One of the hallmarks of D2 and D3 vanilla was replaying the campaign in higher difficulties. Many ARPG players are familiar with the frustrations and limitations of having to play through a campaign to get to the endgame especially if they are asked to play through a campaign multiple times. PoE’s 10 story acts are mandatory and strain even the biggest PoE fan’s patience beyond their league start character. D2:LoD has 15 acts required to complete the game on the highest difficulty. D3:RoS has players play through the campaign once to unlock adventure mode and after that no character created on that account will have to replay the campaign. This level of flexibility was one of the great design choices the D3 developers brought to the genre.
But for every player that hates playing through the campaign, there are also many players that enjoy playing through the campaign multiple times if they feel it is appropriately rewarding. The fine line developers have to walk here is making replaying the campaign feel rewarding without making it feel mandatory.
Based on some of the information revealed it seems the developers for D4 are designing the game so that all characters will have to play through the campaign at least once, but offering players multiple avenues of story progression in a nonlinear campaign to make replaying the campaign less repetitive than a static experience would offer. In addition the developers have mentioned that all of the campaign specific content in the game is instanced so you can scale the campaign experience without scaling the shared world.
To that end, what are some ways that D4 can incentivize, but not force, players into replaying the campaign? I’ll offer some suggestions below, but I’d love to hear your thoughts as well.
Campaign Conquests
After completing the campaign on your character, you are given the option to continue to explore the world of Sanctuary in adventure mode or take on campaign conquests. There are two campaign conquests available in D4 at endgame. Campaign Conquests share the same loot tables as other endgame activities and come in three difficulty settings: Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulty.
Difficulties explained:
Overload Mechanic: Players replay through the campaign, but after killing each area boss in the campaign the difficulty of the campaign scales (the overload mechanic). This difficulty scaling only affects the instanced portions of the campaign and not the shared world.
Death penalty - adds increasingly larger penalties to your clear timer on speedrun conquests to discourage players from death hopping or brute forcing the content.
Death penalty (Nightmare) - adds increasingly larger penalties to your clear timer on speedrun conquests to discourage players from death hopping or brute forcing the content.
Death penalty (Hell) - Deaths in Hell mode still add increasingly larger penalties to your completion timer like Nightmare, but a death in Hell mode will respawn the player in town and reset the instance in which the player was progressing. Only deathless runs will reward progression in Hell mode.
Bosses gain bonus abilities in Hell mode.
Inferno Difficulty
This is true insanity. The developers don’t think you can complete this, but they will absolutely not nerf it by intentionally adding more power to the game. This is the vanilla inferno experience reborn.
Overload mechanic
Campaign instances have 3 keyed dungeon affixes (lvl 40-50) keyed dungeon difficulty progression. (assuming lvl 50 as max keyed dungeon affix level)
Death Penalty (Nightmare)
Death Penalty (Hell)
Death Penalty (Inferno) - On inferno difficulty each death you take inflicts a torment on the character. Torments could increase skill cooldowns, reduce health or resource regeneration rates, slightly nerf damage, etc… These torments would last a set amount of time (~10 minutes). Stacking too many torments is certain doom and waiting out the torment to expire would not be a good idea in a timed run. You really need to play this difficulty cleanly.
Conquests Explained:
Campaign Conquest: Timed Runs
Can be completed in Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties, but each progressive difficulty must be unlocked by completing a timed run on the former within a certain time limit.
A timer is displayed on the UI tracking the current playthrough time of the run and ends when the final campaign quest is completed.
Different difficulties have different penalties for death related to increasing the timer for that run.
Leaderboards track the overall completion time and the number of deaths.
Campaign Conquest: Death’s Bargain
Can be completed in Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno difficulties, but each progressive difficulty must be unlocked by completing the former.
In death’s bargain players entering an instanced area of the campaign are asked to pick their own keyed dungeon affixes from a list the game auto generates. You will always be given 4 keyed affixes to pick from and depending on difficulty setting will have to choose 1, 2, or 3 of them.
In addition to choosing the normal keyed dungeon affixes players will have to choose a bargain from a list of three options. A bargain is a power that is granted to the player for that instance but comes with a tradeoff. Tradeoffs might affect the player directly by lowering some facet of their build, or indirectly by buffing the monsters / dungeon mechanics even further.
Every instanced area of the campaign where you make a bargain will have a point total associated with the affixes you choose and the bargains you make. Completing the area without incurring any penalties will reward you with the full point total for that area.
