[D4] - Replaying the Campaign, Endgame Modes

General Discussion
161

Typically though campaigns scale harder the further you progress in them. Act III and IV in inferno in D3 were much harder than Act I and II. Act IV and V in D2 were much harder than Acts I-III. I assumed their campaign would follow similar logic.

I also think they want to have a good sense of progression with the keyed dungeon system like you do with the mythic+ system in WoW. I’m not sure that’s achievable with just a few keyed dungeon levels. The mythic+ system in WoW extends well into the 30s and I could see the keyed dungeon system scaling much further than that. They’ve shown a rank 15 key in their original description of the system at Blizzcon 2019.

I may be assuming too much here about the way keyed dungeons work, but from what I understand they have a rank and an affix.

  • The rank increases the monster levels in the dungeon.
  • The affix introduces a new effect to the dungeon.
  • It’s unclear if the number of affixes introduced will always be one, or if as the dungeon rank gets higher we could see keys with multiple affixes.
  • It’s also unclear how you get higher rank keys. Do they start dropping randomly after you beat a lvl 1 dungeon you can start to find lvl 2 keys, or do you have to combine keys you find to make them higher rank, or can you rank them up at the end of a run?

The original intent of my proposal was to let the key ranks be synonymous with campaign difficulty, where maybe Act I in the campaign (or the dungeons in the first zone you quest through) are rank 1, then in Act II they are rank 2, in Act III they are rank 3, in Act 4 they are rank 4, and then in Act 5 (the fifth zone), they are rank 5. If the difficulty scales linearly on key ranks this would make a lot of sense.

Then each campaign instance randomly rolls a dungeon affix (1 affix on NM, 2 affixes on Hell, and 3 affixes on Inferno), but the instances are still scaled based upon dungeon key ranks.

We could absolutely separate the ranks of keyed dungeons from the campaign altogether and have NM, Hell, Inferno have its own handcrafted difficulty progression curve, but even in such a case I think it would be interesting to let dungeon affixes randomly roll on campaign instances in those difficulties.

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I could see it, but I sure hope it doesn’t. They should never go above 10 difficulty levels.
Mythic+ is not a good system to copy, and already has too many difficulty levels.
It feels better when there are fewer, with larger jumps between them, so you cant just always pick a “perfect” difficulty for your character. Kinda same issue with enemies autoscaling to your lvl.
Some might call that a smooth difficulty, but I would consider it a bad one. D2, PoE, Grim Dawn etc. all handle this better by making each jump in difficulty much larger.
Too much choice takes away the feeling of barely being able to break into the next difficulty.

Anyway, even if we said there was 30 key dungoen lvls you could also just have 30 campaign+ difficulties. That would work best imo.

That said, splitting the difficulty levels up so a full campaign+ playthrough have multiple difficulty jumps, doesn’t seem like it should cause any serious issues either.
In your example with 10 key dungeon difficulties it could be
Campaign+1 = key 1-3
Campaign+2 = key 4-6
Campaign+3 = key 7-9
And the “odd” one:
Campaign+4 = key 10
As the ultimate challenge throughout, making it okay that it has less difficulty scaling (since that also allows us to fight these bosses at their very best).

Now if there was 11 key difficulties you just make Campaign+4 into key 10-11.
This way it should add up no matter how many, or few, difficulty levels key dungeons had. With no need to ever add more key dungeons to align the two.

This I think would be bad. More room for balancing errors. Requires more development time.
All endgame should be build around a single difficulty scaling system. These things are hard enough to balance already.

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I definitely agree with this for balance purposes which is why I suggest keyed dungeon ranks drive this thing. I wish we knew more about their ideas for difficulty scaling in general and especially at endgame, but I have a feeling this is the toughest design challenge they have. Every way they’ve designed D4 so far makes getting the difficulty curve a challenge: nonlinear campaign, sidequesting areas, shared world, world bosses, keyed dungeons. All of these things require care for how they are scaled so they work well together. A really good video to watch on these topics, that I refer back to often is an interview Rhykker did with the devs post Blizzcon 2021.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mAAN3B2n58

I would have loved a blog post devoted to their discussion of the campaign and difficulties of scaling, like they talked about in this interview.

