Diablo III

Diablo IV Campaign Finished

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Good Morning Friends! Last night I stayed up a bit later than normal because I was winding down the last few bits of the Diablo IV campaign. I started Thursday evening when the game launched into early access, played quite a bit Friday, Saturday, and Sunday ultimately wrapping up around 11 pm last night. I would love to be able to tell you how many hours I played, but the absence of a /played command or any other sort of player stats prevents me from doing this. That is a microcosm for Diablo 4 as a whole… some aspects of the game are deeply thought out and others seem curiously missing… like the seeming purposeful decision not to have a map overlay. I think this game is going to be a lot of different experiences for a lot of different types of players. If you are the type of player that traditionally expects to play through the campaign of a Diablo game and then bounce… this might be the best Diablo you have ever experienced. If you are more of a Diablo/ARPG hobbyist you will be presented with a cavalcade of choices that might lead you to believe that this game was not designed with you in mind.

I think ultimately for me, Diablo IV is a mixed bag of both brilliance and abject stupidity. For me, a Diablo game is a power fantasy about getting strong, leveling up, and then laying waste to the hordes of hell. In order for that to work, the moment-to-moment combat has to feel amazing and allow you to indulge in the power fantasy of firing off big attacks regularly in order to make the entire screen explode. Combat vacillates between feeling completely brilliant… and feeling plodding and painful and this is largely dependent upon if your abilities are off cooldown and if you have the resources to spend them. Given that the game has not yet officially launched and we already have a significant round of nerfs to slow down that experience… I feel like the game Blizzard had in mind is not the game I wanted to play. We will see if this changes as I begin the gear for the endgame, but the campaign while better than at any stage during testing… was still largely a frustrating mess.

As I have said before I followed a guide for this play through because ultimately I was wanting to give Diablo IV the best possible chance to grab me. Of all of the “spenders” I had played with during testing, the one that I found I enjoyed the most was Upheaval which is a big frontal cone attack. This involves a bit of kiting around but largely that style of gameplay does not bother me. So I ended up following the Upheaval Barbarian Leveling Guide from Maxroll, and for the most part, I think it did as good of a job as possible for easing my leveling experience. At this point, I could respec and try something else and really the cost of just over 94k gold to refund 52 talent points… seems fine given that I am sitting at 1.1 million gold while spending most of the game salvaging everything. I purposefully stayed away from Whirlwind because it clearly seemed bugged… and it was one of the abilities that ate the hardest nerf in the pre-launch patch proving that to be a wise thing to stay away from it.

My path through the game was a bit uneven. For the first three acts of Diablo IV, I spent my time plodding along and completing almost all of the side quests. Then as I reached the end of Act III… I decided that I really wanted a mount which is awarded to you at the beginning of Act IV. From that point forward I pretty much rushed through the game only focusing on the main story arc, because the leveling process had overstayed its welcome. Admittedly this is coming from someone who is used to doing the entire Diablo III leveling process in about 2 hours and the entire Path of Exile leveling process in about 5 hours. The endgame is the beginning of the game to me, and I figured there was plenty of time to start picking away at the rest of the side quests after having completed the story. Truth is… finishing all the sidequests is essentially mandatory for an endgame build as there are ten talent points hidden in the renown system that you are going to need.

As far as the story goes… this is without a doubt the best Diablo story to date and quite possibly the best ARPG story as well. That is admittedly not saying a lot given that most ARPGs only have just enough story to keep the wheels from falling off in transit. Would I consider this one of the best story games when judged against all of the great story games I have played? No… absolutely not. It is a serviceable story, but it is also a Blizzard story, and that comes with all of the baggage attached to that statement. It is a story about big forces moving against the player and plot twists that you can see miles away. However, it is still a fun epic romp through some really large set pieces that serve as an excuse to set up some big fun battles. The only real complaint that I have is that much of the denouement of each conflict plays out in the form of a cutscene that you watch through Blood-O-Vision 3000… as you touch Lilith’s Pedals. Diablo has always been known for its cool cutscenes and this is no different, but they also serve as the key method in which the larger plot moves forward which may or may not be your personal taste.

Most of the boss encounters are legitimately good. There is enough room to scale them up in order to create something akin to the Uber bosses from Path of Exile. On lower difficulties, they serve to feel just challenging enough to not fall over immediately as the bosses in Diablo III did. There are a few fights that felt needlessly tanky… but I chock that up to the general lack of balance, the game seems to have. I feel like Diablo IV is a case in point of why you don’t get rid of Q&A employees as Activision Blizzard has had a habit of doing over the last half dozen years. I think Diablo IV could be a great game given enough time and focus to balance the game into something that actually feels fun all of the time… rather than feeling fun under exactly the right conditions.

