There is a malaise in gaming. New releases are cycled through quickly (even one as exceptional as BG3) and the games with staying power are old - shooters, mobas, and GTA V (apparently on the strength of roleplaying). The market has been stale year after year. Yet interest and money appears to be growing rather than waning. Apparently the Singaporean government subsidized that dumb Skull and Bones flop that managers have been squabbling over since an Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag mini-game.
ARPGs are another old concept, except with inferior popularity. In the absence of multiplayer competition the games boil down to item chases with gameplay that is aptly described by the relatively popular streamer Shroud, “If you think about it ARPGs are kind of lame. All you do is spam one button to kill mobs.” In today’s market there are always people playing lame games. I do it myself out of a lack of quality options. But sooner or later it’s going to dawn on some of the background dimwits who supply video games that rather than dumping money into old ideas that seem safe and easy to project there is a need for qualitatively different things to shake things up.
As far as ARPGs are concerned the weakness is clear - they are dumb-to-play games. Ironically some of the fans of the genre may think they’re exceptionally smart because there are different “builds” and item combinations but the stupidity of gameplay is inescapable to the point of being freely acknowledged. What background complexity there is is often bypassed by following online guides as well.
Imo the key to the future is not treating players like complete idiots, at least not as far as gameplay is concerned. Games that challenge people rather than games that treat them like idiots tend to be the ones that go down as achievements. I think the controls of ARPGs is where you flip the stupidity of these games on its head. MMORPGs blew the ceiling on the number of actions available to players and proved immensely successful, again, by not treating players like idiots (incidentally BG3 did something similar). But MMORPGs are also slower-paced games that have set rotations creating the illusion of choice and complexity, or have abilities with long cooldowns that mixed with everything else require in essence third party applications to keep track of. The mechanical and mental strain of trying to port that control scheme to faster-paced ARPGs seems unreasonable.
When people think of what a really interesting game would be like they will probably eventually arrive at the notion of repeatedly having competitive choices. That is how a player has meaningful agency - making a choice from a set of options and having that matter. In ARPGs that choice is made outside of combat and usually lasts for tens to hundreds of hours. The gameplay itself is idiotic. There is no choice when you actually play an ARPG, you know exactly what you’re doing and what you’re doing couldn’t be simpler. You do the same few actions over and over again, even relying on a single one of them for much of your effect or “agency”. That is downright abysmal gameplay, albeit it can be entertaining (particularly for you know who).
In my mind the solution is simple - tiered multiple choice. People take inspiration from the weirdest things; how about from school? Repeatedly having sets of options that enable your character to do different things. I have discussed how this concept could work at significant length, for example here. Experimenting with this doesn’t even have to replace the base ARPG experience as it could be treated like an additional gameplay option. The theoretical ceiling is high.
TL;DR Stop trying to make an ARPG game for idiots, which is a common feature of all ARPG games, and take a risk at doing something actually innovative. Put that in the weekly report that doesn’t matter. Also, you can’t rely on aggregating player feedback for innovative ideas because people are idiots.