164

Really hard to design such thing as ARPG stories are not expected to split. Most you can pull is allowing player to have some sort of shortcut by branching plot. However, you’ll end up killing Prime Evils as always so story doesn’t really have such space to include branching plot. Any story driven thing you can introduce can repeat itself at the next play through to a degree. Gating or limiting the content won’t solve any issues.

If, in the campaign story you supposed to kill the monsters x, y and z in an order by passing through path-a and path-b first; then next playthrough things can mix up and story gives you path-c to bypass path-a to jump for path-b or directly at monster-y before monster-x. Most you can pull in a very limited story driven gameplay is this approach. Besides a few extra mechanics and restrictions introduced for thrill.

Incorporating too much story elements would slow the pacing which isn’t expected from an action-RPG. Force to repeat the linear missions and you finally bore the player even though you offer justified rewards. Split the expected outcome in phases and you might have just drag it or halt the intended progress.

tl;dr: I failed to find any information about endgame models or how they gonna approach leaderboards or seasons. Thank you for reading this wall of text.

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This would be a strong reason for each campaign+ difficulty to correspond to only 1 key dungeon lvl too.

In endgame I don’t think the shared world would be a big issue in the other hand (well, it is a big issue but not in a way that relates to difficulty scaling).

Two overworld solutions:
Each difficulty level comes with its own copy of the overworld. D3 style solution where you just pick your difficulty at login.

Or have all difficulties (or sub-brackets) in the same overworld.
Like you might run into a world boss +1, then a bit later you run into a camp+4.
That would give a very dynamic world which sound interesting to me.
However it would of course also cut down the realistically available content for a player in the overworld, as a new player in endgame would have to skip the camp+4 and go look for something else to do.
Since it is a big world that might not be much of an issue though.

One last thing. It feels like we are saying that all enemies have a static difficulty just because they exist within Key dungeon +3 for example.
But that doesn’t have to be tbe case.

Let’s say you wanted to have an extra difficult area in the overworld. That needs to feel more dangerous than the areas around it.
You could just make these enemies lvl 41 instead of 40. Or make a larger % of them elites.
Same goes for key dungeons themselves. Most monsters might be lvl 40, but then you get to a special room in the dungeon where the enemies are lvl 41, or all elites.
Same could also be used in campaign+ (maybe even address your view on smooth progression in the campaign).

I mean, these are the difficulty adjustments that already exists in the game before we introduce endgame key dungeon difficulties, and they still exist as tools afterward.
Blizzards won’t even have to listen to us for that, since this is exactly how WoW works too.

166

I can get behind the trying out different builds idea. I think there should be Power Cards, you find a good card, make changes to your build etc. Some Power Cards last 2 hour, some 10 hour, some 2 days.

It doesnt really work, if there isnt Cards, kids just go to forums/internet and take the best build from there. You look at the card, and build your build accordingly.

FO76 did something like that, with Perk Cards and it wasnt that bad.

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167

I don’t think they are going to have much of an issue figuring out scaling for the original campaign play-through. I think that will be very handcrafted and deliver the player to max level upon completion. It will likely be so thoroughly play-tested as to feel really good.

The question becomes what happens when a player hits level 40? If you go off what they are saying in the video I linked before there won’t be a separate - flip the switch and now it’s endgame experience - so it sounds like there isn’t an adventure mode as the game basically starts in adventure mode. It appears that you will unlock repeatable endgame content while playing through the story. So you might flip a camp at lvl 20 on one play-through and it start giving you repeatable quests to do, but on another play-through with a different character you might flip that same camp at lvl 30 instead. There are going to be some areas in the world that are always high level as you play through the game and you’ll have to come back to complete/explore later.