I’ve now officially entered the endgame of Diablo IV, but can’t really talk much about it yet. I unlocked the Tree of Whispers which gives you access to the Whispers of the Dead system. From what I understand a zone is marked by the tree and you are sent there to reclaim “the debt that is owed” I won’t go into that in any more detail as it could provide some spoilers. Essentially it is a bounty system that involves you going and doing specific activities in a given zone in order to collect Grim Favors. Grim Favors are then turned in for rewards from the tree that I believe give you access to legendaries and nightmare dungeon glyphs. Nightmare Dungeons are effectively mythic plus from World of Warcraft and the glyph is somewhat like a map in Path of Exile and will set the affixes being applied to the dungeon. I legitimately have only played long enough after the campaign to unlock the dialog box explaining this system and then took a screenshot of the area of the map it was being applied to this morning. I am sure later this week I will have a more cogent set of thoughts about this system.

If you want bonus points… you can listen to me ramble for twenty minutes about the live service dystopia we find ourselves in, and some of my fears about what a battle pass system will mean for this game. Of note… this was recorded before I started focus firing the campaign and doesn’t really reflect much on the game itself other than my general concerns. There are times I feel like recording one of these videos and I did so yesterday morning. Basically, my thesis is that a given player only has time to play one live service game at a time, and as a result, EVERY live service game is ultimately competing with every other one.

I think ultimately my stance is the same as it has been for a while. I think Diablo IV is a great game for the players who will play through the campaign once, and then move on with their lives… maybe to revisit much much later but won’t be mainlining the game. Was it the game I had hoped it would be? No… not in the least. Does that make it any less of a good game? No not really. I think Diablo IV is a very solid game that is just fun enough to get you past some of the major frustrations. I think the first map sucks ass and they would have been far better starting the player in the second map… Scosglen. Scosglen feels and more importantly, SOUNDS like a Diablo game. Diablo is a game about killing demons to jangly chords… and Diablo music finally starts to kick in during Act II.

If I had any bit of advice for new players approaching this game… it would be to do NOTHING but yellow quests aka the main questline… until you reach the beginning of Act IV and complete the quest “Donan’s Favor” and then from that point forward you can return to screwing around and doing side quests at your leisure. Mounts make a massive difference in improving the quality of life of this game and in truth Blizzard fashion… you are robbed of that experience until you are almost done with the campaign. Knowing what I know now… I would essentially rush to the point of having a mount and then return to a leisurely leveling pace. However for all characters from this point forward… I probably won’t actually do the campaign given that unlocking the mount once unlocks it for all of your characters.

I know that I am a very specific edge case when it comes to Diablo players. I liked Diablo III and felt like it got a lot of things right. Diablo IV feels like an overcorrection in attempting to erase the legacy of Diablo III from memory… while at the same time reconning some of the story elements to essentially make that game more or less not exist. As a result, Diablo IV is a direct sequel to Diablo II, in both stories… and the plodding feel of combat. If you loved Diablo II… and have played it recently and still can affirm that it is your ideal Diablo game… then Diablo IV is probably going to be a gift from the heavens planted at your feet. If you liked Diablo III… this game is going to feel like an uncoordinated mess at times. If you are a big fan of Path of Exile… this is going to feel like a bit of a slog compared to how relatively fast moving through that game can feel. Still, I don’t think Diablo IV is a bad game… and pending Blizzard gives the game some TLC over the next few years it might even become a great game.

I figure I will spend some time exploring the end game, but also am more than likely to happily jump on the next game that comes along which catches my attention. This is probably blasphemy… but I think Diablo Immortal was actually a more mechanically enjoyable game than Diablo IV. Too bad they chose evil and went full-on into microtransaction hell with that one because it is more the direct sequel to Diablo III that I really wanted.

My ARPG Hours Played

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Good Morning Friends! I was not entirely certain I would be doing a blog post this morning because technically this is the beginning of my “weekend”. However last night I embarked upon some madness and this morning I am sharing the fruits of it. I think I’ve been a little dishonest with myself when it comes to the extent to which Path of Exile has become my new gaming “main squeeze” over the last two years. This is part of a larger evolution that I did understand considerably better, but I was not fully aware of the sheer extent to which I have been choosing to play Path of Exile over other games. For the last decade, I have been on this transition from playing MMORPGs as my primary gaming vehicle to ARPGs in part because ARPGs feel much better to play solo.

