Stories from Development: The Map System

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I vividly remember the meeting we had where we first discussed this idea of content difficulty entitlement. The word "entitlement" usually has massively negative connotations, but it is a very accurate description of the situation that was occurring. It was quite frustrating, watching people intentionally sabotage their own progression and then getting angry about it.

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Those players that could kill monsters quickly worked out the best farming areas that had a combination of weak monster AI and linear layouts. The Ledge was a great example of this.

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Sarno wrote:

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Bex_GGG wrote:

It was quite frustrating, watching people intentionally sabotage their own progression and then getting angry about it.

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Bex_GGG wrote:

We needed to find a system that made players feel good about playing at the right level for their progression.

Didn’t you also have this problem with players feeling they “should” play Hardcore?

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

It's always been great to see you guys give little insights and stories of how the game has developed.

Quick feedback though; I feel this passage:

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Chris wrote:

I doubt anyone in our community would disagree, but some Action RPG developers don't realise this and launch with a static world. Having random level layouts, random monsters and random events that occur within those levels means that players can repeat the same content over and over without feeling the same level of repetition that they would if the area was exactly the same each time.

...would be better without that first sentence. You'd express the same justification of your design, but without throwing other devs under the bus and treating your views as some kind of truth that others don't "realise".

Anyway, thanks, keep it up :)

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FadeXF wrote:

2) Why is T10+ just so inaccessible without "buying" access from other players? Why is it GGG development angle to keep high level players (90+) stagnant in T10 and under maps? I would LOVE to hear a completely logical, irrefutable reasoning from GGG directly on this one actually... THAT is a thread I would love to read and have an open dialogue with GGG directly about. It just doesn't make sense to me that should we base things off randomness... that while a lot of players may experience good map drops, there are others (myself - sadly - included) who just cannot for the life of them sustain T10+ maps... content that is actually suited to the power level of my characters.

WHY is it that GGG is perfectly ok with level 90s being stagnant in T10 and under content - "kiddie pool" content - instead of the actual end game maps?

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Orca_Orcinus wrote:

I am not happy about this at all, and I'm getting pretty fn frustrated with GGG- Rory and Chris in particular.

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I vividly remember the meeting we had where we first discussed this idea of content difficulty entitlement. The word "entitlement" usually has massively negative connotations, but it is a very accurate description of the situation that was occurring. It was quite frustrating, watching people intentionally sabotage their own progression and then getting angry about it. Eventually we realised the truth: the game design was at fault and needed to change. We needed to find a system that made players feel good about playing at the right level for their progression.

This is the verbiage of a group of people that are divorced from Reality.

Chris can't be trusted not to lie nor not to just make up his own reality ad hoc and then hoist it on the rest of us as if tho we can't see what's actually happening, to wit these releases- the incoherent ramblings of deranged lunatics.

GGG can do as they please, and yes ofc they don't need me to say this, for just as I can do as I please, so too can Rory and Chris. More power to 'em.

But the game (not GGG as a company, here I'm discussing the role-playing game) does have a core philosophy of incrementally becoming more and more difficult, more and more obtuse, more and more unwieldy, and then more and more discriminatory in who sees the end-game.

This is their core game philosophy, and so this then means no tutorials, no logs, no paper doll, no target dummies, no back-tracking, no learning from mistakes, no learning-over-time, no incremental progression, no recourse for events outside the player's possible capability to play around, let alone plan for, and ofc no other way to progress than a) find what you need as a drop (not going to happen, e.g. SSF) or scam it off other players (there's actually also a third way, the most powerful way to progress, but mentioning it would get this post removed, and it's existance is ruining the game for reasons you can see below) no trading in-game, no item valuating in-game, and no item modifier range information in-game, no mob information, no information about summons, no information about modifiers and support gems that trigger or are conditional upon another event's occurrence.

This also means that there _is_ introduced into the game such dumb-ass shit as allowing scamming, preventing scammers from being name-shamed, allowing people to use that 3rd mentioned above method of item-acquisition to manipulate the economy affecting 100k+ people, preventing people using that 3rd method above from being punished, and being deliberately obsequious by adding in non-game enhancing crap such as burning ground (forcibly removed by Microsoft from the xBox 1 version, since it is DESIGNED to kill frames), water droplets on windows (did you even know that's a thing in Poe? It certainly is, and I'm sure you're also excited to know GGG wasted resources on water droplets on window panes...), netcode that was not viable for a single person game in 1995 let alone a multiple-server enterprise in 2018, no sliders on speculars, actually no sliders anywhere for that matter, creating a packed mega-file that has to be unpacked on the fly to be used, then separate folders for map hashes and shader. aoc files that are entirely too large for the info they convey, a 3D positional audio system that has been changed many times over the last 6 years, and is still not implemented so it doesn't cause crashing, refusal to allow DX 9 to unhook from the various crap that Poe runs when the executable terminates (regardless of how it terminates) so it takes minutes upon minutes for the cache to be free of the bloat Poe put there, and then forcing persons to dredge through logging in char select, city zone-in, hideout zone-in, map zone-in, force to walk to your abyssal depths, then finally zone into that upon abnormal termination.

The above paragraph is not, sadly, even a comprehensive list of the deliberately-included impediments to progression and experiencing of the end-game GGG has implemented.

Again, more power to Chris and Rory, the accounting firm they hired to run actuarial figures on whales and MTX purchase is all they care about. And again, it's their game, and they gon' continue to do as they please.

But don't sit here pissing on our parade, and then exclaim out loud how heavily it's raining. It's very infuriating.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

It's always been great to see you guys give little insights and stories of how the game has developed.

Quick feedback though; I feel this passage:

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Chris wrote:

I doubt anyone in our community would disagree, but some Action RPG developers don't realise this and launch with a static world. Having random level layouts, random monsters and random events that occur within those levels means that players can repeat the same content over and over without feeling the same level of repetition that they would if the area was exactly the same each time.

...would be better without that first sentence. You'd express the same justification of your design, but without throwing other devs under the bus and treating your views as some kind of truth that others don't "realise".

Anyway, thanks, keep it up :)

Completely agree. It was unusually...zero-sum of Chris to say that. That and I found myself somewhat disagreeing because I still play the *shit* out of Titan Quest and it has static levels. Endlessly Random Levels don't mean diddly squat if the only way to get through them is a tightly focused meta that is unrewarding to play in its bot-like repetition.