ARPGs were a good genre for it's time but not anymore. Listen

PC General Discussion
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So hear me out.
Before I go deep on to this subject I want to tell you where I come from.
I’m grinding D2 LoD since 2002. I come from an era where playing hardcore characters and alt f4ing out of the game made you invisible in the chat lobby and you were DEAD. I lost several good geared characters back then.

The season is totally fine because it is something different. I like the traps and at the same time I hate the clunky movement and hitbox ranges and that it’s not zoomed out enough to even see traps out of screen. It’s all argueable, but the Vaults are awesome.
The concept is cool, even bette than in PoE.

The pet is bad, but who cares. In my opinion pets are bonkers and always were. Heck, they were bad in Diablo 2 as well. They and Mercs ruined Diablo 2 to begin with. Necro skeletons were only viable in Poison Nova builds with Enigma. Other than that trash.
It doesn’t fit in a world like Diablo 4. And even in Diablo 2 it ruined everything. Forcing Light sorces to get expensive Infinity and be unplayable without it.
We had Enigma (another trash designed item) that was way to op and out of place. It ruined the meta for way to long and still is to this day in D2R. It was bad item design.
And the same we have in Diablo 4! Shako has to be on the same exact bad design as Enigma, CTA and Hoto.

D2 PvP come on… we had cool tournaments back then but honestly they were just a cringe fest. Baal runs and CS runs were nothing other than a chat channel with something to do while chatting.

Looking back D2 was just a action role play casino slot machine game.
No normal person enjoyed baal runs, endless AT runs, Travi,… Thats why most people had bots.

And the sad truth is ARPGs haven’t gotten better since then. Not even PoE. I’d even argue PoE is worse (time invest/ fun gaining wise).

The only good thing about Diablo 4 is that is actually comes to an end at level 100 and you can basically farm gear in a reasonable time an average working human can spare for a video game unlike D2 or PoE.

You can hop in this game for a ladder if you feel it, slay monsters and still have a life. After a week you can go because you seen everything with your main. Or you play an alt. Or whatever.
In other ARPGs you are forced into a weird grind that no one needs besides people who have 24/7 time (like us kids back then). It serves no real audience.

Just grind this game a few days/ weeks and move on and come back a half year later. Better than an artificial arpg grind that is outdated in 2024.

ARPGs (yes, even Diablo 4, PoE , PoE2, LE,…) are all going to bad because of the nostalgia D2 still gives us. But in reality D2 was the worst time sink existing. ARPGs are the weirdest genre and outdated.

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This isn’t an aRPG. It’s a failed attempt at an MMO-lite.

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Sorry, but D2R is still amazing. And would be game of the year if they just remade it using this engine and graphics.

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No because half the player base would cry about Wudijo being lvl 95 day 1 and farming torches already.

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You’re completely wrong on all fronts lol. ARPG’s are still good. Done right. Which this company clearly can’t do anymore.

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Don’t know a single ARPG that is done right to this day.
The only one was D2LoD and only cause I was a kid and that was the best thing available in that time besides Warcraft 3 line tower wars and Starcraft BW.

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Then it’s probably just not the genre for you anymore because they are out there.

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The only argument pro D4 that I currently have is that it’s decent to play, has fun mechanics and if people wouldn’t play with a guide open copying everything and watching streamers play in an unnatural way a game should be played (back then no one got paid to play 24 hours) players would have fun. I don’t even think people would be clearing high NMDs now because of missing knowledge.

People ruin arpgs for themselves instead of just playing on their own the first weeks and it’s only because of this artificial race everyone wants to compete in even though they don’t stand a chance anyways.

Leaderboards are probably only for 3% of the playerbase interesting.

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I first played Diablo II without BNet and played Solo offline. Though eventually, I would experience the Bnet side and that turned me to the dark side. That’s when I would just play DII LOD on Hardcore online mainly solo. I experienced good things with the Diablo II community and some bad experiences. So, I mainly would just create my own private lobby and play solo.

I agree with you on this. I haven’t yet experienced the NM vaults just yet on my Hardcore 56 Rogue, but so far, I am enjoying the season. Yes, though, I did love the blood seekers from Season II and it is unfortunate that none exist in a similar mechanic in Season 3 dungeons aside from NM vault dungeons. However, I have had experienced some nice surprises in Season 3, like finding the Butcher in a cellar by himself surrounded by mangled corpse’s strewn about in a dark gloomy cave where only he stalked in the darkness. It was fantastic. I had to run at the time because I didn’t want to die. Can’t comment on POE because I haven’t played it enough.

I actually don’t mind the pet. I would prefer a follower as long as it is similar to the design of mercenaries from Diablo II. Simply for two reasons, one they could be geared and thus be extensions to the player. and Two, they could die. The threat of death made you care to protect you’re mercenary or Rogue. I always had a Rogue as my Mercenary. Yes they could be revived even on HC but it required a gold cost. Which would be higher due to gear and level.

