The potential of Path of Exile's dynamic content -- End-Game? What End-Game?**

My point, is that you will enjoy more usable content sooner.

Would you rather have new caves (that look like the old caves, they're just different caves), or 5 new skill gems?

Would you rather have another archer (or sand spitter, or goatman thrower, or...), or 3 more keystones?

Would you rather have a new "desert" area (that heavily reuses the sand tiles from the shoreline), or 5 more cosmetic MTs added to the cash shop?

Adding a new map (let alone enough for an act, let alone enough acts to replace a difficulty and remove a replay) takes art, programming, design, balance, testing, (and so on and so on and so on...) resources - you can use those resources to eliminate reuse of the same backdrop (but it's still a different experience, because last time you fought Brutus, you didn't have Minion Instability and your Spectre gem.), or you can use those resources to... Add *new* stuff to the game, at a much faster rate.

Scaling is a good thing by the way, because even when you are adding new stuff, you can just scale it to the appropriate level, and then tweak from there. Games, especially games with a wide level range, can suffer from inconsistencies, where (or perhaps when...) it's more efficent to skip the hard low-level quests to do easier-but-higher-level stuff - Hailrake and the Fetid Pools are current examples of this in PoE - and a little bit is ok ("Want something challenging? Clear the Fetid Pools at level 4!") but if that's how the whole game is, people just ignore the "bad" areas for the "good" ones.

I don't see much point in having a ten act long campaign that takes you all the way to 100. Most people don't have the patience for that and most people wouldn't get past the sixth act anyway when the pace of leveling would really slow down.

Instead of removing the higher difficulties by adding more acts in a linear way, I would rather see more acts added in a parallel way. The game itself would only be 4-5 acts long and then you would reset to the next difficulty as normal. Each act would actually have one or more alternate acts that would be completely different.

This could take many different forms. I'll use Act 2 as an example. At one extreme you could have an alternate desert Act 2 with completely different areas, monsters, bosses, quests, etc. When you leave Merveil's cave you have no idea if you'll be walking into a forest or a desert. If GGG wanted to keep a stronger connectivity to their overworld then the Alternate Act 2 could still be the forest but with completely new monsters, areas, and quests. Alternately, GGG could randomize the quests and side areas. Now we have the Chamber of Sins quest but in another playthrough the CoS would disappear and another side area would appear somewhere else with a different quest.

These could be completely random from one play to the next or they could be influenced by player choice. I would love to see the player's choice of which bandit to help/kill in Act 2 have a much bigger impact on how that Act plays out and maybe even influence some events in Act 3. True player choice in questing has never been done before in ARPGs and the possibilities are really just awesome and the current bandit quest is just a glimmer of that.

"

AgentDave wrote:

My point, is that you will enjoy more usable content sooner.

Would you rather have new caves (that look like the old caves, they're just different caves), or 5 new skill gems?

Would you rather have another archer (or sand spitter, or goatman thrower, or...), or 3 more keystones?

Would you rather have a new "desert" area (that heavily reuses the sand tiles from the shoreline), or 5 more cosmetic MTs added to the cash shop?

Adding a new map (let alone enough for an act, let alone enough acts to replace a difficulty and remove a replay) takes art, programming, design, balance, testing, (and so on and so on and so on...) resources - you can use those resources to eliminate reuse of the same backdrop (but it's still a different experience, because last time you fought Brutus, you didn't have Minion Instability and your Spectre gem.), or you can use those resources to... Add *new* stuff to the game, at a much faster rate.

Scaling is a good thing by the way, because even when you are adding new stuff, you can just scale it to the appropriate level, and then tweak from there. Games, especially games with a wide level range, can suffer from inconsistencies, where (or perhaps when...) it's more efficent to skip the hard low-level quests to do easier-but-higher-level stuff - Hailrake and the Fetid Pools are current examples of this in PoE - and a little bit is ok ("Want something challenging? Clear the Fetid Pools at level 4!") but if that's how the whole game is, people just ignore the "bad" areas for the "good" ones.