Penalties can be incurred for failing to kill all the monsters in the dungeon, not completing a particular dungeon objective, dying and incurring point loss penalties etc…
The goal of the Death’s Bargain mode is to achieve a high score for your run based on the challenges you choose to take on. These challenges are completely within your control, but the more severe the affixes and the greater the bargain the higher the score you’ll achieve. The mode is not based on speed clears in any way. You do not earn bonuses for clearing instanced areas faster or the campaign faster in general.
Leaderboards for Death’s Bargain track the total score for running the campaign in this mode and the number of deaths.
Rewards for completing these conquests vary based on the times/scores earned and difficulty level of completion. There are essentially gold/silver/bronze completion levels in each conquest that award transmog, crafting materials, pets, mounts, etc… depending on the difficulty in which the rating was earned. There are no special item drops in these modes, they have the same loot tables as other endgame content. Only cosmetic rewards for completing them at a certain level.
Yeah, I really hope resetting and replaying the campaign is one of the end-game activites. It should be completely optional to do, but be as challenging and rewarding as other end-game.
Also, all the normal end-game activities should still be around in the campaign resets. Like, you should still have key dungeons, you should still be able to liberate camps or whatever.
Maybe semantics, but don’t ever design something you dont think players can complete. That would be pointless imo. Like D3s “and then we doubled it (but totally didn’t test it)”.
Also, if they do make some super hard content (which I very much hope they do!), dont make it any more rewarding to do it. Make it purely for challenge. Otherwise we end up limiting how many builds are viable. Like D3.
In your example, drop chances might keep increasing until Hell difficulty, but not in Inferno difficulty.
Please lord no
No more timers! Being fast is already the most efficient thing to do in an A-RPG. It does not need additional time limits.
Totally fine to use it for leaderboards of course, but dont use it for rewards, nor as a requirement for unlocking the next difficulty (as in your example).
I would assume they’ve theory-crafted it as possible in this case, but figure it is very unlikely. Yeah I wouldn’t advocated for blindly releasing content in this way.
I wasn’t really advocating for any drop chance increases or efficiency gains with these systems. Rather I was hoping to tie whatever difficulty scaling they have for keyed dungeons to the campaign. Essentially nightmare would scale like the keyed dungeon progression from lvl 1-19, hell would be 20-39, and inferno 40-max. This way the difficulty curve for keyed dungeons and replaying the campaign are essentially linked. The only difference in the campaign mode replay-ability are the death penalties and added boss mechanics. I also think I would tie the reward structures as well. That way if higher keyed dungeons reward more loot at a certain rate, then so too would the campaign instances based on the same system.
I think those kinds of modes are perfectly fine if their rewards were purely cosmetic as I described. If a timed mode gated power-based rewards I’d completely agree, but if your build can’t really do the timed mode well perhaps it can do the Death’s Bargain mode well since it doesn’t have any timed component. Either way, I’d love to add gameplay twists and a sense of competitiveness to replaying the campaign without rewarding power or efficiency in gaining power as a result.
Unsure if it was clear from my explanation, but I was wanting the shared world state to be at endgame as you replay through the campaign in these modes. I’m not sure to what extent that is going to be completely possible as I imagine some things in the shared world are tied to the campaign completion, but I’d love for them to figure out a way of decoupling the two in a replayable system.
I really like the gameplay loop you could acheive with the Death’s Bargain design. Restart the campaign and playthrough a bit until you feel you are reaching a wall. Do some shared world endgame activities to get better gear and dive back in. Repeating as necessary to finish with, hopefully, a high score.
I think we are over this by now
It’s a relic of the past where you couldn’t have enough story content to fill a character play through up to max level
With this big open world I am pretty sure they won’t need multiple play throughs
Also the design direction seems to be a small max level that will be reached within the first play through and then a lot of endgame progression and challenges that will keep the players invested without forcing them to listen to the same dialogues over and over again
Agreed. The different end-game acitivities should use the same difficulty settings.
Only saying they all also shouldn’t keep rewarding more and more the higher it goes. Especially not with the difficulty described in your example.
It definitely should not be needed. That part is a relic.
But supported as an alternative to running 213414 dungeons? Yes please.
I’d be much more interested in playing D3, if I could do the campaign instead of silly GRifts. At similar difficulty and reward level of course.
I would be all in favor of completely new endgame story experiences which make replaying the campaign un-necessary. But these are very development intensive and would likely not be ready at launch and would need to feature some level of replay-ability themselves. The system I’m proposing here is completely optional for getting items and taking on whatever content the game does have planned for endgame, but it would not be very development intensive since they are already developing the keyed dungeon system and dungeon affixes in the first place.
