Oh boy… this argument is tough to sell from someone who hasn’t english as his first language…
But I like to put myself into some heated topics, so here we go…
First I would like to invite you to look at the scenario we have now:
Grim Dawn
You can say what you want and sing all your praises to how much Grim Dawn is awesome, but at this very moment, Grim Dawn only has 2000 players inside the game.
The game is good but people don’t play it?
Last Epoch
Came from record numbers on launch of its 1.0 version with 250000 players to only 25000 in one month.
Path of Exile
They are now on the launch of a new season, so as expected, doing good numbers but few days ago they were in the realm of only 7000 players.
Diablo IV
We don’t know real numbers of Diablo IV but looking at Steam numbers, today they have half the players they had at the launch on the plataform.
Wolcen
From above 100000 players to impressive 80 playing right now.
And I don’t think we can blame this only on a bad launch.
Until 2023 they were releasing big updates to improve the game.
So… why is this? Why players of ARPG can’t stay in the game for a longer period of time without the gimmicks of “Seasons” or “Leagues” or whatever your prefered game likes to call its seasonal content?
And if I had the final answer, I wouldn’t be making a thread in a forum.
I would be with my suitcase at the door of Blizzard to sell the solution.
But it seems like that for any reason there is a fatigue of the players about the genre.
Something changed and people seems tired of the repetition (or the formula).
And what I see devs doing is trying to mix the genre with different ones.
Diablo IV tried do add MMO elements. And I don’t need to say to you how that ended.
Path of Exile II, by what everything is pointing out, will try to become an isometric souls like.
I can even go far and say that the seasonal content is how they’re mixing genres to the ARPG formula, but for a limited time.
And all that is to repeat what I state in the title: The ARPG genre can’t stand on itself anymore.
call it top-down action RPG. it doesn’t have to be isometric.
good call on mentioning the camera angle. not a lot of people understand how important that is in determining gameplay and that you can’t compare two games with two different camera angles.
Your expectations are unreasonable. PoE leagues are consistently large on release, and Last Epoch going from 250k to 25k in over a month on the release of a PoE league is perfectly fine.
I have no idea what “can’t stand on itself anymore” even means, but needless to say, PoE remains a growing game in terms of long term, Last Epoch had something like 5x the players that it had prior to release with the release league and will have another league to follow, and despite it’s obvious status as a turd, D4 still has an exceptionally large number of players.
Why do you expect players to stay in an arpg longer than “a league” at a time? If the game genre lends itself well to fresh restarts on a reasonable schedule, why would they change it?
Some days ago I got curious about Fallout 4 and went to give a look on their numbers.
Surprisingly, Fallout 4 has been keeping the same amount of regular players month after month AND FOR YEARS.
Isn’t a big number, but for some reason their public remained loyal.
It’s about this behavior I’m talking about.
Without seasons, players of ARPG don’t stay in the game.
What you can take from that when you look across the board and see that everyone has the same problem?
That something with the genre don’t stick with players today and they need seasons to compensate.
Also:
You saying that losing 200000 players in one month is “fine”?
Not in one million years. What, don’t they have a good game that can keep the players even on a launch of the competition?
Again, I say to you, the problem isn’t with Last Epoch.
And I ask you this: Why Warframe doesn’t have this problem?
I mean, Warframe and Path of Exile are free games. Both are in multiple plataforms. Both have seasonal content. But we don’t see Warframe losing players.
The genre will often result in insanely long hours played over the course of the title’s lifespan. It can often times be very bursty due to the seasonal resets, but it’s not abnormal at all for even self described “casual” players to rack up 50-100 hours in a single season. Multiply that by multiple seasons a year over multiple years and that’s great value for the expense of one game.
I think aRPGs are doing fine as a whole, especially if they are good games. Crate would not be releasing an expansion to Grim Dawn if it didn’t make them money.
I believe that the Casual Diablo like ARPG market is the largest of all (Diablo Like ARPG) and the only one that does not have a very good game in it. I mean… Diablo 3, although it seems like a lie, had many players, and I’m not talking about the beginning. I’m talking about a few years ago (mainly when he started creating interesting seasons).
If Diablo 4 manages to create a very good Endgame while still being Casual, then you will see this “trend” change.
(You can play a casual game as if it were non-casual, but you cannot play a non-casual game as if it were casual.)
The amount of players doesn’t matter in these games, it’s the revenue. As long as the companies can continue to afford to pay their developers and keep the servers running we’re golden. Quite literally anything else doesn’t matter.
That’s not necessarily a problem. Most non-competitive online games see spikes of players dropping off and coming back when new content hits, this is normal for multiple genres that offer online play.
Because all this Diablo like loot based System ARPG lack of content and it rely on repeatly grinding and leveling to sustain the game play. This formula was working in Diablo 2 because leveling was slow and reaching maximum level was a great achievement back then.
Diablo 4 made a huge mistake of being light on the campaign and the game was not sustained by any interesting late-game content. You can see BG3 is top 10 in Steam Chart now as player enjoy replaying the campaign with different builds. Elden Ring has much more players than Last Epoch even though no new content released in two years the campaign is great and the game never waste your time in randomizing your gear drop and they cleverly put a softcap on your stat so you don’t need to waste time grind your level.
D4 will be my last loot based game, as I found this genre is boring as you just repeatly kill thousands of same monster like a fool because the game randomized the gear stat. This was the old formula of the Korean MMORPG
Helldivers and Palworld still remain on top steam chart from release and till now as those game has good replayability content. LE is just capitalized on players D4 players disappointment in Season 3 and hope they can escape the boredom by spending another $35 and found that they are back to the same boredom hole after one month of gameplay
There isn’t any new league in decade old game like Left for Dead 2, but it still has more players than LE. This so call D4 killer is imploded, the writing is already on the wall.
I will argue that people get bored, sooner or later, doing the same game play loop over and over. This applies to all games with a few exceptions. For example, I don’t think I will ever get bored with chess, because each playthrough is a bit different.
Anyway, I have no idea how the devs can fix this. I’m just a player that like to consume content. Keep me entertained and I will keep playing
arpg is a sub genre, some may like to think of it as a main genre, meaning xyz, but it really is not, reading the description for D1 is my proof i bring to the table, Described as a Isometric strategy RPG with real time combat , making it part of the arpg sub genre.
With its real time interaction and combat, hack/slash beat em up style.
This is what people like me look for in these games, and that is why we play story and look for rpg mechanics.
The endgame subgenre and grind that D3 created is something new, that most refer to now when the use a coined term aprg, and its rather frustrating as like it can be with music.
We need a new name for that, to eliminate the mechanically confusion that exists in this genre of arpgs. Which means yes it can have souls like stuff, Dragons dogma, it can be many things, rogue like, as long as its actions are real time, and well action based, its a arpg.