Playing MMORPGs like I often do… completely alone… with only very rare human interaction… feels like I am misunderstanding the purpose of that genre. There are just so many activities that I can’t realistically participate in without also building the social infrastructure required and committing to the regular play schedule required for them. Playing a Diablo-style Action RPG however… is a largely solo endeavor that occasionally benefits from friends, but features a rich series of activities that you can engage with entirely on your own. Part of why I have come to love Guild Wars 2 so much is that it allows me to FEEL like I am part of a larger group experience, without actually having to do any of the social maintenance required to truly be part of a group. In the ARPG genre, however… solo is the norm and as a result, most of the mechanics are designed to be completed without the need of any other players. In an era of progressively forcing you more and more into group gameplay… the humble ARPG stands as somewhat of a beacon in the storm.

Now we scan forward to yesterday where on Gamepad.club I was commenting about being somewhat gobsmacked that a month into the Crucible league and I have already found seven Tabula Rasas. For those who are uninitiated in the nonsense that is Path of Exile, the Tabula Rasa is essentially the ultimate starter item. It gives you access to six sockets of any color at level 1, and this is really the basis of most “second characters” because it allows you to stack powerful support gems on an ability long before you can realistically get that many sockets on a single item. During this league, I have found six Corrupted Tabulas (+2 Minion Gems, +2 AOE Gems, and +2 Aura Gems) and four vanilla ones. Now one of these corrupted Tabulas came from the Vanity Divination card set, and two of the normal ones came Humility set. The weird thing about it however is that I have spent ZERO hours purposefully farming for one like I did last league in Blood Aqueducts.

To this entire exchange, my friend Carth innocently commented that he could not imagine how much time I’ve put in this league to see that many. Now I know that number is large because when Steam tried to shame me into leaving a review for the game, it shows that I have now played over 1100 hours in total. I’ve honestly contemplated giving the game a review, but quite honestly… how does one leave a review for a game as complicated as Path of Exile? Over 1100 hours into the game, I still feel very much like a “new” player. There are so many aspects of the game that I legitimately have no understanding of yet. Knowing that Steam was tracking my time played, I assumed that Grinding Gear Games was as well… which led me down the path of the /played command. If you have followed this blog for any length of time you will know that I am an aficionado of the spreadsheet, so I decided to try and get some better data on HOW my time was played.

So unfortunately last league I decided to delete all of my characters that pre-date the Sentinel league, in part because none of them made any sense and were also using names I might want to recycle. So I can only really go back as far as May of 2022 but you can see total hours spent in each of the four most recent Path of Exile leagues. Forbidden Sanctum was the league in which the game really made sense to me, and I started to fully understand a lot of the key mechanics of how to make a character “feel good” to play. It was also the league in which I discovered how much I loved Delve. My main of that league represents 276 of those 647 hours… with likely MOST of that being time in Delve. With the latest Crucible League, I have already eclipsed the time spent playing both Sentinel and Kalandra combined. Since we are only one month into the league and I have already almost reached the halfway point of time spent in Sanctum… I might even eclipse that league as well.

This led me down another rabbit hole of being curious about how Path of Exile stacks up against other ARPGs that I have played. As far as I am aware there is no really good way to get hours spent playing early pre-steam ARPGs. For example, a lot of my time spent playing TorchLight II was not through Steam, and I repurchased that game at some point just to make it easier to play. Not included are Diablo and Diablo II, because while those hours probably exist somewhere in the bowels of battle.net I am not entirely sure how to retrieve them. Essentially what I have learned is that I have now played more Path of Exile than literally any other ARPG I have played… and by a decent margin. Last Epoch is still gaining time played but we are not even close to the order of magnitude.

The one that surprised me heavily was Diablo III, which has roughly a decade-long headstart on Path of Exile when it comes to my interacting with it. I’ve played a lot of Diablo III, but the challenge comes from HOW I actually play it. A Diablo III Season essentially can be compressed within a weekend at this point, and by Monday morning if I am taking the season seriously I have completed all of the accomplishments and walked away with my seasonal “Kitch” and then rarely spend much time after said season playing at all. Whereas with Path of Exile, there are just more sliders and each and every step in the journey requires more effort to achieve. After a week I had what felt like a reasonable “starter” character and then spent most of the first month refining that character and progressing through maps and ultimately getting into a comfortable place where I could farm delve.

