For those who keep harping on about how expert in PoE GGG devs should be

I don't think this is a case of "hiring fans"

These sort of posts usually come after months of them trying and failing to find people in NZ to fill the post, and the jobs that i recall them posting do not really touch on the balance of the game.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Anyway, there's something to be taken from this -- maybe current online gamers just don't want that prolonged, steady progress of level 1-70 pve, at least not outside of a proper MMO where the progress is interesting and immersive. Maybe what worked for ARPGs ten or fifteen years ago just doesn't work now.

A game that is nothing but end-game is fine as long as you don't point out that's what it is. As long as you can sell the end-game style experience in and of itself. Too late for PoE there, I'm afraid. On the other hand, what would an ARPG that is nothing but end-game look like? Oh, that's easy: a shooting game.

And here we are, so close to that you can almost hear the frantic Touhou style music...

First of all I have to say I find these rational and knowledge-based discussions really interesting.

As for the quoted part, you have a point of course, maybe a big point, as an awful lot of popular games are twitch shooters of one kind or another. But there is also a different crowd that are interested in "old-school" games, proven by countless successful Kickstarter (and Fig) campaigns. Admittedly I'm more from an RPG background, so haven't kept tabs on games there more alike POE (I'm new to that myself), but considerable amount of people have supported games like Pillars of Eternity I and II (confusingly accronymed POE), Wasteland 2 (and 3) and a host of games from different genres. This in itself is a reaction to developers/publishers not daring to make such games any more, so some brave souls tried the crowd sourcing model -- and it was a big success. Many failures too, don't get me wrong, but overall it has been a great success, and a fantastic gift for those of us who still love more slow-paced and "old-school" games.

For me, the alternative wasn't to buy one of the millions of shooters pouring out, but to stop playing games. Therefore games funded via e.g. Kickstarters has been a saving grace, meaning I'm able to buy/fund and play games again. Could still have played some old ones, but it's still nice with a different experience at times. And although it's a very different genre, I've also had hundreds of hours of fun with Stardew Valley, Banished and suchlike. Presumably not something the meta-speed crowd with level 100 characters in POE would want to play, but there is thankfully still a fairly sizeable crowd out there that are interested in games like that.

And if everything else fails, I can always go back to competitive Civilization IV play. I usually do every 6 months or so, until it wears me out. Shame that series went to hell too, but it's what sadly seems to happen these days.

As for POE, I really hope the next league will move away from the stressful speed-incentivised Incursion league, so that a broader range of builds will be viable, and a broader range of gamers can reasonable access it. I honestly believe that catering so much for the top 1% of the player base won't be healthy for the game long-term.

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鬼殺し wrote:

I'm always drawn back to Overwatch comparisons when we talk about PoE2018. As some know, Overwatch is the leftovers of a much bigger PvE project Blizzard had cooking, Project Titan. When that proved unfeasible, the higher-ups said to the Titan devs, you have X weeks, give us something people can play. So those devs scrapped all the pve, all the world-building, all the lore, all the leveling and made it a straight pvp game -- probably a sub-game or end-game in Project Titan's original premise. And obviously it proved a huge success, paving the way for other games that drop the premise of 'pve' and skip straight to fast-paced high-power pvp.

This is because straight pvp is the easiest way to generate reusable content, I imagine that many of the original overwatch characters had their animations and movesets complete when they started stripping stuff out then it was just a matter of some first person perspective and map creation (which takes very little time in itself)

The interesting thing with Overwatch is this, if it wasn't made by blizzard would it have succeeded? I think absolutely not, fundamentally its TF2 but the issue with any pvp game is if you can't get critical mass of players you just can't sustain. Blizzard have enough pull that it would never have been a problem for them (obviously the game itself is extremely well polished too i'm not saying its bad here just that it was never going to be overlooked like many titles with a similar methodology are)

I too will be interested to see what happens with camelot unchained I was a big DAoC player up to halfway through trials of atlantis but part of me genuinely believes they got lucky that the PvP was so good in that game, obviously it was designed with some elements that are anathema to most MMOs now (stat caps etc) however it just seemed a little bit too good to be intentional lol.

GW2 had a really good stab at emulating it for example but it just isn't close, the ability to use all skills while moving seemed great on paper but in reality the fights it creates just give me a headache with how lame they actually are, plus mesmers are as broken as bonedancers were.

well, the biggest fans and pro gamers of d2 created poe, according to the video that should have failed