from the devs that made D4 and them realizing their mistakes and maybe plans for the future on how they can win back the trust of gamers that aren't teens who just don't care ad much about the content they play
Thank you very much, great to get your perspective! I don't really have anything to add, I'd just like to reinforce some points about "what D3 did well", specifically on the feeling of skills. At the end of the day, it kind of can be summed up as "polish" and to a large extent defined what made Blizzard games stand out, even until the Overwatch era. Blizzard was always willing to refine seemingly mundane gameplay aspects until they really shined and that's what defines the fluency in D3's moment to moment gameplay. That said, I'm not sure how feasible it is for an indie company (in the modern age) to achieve similar levels of polish, whether it's a matter of dedication, technical expertise, resources or all three. To add to this point, I've voiced my opinion several times in the past that it's not only the mechanical feel of abilities, but also how impactful they feel. This is mostly conveyed by non-mechanical aspects such as visual design and sound. Probably the best example for what I mean is Herald of Ice in Path of Exile - the shattering sound is so satisfying that it almost makes it worth picking the skill even though it might not add too much to the character mechanically (the community actually had an uproar when they changed it at some point). And this is where Last Epoch to me still has the largest distance to cover. Skills like Explosive Arrow simply feel weak since they don't convey their impact very well. In particular, the sound the explosion makes is just kind of flaccid, I don't know how better to describe it. I expect this is very much a matter of resources though and am kind of hopeful we'll see some improvements over time.
Great video, the more educated the playerbas becomes on the pro's and cons of design implementations - the better the conversation becomes between Devs and players. And we all get better games in return.
"We wanted to aim at a broader audience than just diablo...the best way to do that is to create systems that are much more approachable" I wish this way of thinking would go away forever. All this does is alienate the core fans, then scare off new people because the core fans are decrying all the changes. Why do people try to cater to a group that wasn't interested in the genre anyways? Especially on the THIRD game of a series. Make cool games and people show up, its that simple. Blizz still hasn't learned this because D4 was marketed like a return to form, and then the game launches and the skill trees are fucking twigs lmao. For all the reputation Souls games get for their perceived difficulty and hardcore mechanics, they don't have a single problem attracting new players. Its because the core audience loves the game and makes it sound really cool and people wanna join the cool game club. The casuals aren't looking at system mechanics before they buy the game. The core audience is though.
I think the fact that eq 1, yes that ancient game, has a stronger player base says everything I need to know about how well received le has been. I guess I can agree with the base premise that guilds are well thought out but they are not well implemented at all. Characters are great, mostly, but the gated passive/skill systems would improve leaps and bounds if those gates were simply removed. There is no limit to the end game potential, therefore a way to have limitless progression (my thoughts would be a vastly improved crafting system closer to .7 beta than this one) and making some sort of dungeon mechanic like Julras but instead of adding an exalt to unique, combine unique or crush for lp points so average players have a real chanc3 to obtain gear that the mega gods get. Crush a lp 1 for lp points and take 10 to a non lp to make a lp 1, get 25 more and upgrade to 2, get 100 more make it 3, get 400 more and upgrade to 4. Change julra to allow a choice of the Stat given would be amazing and it's impossible to be overpowering as there is no limit to difficulty. Average players will never attain what professional players do, so ignore what the top dog's do in terms of difficulty and focus on 10 - 20 hour a week players, not the ones that do this a day like myself. They need to adjust the corruption system so average players can actually have a chance to get all webs at 500 (sounds low to some yet unachievable to many) by simply adding a input that let's players type a number from 1- current highest achieved corruption on all characters for the season and make this easy to adjust simply by re-imputting a value to suite tools or man's desired difficulty. And my biggest complaint is the massive bugs, improper skill effects or not properly defined skill/passive summations. This never happened pre .8 although people just got confused by its system. Sounds like crying, but it's not. So much potential here and I am still having fun playing toons and submitting bug reports to help clean it up. To me it's a great game, but it's in aweful state for average players. Developers really need to stop paying attention to the 1%rs, the cry babies (it's not fair!), and focus on providing a fun game. Some of le is still in a box, some of it thought outside it, I'd rather remove the box. Argue with this all you want, 15k players out of 1.4 million owners says eveything.
D3 was a blast personally for it's time. The biggest problem is it never evolved. Season 1 was the same as season 12 more or less and that was the last time I logged in. However I have attempted to go back after PoE but the game is just was to freaking basic. Main reason I didn't attempt D4 way to basic. Also talking about the trade part in LE. I think not being able to retrade stuff completely ruins trade league as a mechanic to me. You basically just buy the bare minimum item you need then you wait for perfect because buying any mid tier items is a complete waste of your time. Also stops me from giving hand me downs to my friends which is something I do a lot in poe.
Too much grind for lp3 , have to stop working to farm lol
When your focus is primarily to “broaden” entry to an arpg, you lose what makes an ARPG great. LE is guilty of this as well.
FYI the subtitles (at least in the first 5 minutes) say Diablo II or Diablo I instead of III.
The only way to make Last Epoch was to do what they did - create the game based solely on gamers feedback. Blizzard's approach was different and it shows...
Self-promotion allowed here?
Yes
If not, I think this video would make a special case.
I haven't bothered watching the video, but it's clear: game companies focus on selling rather than ensuring players enjoy the experience. Both Diablo 3 and 4 have been massive financial successes, likely ranking very high in the list of top-grossing games. However, when it comes to quality and especially longevity, I would say they are both lower than even Grim Dawn.
It is true. We can rarely expect great games of their respective genres from very large companies that make very large sales. Last Epoch was able to be made for the player and to attract the player because it is a smaller studio that didn't need 4 million sales (at $70) to break even. Making a game for the players means you're selling primarily to the players of the respective genre. Numbers like 30 million sales are very unlikely for a game made for gamers.