I’ve now branched out heavily into additional characters, but each of them requires way more effort from me than gearing out a second character in Diablo III. Additionally, if I have played a Multishot Demon Hunter once, I’ve played every Multishot Demon Hunter. There is no real nuance to individual character building because every Multishot Demon Hunter is going to look essentially the same because there are only so many sliders you have access to in order to differentiate your character. While I played a Righteous Fire Juggernaut last league and I am playing one again this league… in both cases enough fundamental changes took place between the leagues that they both look significantly different in both gearing and how they mechanically feel. I played around with a Toxic Rain character last league, but the one this league just works better because I now understand so much more about that style of character. Path of Exile is just more of a “living game” whereas Diablo III has largely felt like it was in maintenance mode for the last half dozen years.

I think at some point down the line Last Epoch is going to feel just as good to me as Path of Exile does today. It definitely has a lower barrier of entry, but features some of the same deeply nuanced character-building. Additionally while more deterministic, the gear grind feels way less templated than it does in Diablo III, where in that game I need these eight items to make my build work and once I have collected them I am essentially “done”. Diablo III is a solved problem and while I still enjoy playing it, my periods of interacting with it have become significantly shorter each season as I am now better at solving those problems. Of note, I’ve also gotten significantly faster at solving problems in Path of Exile, but once solved… there is just a wider variety of interesting things to engage in. My hope is that Last Epoch will build out some of those extremely interesting things to engage in as well because for the moment the Monolith feels somewhat stale.

This morning’s post was an interesting exercise because while I already knew I played an excessive amount of ARPGs… I did not necessarily understand the full extent. Prior to this morning’s post I would have told you that I had played “way more” hours of Diablo III than I have of Path of Exile as well. Sometimes numbers are interesting and deeply satisfying to investigate. Does anyone actually care about this sort of post? Very likely not. However yall are stuck following my whims if you are a regular reader, so you should probably be used to it by now.

More of the Same

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Good Morning Friends! Yesterday the Diablo IV PR team dropped a video previewing the “endgame” activities that you will participate in after you hit the level cap. I had heard that it was getting more downvotes than likes, and as a result, I thought I might talk about my own feelings regarding what I saw in the video. I feel like it is important to cover some ground before I do so. I am a huge fan of ARPGs and if you sift through the last decade and a half of this blog you will see evidence of this scattered throughout its pages. Second I’ve played both very limited closed and open testing periods for Diablo IV but can only really reflect my thoughts on the open testing. It isn’t like the closed testing really gave me information that I did not gain through the open weekends, however. I’ve also already largely decided that Diablo IV is not a game being designed for me and the types of gameplay that I enjoy in ARPGs. You can read some of my comments on my experiences here, but I wanted to get this out of the way to explain that I am going to try and be balanced but I have my specific biases as does everyone talking about this game.

Let’s talk about what was outlined in the video while staring at my Beefcake Murder Hobo Barbarian from Open Beta. Essentially the video outlines a number of activities that will exist and will at least make up the early “endgame”. It also indicates that releases will be made on a semi-regular basis that will add additional “content” but we are uncertain exactly what any of that release schedule will entail. Diablo Immortal “launched” on July 7th of 2022 and has released a total of 11 “seasons” worth of content some with major changes and some with minor tweaks for an update roughly every 24 days. Diablo III has had a rather anemic release schedule going for long periods of time with no updates other than the rolling new season every 3-4 months… most of which only entail the release of a new cosmetic chase item. I expect that Diablo IV is going to land somewhere between these two with not nearly the frenetic schedule of a mobile game, but at least something dropping each quarter. How significant each drop is going to have not been explained yet. I also expect expansions that add the missing classes to the game like Crusader and potentially Witch Doctor.

I am going to start by Cataloging the Endgame Activities outlined in the video:

  • Four World Tiers
    • Open World
    • Events
    • World Bosses
    • Dungeons and Strongholds
  • Nightmare Dungeons
    • Requires consumable “Sigil” to unlock
  • Helltide Rifts (this one I am uncertain about)
  • Bounty Board in the form of an Angry Tree
  • PVP Areas

World Tiers

The video introduces the concept of World Tiers, and in the Open Beta, we immediately had access to two of these… Adventurer and Veteran. After completing the campaign moving to Nightmare sounds like it is gated by what they referred to as a “Capstone Dungeon”. Upon beating that dungeon you can set your world to the next difficulty which I would assume involves some grinding again and unlocking the next capstone dungeon and progressing forward. There is no clear indicator if you will need to progress through the story again at Nightmare difficulty, or if this just opens up the next Capstone Dungeon immediately. In Diablo III, the initial endgame was effectively just repeating the story over and over at different difficulties so I would hope that they do not make this critical mistake again.