Balance is key, and I'm pretty sure GGG are aware of this. Making me choose between cheap-and-easy content and substantial, world-changing content is hardly fair. But since you've put a gun to my head, I'm going to be really stubborn and say I'd still rather new world content over things that just affect the character. I know, from a player standpoint, new content is new content, and yes, facing a tougher Hillock with more skills is a different fight...but again, with the MMO method in mind, you can reuse the Brutus model, change its name, its nature, maybe screw with the palette a bit, add a few details. That to me is still 'newer' content than just facing Brutus again in the exact same place, 'scaled' to a higher difficulty.

Okay, by scaling I immediately thought you were referring to the sort of 'character-based' scaling we saw in the recent Elder Scrolls games, not dev-based scaling per content addition/patch. The latter is of course a very good thing.

I have never played an Elder Scrolls game, so I have no idea what you are refering to.

"

tpapp157 wrote:

I don't see much point in having a ten act long campaign that takes you all the way to 100. Most people don't have the patience for that and most people wouldn't get past the sixth act anyway when the pace of leveling would really slow down.

Instead of removing the higher difficulties by adding more acts in a linear way, I would rather see more acts added in a parallel way. The game itself would only be 4-5 acts long and then you would reset to the next difficulty as normal. Each act would actually have one or more alternate acts that would be completely different.

This could take many different forms. I'll use Act 2 as an example. At one extreme you could have an alternate desert Act 2 with completely different areas, monsters, bosses, quests, etc. When you leave Merveil's cave you have no idea if you'll be walking into a forest or a desert. If GGG wanted to keep a stronger connectivity to their overworld then the Alternate Act 2 could still be the forest but with completely new monsters, areas, and quests. Alternately, GGG could randomize the quests and side areas. Now we have the Chamber of Sins quest but in another playthrough the CoS would disappear and another side area would appear somewhere else with a different quest.

These could be completely random from one play to the next or they could be influenced by player choice. I would love to see the player's choice of which bandit to help/kill in Act 2 have a much bigger impact on how that Act plays out and maybe even influence some events in Act 3. True player choice in questing has never been done before in ARPGs and the possibilities are really just awesome and the current bandit quest is just a glimmer of that.

This actually just another MMO model, too. When I was playing that abomination Allods, I realised after a few level-based zones that each character I played had no choice as to where to level: you start HERE, you progress to HERE, you go HERE, you are ready for HERE. When I realised this, I quit the game, instantly. Because no other MMO I'd played did it that way. There were also options. You could find critters at level X all over the world, usually appropriately distanced from the starting cities, but sometimes not. At any given time in EQ, you could be hunting level XX monsters in several very distant zones for very different reasons and different quests.

Same with DAoC, although that was perhaps a little more cramped, you still had options for which forest or plains or caves suited you at the time.

To blend your idea and mine, couldn't GGG have, say, 2 versions of act 2 (we'll call them forest and desert), neither of which advance any sort of grand multi-act story (so you have isolated quests throughout), and then simply scale the unused second act to become an effective act 3 -- the results of both acts then affecting act 4, which might be a standard each time. This way you maintain the parallel design and the randomness of which will be your 'act 2' and which your 'act 3', but you also maintain what I desire: more content per 'difficulty.'

You're right about people not playing through 10 acts -- which is why I'd also flatten them out in tiers. Make certain acts 'story' or 'arc', and certain ones 'side stories of exploration through Wraeclast'. You can, of course, replay whichever you want, so levelling isn't TOO forced -- but let's say the final act is for levels 85-100. You can gain 1-15 in act 1 (story), 16-25 in act 2-1 (random path), 26-35 in act 2-2 (random path), 36-45 in act 3 (story), 46-55 in act 4-1 (random), 56-65 in act 4-2 (random), 66-75 act 4-3 (random), 76-84 in act 5, finally 85-100 in Act 6/finale (big bad boss of story arc). And when I say random, act 4's example could also be 'you have to do all three, pick your path'. This way you could also choose which types of monsters you'd rather face at 46-55 and which you'd be okay to face at 66-75.

I know that levelling goes crazy once you pass the early stages, but much like ArenaNet and their approach to Gw2 (which uses CHARACTER scaling rather than monster, which is brilliant but not applicable here), I don't really understand why it has to be that way. Why do you gain 15 levels in an ARPG's first act, and then barely 10-15 in the next two, and then maybe 5-7 in the last? If you could flatten it out, and say, right, each act is designed to give you 15 levels if you work at it, then you're immediately almost doubling the level goal of four acts over what I consider an antiquated scale of diminishing returns.

