Just started to watch this MMO documentary again and...

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Durf wrote:

Could POE be in danger of being succeeded in the near future by another ARPG that doesn't get as bloated and overly complex? Could POE be to the ARPG genre what Everquest and other MMO's of the time were to that genre before WOW came along and dominated? Maybe POE 2 will do this... or will POE 2 become as bloated as the first and will we then see a successor to the POE franchise when the timing is right?

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trixxar wrote:

If you had the scope of PoE content but without the insane

-impossible to understand crafting options

-intentionally unpleasant trade (seriously who the F&#@ introduces a mechanic then intentionally makes it suck?)

-pretending there is a complex passive tree but then designing the game so that there are about 10 viable options


PoE would crumble within in a month.


(To all the white knights, do you even really believe Im being hard on GGG, do you really think this is not a reasonable take?)

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zakalwe55 wrote:

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Durf wrote:

Could POE be in danger of being succeeded in the near future by another ARPG that doesn't get as bloated and overly complex? Could POE be to the ARPG genre what Everquest and other MMO's of the time were to that genre before WOW came along and dominated? Maybe POE 2 will do this... or will POE 2 become as bloated as the first and will we then see a successor to the POE franchise when the timing is right?

We should know in a couple of weeks. I expect Diablo Immortal to be as shallow as a puddle...and be more accessible to millions.

Yeah, WOW had the quality of life, was easier to understand and was less grindy than Everquest.

Hmm, Everquest 2 had less players than Everquest 1.

Camp check...train to zone!

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

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zakalwe55 wrote:

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Durf wrote:

Could POE be in danger of being succeeded in the near future by another ARPG that doesn't get as bloated and overly complex? Could POE be to the ARPG genre what Everquest and other MMO's of the time were to that genre before WOW came along and dominated? Maybe POE 2 will do this... or will POE 2 become as bloated as the first and will we then see a successor to the POE franchise when the timing is right?

We should know in a couple of weeks. I expect Diablo Immortal to be as shallow as a puddle...and be more accessible to millions.

Yeah, WOW had the quality of life, was easier to understand and was less grindy than Everquest.

Hmm, Everquest 2 had less players than Everquest 1.

Camp check...train to zone!

In all my years of gaming, I've had two 'oh fuck ME' moments that almost made me quit there and then, and they were both in classic MMOs. One involved killing a monster to get a little belt in Everquest 1 known as the Flowing Black Silk Sash. You had to join a queue (like, a literal queue of players in the area) to wait for the monster to spawn. It did not spawn that often. I'd been in the queue for almost two days, and...fell asleep. And yes, I know. Two days isn't even that bad compared to some of the FBSS horror stories I've heard. That and the monster didn't ALWAYS drop one...

The other 'oh fuck ME' moment was in Eve, and was technically another sleep-deprivation triggered issue involving grinding a year for a certain ship and then taking it up against enemies that were almost tailor-made to destroy it...

PoE's mechanics and complexity are hardcore, sure, but there are facets of hardcore and the old MMOs were just on the far side of the moon in that respect. And while it's fun to trade war stories, the fact is you need to have experienced the war in order to get them. We all suffered together, ah what fun times...

WoW changed all that. It was the first MMO to make a serious and very deliberate attempt at making MMOs user-friendly rather than presenting a mountain of user-unfriendly elements taunting a 'real' player to learn how to use them. As such, we who 'walked uphill in the snow both ways' just to get a glowing weapon (which you couldn't even trade!) kind of mocked WoW's mainstream appeal to the kiddies the way 'real' drinkers mock poseurs with wine coolers. Buuut you can still get shitfaced off wine coolers and often much quicker. So as newbie-friendly and immediately gratifying as WoW was, there was no denying it was the real thing as far as obnoxiously addictive MMOs go. And it reigned supreme for a very long time, because that level of accessibility only comes along once or twice in any genre's heyday. FFXIV might be the successor to WoW (might be), but it's nowhere near as accessible. Killer fucking OST though.

Getting back to this notion of a genre's renewal, Path of Exile is definitely akin to those older, stubborn MMOs that expected players to rise to the 'challenge' of their clunky, cruddy mechanics. The difference here is two-fold:

1) ARPGs arguably already had their heyday with Diablo 2

and

2) Blizzard's own attempt at WoWifying the ARPG genre, Diablo 3, happened around the same time as PoE and erred on the other side: it was too dumbed down, too influenced by its big brother WoW, too console-centric.

