[feedback] bored to death

Make your build, to level the character, to gear it up, and to get firm with the game mechanics is EVER PRESENT.

It is present 100% of the time. From start to finish.


First game is "scripted main campaign", act1 and act2, repeatable 4 times.

Not sure what % of the game that entitles to.

Second game is "end game", Maelstrom of Chaos, re-use all game assets at top difficulty level.

Not sure what % of the game that represents.




If we evaluate by time spent by the player, second game quickly start to dominates the % after each day after the first half of the week spent playing the same character.

With 1 character, for the first month, 3-4 days you spend on "first game" and 26-27 days you spend on "second game". Only people that make multiple characters from level 1 to level 58 or so will have a similar % of time distributed evenly amongst "first game" and "second game".

If we evaluate by "time/resources developers spent making act 1 and act 2, minus the assets that are re-used in Maelstrom of Chaos", then its clear that the bulk of the % of resources and development time went on "first game".

I've played a fair amount of time, leveling maybe ten char to +25. But I've only cleared one chaos level. I've always rerolled before getting to chaos. So in my case, 98% of my play time was on the "first" game.

@Tertium_Quid: I also had suggested this system to be implemented on my feedback thread Though not many people interested with that, also got no reply from any dev till now. I also would really like to see it implemented.

'Interested' putting some very important issues lately with frankness, that's admirable at the very least.
The content is the epitome of repetitive feeling being felt lesser and lesser. The lesser the redos bug the player the better and longer the gameplay serves its purpose to a player, which should be the target GGG should lean onto imo.

I've always dreamt an arpg that has different content from each other as for all the difficulties go on. That of corpse needs a much more work and endeavor, needless to say.

And personally what i call as "challenge";
for melee characters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wz_gJlWlxXs
for spellcasters: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nnHzB86F68

For those who had struggle getting my point. Maybe it makes more sense now, that how AI actually acts and brings difficulty to table in a true way.

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BrecMadak wrote:

@Tertium_Quid: I also had suggested this system to be implemented on my feedback thread Though not many people interested with that, also got no reply from any dev till now. I also would really like to see it implemented.

'Interested' putting some very important issues lately with frankness, that's admirable at the very least.
The content is the epitome of repetitive feeling being felt lesser and lesser. The lesser the redos bug the player the better and longer the gameplay serves its purpose to a player, which should be the target GGG should lean onto imo.

I've always dreamt an arpg that has different content from each other as for all the difficulties go on. That of corpse needs a much more work and endeavor, needless to say.

The part of your feedback dealing with "random side quests" (or as you called them "Altering Quests") was but a very small part of your thread, and was poorly fleshed out, so it is of little wonder it went unnoticed.

Maybe, there could be different 'random side quests' for each act per difficulty (as you suggested), so as to get at the of feeling that each difficulty is actually different, not just a slightly more difficult version of the previous one. I fully agree that something is needed to break the monotonous state the game is currently in...

Just a comment as I think (despite some of the disagreements here) this is a significant discussion about PoE.

I've played mostly rangers --- 4 or 5 up to mid-50s and merciless difficulty, a couple up to the low/mid 30s and assorted other lower lvl characters in the other classes (all HC). That should be enough to indicate that I like a lot about the game and think it gets quite a bit right (some good, basic ARPG combat mechanics and character building).

But the boredom/monotony criticism has some bite to it. In particular, there's not a lot of difference in the game-play from lvl 1 to lvl 50. It seems like at lvl 1 you do 1-10 da (say) vs 10-20 hp monsters, and at lvl 50 you're doing 250-500 da (with skill and support gems) vs 500-1000 hp monsters but it's hardly much different (and maybe you throw in a curse or two here and there if it becomes worth the bother). Everthing just scales up, so the net effect is that it all feels pretty much the same.

Added to that, there aren't areas/boss encounters which feel really different --- to make the obligatory D2 comparisons, like Travincal or the Chaos Sanctuary. And, to compare with D1, when you got to hell/hell with a lowish 30's lvl character (or the endgame in D2/LoD) it felt like a different game from what it was when you started out, which is not how PoE feels right now.

Maybe part of this is how the skill gems lvl up pretty much just to increase their strength and keep pace with the required da, but that's about it. It ends up with very little sense of progression, instead of like you're acquiring qualitatively new abilities and combat capabilities as you lvl up.

Anyway, I wish I had more constructive suggestions to make for how fix this. Perhaps some of it is simply a matter of adding more content (interesting bosses, areas, maybe high lvl skill gems...). From a HC perspective, thhough, one thing I wouldn't want to see is an attempt to add combat/boss-exictement through one-hit kill mechanics (even if, in principle, you could avoid them most of the time).

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zriL wrote:

I've played a fair amount of time, leveling maybe ten char to +25. But I've only cleared one chaos level. I've always rerolled before getting to chaos. So in my case, 98% of my play time was on the "first" game.

That's what I've meaned. I play (nearly daily, but random amount of time) around one month now, and none of my chars reached chaos yet. And I enjoy it nevertheless! I may not be the real scale - but I even enjoy some games where I never reached the checkered flag...

In my opinion, a game that leads me through its "first part" in much less then a week (as the 3-4 days of Interesting), I would be very quickly bored to death and be gone.

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Thecla wrote:

Maybe part of this is how the skill gems lvl up pretty much just to increase their strength and keep pace with the required da, but that's about it. It ends up with very little sense of progression, instead of like you're acquiring qualitatively new abilities and combat capabilities as you lvl up.

This is it! I've been pondering this concept since I first posted in this thread and came to this exact conclusion today! It's not that PoE is boring in and of itself - it's the skills that make it boring because you never get to "invest" in those high damage skills. They automatically level up. You only get to invest in the "boring" passive skills, making leveling up feel totally pointless. Which is why I suggested way back on page 4 or so that the passives need to become magical affixes (or even perhaps the standard RPG Attributes point distribution), and the non-passives need to be the skills that you level up. The way it is now... it's really just not fun. And your right, you never feel like your over-powered or even "progressing" for that matter because your damage output matches your enemies health every time. It may be perfect on paper, but does not play out well in real life. People want to feel like their characters are getting stronger, not on a continual treadmill with no real benefits.

I believe GGG is aiming to have the passive tree facilitate the "sense of progression" feeling. This is why they continue to introduce larger passives, as well as the keystones.

The skills in PoE are very simillar to the skills in D3. Both are aquired through leveling , both can be augmented in order to differentiate builds either via gems (PoE) or runes (D3).

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Wittgenstein wrote:

The skills in PoE are very simillar to the skills in D3. Both are aquired through leveling , both can be augmented in order to differentiate builds either via gems (PoE) or runes (D3).

I don't want to get into a "PoE vs. D3" debate (I think both games will have their own place and hopefully I'll appreciate both of them in thier own way) but my impression of D3 is that high lvl runes will/should make skills work in a qualitatively different way from low lvl runes, which can't really be said of how skill-gems lvl up in PoE right now.

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Thecla wrote:

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Wittgenstein wrote:

The skills in PoE are very simillar to the skills in D3. Both are aquired through leveling , both can be augmented in order to differentiate builds either via gems (PoE) or runes (D3).

I don't want to get into a "PoE vs. D3" debate (I think both games will have their own place and hopefully I'll appreciate both of them in thier own way) but my impression of D3 is that high lvl runes will/should make skills work in a qualitatively different way from low lvl runes, which can't really be said of how skill-gems lvl up in PoE right now.

D3 runes effect the way the skills work. So do the mod gems in PoE. That was my only point.