World map backtracking and sense of place, Final Fantasy style

It strikes me as old that GGG hadn't thought about the many difficulties part of the game, given that they have rethought gold, potions and endgame (admitedly, getting most ideas from the games they liked and/or played; talent borrow, genius steals!).

The purpose of having many difficulties is to get better gear, fight stronger monsters and new quest rewards. No one of this things require to replay the same game three times to achieve.

Not only that, people uninformed about Diablo-like games can get confused or bored at the idea of replaying the game again. Good players just rush through the areas using power levelling uniques and skipping lots of places, and many builds are complete once you get to act 3 Merciless anyway. It feels less fresh.

Personally, I dislike the feeling of Déjà Vu it generates. Maps have a in lore explanation (even uniques, if you like epileptic trees), but replaying difficulties doesn't have one (maybe: "The world is an ilussion, Exile").

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One of my fondest memories playing RPGs, specially Final Fantasy (or Ultima for you middle aged people), was to have a world with weird places to revisit, and watching the world evolve as you go:











This things make me search again in some areas, to have access to new ones or to find something new, and you get to learn (naturally) about many places. This brings a strong sense of place that has been lost in many RPG's lately.

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What could be done instead is to have aditional quests after you defeat Dominus, that make you return to old places. NPC's could react to the world changes, like Dominus defeat. Make the little a sandbox-y, to say something.

You could explain elemental resistances going down and enemies becoming stronger as a corruption or nightmare that is invading Wraeclast and goes further and further. This would serve like some kind of scaling when you complete the quests equivalent to a difficulty. And it could be more gradual (10-20% per set of missions around the acts).

Your natural destination (after reaching lvl 66) would be the dream worlds that are enclosed in the map system then(read the newsletter #4, about Lazhwar).

"

Lazhwar - An old archbishop of the Eternal Faith who secretly conducted dark experiments, using thaumaturgy to create his own miniature worlds in which he could rule as a God. Malachai studied his work with interest, using Lazhwar’s designs as the foundation for his Eternal Laboratory.

When the Emperor Voll took power, Malachai freely gave Lazhwar over to the Purity Courts. Lazhwar was burned at the stake for ‘fraternizing with unholy forces’.

http://www.reddit.com/r/pathofexile/comments/1ahsze/diamond_supporter_newsletter_4/

The quests don't need to be random (to not copy D3: ROS, there is the map system anyway for random levels), and it could add some degree of choice (like the bandit's quest).

There are tons of boss fights to recycle (Invasion bosses!) to avoid boss repetition at least until maps (or if the player wants to farm them, with the proper scaling), corrupted levels, and probably the expansion will bring new missions too (and NPC that can work as quest givers), so there is a lot to recycle without repeating.

I would like some Ultimate weapon-esque optional bosses to be found eventually, not as hard as Atziri, but something challenging for those at the Cruel level, to have something to do. Cruel feels...meh

There are many types of grounds and other modifiers (well, maybe after some optimization), too.

This would bring the world to life, giving it some natural reactivity to player actions, keeping the things fresh, and it could be optimized for power levelling for those who are experienced enough, so one can get to maps fast to the real end game.


PS: also, you could give a symbolic gesture to those who achieve level 100, to give a carrot in a stick to those levelling with diminishing returns.

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Alysma wrote:

Difficulties are being dropped as more content is added. E.g. in beta, there were two acts and four difficulties. I would expect this to continue until we'll have only one play-through once we get reach acts 8-9ish :-)

If they do the new acts.

Anyways, more sidequest for things like equipment upgrades could be welcome (at least until the merciless range).

And the backtracking, done right, improves the world feeling. Wouldn't be that awesome?

Wouldn't you like something like the Reaper of Souls Adventure Mode:



The Wraeclast world map is out there:



It's just begging to happen, ;)