This makes me think a couple of things:

  • Shared world quests and cleansing camps will always be tied to your level - so I don’t think there are any plans for a camp+4 kind of model, and once a camp is unlocked you won’t be able to replay the camp unlocking experience. When you hit lvl 40 you will automatically start earning the “endgame rewards” from those shared world repeatable forms of content.
  • My guess is keyed dungeons will begin with rank 1 being a slightly less than lvl 40 experience, so those keys start dropping before you finish the campaign, and will go up from there. No idea what that means for the max keyed dungeon rank, but we’ve seen rank 15.
  • I don’t know what the scaling will be for world bosses. My guess for now, based on the Blizzcon 2019 demo, the world bosses will simply scale to your level. So you could fight one at lvl 10 while others fighting around you are lvl 40. Really not sure on this.
  • I don’t think all uniques/legendaries will have static levels. I think you could have the same unique that drops as a lvl 10 item, from a lvl 10 monster could also drop as a lvl 40 item from a lvl 40 monster. I hope I’m wrong on this.

Because of this, I don’t think they have any plans for a campaign replay system. I think they will just take the campaign dungeons and roll them into the keyed dungeon system. You can replay those dungeons post campaign by finding a key for them.

If that’s the case, then I think they are planning one more piece of endgame (at launch) to go with keyed dungeons and shared world repeatable quests.

There are two likely candidates:

  • Boss rush, helliquary, boss arena sort of system, or
  • A story-based, multi-level, endgame dungeon experience.

I’d be fine with either and would love both, but then this brings us back to the fate of a campaign replay system and the feedback in this thread.

If they wanted to create a replay system, balancing the difficulty against their shared world design is going to be tricky. I fully expect parts of the campaign are going to alter the shared world, and any replay system they create would not revert those changes since it would seem odd to give up already unlocked endgame content to play other endgame content.

So to implement a campaign replay system I’m left with only one realistic option.

  • Campaign replay system could be designed as we’ve discussed with difficulty revolving around the keyed dungeon system, but the story would have to be slightly altered on the replay. Areas where you’ve unlocked camps or altered the world in some way would acknowledge you’ve already helped them before and send you on to the next task or change the task up in some way. For example, you flip a camp that unlocks a campaign dungeon the first time you play through. If you play through a second time that camp is already flipped and the dungeon is already active, but the dialog slightly changes and the camp asks you to go check it out.

Essentially the developers would have to create two campaigns. One that plays through normally, and another that is specifically designed for the replay system to deliver a coherent story in that altered world state. I would love it if the developers took some extra time to make this possible in endgame. I know that was sort of long, but many aspects to discuss here.

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168

@Shadout I want Blizz to work on the game as they have it right now. If they wish to add such a thing add it in an expansion. I want D4 to be a huge success where it at least has two full expansions.

But thinking we are Mr. Mrs. (Ms.) know it all’s is not healthy at all.

That earlier comment of mine about ancestral, demonic and angelic stats was not saying that we can criticize something that doesn’t exist. Instead I was using it as a way to show that nothing is so set in stone that it cannot change unless the game is really close to launch. Besides if such a thing did happen where campaign plus couldn’t be added till later there will be no harm at all.

It is not like not having it will destroy D4. The idea of continually repeating a campaign is a thing of the past that is going the way of the Dodo bird.

I can add to Eigen9’s list of cons. It can be seen as a lazy way out of developing a separate endgame that could even extend the story of D4. A lack of passion for the game. Where they just keep reusing the same old stuff never adding anything new.

Blizz’s endgame system might already use places in the campaign already. Where instead of actually revisiting it directly. They do so in parts in the endgame much like D3’s endgame in adventure mode.

It all depends on how Blizz has the difficulty scaled in the keyed dungeons. If they have 4 affixes and 40 ranks of keyed dungeons you can see how it can create a difficulty bloat. But I guess you just don’t want to see it that way. Where the ranks will be meaningless and only the affixes will mean something to you.

At this point in time it is no doubt finite. But in time it could morph into something that would be more akin to how GRs and difficulty levels of the game. At one time T6 was the highest along with somewhere around GR40 IIRC. Now look GR150 and T16 all because of power creep.

If you don’t design a deep endgame system that is enriching and fun to play. Then players will say that look we are done with the endgame and there is nothing left for us to do. If those players are not into alts then they are done playing D4.

In your discussion with Eigen9 you finally get it. With 30+ campaign difficulties that would translate to adding a T26 in D3.

you actually think that jumps don’t do the players any harm. Then why do the players hear complain about the fact that the progression through the 20 difficulties in D3 are not smooth. Where you go from one through to the next and so on.