It kinda feels bad that the different difficulties don’t just open up on their own. For example, in Diablo III the difficult tiers are level gated, and if you are absolutely Feeling your Wheaties you can run the entire initial campaign on Torment 1 if you so choose. This was absolutely a key mechanic before helping your friends catch up quickly to the endgame levels but zooming them through content and catchup experience is likely not going to be a thing in Diablo IV based on the limited testing I did with friends during the beta. Essentially higher world tiers feel like more of the same… same open-world areas, same events that reoccur on a schedule, and same world bosses.

It is really the World Bosses that concern me the most when it comes to Higher World Tiers. Essentially this template of keeping moving forward in World Tier is something that we experienced with Diablo Immortal. There if you fell behind the average level of your server, you simply did not have groups to do anything with. I simply could not get groups for the bosses at lower World Tiers, after taking a break from the game and seeing the majority of the server zoom ahead of me. This is probably going to be something that is rapidly a problem with this type of world design for Diablo IV unless all of the world tiers are blended together at the same time.

Nightmare Dungeons

So based on the video, there are apparently “over” 120 dungeons in the game. Now I have talked about them before and how similar they felt… with it feeling a bit like the World of Warcraft cave problem of every single cave in the game having the same layout. That aside… there is apparently the chance of having a “sigil” drop that allows you to turn a dungeon into a “Nightmare Dungeon”. Doing so adds “affixes” to the dungeon that modifies the experience. If you have played World of Warcraft since the Legion expansion, you will know this system as Mythic Dungeons. Now it does not necessarily sound like keys upgrade in this system, but using a key to unlock a game mode that adds challenging modifiers to the dungeon… is basically the same thing as Mythic. This does nothing to disprove my hypothesis that Diablo IV is an MMORPG, but whatever people generally enjoy Mythic as a game mode.

It does concern me a bit because this absolutely sounds like a “bring your own group” type experience. I am hoping that the game offers some form of matchmaking other than just spamming chat and looking for a group.

Helltide Rifts

So this one I am completely uncertain about as to if it is an actual game mode or not. During the section talking about dungeons, Joseph Piepiora specifically calls out one of his favorite modifiers called Helltide Rifts. So that would lead me to believe that this is just a subsection of Nightmare Dungeons. However on Reddit folks are specifically listing this as a game mode, and further on in the video, there is footage making it seem like this is taking place in Open World areas as well. So I am utterly confused by this, but it sounds like Rifts shown above open up, and harder mobs that don’t necessarily exist normally in an area spawn forth. So other than that I legitimately have no clue what is going on here.

It does not strike me as anything close to the usage of the word “Rifts” from Diablo III, where they were instanced content that you ran through either on a timer or until you collected a specific number of orbs. The Open World footage reminded me a bit of the raid rifts from the game Rifts, so again I am clear as mud on what this even is… or if it is just a subsection of Nightmare dungeons. Maybe the footage I think looks like Open World is just dungeons that have a more open layout. Diablo Immortal definitely had dungeon areas that looked more like just an Open World map, so maybe Diablo IV does as well.

Bounty Boards / Bounty Tree

Apparently, there is a tree that is angry with us, and it wants us to do bounties for it to make it less mad at us. I mean that is what I got from the words that were said in the video. Mechanically what I understood it as… is that there is a tree somewhere in the world that serves as the new bounty board. In Diablo Immortal conveniently located in the town was a board… and you could accept mini-quests to kill some stuff, collect some monster giblets… or do something similarly menial. Doing bounties looks like it allows folks to purchase gear. I mean I am fine with bounties as a concept, and honestly, I enjoy doing them. They were probably part of Diablo Immortal that I enjoyed the most. However, generally speaking, these are less an objective in themselves and more something that you do while you are doing other objectives. I can’t really get excited very much about this feature.