And even though you might not like playing the campaign over, there are many players for which playing through a story mode in the game is more preferable than open-ended adventure style endgame content. I see a campaign replay system that isn’t forced on the player as a great way of maximizing return on development time.
But, to be very clear, you are correct - custom endgame content (big plusses if it’s story driven) apart from the campaign will be more highly valued by a larger majority of the player-base and should absolutely be a goal of the development team.
Honestly, it’d be tricky handling the difficutly, but if it were up to me, I’d give 2 sets of difficulties (or 3 if we count the campaign), one for the overworld, and the 2nd for the dungeons.
The Overworld (which would include campaign as well) would have 4 difficulties:
Normal (available from the start): could also serve as the tutorial with enemies ranging from level 1-30 depending on the area of the regions their found in.
For instanced campaign, the monster’s level will scale with the leading player’s.
Nightmare (available from the start): The enemy found here are 5 levels higher than when they were found in Normal (so ranging from level 5-35). Some enemies may gain resistances.
For instanced campaign, the monster’s level will be 2 levels higher than the leading player’s.
Abyss (only available for characters that reached level 35): The enemy level is scaled to the highest level player in the area, and also includes some changes to the monsters the player faced. For example, if a spot normally has 7 skeleton warriors in the previous difficulties; the spot would now have 3 skeleton warriors, 2 skeleton mages, and 2 skeleton commanders.
For instanced campaign, the monster’s level will be 4 levels higher than the leading player’s.
Also some enemies may gain resistances and/or new (or upgraded) abilities based on the monster, for example a Fallen Overlord may gain splash effect to it’s attacks, or a succubus could gain the ability to debuff (or further debuff) players.
Hell (only available for level 40 characters): The enemy level is now set to 50, and also includes monster changes/additions that the Abyss difficulty had.
For instanced campaign, the monster’s level will be 9 levels higher than the leading player’s.
On the other hand, dungeon-based content (including key dungeons) could be tiered based 1-10:
Tiered 1-3 = Normal
Tiered 1 filled with level 5-10 monsters
Tiered 2 filled with level 12-18 monsters
Tiered 3 filled with level 20-26 monsters
Tiered 4-6 = Nightmare
Tiered 4 filled with level 31-32 monsters
Tiered 5 filled with level 33-34 monsters
Tiered 6 filled with level 35-36 monsters
Tiered 7-8 = Abyss
Tiered 7 filled with level 37-39 monsters along with changes to monster composition and abilities.
Tiered 8 filled with level 40-41 monsters along with changes to monster composition and abilities.
Tiered 9-10 = Hell
Tiered 9 filled with level 42-45 monsters along with changes to monster composition and abilities. Also some changes to the mechanics of dungeon (for example dungeon may gain more traps and such).
Tiered 10 filled with level 46-49 monsters along with changes to monster composition and abilities. Also some changes to the mechanics of dungeon.
Turning a dungeon into a key dungeon would automatically set the dungeon difficulty to tiered 7 or higher.
Well it’s expensive and it was harder to do levels and characters I guess
But I guess it depends on the franchise
Pokémon always managed to get everything out of your pokemon in 1 story xD
I think, more levels and longer story is mainly a question of time though. Dev teams nowadays don’t have more time than back in the 90s though.
But I agree, that it’s generally expensive to have a longer story.
Nevertheless, I would really enjoy a long story in D4, which is replayable.
Btw, if the story is not mandatory with all chars, I wonder, how you level to max lvl… I dearly hope, there won’t be boosts! That’s a potentially good source of money for blizzard, as wow shows, but I would personally hate it.
I agree difficulty scaling that makes sense to players is going to be a big hurdle for the development team. It’s why I’m suggesting they decouple the shared world completely from the campaign/keyed dungeon system. The campaign replay system and the keyed dungeons are linked in terms of their scaling.
Rather than think about difficulty scaling I’m more interested in reward scaling, i.e. can monsters in the shared world drop the same things as monsters in the keyed dungeons. They could if keyed dungeon completion also scaled the shared world. For example, using your idea of a max lvl 10 keyed dungeon and the 4 tiers you have I’d advocate for something looking like this:
Tier 0 loot table - normal campaign play-through with some drops in the table unlocked by character level
Tier 1 loot table - for Keyed dungeons lvl 1-3 and campaign instances on replay that are also lvl 1-3. After completing a certain number of lvl 3 keyed dungeons the shared world scales to the Tier 1 loot table.
