Each WoW expansion increases level cap like every 2 years. It removes a sense of playing for me if I don’t buy it and I think it is a cash grab.
It makes me instantly power locked from players who bought it no matter how much I put in a character it all gets wasted just like that.
I would prefer Poe way where instead of increasing the same power cap they add new stuff to try but not forcing it and not locking me from being competitive.
Looking at how Overwatch 1 owners will be able to play on same content with Overwatch 2 actually gives good promise.
You think having to pay for new content is a cash grab?.. How old are you? If you work on something do you expect to hand it out for free as well?
You could always just go play POE since you seem to want Diablo to mimic it. I never understood the mentality of “change your thing to the other thing, because I like it more” go play the other thing then?
I wouldn’t say they need to add more levels, but more content and more powerful items are welcome to have like what LoD did.
Though I would also say that they should make it more like Diablo 2 where getting to max level is an extreme end game thing and you don’t need to be max level to do all the content in the game.
The expansion should offer some new stuff to aim for, but at the same time shouldn’t be a hard reset on the gear progression like a World of Warcraft expansion.
Plus, when an expansion does drop let people make non-expansion characters.
I believe the max level should be exactly that: The maximum level.
Expansions can bring way more content to a game than larger numbers: New prefixes and affixes, new legendary items/gems, new socketable items, new crafting plans, new zones, new dungeons… But all of it should be on par with the rest of the game. There should be a mix of everything new through all the content, not just max level.
An expansion should expand more of the game than just the numbers on damage, health and stats. Neverwinter Nights did it right with their first expansion: People without the expansion could play with those that did have it, and there was no feeling that you had to have the expansion in order to progress your character. Everything in the expansions was completely optional, but greatly enhanced your game if you did happen to have it in ways that were not power creepy.
This is an interesting thought with a great example.
But what if your player base has reached their max level? They’ve geared their character they way they like. You’ll always have a proportion of highly-motivated jobless (probably college kids) who max out games obsessively. They chew through your content. Eventually many of the others catch up and we all know Blizzard’s timelines are slow.
If you were to come up with a new expansion as you suggest, with sidegrades, and new dungeons, etc, how long do you think it would last players? Could it buy you enough time to get another expansion out?
At what point, do you need to give the player some additional power in order to keep the game interesting? I’m an altoholic, and I’ll happily make another character, but many aren’t. They’ve played through once and don’t want to be forced to do it again (leveling). The issue here is replayability. You need to give players, including those with min/maxed characters, a strong incentive to keep playing.
I think there’s a couple of ways to do it:
A new of augment (ex. the legendary gems when they were released)
New “build-defining” items (ex. sets, legendaries, etc)
New content/story for players to play through
But none of those is going to keep players content for months to 2 years.
New repeatable, difficulty-scaling end-game content
Ultra-rare stuff to farm
PVP (because if you have already “beaten the game”, you kill other players)
Competitions (ex. leaderboards for whatever)
Mutaters (changes to the game’s rule set that force players to change builds)
Regardless, you’ll need rewards for the players who do those things. And that usually means power boosts. I think it’s just an inevitability of keeping the game interesting.
There are pros and cons to both horizontal and vertical progression.
What they both have in common is that they consistently need new content to keep players engaged, whether this means new items and abilities for new builds or new areas for new challenges.
Bovie’s reply about his 2 year hunt being negated, as a presumed suggestion of horizontal progression, is something I personally see as a problem. If you’ve not played for two years, or literally had to take that long to get where you are, and it’s still basically BiS, that tells me the game has been stagnant.
The common perk of vertical, and with that periodic resets on cap increases, is that it completely renews the hunt to get where you were on the next level. This leads to less risk of new content being DOA because it doesn’t have something you need from it. The point is never to feel jilted about past effort going to waste, as it still should have had benefit in that moment. If you can’t see that, then I would further question if one actually enjoyed the game they’re playing.