PVP Areas

We knew there would be PVP in the game, but I have to tell you right now… this is very much not a game mode for me. I will never participate in it, because I don’t really do PVP in general. I do not care about flopping my virtual schlong on the table and measuring it against other players. I am not terribly competitive in nature, and the main reason why I enjoy WvW in Guild Wars 2, is that traditionally… there is a lot of killing of NPCs and capturing of objectives and very little actual fighting. From the sounds of what was described in the video… it seems like Diablo IV pvp is something akin to the Dark Zone from The Division. This has more collectively become known as “extraction mode” where you go into a dangerous area and are trying to get back out with a resource of some sort. In this case, it is some sort f shard that you need to purify inside the danger zone, and while doing that you are flagged on the map to all players in the vicinity so they can come to kill you and take your stuff.

Again… this is not a game mode I am ever going to engage in. They specifically call out spending these shards to buy cosmetics. I kinda hate when cosmetic appearances are locked behind specific systems that I have no interest in engaging with… but I lived with that in WoW with the cool PVP armor and mounts and I guess I can live with it in the Diablo MMORPG as well.

More of the Same

I’ve already told you my biases, but there is part of me that had held out hope that the endgame was going to blow me away. The leveling game in Path of Exile for example feels NOTHING like the variety and fun of the endgame. However, what it sounds like, at least based on this PR video… is the Diablo IV endgame is more of the same type of content that you have already experienced to that point. Since I was not really feeling the experience of playing Diablo the MMORPG, then I don’t think it is going to drastically change when I hit the level cap. I’m a bit disappointed and maybe this is going to be another situation like Diablo III and we have to wait until the expansion comes through before the game actually gets good.

Don’t get me wrong. I think Diablo IV is going to sell extremely well, and there are going to be a lot of players that play through the campaign and then uninstall the game never to be seen again. I do not think they have designed a compelling endgame experience that is going to target the ARPG audience in the way that Diablo III, Path of Exile, or Last Epoch have. I think there will likely be some World of Warcraft players that eat this game up, because legitimately as I have said before it is the Diablo MMORPG. I just don’t know if there are going to be enough players sticking around after the credits roll to make the endgame feel like it is thriving.

I know that I will likely spend at least some time poking around in the game when it releases in June, but this video has done absolutely nothing to sell me on a vision for the type of gameplay experience I actually want. I didn’t even talk about the paragon board system in part because we really don’t know a ton about it. However, the footage from the video shows really boring options like what we consider “travel nodes” in Path of Exile that just reward flat stats. I still do not feel like this game is targeting me or the other players that regularly participate in seasons, ladders, and leagues. That said… I am still uncertain who the players are that are going to be sticking around and feeding Blizzard long-tailed transactional money to keep this game making money in the long term. I am glad that is not my problem to solve.

Perfecting Last Epoch

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Character Selection Screen from Last Epoch

Good Morning Friends! I freaking love Last Epoch. Back in 2018, I have to admit I did not see where this game would go but it has honestly become that happy medium between Diablo III and Path of Exile for me. As much as I love it though, there are still some features that I wish it had. This morning I am going to spitball a wishlist of features that I would love to see that I feel would turn this diamond in the rough into the perfect game. I feel like this is fair game since the group at Eleventh Hour Games seems to be constantly evolving the game to make it better. The multiplayer patch really brought Last Epoch into the pantheon of great ARPGs for me. That however is not to say that there cannot be improvements.

Guilds/Clans

With the drop of 0.90 we got the ability to group up with other people, which is really key for my long-term enjoyment of an ARPG. When this was implemented there were also some very basic social features, like the ability to add players to your friend list. This is sort of the bare minimum of required functionality, but I would love to see this expanded a bit more. I am very much a guild-minded person, and even in the largely throw-away Open Beta weekend, I created a branch of Greysky Armada in Diablo IV. Guilds are many things, but at their most simple level, they are an easier way of meeting up with your friends rather than having to trade dozens of individual account ids. Even if we got nothing more than the ability to join a guild and the ability to have a guild chat channel, I would be happy enough.

I mean ultimately that is the only functionality that we have within Diablo III, but it is important enough to me that I consider it on the “should haves” if not on the “must haves” list when approaching a long-term social ARPG. I mean I did not play Path of Exile very long without going through the process of creating a guild.

Guild Bank/Trading/Locking

Surrounding the announcement of the multiplayer patch there was a lot of discussion surrounding trade. Right now it is extremely simple and follows something akin to the rules of Diablo III. If you are with a player when an item drops, you can gift the item to another player. However, I believe with the 1.0 patch, they will be working in a brilliant compromise to the debate of no public trade or a full-on POE-style trading economy with APIs supporting it. Essentially every player will have the choice of either joining the Merchants’ Guild and eventually receiving access to full trading including a public auction house system or joining the Circle of Fortune and receiving improved drop rates but losing the ability to publicly trade items. Circle of Fortune players will be able to build up a currency with another player and then use that to gift items to them, pending they are also a member of the Circle of Fortune. Merchants’ Guild players will never have access to items dropped by folks on the Fortune side.