Anyway, now it's my turn to be writing penultimately delirious at midnight after a day of writing 'work' that makes sense to precisely two people: me and the person I hope will like it enough to give it a pass.

"

AgentDave wrote:

I have never played an Elder Scrolls game, so I have no idea what you are refering to.

Shit. Well, I could hope you'd research it for yourself, but I'll give a quick rundown. Elder Scrolls games are massive, massive open worlds where you can go anywhere, do mostly anything. They encourage exploration from the start, rather than tying you to one area to another by difficulty.

This means that level 1 enemies aren't just near the start, they're all over the place. IF you're level 1...

Skyrim did this fairly cleverly by having monster ranges, but the former game, Oblivion, was ridiculous about it. As you levelled, so did every single monster around you. The problem with that is, of course, you were soon facing mere bandits equipped with crazy items and hitting like trucks.

That's bad, bad, bad scaling.

Amalur had an equally annoying sort of scaling. Unique items scaled. So you could drop the Badass Sword of Badassery *anywhere* -- it wasn't tied to any one base item, just swords. And all of its stats would scale depending on the level you were when you found it. It was really...crap.

Bad, bad scaling.

It was rather comical in oblivion.
The bandits kinda lose their 'we are poor so we have to be criminals' feel when you see them walking around in the game's second-best armor. :)

And amalur's EVERYTHING scaling just flat out sucked.. god that game would've been great if they didn't overlook some major issues. :/

Anyway, my ability to write long ass teksts is far inferior to that of you two so I'll just stay out of the other parts of this discussion. :P

Charan, players (or really, "people") tend to like closure. That's why some of the best games have a finite story, but much outside of that story that you can do - FF7 could be completed in about 20 hours, but you could play the same game for 150+ hours if you did everything that could be done - got the level 4 limit breaks for everyone, got the gold chocobo, got all the prizes in the Gold Saucer from the tickets, did the arena, beat the Weapons, got the unique materias, etc.

Another take on this is to force players to go back to earlier levels to access areas that they couldn't before - my son plays Lego Harry Potter, and it's like this - you don't get the BlahBlah spell until level 15, at which point there is doors that you need the BlahBlah spell on levels 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, and 14 to open.

Or, have you ever read the Wheel of Time series? I have probably 50 friends who started the series. I don't think any of them read the last book to come out - after 14 (or however many it's up to) 1000+ page books, you've pretty much covered everything. Rand can whine some more, or the Forsaken can gloat more, or you can have a few more epic Aael vs Darkspawn battles, blah blah blah... You've covered every character in excruciating depth, every corner of the world. Anyone can write a sword fight. Most people can make it interesting. Fewer can do it 5 times. I doubt anyone could write 10,000 which are distinct and compelling.

For these reasons, it's far far far better to utilize the replay of the acts, while making it "same-but-different". YOU might play optional branching acts which collide back together at key points to progress the story, and take you all the way to 100 - but if so, you're the exception, not the rule.

Some very good thought-out suggestions have been made, nice of you starting a thread like this one Charan !

In my opinion what is better and more difficult thing to overcome is "doing" gameplay value to be much more replayable in the best possible way, rather than adding many many acts to game. Because even so you have 10 acts say, you will still feel like the previous area would be felt as repetitive/samey in next difficulty once you get in.

What i would suggest in here is mixing three vital mechanic into game for improving replayability to the max, first starting with what AgentDave just said in his last post;

• "Another take on this is to force players to go back to earlier levels to access areas that they couldn't before"

tpapp157's;

• "These could be completely random from one play to the next or they could be influenced by player choice."

Mine and Avireyn's suggestion: "Randomized side quests"

Add these 3 to this game and you will be floored, or very likely you can even have an heart attack while playing.

After implementing these 3, you will have one of a hellish masterpiece in the genre without a doubt.

* These were one of the better suggestions i've read for a while definitly, and should not be overlooked.

Brec, you just suggested Diablo 3. Which, if I recall correctly, you dislike intensely.