[D4] - Replaying the Campaign, Endgame Modes

General Discussion
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@Shadout First of all we don’t know if there have been any iterations on keyed dungeons. Also we don’'t know how deep they go as far as difficulty or how they scale in difficulty. That means that a campaign plus system might need to have 20+ difficulty levels to be identical to the keyed dungeons. I wonder how many players would love another 20+ difficulty system like D3. Because we can replay the difficulty at max level on any difficulty we please.

I think ultimately only less than one percent of the people would even bother to play it. Why go through a big campaign with the same rewards as keyed dungeons when keyed dungeons will no doubt be smaller than the whole world of Sanctuary.

Look it no doubt gets boring listening to the same story over and over and over again for the one hundredth plus times. This is true for the ones that have won awards on their story. More so when the campaign is on the rails. A linear campaign is boring as hell.

Players these days don’t mind going through the campaign at the most once per character then endgame. No you don’t have to be max level to participate at endgame. PoE has proven that to be the case and it is a good idea. That means you can still make progress as far as leveling goes by playing the endgame.

When we don’t know how many affixes will exist. When we don’t know how the keyed dungeons scale in difficulty. You could have a system where a campaign plus might need 20+ difficulty settings just to be in line with what the OP is wanting.

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@Eigen9 I want part of D4’s endgame to be all about trying out different builds that you would need to make alts to do. Builds that are viable, where the gap between the best builds and subpar builds would be small enough that players won’t mind due to how the endgame system is designed.

I feel as long as you don’t have a lot of time gated things in endgame or a progression system that is endless power. Which they said they won’t do, but can still have infinite paragon it just wouldn’t be entirely linear. It should be more than just pushing a character to the endgame then staying with that character till their gear is perfect.

Grim Dawn has such a huge variety of builds that I can see within the system. Even though i have been playing for only about a month now. I might try making my own battlemage that would have an elemental Cadence from the soldier. Where the arcanist would only add in buffs/debuffs to elemental damage along with other defenses as well. A battling summoner looks like a possibility as well.

I see this from the skills that are in the masteries. Just wait till I take a closer look at the gear in Grim Dawn. I might see even more possible combination as well that would be viable. Sure they all won’t be the meta but still they will no doubt provide many hours of fun to play.

Sure I still want plenty to do at endgame. But as long as making other builds by making alts is definitely what I would call part of an endgame.

103

Well said.

If people really love playing the campaign mode for 3 times to reach the endgame, Blizzard wouldn’t remove the Nightmare, Hell, and Inferno from the game and introduce a dynamic difficulty in the past but hey, they did it after all. I can’t confirm this but I also heard that PoE removed the outdated difficulty system too. So much for people “love” repeating the campaign mode. :rofl:

I also remember reading the post in the old D3 forum where people told the Blizzard that they were tired of farming Inferno Act 3 over and over every night and Blizzard said they understood their frustration and ask the players to stay patient as they will find the solution to it.

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I’d say that if the campaign doesn’t offer a worthwhile reward and/or challenge for folks, then most will be inclined to rush it. On the other hand, if the campaign offered a decent enough reward and/or challenge, then folks will run it repeatedly despite already completing it a number of times (no different from how folks run bounties and rifts repeatedly even now). Reward and challenge are major factors for deciding whether people play certain contents or not. In the case of Diablo 2 and 3, the campaign doesn’t offer it (beyond a few key Diablo 2 quests), so you have plenty of folks rushing the campaign (or even skipping it entirely) for contents that do offer challenge or reward. In Diablo 2 case that’d be either pvp, baal runs, mf runs, etc.; meanwhile in Diablo 3 case that’d be greater rifts, nephalem rifts, bounties, and maybe ubers.

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105

I’m going to try one more time… The way the world in Diablo 4 is designed is fundamentally different than how every other previous ARPGs world is designed. In previous ARPGs the world is the campaign, the campaign is the world and endgame is often a completely separate experience, existing in a different location, gated by completion of the campaign. This is not the case in D4.

In D4, the developers have said they wanted a nonlinear campaign with a lot of open world side content, but the main story of the campaign would be instanced so that players can play it solo and does not interfere with the open world. The keyed dungeon endgame system is not some separate location in D4, but exists in the world alongside the campaign at all times. It’s unclear if they are going to force players to play the campaign even once much less force them to repeat it. The main campaign in D4 is essentially a series of instances (story dungeons if you like) with the over world used as the vehicle to have you move from one instance to the next.

All I’m advocating for in this thread is that those instanced campaign dungeons be treated like keyed dungeons, so at endgame players could CHOOSE to play story dungeons which are more tightly designed, with awesome boss fights, and music to match, or they could choose to play keyed dungeons which won’t have the same level of design, but will hopefully be a ton of fun to play due to randomization and sheer variety (100s of them at launch). If the reward structures were similar and the overall progression difficulty were similar it would lead to more choice for players at endgame, which I can only perceive as a good thing.

