Diablo 4 announces that there will be a campaign skip ... its time for POE to do the same

"

Phrazz wrote:

I understand perfectly well why we can't just skip the acts from the get-go in a new league. Economy, journey, attachment, progression... But I do think it's time to implement some sort of mechanic to ease up on leveling your second, third or fourth character. How that mechanic should look like, I don't really know.

Personally, I don't really mind leveling new characters. I've almost leveled 3 characters already this league. But I do think it's an issue when it comes to player retention for a lot of people, and I can't really see how it would hurt/damage anyone/anything.

I think I would just have it so you can travel to any Act previously reached in that league. You might not be able to handle it and have to go lower, but with drops and levelling uniques I bet you could skip at least every other act easily enough.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

kaepae wrote:

It hasn't even launched yet, and they're promoting skipping the campaign.

They are promoting player advocacy. Full stop.

You have to complete the campaign once first before its an option. Subsequent characters have the abiltiy to do it again, or any other way the player wants to level.

Players having the option, and not being forced by the devs to do something they dont enjoy, is far better.

There is no sane, reasonable, argument against this type of accessibility. PoE is the one that has this wrong.

Currently in D3 in new seasons you can skip campaign from the get go and do bounties from the start, if players have beaten the campaign in the past one time (which can date back years).

Not sure how this will work for D4. I assume the same. First season everything will be new and everyone will do the campaign at least one time before they unlock the ability for alternative leveling.

But what will then happen afterwards at the start of seasons 2+ ?
Still mandatory campaign for one time or having the ability for direct skip and doing other leveling stuff like in D3 once campaign is beaten one time (in the past/past seasons).

"

gandhar0 wrote:

Not sure how this will work for D4. I assume the same. First season everything will be new and everyone will do the campaign at least one time before they unlock the ability for alternative leveling.

But what will then happen in seasons 2+ ?

They already announced that you must complete the campaign once to start with. We don't known what season 1, or subsequent seasons will bring, but they did mention not having to collect all the Lilith altars every season. We should find out more next month as I believe there will be a dev cast on the seasonal model and battle pass. Presumably the "beefy" seasonal content will provide a new evolving space for leveling. Sounds good to me personally if I never have to repeat the campaign if I don't wish to.

Plus what are PoE Andys even saying here in terms of D4? Why is forcing the players to complete the campaign every season a net positive anyway? Just make it optional. I truly do not understand the issue here with player advocacy in this space. PoE is super out of touch imo, for whatever reasons, holding up the campaign experience.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Just make it optional.

How would this even work in a competitive scene with a progressive market? It's like if LA Lakers would start the next season with the same amount of points they finished the last season on - or just skipped 60% of the first matches. Isn't the word "season" implying a fresh start for everyone in a competitive scene? Hell, it would even imply more if we used the word "ladder".

I swear, we've probably reached a point where PoE has to change EVERYTHING it tries to be for you to find a single positive thing to say about it. I'm surprised you're still here, and I'm genuinely curious as to why.

Like I've said before in this thread; maybe it's time to introduce some alternative for your second or third character every league. But to skip 60-70 out of 100 levels in a game all about character progression just seems very weird to me. "Out of touch"? I don't play many games, so I seriously do not know the answer here, but how many "character leveling games" out there do actually let players skip more than half of the character levels?

And as other have asked: Where do they draw the line here? Acts? White maps? Yellow maps? Red maps? Should I be able to create an Uber-ready character right off the bat?

"

Phrazz wrote:

. But to skip 60-70 out of 100 levels in a game all about character progression just seems very weird to me. ...
And as other have asked: Where do they draw the line here? Acts? White maps? Yellow maps? Red maps? Should I be able to create an Uber-ready character right off the bat?

I think you're conflating two asks.;

1) be able to skip levelling via the campaign
i.e. be able to level characters (*after the first/league) in Delve, or Heist, or an endless map zone, or Rifts, or ... something other than campaign. Variable levelling rewards - extra gems or items - would not be awarded; extra skill/ascendancy points would be given at set levels.

2) be able to skip levelling entirely
After raising one character/season to Epilogue, or completeing the Atlas, or killing Pionnacle bosses, or whatever break point, you can create more at some level, probably Atlas start. No gear or skill games, but you can skip the campaign levelling.

I can see the attraction to #1 fpr most players, including me - and I reran the campaign in D3 (hardcore as it was easy) more often than not. But I can't see it coming in soon in PoE2, if we already know the endgame is largely as-is and the whole point is a new levelling campaign.

I can't see #2 happening in PoE2 for some years, given the complexity of levelling gems/builds, and also skipping a campaign that's consumed years of development time.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Just make it optional.

How would this even work in a competitive scene with a progressive market? It's like if LA Lakers would start the next season with the same amount of points they finished the last season on - or just skipped 60% of the first matches. Isn't the word "season" implying a fresh start for everyone in a competitive scene? Hell, it would even imply more if we used the word "ladder".

I swear, we've probably reached a point where PoE has to change EVERYTHING it tries to be for you to find a single positive thing to say about it. I'm surprised you're still here, and I'm genuinely curious as to why.

Like I've said before in this thread; maybe it's time to introduce some alternative for your second or third character every league. But to skip 60-70 out of 100 levels in a game all about character progression just seems very weird to me. "Out of touch"? I don't play many games, so I seriously do not know the answer here, but how many "character leveling games" out there do actually let players skip more than half of the character levels?

And as other have asked: Where do they draw the line here? Acts? White maps? Yellow maps? Red maps? Should I be able to create an Uber-ready character right off the bat?