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169

@Shadout any time you actually design a game where you come across enemies of different difficulties in areas might be confusing for players. More so if they are randomly scattered per play session.

I don’t need cards that will only last for a little while. I like the idea of having characters that I have to go through the process of taking them from zero to hero.

@Eigen9 I want to tell of only one thing that I can remember that was etched into stone. Although it wasn’t in a Diablo game. It was the game called City of Heroes.

When it was in development Cryptic Studios/NCsoft actually thought that players wouldn’t want to customize their powers. Boy oh boy were they wrong big time. So what happened was that the devs had the animation, point of projection, color, sound, etc… all baked into the power. Instead of having the power call for those things when it was activated.

It took NCsoft’s Paragon Studios, when they took over the development of City of Heroes for NCsoft, years to figure out how to offer power set customization.

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170

I doubt the campaign will have any drastic effects in the game world, in terms of changing it. Especially if they want to have that non-linear open world feeling (I wish they would not, but not really a thing I consider important one way or the other).
Would be cool if it had world changing moments though. But any changes that would affect campaign+ could probably be handled like in the campaign itself.

Like, when you are on a quest that requires a camp to be in a specific state, it loads back into that state for just a moment while doing said quest. WoW does much of the same with its content, can’t remember right now what it is called.
Especially since the game seem to be in permanent adventure mode from lvl 1, as you mentioned, the move from lvling to endgame should not represent this momentous jump in how things work.

As for world bosses and other overworld stuff etc. scaling to your lvl and nothing else, it is hard to see how it can be relevant endgame content without adhering to the same scaling as key dungeons. That pretty much seem like a requirement.

Before going into your posts I will just thank you for finally moving (a little bit, but baby steps are fine!) away from strawman building, and in multiple occasions here stating your own opinions. Good to see and allows for much more meaningful discussion.

Back to the post: Success is not measured in amount of expansions.

Indeed.
The further away from launch the more can be changed though.

Not a con, since it is not either/or. They could reuse the campaign AND add new story. As they should.

Nonsense.
You not liking it is fine, but a very different matter.

I would sure hope so!
Again not either/or however.
I already outlined how they should use the overworld in endgame.

No you need to explain that one instead of repeating it. I would definitely consider 40 key dungeon difficulties as bloat, but you are not explaining how campaign+ would in any way create or affect that bloat.

What is your argument?
Can Blizzard fail and repeat all their mistakes of D3? Yes. I kinda expect they will.
But how is that remotely relevant for the topic here? The arguments presented here are describing how they avoid failing again.

Yes?
There should not be 30 difficulties… again unrelated to the topic.

Designing a fun and engaging endgame. Now THAT is the topic of this thread.
That said, it is totally okay if some people are done with a game and move on.

Difficulty jumps benefit the player experience by creating more challenges to overcome.

Huh? Nobody seem to complain about that.
D3 difficulties are insanely smooth. Which is a big part of their design issue.

Oh no, are we confusing the poor players? What a terrible thing to do!
I guess we just fundamentally disagree on that one.
Meeting a lvl 70 enemy that obliterates you, as lvl 60 in the first area of WoW TBC is not a design flaw. It is good design and world building.

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I was just basing this off what I heard said in that interview. It seems like parts of the campaign will involve cleansing camps; at the very least you could cleanse a camp while playing through the game whether it’s required or not. If that’s true, then any replay system would either need to temporarily revert a feature the player has already unlocked (through sharding), or would need to be altered to reflect the current world state (also possible).

In the case of sharding, they have stated that if you join a multiplayer game and the leader has not cleansed a camp but you have it will default to their shard of the world state. It seems possible they could do the same thing for a campaign replay - temporarily shard the shared world as being untouched allowing you to repeat the camp cleansing, and then moving you to the completed status shard you had prior to the replay. That is going to be a not-insignificant amount of work depending on how many times throughout a replay it needs to be done and could affect the experience for other players (shards can have weird consequences for other players in shared world games). I have some hope their new engine was built with sharding in mind, so maybe they can pull that off seemlessly. WoW uses this too much in my opinion and it doesn’t always work right / feel good when they do, so if by creating a slightly altered campaign replay I can avoid having a ton of sharding in solo play I’d probably lean toward that approach.

