I’ve been a loyal diablo player since the first. I love and hate Loot. I love finding that amazing piece, and I hate what that piece does to the gameplay.
What if Trash damage, health, and skills were MOSTLY percentage-based rather than gear/difficulty dependant?
Please hear me out. The key here is that loot-dropping elites/bosses don’t change and scale to gear.
But the hordes of trash? They lose all their value at the end game. Because we don’t want our Gear to feel useless suddenly we sacrifice a large part of the whole reason we play! I don’t want my challenge to disappear along with the usefulness of the vast majority of my skills. If certain portions of the game were NORMALIZED then the challenge and experience of those sections would remain AS DESIGNED! I could appreciate the need to kill the shaman first or dodge the hammer blows or whatever other amazingly fun skill stuff that vanishes because of the stupid loot curve.
Call it a dark souls mode. Make it clear that it’s for serious challengers only and leave the bosses and elites gear dependant so loot stays relevant. Please…the loot curve destroys your beautiful game, and I believe this mode would be more popular than you think. (especially with me)
It could work if you eliminate bosses so basically every mob you encounter is a mini-boss in itself.
Proper balancing however could still achieve good results so that trash mobs aren’t one-shotted with godly gear.
It all boils down to how gameplay intensive your game is. For example, PoE is basically a point-and-click kill simulator, because there isn’t much gameplay variety in the game. All trash mobs attack you the same way and there’s no reason for any tactics during combat. Hades on the other side is the exact opposite of PoE. Every trash mob there has an optimal way to approach and if you don’t follow it that will cost you health points.
In the optimal aRPG scenario where we have very good AI on mobs with each of these having unique abilities a very good balancing would be needed so that trash mobs are like mini-bosses even in the very late game when the player has the gg gear.
Kinda negates most of the reasoning behind gearing, no? If the difference between fresh char and 10 000 hour in fully decked is negligible, why spend the time in the first place?
Trash is the vast majority of what you encounter, sure the boss might be easier, but if the way there is always static in terms of difficulty, the game would become at least to me stale hella fast.
If your goal is to one shot mobs you can stop playing after an hour once you gear enough to do this on normal.
A lot of players enjoy the item hunt, the min/maxing journey and the combat challenges (the competition). Having your character grow in power slow doesn’t kill the gameplay, on the contrary - it makes it more addicting.
Sure, but if one piece makes no difference from another piece, what’s the point of that? Min maxing is entirely pointless when stats does not matter for performance.
But the OP didn’t want slow, he wanted none at all. Trash would pose the same difficulty fresh geared as fully decked.
The point of souls-like is not being hardcore or not dying. It’s quite the opposite, it’s a game where the whole point of the game and why it’s considered hard even though it isn’t, is to die a lot (the original PC version was called “prepare to die edition”).
Dark Souls fans don’t even call themselves hardcore, they just use the mantra “git gud”, meaning the goal is to stop sucking at the game and improve at it, not be a super hardcore person
I agree the challenge shouldn’t go away when you get better gear, but that is a matter of making sensible gear/character progression, and challenging enemies. Not by making everything scale to you in a treadmill. Heck, even without the direct scaling, that already is what D3 does with its 150+ difficulty settings.
Diablo 3 is like this, where| = difficulty/power jumps) (gear/char scaling is of course continuous, and not happening in jumps, it is just to make it easier to illustrate)
Gear/char scaling: |–| --|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|
Difficulty scaling. : |–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|–|
(can’t fit in 150 difficulty levels, nor 20000 paragon lvls)
As in, so many difficulty levels, that you can always pick the perfect one for you, creating a sense of auto-scaling/treadmill
Diablo 2 is like
Gear/char scaling: |-------------------|------------------------------|
Difficulty scaling. : |-----------------|-----------------|
As in, the difficulty ends before the gear scaling, resulting in a fairly easy game at the end. But large enough jumps between the difficulty levels (normal, nm, hell) that you can encounter real difficulty along the way, until you reach the endpoint of outgearing the difficulty.
Diablo 4 imo should be more like
Gear/char scaling: |--------|--------|--------|
Difficulty scaling. : |--------|--------|--------|--------|--------|
As in, have a few difficulty levels above point where your character cant get any stronger. As challenge content. It should offer NO additional rewards, nor better droprates.
Yeah.
While the souls game do have some actually difficult content, those bosses are basically always placed as optional content or expansions (with Sekiro as the significant exception).
For the most part the games are not very hard at all. They just expect you to actually learn the games, play by its rules, and do it reasonably well. You never need to play amazingly well, getting above “bad” is enough. Whereas many games are like “we will let you pass no matter what, if you try enough”.
What he actually said though was that gear should have minimal effect on trash, it should be a percentage game, which at least to me would render the whole point of farming gear pointless, since the carrot of better gear is to be more efficient at killing things. Remove the carrot and I don’t really see a point in the game. Done it once and that’s it, it will never differ.
Now I would have no issues with higher torment levels, something to strive for as it were, but making the gear curve a flat surface would definitely not do it for me.
The game even gives you gear choices that are basically cheats. I remember the first character I built in Demon’s Souls was such a scrubby choice, I had the regenerator ring + adjudicator’s shield combo that gave me pretty ridiculous health regen and both a crescent falchion as a melee option that dealt ridiculous ammount of damage for a early game melee weapon and magic which was totally broken. There was a boss that I completely sniped being outside of it’s range.
But even if you don’t know how to get the cheat gear, the game is very manageable. Most of the people who streamed and beat these games were super casual and not even that good at it.
This way you still have min/maxing 1% → 15%, but the journey is slower and trash mobs keep gameplay value. The combat is not one shot point and click at the end.
There are two ways for that, either he pushes himself to GR120-130 or expects core systems to change to provide a challenge for the casual players. Which one is more likely?
Yeah, I dont generally watch other people play games, as it is pretty boring. But I have a fetish for watching new people play Souls games. Just special to see someone who have not really played many games before, go in, fail completely at first, and then a few weeks later they are dominating a Souls game. Feels like an epic journey, and one you can remember yourself going through if you played them.
Games should not aim to be hard, they should aim to make you feel good about conquering them.
Which does require the games to offer some challenge, and especially not to relent on that challenge. But it never requires a high difficulty where most people cant keep up. I would say basically anyone, that doesn’t suffer from handicaps that limit their ability to play games in general, can beat Souls games (excluding Sekiro). It doesn’t require anything special.
Some games just push up the difficulty. Like Super Meat Boy and similar games for example, but extreme difficulty just doesn’t feel anywhere as good as well-balanced difficulty.
The Souls games should be a role model for a lot of games when it comes to difficulty design. But especially for A-RPGs like Diablo.
Having enemies fully scale to our power would be the opposite of what Souls teaches.
Yep. In Demons Souls much of the boss cheesing probably came from a lack of developer experience, but in the later games it is clear that much of it is now by design.