I would love to see this tweaked a bit to add a new classification to the item locking. I would love to have something similar to the guild bank from Path of Exile. As we work our way through a new league, we are often dropping items that look decent for folks coming up behind us. I would love for some way to have “guild locking” for lack of a better term so that if you donate an item to the guild bank, it can only be used by members of that guild. This would keep those items from ever making it to the trade economy but also increase the social aspect of the gameplay. Maybe even create a “guild currency” that you gain from spending time grouped with guild members, which you can then spend to remove items from the guild bank. Granted there would need to be some administrative level that allows folks to clean out the bank and dump unneeded items straight to gold or shattering, but I am certain Eleventh Hour Games could reach a good compromise for how all of that might work.

Adventure Mode/Bounties

The worst part about leveling a new character in both Path of Exile and Last Epoch is the fact that you need to go through the story content again. One of the systems that work brilliantly is Adventure Mode from Diablo III, and I am somewhat shocked that no other game has implemented something similar to this. Essentially in Diablo III, once you have finished the campaign one time (and I believe now it is just immediately open to everyone), you get access to adventure mode which allows you to freely move between all waypoints available in the game and choose your own path to leveling.

Given that the Last Epoch map feels pretty similar to the Diablo III one, I could see this sort of system working beautifully. Another aspect of Adventure Mode that I really enjoy is doing Bounties for Bounty Caches. I get that for many players these are not exactly the highlight of their gaming experience, and they are often much maligned by more hardcore players as being a “requirement” of the seasonal journey there. I personally like them because it gives me a clear micro objective that is broader than running a single map, but less time-consuming than completing an entire quest sequence. There are lots of generally useful resources that already drop like candy, that I could see rolling up into specific bounty caches. You could have a cache of crafting resources, a cache of idols, or even a cache of rare gear with the very limited ability to drop uniques or set pieces. More paths to the same result is always a good thing as far as I am concerned because it allows folks to vary up their gameplay.

Unstable Echoes

This idea goes somewhat hand in hand with the opening of an alternative leveling mode like Diablo III’s adventure mode. Right now you can technically start the Monolith when you reach the End of Time zone for the very first time. Whether or not you can actually do that is another question, because the Monolith system as it exists today is at a fixed level and requires you to be able to survive a level 55 map. What I would propose is something akin to the Nephalem Rift/Greater Rift system from Diablo III. The idea I had is to call them “Unstable Echoes” and effectively zone into a random echo map with random objectives and random rewards. Much like players enjoy leveling through doing Rifts in Diablo III, it would be awesome if we could just start doing Monoliths in a random system independent from the ACTUAL Monolith progression.

I mean if Eleventh Hour Games wanted to go for the gold, it would be neat if these Unstable Echoes had a sequence of objectives that ultimately led to fighting a miniboss similar to a Rift Guardian. That however isn’t necessary, and I would honestly be perfectly happy with just randomly spawning one of the existing Monolith Echoes at a level that scaled to the player. Bonus points would be if the system allowed players to choose what level of Monolith they wanted to tackle. This could even be spun into a completely unique progression system that worked kinda like Greater Rift progression so as you passed level 100, you were gaining a certain amount of corruption as well to keep making harder and more rewarding singleton Echoes.

Hideouts/Housing

Right from the start I know this request is a bit out there because player housing is an exceptionally expensive system to implement. It is one of those systems that can have some extremely solid returns when it comes to selling cosmetics, but a massive initial outlay of work to put even the most basic version in the game. That said… I love the Hideout/Guild Hideout system from Path of Exile and I would love to see something like this implemented at some point in the future in Last Epoch. I mean these really don’t serve a purpose other than allowing players to have a trophy hall of sorts and a shared communal space. This is definitely on the long-term “wouldn’t it be cool” list.

Appearance Collection/Wardrobe

I love cosmetics and wardrobe systems, and right now Last Epoch already has the most basic version stubbed out. Currently, if you have one of the pets gained through backing the game at various times during its development process, you can have them follow you around. In-game there is an Appearance tab for your character and it has slots similar to Path of Exile where you can in theory modify the visual appearance of every item you have equipped. I would assume that the idea as it stands to have a similar cosmetic shop to Path of Exile where you can buy an appearance and then wear that as a sort of visual override to what you actually have equipped.