I think it’s possible to have the shared world state not scale beyond level 40, but I agree it would be better if it did. The way it could work in the shared world is the way zone scaling works in WoW. Two players at different difficulty levels are both attacking the same enemy. Say you are level 40 and the other player is level 20. The damage each of you deal is converted into a uniform unit (percentage most likely) and is subtracted from the mobs percentage based health pool behind the scenes. That uniform health pool is then scaled back into the individual health pools that each player sees. The developers would then need to have some weighting mechanism to determine how much each player is contributing relative to the other. It would feel bad if you are hitting a lvl 44 elite that’s been scaled and the person next to you is hitting it as a lvl 10 elite on their first play-through but they end up out damaging you.

Scaling the world state based on keyed dungeon level is probably the best way to go in this instance. Rather than have the world constantly scaling around me so it never felt like I got really powerful, I would try to have a quest where you have to grind up to a certain keyed dungeon level (say rank 5 for the first time) and then upon completing the quest you trigger a world upgrade (you can choose to not turn it in for a bit and keep the world at one level, but if you do that the rewards don’t scale with it). This would give you some control over when that world scaling occurs. At this point, you also unlock the ability to replay the campaign at that new world scaled state (NM level). The next quest to upgrade the world might occur at rank 20 (Hell level) and the final quest to upgrade the world state might occur at rank 50 (inferno level).

If they are planning a campaign replay and a scaled shared world, this is my best guess of how they would make those work together.

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The impression I’m getting from this thread is that some people never played a game with a well implemented story-driven progression or a well implemented New Game Plus (not necessarily both).

The idea of redoing content in progressively more difficult and rewarding ways is something that people enjoy, even in games with massive ammounts of content. Why is raiding progression in games like WoW and FF so popular when it’s essentially new game plus for raids? I don’t play wow, but in FF you have the alliance raid, which is fairly easy and you can do with randoms (sort of a middle ground between LFR difficulty and Normal difficulty in WoW, depending on the raid), the savage raids which are kinda like “Nightmare” difficulty where it’s more difficult and rewards with excellent loot (actually, most of the loot you’ll need) and Ultimate difficulty which is mostly done for the challenge of it. And people LOVE that stuff. Even though it’s technically “the same raid 3 times”.

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173

I am playing FF14 and I think the new game plus as the endgame is rubbish. I like FF14 but I have zero desire to replay the entire FF14 story which can easily take 100+ hours to finish. Until now, I still haven’t click the “New Game+” option.

FF14 NG+ option:
https://i.imgur.com/j3guIWo.png

Those are not new game plus or campaign mode+. If anything, those contents are something like D3 Greater Rift or D2 Uber content. You don’t have to replay the entire campaign+ to reach and unlock them. You only need to play thru the story mode/sidequest story ONCE to unlock them forever.

People love them because it is not campaign mode+ but standalone content like Greater Rift that can be cleared on average 20 minutes, not hundreds.

There is a good reason why people hate FF14 Main Scenario DF because they don’t feel like playing thru unskippable story mode, and it is just 2 zones, and the developers have to “bribe” the playerbase to play these 2 “awesome content” so the players can “help” the new players to clear these 2 compulsory zones. It is no a coincidence that you won’t be able to find similar zones and designs like these 2 zones afterward in their next expansion and contents anymore.

This is FF14 Main Scenario Duty Finder content:
https://i.imgur.com/BNNtkO6.png

and here is what people think of FF14 Main Scenario in the Duty Finder:
https://i.imgur.com/IN3NygR.png

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I’m not talking about playing everything again, I’m talking about story-driven endgame that is repeatable. Raids have a story motivating them, you need to do quests to attune to them and the lore explains why you do it again. Rifts are different because there’s no real motivation behind them, they’re for “training”.

My favorite example of new game+ in the way you mean it is Dark Souls.

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175

Again, you only need to unlock and clear the Raid once and you can access them on the Duty Finder…forever instead of needing to replaying the campaign again. Heck, you don’t need to replay the entire campaign/story mode to unlock the FF14 raid as you can unlock them just fine in the same playthrough.