Tier 2 loot table - for keyed dungeons lvl 4-6 and campaign instances on replay that are also lvl 4-6. After completing a certain number of lvl 6 keyed dungeons the shared world scales to the Tier 2 loot table.
Tier 3 loot table - for keyed dungeons lvl 7-8 and campaign instances on replay that are also lvl 7-8. After completing a certain number of lvl 8 keyed dungeons the shared world scales to the Tier 3 loot table.
Tier 4 loot table - for keyed dungeons lvl 9-10 and campaign instances on replay that are also lvl 9-10. After completing a certain number of lvl 10 keyed dungeons the shared world scales to the Tier 4 loot table.
There is no loot that doesn’t drop from a Tier 4 loot table, so even though you could have keyed dungeon progression beyond lvl 10 there are no items that can drop in a keyed dungeon at lvl 11 that couldn’t drop from one in lvl 9-10.
I hope that makes sense. Basically they can use keyed dungeons and their completion as the mechanic which scales the world and campaign.
To my knowledge they’ve indicated every character will have to play the campaign at least once - which I think is the right choice - but the campaign is not very long (if you rush the campaign directly) and can be played in different orders with different levels of side-questing involved.
Honestly, so long as no single pve content offers any exclusive non-cosmetic reward, such as runes being only obtainable from keyed dungeons, or uniques only dropping from world bosses, etc, I don’t really have a preference to how they handle the rewards. I just ask that no single content becomes drastically better than the rest in terms of challenge and reward, and instead each of them are as close to one another as possible. Diablo 3 would be a lot more enjoyable imo if exploring adventure mode, and campaign mode were as close to as rewarding and challenging as greater rifts.
Agreed, I don’t want another Ring of Royal Grandeur situation where only a specific endgame task has a piece of gear locked behind it. When I talk about tiers of rewards I’m always thinking back to D2 and how when you finished Hell difficulty you’d be roughly 65-75 and not all the gear in the game would be accessible at that point, you still had to continue to level up to at least 84 to get the full loot table available. I just want to have a mechanism in place in the game that allows for a sense of continued progression to open new tiers of loot drops game-wide.
I dont mind increasing the item pool over some steps in end-game (though those added items should not be stronger, just different). But the full item pool should still be accessible reasonably early imo.
I had a similar suggestion for Diablo 3; where in case a dead player forces resurrect they lose vitality effectiveness after death and it stacks with each death causing bigger losses. I simply called this “Wounded” stat or “Fallen from grace”, can’t remember what I wrote on the google doc but it was something to prevent player from throwing themselves upon the harder enemies in vain.
As far as I remember about the document, only way to avoid such punishment is having a friend channel your grave to lend you a hand or dying with a Nephalem Glory buff.
To also spice things up perhaps, halve the experience gain from the monsters you slain at the same area you killed the boss on? Game already supposed to give relatively lower experience upon grinding the same area as your required experience amount will grow larger for level up and the level spread between you and monsters will widen up. Once killing the boss, player would have no incentive to stay at that area but move forward to the next unless looking for specific loot restricted by monster level system.
Even though your idea might work the problem is there is no way of knowing just how many players would actually use such a system. You have to remember that developers will not make a system that only a small number of players will use. They want a system that will be used by the majority. You might not have enough players to make it worthwhile for Blizz to do something like what you are wanting.
They still have HC.
But yeah, keep the campaign replay system simple imo. No need to use a ton of resources on it.
Have a Reset campaign button/npc (“stay a while and listen to the heroic retelling of whatever”). Only usable after having finished the campaign each time.
You pick a difficulty level, with the same options as in key dungeons. Rewards and difficulty scales to be be similar to other activities of this difficulty. Somewhat lower rewards than key dungeons however, due to the campaign being less RNG based (and thus potentially easier) + it doesn’t require keys.
Basically all adventure mode content remains active during the campaign replays. Key dungeons, camps, world bosses, random events and so on.
Which combined with the above reward structure should incentivize you to do those things on top of replaying the campaign, mixed with each other. This also encourages you to explore rather than just rushing through the campaign quickly, since part of its rewards are still coming from the adventure mode content.
The end. Since all of the above, except adding the reset functionality, and balancing the rewards, is seemingly how the game already works, it should not exactly be a big feature to add.
But one that would improve the game a lot for some of the players.
I highly doubt that D4 will have more than one play through per character. Since GGG removed the multiple play throughs to endgame. And D3 removed it from vanilla. I highly doubt that Blizz would do that to D4. We will probably have just one play through to endgame.