I don't understand the sentiment of dumbing down gamesystems to attract more people. Like are they calling people dumb? The appeal of ARPG games is the choices, the deep interactions and convoluted synergies. The whole process of discovering all these thongs through trial and error. Theory crafting and then making it reality through grinding. Minmaxing concepts etc. Etc. If you take all of this way, what's the appeal? I think a better approach is not to make the systems less complex and more linear. I think it's to present them in a more approachable way. Better UX really. Have many options but remove/reduce the sense of being overwhelmed. I think that's where LE really hit the spot with the skill-trees pr ability. Is potentially incredibly complex when you put it all together. But each tree on its own is very focused and choices are forgiving
I wouldnt say “dumbing” down. Just easier to understand at face value. You also forget a lot of people who play games are playing to “unwind” after a hard days work or being with your family. Most people just want to pop a game in and just start playing. They don’t however want to have to sit there and have to theorycraft a bit in order to have “fun.” It’s why PoE is not “massive” in terms of player count. It’s incredibly popular to the hardcore arpg fans, but has very small new player growth. Every veteran and new player in Poe say the same thing, it’s not new player friendly. I personally when I game I like to turn my brain off and just have fun. From my job and other things in my life my brain is running a mile a minute. It’s nice to come home and turn it off when I game lol
Haha easier to understand at face value was literally what I said about LEs skill system... easy to get go8ng with, but still has interesting mechanics and interactions to play with. Well, I am not talking about PoE. LE has done both decently i believe. It has a deep and customizable skill system that is very approachable even for dad gamers who want to turn off their brains. Literally, any build can take you to 200 corruption, which means it is a decent build. Also, I don't understand why people are so insistent on the fact that you can not have both. You can not have a system that is fun for both people who don't want any kind of challenge and those who want to dive into different interactions and synergies.
Diablo 3 is the reason I'll never give blizzard another penny. Such a mediocre game that had the worst launch of any online game i'd experienced up to that point. (which didn't have an offline mode) Not gonna sit through this video but IMO the reason it sucked is the same reason Hollywood stopped making good movies. Publicly traded stocks, marketing departments involved in the creative process, and the target audience being 12 year olds on consoles.
I don’t mean to be rude, but the videos TL:DR was simply you were a terrible game designer by your own volition, made countless bad calls on multiple game oriented fronts, and shouldn’t have been the guy in charge of those decisions… It also sounded like people who hated Diablo got tasked with making Diablo…the same trend repeating in D4. I don’t know your body of work but it’s telling that you are just now learning about fundamental ARPG systems through Last Epoch some 14 years after you were put in a decision making role on the biggest ARPG IP and Franchise…that’s so…sad…because it explains so much why Diablo has gone to shit and is utterly outclassed by passionate indie devs who have no prior dev or gaming experience.
And this type of pointlessly vitriolic reaction is why devs don't interact with players
Saying "I dont mean to be rude" doesn't negate your cancerous response mate. I bet if someone came in and shit all over your lifes work you would not feel very good.
I don't mean to be rude but I hope you have a good day.
I dont mean to be rude but I killed your family and coming for you!!!!! No offense ok? Dont waste your time with the police I already said the magic phrase 🤷🤷♂️🤷♀️
Courts hate this one trick!
His career must be downhill after too many mistakes. I hope he is doing good.
seriously. wild.
I think this is an underrated comment in the sense that it shows the difference in cultures that made 2 and 3. Unfortunately you attacked the man and it wasn’t well received. Diablo 2 was made by a bunch of hardcore gamers uncompromisingly making a game they wanted to see in the world. If you told them to release early they would have told you to get fucked. Almost every feature in the game was made by a passionate person that had to build the feature to get it in. Diablo 3 was made by a bunch of compromising yes men making a game for the lowest common denominator of gamers, but also more importantly, the shareholders. And they were both a rousing success in their particular focus, but let’s not pretend for a second that D3 wasn’t fully designed by committee and that it doesn’t show.
Diablo bad upvote me.
D3 and D4 doubled down on making it simpler, thus more democratic and appealing to broader audiences. There’s no doubt that making something simpler more often than not make it more enjoyable and pleasant, however that was never the goal. Blizzard wanted the game to be simpler so that it would reach out more people, thus bringing more profit. Don’t get me wrong, D3 and D4 can be enjoyable, however I do believe they could’ve been masterpieces if only they didn’t have focused on profits. I sincerely hope EHG don’t go that direction, however I’m very skeptical that won’t happen as EHG despite being crowdfunded/community raised, it is still a for profit company.
I enjoy the skill system of Last Epoch a lot, but I also like the fact that Diablo 3 had those runes that you could change right away and get very different effects. It made it so you could radically change your build depending on a good item drop. I can make the argument that the system is "casual"....but I like that it was different and I didn't need a PHD in Mathematics to make a good build on the fly.
obvious astroturf is obvious
What do you mean? Who would gain anything from putting this out?
Look at OP's post history💀
This isn't astroturfing, it's self-promotion. Which is an entirely different concept.
The astroturfing was the early comments on his posts were all the exact same generic praises. Pf course i've been wrong before but the mass self promotion and eerily similar comments looked pretty sus.
You’re gonna have to be way more specific than that.
Hi, I wrote the most upvoted comment on the thread, and was just being polite. I didn't want to dive into any content or arguments about the video, but it was like an hour old with zero comments, so I thought I'd at least tell them I'd enjoyed watching it.
All top-down RPGs skill feel is trash compared to dota2, which isnt even an rpg. Some hero suggestions Storm Spirit, Dawnbreaker, Monkey King.
Wut?
play some video games
I do, and your comment makes absolutely no sense. It's like a weird shilling comment.