This is a good start for certain, but what I would love to see as the final implementation is something akin to games like Guild Wars 2 where every item that drops saves a copy of that appearance to your wardrobe. Then when you click on a slot you see every appearance that has dropped along with every appearance that you have purchased. This sort of system just feels better than a cash-shop-only system, because it allows everyone to participate and also… gives folks options if nothing available through the cash-shop really interests them. Sometimes you just want to wear something that matches and don’t necessarily want to be blinged out. Cosmetic systems are great, but the systems that blend in world drops with purchased appearances are always the best ones.

Character Creator/Gender Options

Last Epoch suffers from the same problem that a lot of older ARPGs have, where when you choose your character class you are also locking in gender and a specific appearance. At this point, I am mostly numb to this construct as I have dealt with it over and over in these games. Diablo III has a slightly improved system where when you choose your class you are still locking in a specific appearance, but you get to choose between a male and female option. Mike one of the developers from Eleventh Hour Games regularly hosts a Friday live stream over on Twitch where he fields questions from the audience, and this has come up multiple times. Each time he gives essentially the same answer… that they would like to do this but they have not felt they could devote the budget to it yet.

On some level this makes sense. In development, especially when you are working on missing features… you often end up with a mindset of “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it” and right now they have a functional character system. However at some point, I would love to see them address this, and they have at least shown some modicum of interest in it as a long-range goal. When they do rework the character creation system, I would love to see them at least have some basic appearance options as well. Diablo IV did not have necessarily the most amazing character creation system, but you at least felt like you could put your own mark on what the character looks like and I would love to see them implement at least something along those lines. Not every character creator has to be something that you are going to spend literal hours on perfecting, but it would be nice to have options.

Account-Based Monolith Progression

The Monolith Timeline and Echo system feels really good. It is a fun endgame that sees your character zipping around the end of time collecting resources and fighting interesting bosses. The problem is when approaching a seasonal progression arc… you are quickly locked into making a hard choice of what character you want to play because progressing this system on multiple characters is a huge ask. I’ve been chewing away at this for weeks, and I’ve still not entered the “true” endgame of Empowered Monoliths. I’ve been interested in trying out a primalist character, but it feels like the idea of progressing another character to this point is a massive outlay of time. Sure you can get a friend to somewhat cheat your way into empowered monoliths… but even that feels super janky.

What I would love to see is something akin to the Atlas of Worlds in Path of Exile, where your progress is tied to your account and not any individual character. Alting is healthy in an ARPG, and I feel like right now… Last Epoch is not terribly alt friendly. A good number of the suggestions that I have made above are to make a variety of ways that you can interact with the game on different characters, and having account-based progression is quite possibly the most important of these. I am hoping that internally Eleventh Hour Games already realizes this is a problem and is working on its own solution.

Seasonal Expansions

Eleventh Hour Games has already announced that they do have a seasonal mechanic planned at some point called “Cycles” and that they plan on these being pretty basic resets. This is fine, and I would expect them to stay basic for a while. However, I do hope at some point the door is open to using this seasonal cadence as the introduction of entirely new game modes. While I feel like maybe the Path of Exile seasonal mechanic system is a bit much for any other game, I would love to see some new game mode added each year or so. I love Delve and Heist in Path of Exile and they wildly change the enjoyment of that game for me. Eleventh Hour Games has already had some pretty brilliant solutions to classical ARPG problems, and I would love to see the sort of game modes they can come up with to expand the base of the game. I am not saying we need the expansion every three months cadence of Path of Exile, but I would love to see something eventually.

Wrapping Up

Last Epoch is a phenomenal game, and so far has been the game I always wished for… something that kinda splits the difference between the overwhelming complexity of Path of Exile and the quick simple joy of Diablo III. That said it can always be improved and my goal of this morning was to lay out some of my ideas for things I would love to see. Do I think anyone from Eleventh Hour Games is even going to see this? No not really. I realize I very small voice from a very small corner of the internet, but I think more than anything I did this for my own benefit to get this nonsense out of my head. I am going to keep playing Last Epoch and enjoying myself, but also going to keep playing Path of Exile and other ARPGs to keep collecting “wouldn’t it be cool” ideas. I love where the ARPG genre is right now and how many different expressions of it exist, but as with MMORPGs, there are always things I would love to see from one game to another game.

Do you agree with some of my assessments? Did I completely get this all wrong? Drop me a line below and tell me your own thoughts.