Next PoE league: Please consider making the campaign optional!

Other modern ARPGs already offer campaign skip, or alt leveling methods. PoE needs to stop being stuck in the ancient past and catch up already. People are way too burned out from the current campaign.

Being able to skip it would actually allow people to try out more builds, there is no downside to letting people just skip past campaign and get a lvl68 char with all skillpoints,ascendancy points and no gear on.


People don't want to play games that don't respect their time investment, and PoE at the moment doesn't do a great job of that. They will simply go play other games that know what their players want, and actually listen to their community.


If other ARPGs can have mechanics that skip parts of, or the whole campaign, then PoE can too.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

Better idea: give us the option of playing the Phrecia/Gauntlet version of the campaign, so it's more fun and engaging instead of just being a thing I do while looking at my second screen.

+1

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

Other modern ARPGs already offer campaign skip, or alt leveling methods.

D4 is the only modern arpg with a camapign skip. Neither Last Epoch or other games of this kind offer a straight campaign skip as it's the basic part of early character progression.

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PoE needs to stop being stuck in the ancient past and catch up already. People are way too burned out from the current campaign.

That's why GGG constantly makes changes to the campaign, or makes things spicer so it's more fun during events. No, there not stuck at all.

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Being able to skip it would actually allow people to try out more builds

So basically something players can already do since years as leveling a second, third or I don't know how many more characters during a league has never been the problem.

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People don't want to play games that don't respect their time investment, and PoE at the moment doesn't do a great job of that. They will simply go play other games that know what their players want, and actually listen to their community.

Who are those people you're referring to? Cause for all we can see is that PoE kept growing over the years despite having no alternative leveling method or campaign skip.

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Pashid#4643 wrote:

D4 is the only modern arpg with a camapign skip. Neither Last Epoch or other games of this kind offer a straight campaign skip as it's the basic part of early character progression.

You can literally skip entire chunks of the campaign in LE by doing a quick dungeon. And its amazing, light years ahead of whatever the campaign is atm in PoE.

Oh and when you skip parts of campaign in LE it also auto-unlocks stuff for you that you would have gotten from the side quests you skipped. Its very nice when a game respects your time.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

You can literally skip entire chunks of the campaign in LE by doing a quick dungeon.

You can't skip all of it tho, and you can only speed up the campaign with good leveling gear, so basically the same you can already do in PoE by blasting the campaign in 2 hours on your second character.

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Its very nice when a game respects your time.

Indeed it's nice that PoE respects players time in many ways. Maybe not in the way you want it to tho.

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Pashid#4643 wrote:

Indeed it's nice that PoE respects players time in many ways. Maybe not in the way you want it to tho.

If PoE respected my time it would not steal away my exp on death, nor would it force me to go through the same boring campaign more than once per league. PoE is full of archaic,ancient,outdated stone-age game design.

It doesn't, and there are games out there that do and compete with it. That kind of pressure is a pretty high incentive for the game to change and adapt to the times.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

If PoE respected my time it would not steal away my exp on death, nor would it force me to go through the same boring campaign more than once per league.

A game respecting players time can go into multiple ways Toffy.
You're in control of the exp lose, cause if you don't die you won't lose exp. It's not the game forces exp lose on you or tells you to stick with act 1 gear and 0 defense.

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PoE is full of archaic,ancient,outdated stone-age game design.

Nah, I disagree. The game has long moved away from that a long while ago.
We did get a lot of good QoL changes over the years, multiple engine updates to make the game not look like 2013, various new leagues and core changes to add various types of content, and a whole lot of changes to make the game easier to pick up for newer players. Quite the opposite of what stone-age looks like.

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It doesn't, and there are games out there that do and compete with it. That kind of pressure is a pretty high incentive for the game to change and adapt to the times.

D4 the PoE killer did not gave PoE an incentive to change in any way.
Last epoch the PoE killer also had no impact on how PoE does things.
Cause quite frankly there's no pressure to begin with, and the game is doing fine with it's own recipe.

A one-league test of an optional campaign skip. Gate it behind a simple, existing account flag—like having a character who has completed the campaign (defeated Kitava) or reached level 80 in a previous league. This ensures only veterans who know the game can skip, protecting the new player experience while directly addressing the major burnout hurdle for us, dedicated players. It's a clean, low-risk way to boost league engagement from day one

If you can't clear the campaign in a few hours, you are the person the campaign is for.

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myBabySteps#9632 wrote:

A one-league test of an optional campaign skip. Gate it behind a simple, existing account flag—like having a character who has completed the campaign (defeated Kitava) or reached level 80 in a previous league. This ensures only veterans who know the game can skip, protecting the new player experience while directly addressing the major burnout hurdle for us, dedicated players. It's a clean, low-risk way to boost league engagement from day one

Yep, that's a great way of seeing how many players would enjoy and use a campaign skip. And if a large chunk do, they can just implement it permanently.

Or they could just do an in-game poll for it and let the actual playerbase decide. But this kind of test is the next best thing.

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ARealLifeCaribbeanPirate#2605 wrote:

If you can't clear the campaign in a few hours, you are the person the campaign is for.

Also, expecting your average players to become campaign speedrunners is ludicrous.