NO ONE REASONABLE IS SUGGESTING AN AUTOMATIC CHARACTER BOOST TO 70. Please stop with that hyperbole. It's alternative leveling options from level 1 post campaign completion on at least one character. (like I dont know... DIABLO?)

As far as the economy, it's already like this post campaign anyways? People choose whatever mechanic they enjoy, they are not (typically), subject to the whims of the "progressive market". You like Blight, or Legion, or Heist, or whatever, then you do that. Heist for example is the most profitable by most standards, but I just cannot. I'm sure many others feel the same way.

For the mechanics of leveling, GGG could have endless Delve, or modified Heist, or literally offer some sort of "maps" at level 1. Sure they would have to figure out campaign specific rewards, but they have the tech to do this already with the endless versions I discussed.

And lastly, I won't even get into the low tier bait of asking "why people are still here", or "why don't I just leave" You are better than that...at least I thought so. Don't make this personal, people like what they like, and there is nothing wrong with wanting a game to evolve. It's not like GGG must cater to what I'm saying, it's literally just opinion.

Gosh, even the people who usually read my posts seem to have missed that one. Including my Number One Fan.

It's not about 'doing things the same way', UU -- it's about realising doing things the same old way for a decade might not be the best game design. No ARPG does it 'the same way' -- as I elaborated in my post on so-called 'campaign skip'.

And this comes back to my main concern with PoE 4.0, even back when I harboured some vague interest in trying it: when the entire genre has moved beyond replaying campaigns as the only way to level alternate characters (absolutely none allow you to 'skip' the story -- in fact, DIV won't even give players mounts to use in Sanctuary until they've finished the story at least once), here we have GGG introducing a whole new campaign that, by all accounts, is taking a lot of developmental time and effort, as the main selling point of its expansion/next step forward. You can't reasonably argue that this is reading the room well at all. Oh, I'm confident it'll be very impressive the first time, maybe even the first ten times, but that's it. Before too long, all that work and effort will have been for something that players just rush through -- again. There is far too much precedent in Exile behaviour for it to be any other way. As Chris said, 'once you are Mapping, we have your soul'. Exiles view the campaign as a fucking tutorial; 1000 hours is your 'first step'. Remove tongue from cheek and this is still largely true.

And very few of those 1000 hours are spent in the campaign. Equally few of the many hours after it are as well. Unless you're some bottom-feeding freak like me for whom 'Endless Ledge' was a far more meaningful term than a mere race variant.

So why is the mode Exiles actually enjoy playing locked behind a long, convoluted and frankly unengaging story for every single character when the whole supposed point of PoE is trying lots of different characters?

It makes zero sense. It made zero sense way back in 2013 when plenty of us were already calling for alternate ways to level characters.

Why not then? You know the answer as well as I. Because they don't have to do otherwise. They've convinced you this 'good enough' is good enough. League versions of the same old campaign are worth replaying it. That HAS to be the argument, but when it's stifling the chance of a genuinely better way, it's not a very good one.

And you keep throwing money at them for this 'good enough' because, again, it's all about the leagues. And the league-related support packs.

And even if you're not throwing money at them anymore, you did. For a while, you did.



I will just repeat what I said earlier: no ARPG in history has been lesser or made worse by featuring a story-independent means of leveling characters. Let the story stand on its own merits; if people want to experience it, it should be because they want to experience it. Not because they have to. Not in a game where the whole point is exploring not the game world as such but the game's mechanics and character possibilities.

Which, coincidentally, brings us back to Diablo IV -- a game stemming from the ARPG genre (I won't say 'evolving'; this isn't necessarily vertical growth) that actually does seem to be about exploring the game world. And that's why it gets away with having pretty simple mechanics early on, and openly embraces story-independent ways of leveling such as dungeons and just plain old exploration of three parallel acts, each with multiple towns, dozens of side quests and quest chains.

If you love and support PoE that much, isn't it your onus, your privilege, to want it to be the best it can be? And Exiles, this ain't that.

2 words.
Level scaling.
PoE does not have this, of which i am glad it does not. The only other thing you could do as an alternate leveling method is delve.

You would have to get rid of mob levels as a whole and just have them scale with you if you wanted to do maps or anything else from lvl 1, which would require a total overhaul of the game.

You could call PoE old fashioned, but i prefer it that way over dynamic scaling like D3 or D4.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

"

kaepae wrote:

It hasn't even launched yet, and they're promoting skipping the campaign.

They are promoting player advocacy. Full stop.

You have to complete the campaign once first before its an option. Subsequent characters have the abiltiy to do it again, or any other way the player wants to level.

Players having the option, and not being forced by the devs to do something they dont enjoy, is far better.

There is no sane, reasonable, argument against this type of accessibility. PoE is the one that has this wrong.

With the option to skip in mind, how much would they invest in that content? How much should they?

And why is one part of the game so unattractive to warrant a skip button, while the other content is intended for thousands of repetitions?

The campaign then needs whatever it is that makes the other content fun to go through over and over. This idea that there is some sort of a chore in the way of the fun is a distance-to-the-carrot issue.

PoE is right in not being able to skip the campaign. It is lackluster in keeping the campaign attractive. The campaign could start right at the atlas and still follow story mode, but with a lot more options. Less distance to the carrot and more choices from the start without loss of story/lore.

But investing in content while already knowing that a lot of people want to skip what you are making and then just say here's a skip button is. so. dumb.

I absolutely hate level-scaling. It's a cheap little effort way of balancing a game. An instant no play game / refund if I encounter it. One of the things i really don't like about Grim Dawn.