League Idea: "Refuge League" -- Shapeshifters

What lies within -- Earth of Man . Deep roots that tickle His domain.

Roots drained of life , His branches.


Sleepless Him.


In a Grey House, on the Hill;

we cannot see, they do not share;

their purpose too simple, we cannot care;

the last joy of life.


"I slept and I dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and I saw that life was duty. I worked--and behold, duty was joy." Rabindranath Tagore.


The World is Wrong

I won't wake up

Start Again, in 2 days

The Keeper will wake them, and make the world Right

First in the Grey House

Then to each Sleeper's Tomb

Pulling them from His domain

Binding the Shapeshifters

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The first two days you see a dying game in 2 stages, first stillness then decay.

On the third day you get to play. As a new character, for this league only.


In a very large grey house, a mansion on a hill, you explore and find the corpse of each playable exile while in first person, horror game style. The first corpse you find is the Templar hanging in the closet.

Poetic more than real, at the end of this you wake up as the Keeper.

On the fourth day you get a familiar experience with new additions. Isometric and exploring the new mechanics of character control, and those unique to the apocalyptic world that is putrefying and petrifying in a dark shapeshifting grip.

Your tools are a singing bowl, stick of incense, a particular cauldron and sealing jars. Your final tool is yourself and what you've honed.
> You feel and wake the world with the singing bowl.
> You smell and permeate the world with the burning incense.
> You bring the hidden into the fore and dispel its blinding grip, for vision, with a cauldron that boils suddenly the sickening heavy air of death. You see their anguished faces roiling. The ground pools and air fills with a winnowing clarity.
> You seal away the shapeshifting shades into jars, to store away underneath the Gray House, to feed the grotto, to enhance the garden.

Largely you must complete certain motions and patterns to put these elusive haunting powers into subjugation. This is the start and end of many challenging quests.

What is going on?
The necromantic Lightless you've encountered were soft posers.

There is 1 most powerful deep in the Earth. The corpse of The Beast has become part of his own plan and All have fallen asleep. They will die without the help of The Keeper.

You must fight and gain refuge on Wraeclast.

You must fight and gain refuge in the Earth.

There is no defeating Him.

Each Exile will hold a different Refuge.

This is the new Act 11, before Atlas.


You are trained by a lithe man of some martial and spiritual prowess.

He gives you tasks to complete. When you first wake these are martial. There are more ways to move, small variations, and new ways to attack, small variations. You practice until you complete a certain standard.

Then it is spiritual. A shapeshifter has arrived. The grotto must be tended to. The deep must be held back. Read these passages.

There is a surprise about the lithe man before you leave the Grey Estate. Surprise to you, not to the Keeper you play as.

Tasks have usually been to do with keeping a good house . . . sending squatting spirits elsewhere after counseling their gripes, tending a basement grotto of some intellectual energy to empower spells & crafting necessary for the worldly to be well-to-do and to keep the deeper levels safe or sealed, a 'deep eco' garden in the greenhouse and a wild outdoor ecosystem, and small advisement to ears and eyes elsewhere in the world, that won't reply with strife or unwanted meddling.

Sometimes difficult trials are in order.

Below the Grey House there is more than a shallow basement. It goes deep, and any task involving the deeper levels has been strange, inexorable, and impenetrably mysterious. This is not an infinite repeating dungeon but an interesting place.


Most all words to explain the things that go on in the Grey Estate are shallow. There is too much to understand and live.

Objects can now be examined. They are held up to the sky and the player can zoom in then, even rotating the object. In this situation the player can zoom in more than usual. You can now zoom out more than usual while playing, too.

There is now a manual. It can be read in-game. This is like a physical manual. You can fine-tune some game options here as well.

The world now has a kind of fog. You cannot see behind you. You cannot see that far ahead. You cannot see through walls isometrically anymore. Everywhere has become poisonous except for the Grey Estate, thanks to the preparations and tasks completed.

In the end, you must venture out to find and free the playable exiles.

Sensory disruption becomes part of the experience. Hallucinations. Shocking enemies. Terrain, sound, and enemies that strain a person. You will need to find refuge to relax and recover.

Sound will never go below 25%. There is no mute in background. Your eyes and ears are part of the experience. Audio cues are necessary in most places, with a disability option that puts more strain elsewhere and/or uses the physical sensation of vibration. System volume is checked regularly and it must be over 50% to play.

Performance has been improved, so a 2016 office PC released at $400 can play the game at 60 fps stable with a graphics card added that was $100 in 2022.

REFUGE LEAGUE

You must have saved the Scion in Act 3 before being able to play this league.
Before you wake as "The Keeper", Some significant NPCs seem to die.
Others go missing. Others show up in strange places in a terrible state.
It should have influence from ARGs "Alternative Reality Games". As well as immersive horror games & movies.

No thanks. So far none of your feedback nor league ideas have any sensible place in this game. It is almost like you want to turn the game into something it never was and never will be. I suggest getting to work and creating your own. Hard pass.

"

Ulsarek wrote:

No thanks. So far none of your feedback nor league ideas have any sensible place in this game. It is almost like you want to turn the game into something it never was and never will be. I suggest getting to work and creating your own. Hard pass.

Very interesting opinion, thank you.

More acts? NAY!

More visual unclarity? NAY!

Finicky object interactions? NAY!

Potential for the beast from below to be Steve? YAY!

"

WaywornExile wrote:

More acts? NAY!

More visual unclarity? NAY!

Finicky object interactions? NAY!

Potential for the beast from below to be Steve? YAY!

< I don't know what Steve means but glad you like the idea of The Beast gaining new relevance.


< Visual cues adding to 'unclarity' would be bad, I agree.


Spell effects should be tweaked overall to get more clarity out of them. If the caster could somehow convey a bit more about what they are doing without adding clutter that would be nice. Reliance on large mob-packs and many many projectiles/ spells is part of the problem, but the normalcy of this and its early introduction (being the norm early on straight through to the end) is what is truly exhausting to people.

PoE 2 has addressed a lot of this so it seems GGG like that direction already.


< I don't know what the finicky object interactions are but the finicky-ness in general seems to be from a lack of inertia on objects and server issues. Characters and spells, everything, tends to be go in a direction or activate Immediately when a button is pressed. If you mean something else then you'd have to let me know.


< I like the campaign. It could be better; like everything in life; but I feel it already has some high quality to it.

The whole game is so 'filled out' that it can only calcify into its niche or it can Evolve with some careful consideration. GGG has already decided on a new game so it seems they want to grow & evolve.