And every ARPG to come along since has failed to do for the genre what WoW did for MMOs. Wolcen has come closest in terms of marrying good gameplay, WYSIWYG UI and the diversity of character builds we expect from an ARPG (wait, is that polygamy?), but it was such a shitshow in production and so HORRIFICALLY unprepared for the amount of hype it generated at the last minute, it collapsed under the weight of that undertaking like a pea under a Fat Princess's mattress. The game landed with suffocated servers and a single skill that was so much stronger than the rest, they HAD to nerf it and by then that skill was the only reason anyone wanted to play. The servers are, so far, handling a few hundred people at a time quite nicely though (lol).

Last Epoch shows promise but it hasn't got the multiplayer down and, like Grim Dawn's relationship with Titan Quest, seems a little too obsessed with being better than one specific game to really find its own way. This isn't surprising: Last Epoch's devs are all Exiles as well.

Lost Ark is an MMO. A Korean MMO. No need to even really go there if we're talking about the 'WoW' version of ARPGs -- it's not an ARPG.

Which brings me to the real point here: the MMO genre *needed* a Blizzard-style overhaul in the mid 2000s. Badly. Tech was fast outpacing what most MMO devs seemed willing to do, and players outside of the genre had much higher demands for accessibility and gratification. But does the ARPG genre need a similar 'enlightenment' out of the dark ages? Or will Path of Exile be the last hurrah for a game type that is essentially stuck in the past? The best elements of 'Diablo' have been improved upon by other genres, be it the looter-shooter, the rogue-like, the twin-stick shmup, the platformer...and nascent genres, like the Souls-like, the procedurally-generated survival game, and the Battle Royale all provide something Diablo never could. Something PoE wants to, apparently. (Spoiler: that's not going to end well; it's like grafting a trunk onto a hippo.)

IF there is an ARPG waiting to emerge that will decisively and absolutely do to the genre what WoW did to MMOs, it'll struggle against the two biases I've circled above. Super trad ARPG fans will dismiss it as pandering to the masses and lacking that 'hardcoreness' of a true ARPG (read: shitty but somehow endearing design), and everyone else will need a LOT of convincing just to give an ARPG a go after so many disappointments. Make no mistake, Exiles: PoE's success as an ARPG is an anomaly and I'm not sure even GGG could tell you exactly why. They certainly couldn't reproduce it.

Diablo Immortal is not that ARPG by the way. Yes, a lot of people will play it. I don't think that many will stick around due to its fairly blatant p2w endgame and its shallow gameplay (it IS made for touch controls, after all, although I also tested it with a ps4 controller and didn't completely hate that), but it's free, it's very authentic aesthetically, and it's almost Diablo 2.5 in some ways. The nostalgic appeal is high and it does honour the Diablo 2 legacy far more than D3 ever could, but your average OG D2 player is probably not part of a massive gaming demographic these days. And, I'd say, your average OG D2 player is already either an Exile or over ARPGs altogether, thanks probably to PoE's terminal inability to be a good *and stable* one.

I cannot imagine a successor to PoE, but I'd very much like to see one happen.

Spoiler

And please don't say 'Path of Exile 2'. No one called 'Brood War' the successor to StarCraft. The thought of calling it 'StarCraft 2' would have been laughable and left Blizzard supporters, who numbered in the millions at the time, very concerned that Blizzard's idea of 'a full game' was seriously off the mark.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Diablo Immortal is not that ARPG by the way. Yes, a lot of people will play it. I don't think that many will stick around due to its fairly blatant p2w endgame and its shallow gameplay (it IS made for touch controls, after all, although I also tested it with a ps4 controller and didn't completely hate that), but it's free, it's very authentic aesthetically, and it's almost Diablo 2.5 in some ways. The nostalgic appeal is high and it does honour the Diablo 2 legacy far more than D3 ever could, but your average OG D2 player is probably not part of a massive gaming demographic these days. And, I'd say, your average OG D2 player is already either an Exile or over ARPGs altogether, thanks probably to PoE's terminal inability to be a good *and stable* one.

I cannot imagine a successor to PoE, but I'd very much like to see one happen.

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Durf wrote:

Just started to watch this MMO documentary again and...