Diablo II like Diablo IV does have a gloomy desperate isolating feel to it. However, when the mercenary or companion is just as vulnerable as the player character is, that adds depth to that isolation and despair. Simply because you have a companion to experience it with. But, just like you, they can die just as you can. I think a simple change from Diablo II HC would be to make it where if you play HC on Diablo IV, the mercenary, companion has a one life just the same as HC. But to get one costs an extreme amounts of gold. Because they can be geared unlike the system from Diablo III. Not saying Diablo III’s followers were bad. Their strengths came from the fact that they were characters themselves and thus a companion rather than a voiceless merc. But Diablo II’s Mercs you could gear. Which is a different experience entirely. I would hope that Blizzard could combine the two.

HC PVP on Diablo II was actually a thrilling experience to watch. It could work in Diablo IV but that is something that the community would have to build not Blizzard. I only got to experience PVP in Diablo II one time, and that was for the beta of Diablo II Resurrected. A holy cold Paladin would not leave my Amazon alone.

Yes but that’s one of the main reasons why Diablo II was fantastic. The loot grind was the best until Dark Souls came about.

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Grim dawn and Last Epoch are both Very Very good. Poe I played for around 4k hours and Im done.
Arpg are the only Games i Play now…even with a Job, a wife and thoisand other Things to do.
If done right, they are so much rewarding and fun.
Even D4 is fun…for a short time each season

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ARPGs are great.

Monetizing an “always online” ARPG with bogus cosmetics, expansions is what hits them hard. My favorite ARPGs don’t do this.

The entire point of an ARPG is to collect stuff either 1 for the sake of collecting or 2 for power gains. Variety of builds add into the interest, where it shouldn’t be about funneling these games into “1 best clear build” and “1 best boss build” and increase the amount of stuff to get.

Inserting “aaaaaaaaaaand you can collect things by buying this stuff!!! and you need to because that’s how the game stays running!!!” is what kills these things.

This is why indie ARPGs tend to be better, they cannot count on that sort of revenue to sustain development. They also trade off ulta-next-gen-high-end graphics for good game engines, personality, and things to effectively make a fun game.

The negative to ARPGs is that the most expensive thing to develop in any game is the art. Because one piece of art has to work in X number of use cases.

You can list EVERY genre of game and see how AAA titles have been corrupted by marketing and profit problems in general.

However, there are outliers, and those prove the things “we’ve all been saying the whole time.”

So nah, and by your list of games, I don’t have confidence that you’re such the connoisseur you claim to be. My favorite two ARPGs were/are Grim Dawn and Slormancer. POE is a close 3rd because when it’s good it’s very good… but when the league is bad, it reveals all of the flaws with the game painfully. D3 is up there for me, because that was back when the “blizzard polish” was in full force and they were generous with the fixes and tweaks (because they were footing the bill by how grossly different the pay model was in other countries). It was naive to think that the blizzard that made D2 had the same spirit for D3, and even D3 to D4.

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That’s just false.

The REASON people gravitate towards socially gained knowledge is they don’t want to invest hundreds of hours in a ridiculous grind to just discover something doesn’t scale, it’s just a drag to try different builds, the entire aspect system is restrictive for no reason (how hard would it be that any aspect you break down just goes into your book with rng values on application?) I would absolutely never use a guide because even the worst build is moldable. And I had fun playing non-meta things that eventually became meta because people in parallel discovered what I was thinking (I was one of the first people I saw doing the trap spam stuff when most were saying how awful traps were, there were no guides or “woah check how strong this is out” builds/vids. Or at least uncommon enough that it wasn’t on the big sites)

If you go completely blind, you don’t even know what some later glyph does.

Further, it’s a drag to put on your reading glasses to parse EVERY YELLOW that drops. Let alone if you don’t follow the notes you have 0 working in-game knowledge about how damage buckets work.

A green +damage weapon seems “better” but a much lower item with the right lines is actually better! herp derp.

The gameplay loop is pretty simple guideless. I did it in S0 and never bothering again.

Crunched through dungeons and when I felt I was too squishy or had too much damage I’d make the decision to move up tier or modify swap out gears.

What made that annoying? How you have to respec. How PVP/NM/Uber Lilith builds are separate builds but there is no build storage. How the vault didn’t let me save multiple copies of each aspect and find them easily. How bad of an interface the paragon tree is. The costs of enchanting.

In seasons past that? I’d look up what someone claimed the “best meta” would be, got those abilities, and just yoloed most of the rest. You can’t go very wrong by just maximizing number of glyphs you socket and going for damage.

Why could I do that? Because the stats are obvious, the uniques that are better than yellows are obvious. And again, if I suddenly would not be able to do something I just tweak. It’s TEDIOUS.

Almost none of those QOL needs to make it not tedious have been addressed. The paragon/talent thing was fine… but not being able to store more than 1 build? lolwut

And being a solo player, this just adds up to a huge advantage to people playing in a group. It’s not hard to just get carried to 100 on a 2nd of the same class which gives you clear vs. bosskill or whatever. But to do it again with a solo? Ick

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Yes, it’s a really stagnant genre. I don’t know what you can do about that when people keep wanting to effectively get the same game over and over though. I definitely want games that are inspired by good gameplay (like D2 was) but I kinda don’t want to have a remix at this point.

