I really enjoy the constant goal and feel of progression in gaining experience and receiving some sort of RELEVANT reward in the process. I found the paragon leveling in D3 to be super monotonous and there was no real feeling of impactful progression in it for me.
I am just concerned that I do not want the whole game to switch over entirely to being about farming items as soon as you reach max level. If there isn’t any relevant skill customization or talents/passives you can continue unlocking and or developing after the base level cap ( which if its only 40 seems like it could pretty quick) it could get pretty dry. I don’t want to just move straight into RNG item progression with the rest of the character building and leveling experience being toast.
Level 99 cap which is almost impossible to reach worked very well in D2. Max level I got to was 92 and I was happy with that. Paragon is worthless and very boring.
Making low and mid level gear relevant at endgame can solve, in part, that problem. It will make the leveling up process more enjoyable if there’s a chance to find useful stuff for endgame as you level up
I maybe wrong but I think the OP is talking about Pre End/Late Game.
From level 1 - 40 in this case as it stands.
Somethings like class based side quests to unlock something in a skill/talent tree.
This is true and not a bad idea if they run itemization right.
That is mostly what I am talking about. It just seems silly to even have a leveling system and a skill tree ( where points are put into it each level) if its pointless and mostly obsolete. Might as well just not have levels and everybody can just level up their skills and farm gear.
There needs to be some thing real and character building to unlock, but not mandatory. That was so beautiful about Diablo 2, all your needed skill points is basically set at level 80, and those last 100 stat points just makes it easier for you to survive. From there is just a long grind where things get easier as you get tougher.
So it’s a good balance of desire, but not forced. Diablo 1 had the same thing where you reached level 30-35 and had everything, but you could still level for all those benefits of level ups and hit ratios. No forcing, but you wanted to.
Regardless of them choosing a level cap that many don’t reach or paragon level or something else, I just hope there is a finite grind and an actual end to it.
Making it per character is fine, but don’t have an infinitely increasing power scale. That leads to some problems down the line. Especially if new players want to jump in when everybody else is at paragon 5000+
Also, make the quests important again. In D2 your quests were tied to your character building. You would complete a quest for a socket quest, attributes, skills, personalization, vendor price reductions, etc. Everything had a purpose.