FF14 Raid list:
https://i.imgur.com/S5Xk29z.png

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I know that. I didn’t say otherwise. Why are you pointing this out as if I disagree?

But you HAVE to attune to them once. They HAVE a story reason to be there. And most importantly, they have actually memorable story-related elements (bosses). It’s not soulless randomly generated grind like GRs

By the way, I love duty roulettes. I see how it can be a burn to some though, having to do Castrum Meridianum over and over.

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177

Because this:

The point is all endgame contents don’t need to get gated behind on the campaign mode+.

Yes, especially during the moogle event. You have no idea how many times I have to listen to the antagonist bragging about how awesome he is and why do we need to follow and accept his conquest.

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I haven’t played FF14 so I’m not entirely sure of the intricacies of their system, but from what I understand the issue people have with the ng+ option there isn’t because they don’t enjoy playing through the content again, it’s because it doesn’t let them access endgame systems while doing so. You have to pause ng+ progress to rejoin the main game if you want to do certain activities. I agree that would feel terrible.

The campaign+ proposal here would allow players to replay the story and still access all the other endgame systems in the shared world (which honestly I think is the potential brilliance in the D4 approach to their open world design). The replayable campaign would still be completely optional though, you wouldn’t have to do it and I’m not advocating for it to be incentivized through some special reward structure to make it more appealing (apart from it scaling difficulty-wise). I’m open to whether or not you should get some sort of title/transmog/mount etc… for completing it, but I wouldn’t want to reward power or more efficiency in gaining power for completing it. It should remain completely optional for those that like story.

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179

You misread my point, the ** (not necessarily both).**

FF14 has amazing story-driven endgame content without the need for new game plus.

Dark Souls has amazing new game plus.

Either is fine to me, as long as there is some actual motivation to doing things other than to get bigger numbers for your character

That’s exactly how it is in FF14. New game+ is a completely optional thing. Duty roulettes and story scenarios give good rewards, but are also optional. If they were the ONLY way to progress in the game, I’d say it’s bad, but you can even just learn a crafting job and craft your gear all the way up to getting started in raiding content.

I think it got so meme’d that I end up laughing it up as comedy content. I understand why people hate it though. For me, being something I only really do once a day, when I feel like it, it’s not that big of a deal.

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I always heard that as a side activity. One you would probably do, since it would be the smart thing to do, but not as part of the campaign. Hard to know. At least they would probably have you clear one camp in the campaign to introduce the concept.
Camps don’t sound like they drastically change the map though. Just a very localized change for the camp itself.
Not new rivers appearing, or a volcano changing the landscape etc. still sounds like if you need an enemy camp for a specific campaign quest the game would just load that enemy camp until you are done with the quest, WoW style.

They will presumably need it regardless of campaign+, since as you say different players will have cleared, or not cleared, different camps.

If it is less work, sure.

Yeah the scaling with different lvls is not an issue as I see it. WoW got that solved. Endgame difficulty is not about lvls, but about scaling up with players as they get better endgame gear (and any endgame character progression which might exist).
If the overworld stops scaling the moment you hit max lvl it will be irrelevant.
Now WoW has some ilvl scaling afaik, but that would be a horrible thing in for an A-RPG (and kinda is for an mmorpg too).

Yeah you must be able to choose between the difficulties. Auto scaling with your highest key clear would be really problematic.
Like what happens when you respec to a weaker build. Or you used an OP build that got massively nerfed.

Being able to pick your difficulty level, either at the login screen, or dynamically by choosing where to go in the game, seems like a basic requirement.

I have seen a few game do the irreversible auto scaling thing, such as Genshin Impact. It only results in awkward game guides on YouTube etc. where people are taught how to avoid triggering the scaling. Quite a mess.

Indeed.

Strawman.
Nobody expects D4 campaign to last hundreds of hours. Pretty sure you yourself joked about doing the campaign in an hour earlier in the thread.

And that is indeed the entire campaign you play through.

Exactly what makes it different from stuff like GRs indeed.

Literally nobody in this thread is saying that!

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