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  1. Combat engine and mechanics
  2. Build development mechanics
  3. Cool items

Then develop interesting synergies and things to discover across the 3.

It’s not hard, the problem is shareholders add 4. Wealth extraction, and focus on that.

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the startling reality is all entertainment sucks these days and will continually satisfy us less and less as time goes on. information overload and dopamine burnout. humans suffer from ingratitude, longing, and regret, no matter how abundant or comfortable our lives become and so the more we have instant access to everything, the more we “win” in this world, we’re actually just losing and sealing our doomed fate. 2024 is the most accurate depiction of a dystopian society that we’ve ever known. in today’s day and age everyone has depression and anxiety suffering from nihilsim and existential crisis in a dangerous, dissatisfying, poverty/war-stricken world where anyone who uses the internet is inevitably hyper-aware of and has access to every tragedy, every event, every product, every idea, etc ever purported by any individual or outlet

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ARPGS can be good games. I have played this PoE league every day for hours since 8th of December, and i still have things i want to do. Just finished building a bossing char so im going to do some invitation farming and uber bosses. And that is after i have farmed 15 mirrors just mapping for over a month straight.

Thing is D4 have not evolved from D3. Its essentially the same game. The gearing is identical so is the items, yes there a few different affixes like damage on tuesdays in D4. but uniques/legendaries is a 1 to 1 copy of D3. You buff certain skills and thats what you have to wear if using this skill type of itemization.

The Paragon board is nothing but % increases. There is nothing there that would change how you gear up or how to scale or how to build your defenses, and it hasnt changed one bit since launch. Plus the graphical style of the boards are something out of a Super Nintendo game, it doesnt look like it was made in this millennia even.

ARPGS today need to have lots and lots of puzzle pieces, its a problem solving game. How to solve your defenses, how to solve your offenses. But there is nothing to really solve in D4 or D3. The charachters build themselves and you are just piloting it.

And as for seasons, having a dud every now and then is fine and to be even expected. PoE as well is not immune to having bad leagues. Difference is that PoE has an amazing rich base game to play if youre not into the league, while D4 has not so the magnifying glass onto the season is much larger because it is like half of your so called endgame. Fix the base game and then a mid or a bad season is not all that bad.

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I actually agree with you mostly, but you’re not going to get many buyers for this argument here.

Traditional ARPGs are an antiquated game design driven almost entirely by nostalgia. I played nearly all of them from launch, including Diablo 1. I’ve seen how the genre has gotten calcified and sclerotic, while the fans got more unreasonable and cranky. It’s a real problem, but it’s also not MY problem; and if Blizzard/GGG/etc. can make money selling these things, more power to them.

The future of ARPGs is in games like Remnant 2. Keeps many of the loot driven aspects that made ARPGs so engaging, but dumps the slot machine control scheme that, if I’m honest, is basically hot garbage. Not for D4, for all ARPGs. WASD helps, but only so much; the isometric view is just not that great for delivering an engaging, skill based experience.

I still don’t think anyone has nailed the cross-over. Remnant 2 is close, but it’s too simplistic. Games like The Division embraced too much of the flavor of the month open world mentality, otherwise could have done it.

Before anyone gets all upset, I’m not saying you shouldn’t have ARPGs to play, or that all of them suck. Far from it. I just think it’s a type of game that doesn’t interface well with how most modern gamers want to experience games, and I can prove it, by pointing out all the compromises Blizzard had to make to shoehorn Diablo 4 onto the XBox and PS5.

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Arpgs are still great it’s just most modern AAA games in general like d4 are boring and bad.
Grim Dawn, Titan quest, D1,D2, Victor vran, van helsing, last epoch, dark spore, dark stone, heretic kingdoms inquisition, I could keep going are all still awesome.
Dark Stone being my favorite and anytime I start it even until this day I end up sinking hundreds of hours

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That’s a big, throbbing, super hard, ultra-erect “Disagree” there, champ.

PoE and others (Grim Dawn, Torchlight, Titan Quest, and even games like Wolcen) have pushed the genre forward by miles while Blizzard is kinda doing their own thing and largely just playing catch-up to where the rest of the games in the genre have evolved to rather than continuing to lead as they once did. They’ve helped grow the genre and expand its reach considerably, adding ARPG’s for all different types of players ranging from your PoE Ruthless HCSSF ultrasweats to your super approachable, easy, enjoy your power Torchlight: Infinite.

The genre has improved by leaps and bounds, and continues to show incredible promise with games like PoE 2 and Titan Quest 2 coming this year.

Honestly it sounds like you don’t even like ARPG’s anymore, OP. Which is fine, we all fall in and out of love with genres. Doesn’t mean the genre isn’t good anymore.

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ARPGs aren’t “dead” or “not good anymore” because YOU think so. It is still a very popular genre, and D2R has a more dedicated and HAPPIER fan base then this abysmal game ever will. Maybe if you feel this way about ARPGs you should consider playing a different genre and walking away from this one.
What a near sighted post.

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