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106

D3 bounties are rewarding and people are still inclined to rush it. The only difference is D3 bounties can be completed in around 30 minutes even if you are soloing while running the whole campaign may take hours to complete.

You will get this if campaign mode is “rewarding”

and I already can hear solo players out there crying “injustice” because they can’t get the reward as fast as those with the team/friends. :rofl:

and I am going to say one more time that I don’t enjoy rerun campaign mode at all. If you can find me doing it because of the handsome rewards that surpassing other contents in the game or I am leveling a new alt character. That is it.

If I want to enjoy the story again, I will do it regardless of rewards. I don’t need “YOU” to tell me to rerun the campaign mode.

Diablo Immortal said hi.

They already gave us the reason to replay the campaign - build a character with a specific role since you can’t respec your character like D3. The end.

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Oh sure, I wasn’t trying to imply that folks take the leisure route when running bounties. My point is that Bounties are rewarding, hence people run them repeatedly. On the other hand, if bounty mats were to drop in rifts, then there wouldn’t be as many players running bounties repeatedly as there are now.

Most likely. No one’s denying that speed and efficiency will dictate playstyles; that’s simply how it is and how most folks play. For example, back during Vanilla, blizzard had made a change to campaign mode that made it possible to receive a guaranteed legendary item when you defeated Diablo once during the campaign. Now this didn’t make running the entire campaign more efficient than simply grinding act 3; but for those who opted for full campaign clears, it did make them prioritize speed for maximizing efficiency.

You may very well be right regarding that.

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  1. You can fast forward most of the story in the campaign if you dont want to see all the dialogue again. Video sequences etc. should of course be skippable, always.
  2. It certainly seems better than running the same Rifts/key dugeons 21145 times.
    Rifts etc. are super-short activities, that is a big part of why they feel so repetitive. Campaign should be many hours long. It just wont feel repetitive in the same way that Rifts do.

Yes! Definitely.
But much more likely, many millions of these players would use such an option.

Yes, and every A-RPG in history have had end-game ranging between bad and mediocre.

I very much hope key dungeons wont have 20+ difficulties. It should never go above something like 10 imo.
But yeah, campaign+, key dungeons, and ALL other end-game activities in D4 should have the same difficulty options. Otherwise you repeat the GRift disaster.

What?
I do not believe this isn’t another strawman. But I am in a good mood, so I will explain it regardless.
Any reward balancing is obviously based on time spent (along with difficulty)… Nobody has ever said that clearing the entire campaign in 10 hours should give the same quantity of rewards as clearing one key dungeon in 15 minutes.

Look, no it does not.

As some has said in this thread, Blizzard is apparently claiming their campaign is not linear.

Nobody as made such a claim as far as I am aware.

Yes, and it could also have 11,000 difficulties. It would not matter. That is just a number. It doesn’t change anything whatsoever about the concepts described in this thread…

Definitely part of the game, a bit arguable if it can be called end-game, but I cant be bothered with the semantics. Anyway, yeah, making alts should be a major part of D4. Even more so than the end-game activites imo.

Another strawman builder. Nice.

Farming act 3 every night is much more like farming GRifts every night, and exactly not a campaign reset.

Dear lord… Spawn more strawpylons.

Not the same. Not replaying it at a higher difficulty on your end-game character.

Indeed, and case for how people would not feel forced to do them.
Same with campaign replays.

That is just a matter of balancing though, and not really related to anything discussed in this thread.
Blizzard definitely need to make sure that solo and grouping is quite equal in power and speed. And in a somewhat related note; power lvling and rushing other players through the campaign should be prevented as much as possible (big XP reductions if playing with high lvl players and such).

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I can appreciate that. I understand not everyone likes story in their video games especially if they have to repeat that story in any form, and I’m fine with that. But I’m simply acknowledging that some people do.

I’m curious how far your dislike of story goes. Before D3:RoS one of the most typical endgame loops involved farming campaign bosses for drops. If D4 brought the spirit of that back by letting boss keys drop in game, that made the campaign bosses have new attacks, higher difficulty and higher rewards would you enjoy collecting those boss keys and breaking up your keyed dungeon runs with some boss runs?

Just genuinely asking for feedback here and not trying to stir up anything.

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https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Pandemonium_Event
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Infernal_Machine
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Rift_Guardian
https://diablo.fandom.com/wiki/Helliquary

Any of these (with slightly alteration/improvement or not in D4) >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Campaign Mode+

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It seems really simple.
Have a variety of end-game activities. Have zero exclusive rewards to any end-game activities, although have somewhat higher rewards of one type, from each activity (except campaign+), to reward playing all of it. As in, key dungeons might be best for runes, camps might be best for crafting materials etc.
=> People can do the ones they enjoy the most, and 100% ignore the ones they hate.

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I agree ubers style fights are very interesting, but this isn’t an either/or it is a both/and; incentives to re-run bosses with higher difficulty and the creation of uber style fights can co-exist. The former requires very little development time while the latter requires a little bit more. It will be interesting to see which side the developers land on.