In the end, gradual vertical is the way to go from my perspective, which places the expansion cycle in 1.5-2 year window, assuming other significant updates in between.
If you get an expansion and have to hunt for Immortal king set level 50 to replace your immortal king set level 40, that’s a waste. This is what we got from D3 vanilla to RoS. If they add new items that gives new alternatives for BiS, that’s a loot hunt.
But Saidosha, I’m fairly old school. I personally don’t like level 40 as a final level in the initial release of D4. I hope that changes, I’ve seen the debates on this topic, I just don’t think you can squeeze real engaging itemization in 40 levels.
Also I think that bar was set there to get the game out quicker. Which is a bit of an issue too (with me) - But in the final tally I certainly will probably play it and have fun doing so.
It’s probably best we don’t have IK sets at all, then. Otherwise, I do agree 40 seems like a weird number. 50 is at least one I’ve seen other games push, and grew past that over time, but I suppose level itself doesn’t matter so much as what comes from each individual level. Gaining 2 skill points instead of 1 would be a massive difference, for example.
Conversely, I’ve never been a fan of early game items being BiS in late game. This is where I’d generally say D3 did it right by having legendaries drop relative to player level. Of course, with the implication of being able to add powers to items, getting newer versions shouldn’t be as arduous. I’ve also been of the camp that we should be able to convert unwanted versions into the consumable, too. That way your old stuff still has a use when it’s time to upgrade.
Something to remember from the dev panels at Blizzcon was the world map. The 5 areas we will get at launch are still only a fraction of the Sanctuary we want to explore.
If each new expansion included a new zone, a new class, new items, new ubers, new affixes, new dungeons, new story quests…
That’s quite a bit of content without resorting to increasing the lvl cap. That should keep us all playing for long enough for the dev team to make the next expac with more new things.
Yeah, It looks like they got about 35% or so of Sanctuary covered. I imagine to get the whole thing it would take at least 2 expansions. It will be a big game!
Well put, if each expansion is a new level cap then all the previous content needs to be reworked to not become a cake walk, same with all gear found as soon as the next cap is in place it’s just a different form of power creep.
Give us a Higher level cap on release then we can have new things added, most would be End Game, but they could add other things to do when leveling to keep that part more interesting as well.
Maybe each class gets a new starting zone? If they are not thinking that way at release.
And yes I know some people just want to get to max level and run end game only, well then let them.
I want all of the game to have me wanting to come back and play it again.
On the Sets thinking they are meant to be a stepping stone to end game, so if they have the same slots for each class and say only 3 items in said set this may stop mixing sets but at the same time give people a way to look at how some skills work in better enhanced ways.
Please dont start them with hugh multipliers that need to get buffed just to keep them useful. Give them Class Skill defining effects if the main use is to change a skill in a fun and useful way that would be better, then just slap on 500% more of whatever.
Totally agree with this. Zones should scale up a bit maybe for the end game. They need a level cap game mode like they had with inferno. But I think all of the acts should be close in difficulty. Maybe like a 5% increase in damage and HP per act.
Open world and monster scaling doesn’t mix. The inverse being forced level syncing, which is something I have never enjoyed in any game that did it as it basically takes away whatever power the player gained beyond a certain point.
Put another way, zones antiquating is going to happen, even if it’s to the point where you no longer need gear/materials from a certain area. The incessant chase to keep every piece of content relevant has led to way too much dev time being wasted in other games that ultimately translates to less new content in general.
D1 had engaging itemization for its time and the “endgame” was somewhere around level 35-45.
…. It’s obvious you don’t have any idea what pay to win actually is.
An expansion that raises the level cap is not pay to win.
Pay to win is being able to buy character power outside the bounds of the game. The Trove MMO is an example of pay-to-win. Trove has a weekly limit on what you can acquire to increase your power, and has dragons that take forever to farm for that also increase your power. However, you can simply spend money to break that weekly limit, and also to buy most dragons. THAT is pay to win.