The helliquary does indeed look super interesting and seems like the Kyrian - Path of Ascension or PoE - Beastcrafting system - essentially a boss rush / arena system. If there was an endgame activity built around this in D4 where…

  • you are sent on quests to retrieve specific demons from the world, or you randomly run into such quests,
  • you collect the demons in a sort of demonic pokedex, and
  • in the helliquary you can combine demons in interesting ways to fight multiple of them at once, or imbue them with special powers, or both, then I’d be super interested.

If the rewards scaled and were different (some reward runes, or gems, or items, etc…) based on the combinations of powers / enemies involved, then personally, I would love such a system. I even think such a system is likely at some point in the game - hopefully at launch.

Despite, the great potential this system has though, it scratches a different itch than a difficult to progress campaign+ system would. One is a long form progressively increased difficulty story based progression path. The other is a quick repeatable, replayable non story based progression path. I would love if they co-existed.

A truly difficult campaign+ (or story-based endgame campaign), a helliquary boss-rush system like the one described above, and a keyed-dungeon system for gearing up seems like a really solid trio of endgame activities. They even form an interesting inter-related loop:

  • The keyed-dungeon system has great promise for gearing up characters progressively.
  • Helliquary has the potential to be the center-piece of a monster-based crafting system or feed into the crafting loop at endgame more directly. An ultimatum like mechanic where if you defeated a monster in the helliquary it gives you the option to take your reward or further buff it for a better rewards, where if you lose you get nothing, would also be very compelling.
  • An endgame story-based campaign (or a campaign+) system would give you a very long form style of progression to check your progress against…am I capable of defeating it now… type of feeling.

I like all three parts working together. Sounds really fun.

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If you seperate the best items like that then players can’t ignore the stuff they hate.

114

Campaign mode+ sounds really boring to me. All those endgame contents that I posted earlier is better off being a standalone content. Even a simple boss rushes/gauntlets with stat increment are better endgame material here.

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I didn’t separate them?
You are just getting 10% (or whatever fits) more runes from key dungeons, 10% more crafting materials from camps, etc.
If bounties gave 10% more bounty materials than GRifts in D3, I sure would never do bounties.
If GRifts gave 10% more gem upgrades than Rifts, I would be a lore more hesitant to ever do GRifts. And so on.
(all of these would of course need to have similar difficulty scaling, and the reward scaling would need to be adjusted for any remaining differences in difficulty; like bounties should probably have a larger deficiency in rewards than the 10% in this example, due to their less random nature)

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I think without an endgame difficulty campaign of some type, whether that’s a campaign+ system or a completely new endgame campaign, the endgame of D4 won’t have this feeling of working toward some ultimate challenge to test your build against. Psychologically I think that sort of progression toward an ultimate challenge is very important. Boss rush or uber style endgames are very binary - you can beat some you can’t beat others perhaps, but a long-form campaign style endgame where you have to scratch and claw together better gear to progress further is a completely different challenge that involves a sense of gradual progression. This is what makes the PoE mapping system so great. It is telling a story, that has gradual progression, that culminates in a series of ultimate challenges.

It would take a substantial amount of development time to create an endgame campaign from scratch. Though, I agree it would be superior to a scaled up campaign+ system if they could pull it off. I’m trying to be realistic about development time when I suggest that a campaign+ system could fill that role instead. I’m open to suggestions about other things that could fill this role also.

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Luckily, it could be both.
Campaign+ takes close to no development time.

I definitely subscribe to the idea of dev time not being endless, and we have to prioritize features. Doesn’t apply here though.

And those other game modes you mention would continue to be standalone content, even if campaign+ also existed. Which is what a few people in this thread seem hellbent on refusing to understand.

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Remember what you told me before? If there is a benefit from some aspect of a game then players feel it has to be done. So players would feel they have to do all to get thise items more efficiently. You guys have told me for years now that it’s not a choice to not to something it if is more efficient or more rewarding.

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Yes. Very true. When those differences are significant. I have also said, lots of times, that if builds are within 5% of each other for example, then they are balanced enough. Or, if solo and grouping are within 10% of each other, then they are balanced enough.

Same with the 10% here (which again is just an example, it likely would have to be higher to be balanced), especially when you take into account the power benefits that comes from being able to focus on one type of content (easier to build toward only doing key dungeons, than doing both key dungeons and camps).
Such rewards for doing different types of content is basically a balancing measure, so those who do varied content are not less efficient than those who focus on one thing.

But, kinda like grouping vs. solo (where the goal should be that grouping was up to 10% better, merely to ensure that soloing never is best), the balancing should be done in a way where it tries to make doing varied content slightly more efficient than only doing one type of content, just to ensure that the opposite is not the case (that focusing on one thing would risk being most efficient).

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Lol. Come one. You’ve been around. 1% is considered significant my a good portion of players. While I agree 10% chance for drops isn’t huge, I’ll guarantee you the people here would all consider it mandatory to do.

Any percieved advantage no matter how small will have the cries of mandatory ond forced from the players.