What happened to Engaging Combat? Video Feedback.

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Nikuksis#6962 เขียน:

Looks like you don't understand why people are playing SSF or Private Leagues.
Mainly its not for "challenge" or something.
Its just for actually playing the game, searching/crafting items yourself rather than playing currency farmer simulator.

However I do not see the problem of being trading game and meaningful combat at the same time. Why do you think that zooming = farming faster. Its not connected, they can balance loot around slower and more engaging combat the way you'd get more currency/items in the same time you do now.

Two points:

1) I was not saying "why" people play SSF. I was merely pointing out how SSF fits into the argument about "trade v. meaningful combat". Obviously...people who play SSF have many different reasons for choosing that mode. A personal reason for choosing SSF has absolutely nothing to do with how SSF fits into the game, or how its design compares to these scenarios.

I mean.....I could tie four fingers up and not use them in order to "force" meaningful combat by hindering my own reaction times and ability. Or choose to play with only 1 support on each skill. But that has absolutely no bearing in this discussion. What I do doesn't change the overall game.

Oh and for the record: sure some choose SSF or Private Leagues in order to create a pseudo-single player. But far more choose private leagues and SSF BECAUSE they are additional challenges and they want a harder game. Same with choosing HC, or Ruthless in PoE 1. These are all designated challenge modes of the game, and are billed as such.

2) The problem of "trading game v meaningful combat" is already pointed out in previous posts. When you are able to trade for items well beyond your power level to get yourself....it trivializes and erases any meaningful combat between those two points. And those points can move to any two points in the game, and can span potentially the entire endgame system.

Ex: Say you just entered maps, but you got a lucky drop worth a lot right before that. You can trade for an item you probably wouldn't get for weeks of solo play and/or 10+ levels of difficulty and progression. Now...you are all of a sudden blasting through all content that wasn't designed for the items you are now in possession of...thanks to trade. It has nothing to do with drop quantity and the like: trade enables you to get items you wouldn't otherwise be able to obtain.

If it is true that harder content should yield better items (and this MUST be true for a loot-based rpg game to function), and it is also true that all items are tradeable (GGG design)...then it is also true that anyone engaging in the trade system is actively working against any possible meaningful combat design. And since, by GGG's own statements, trade is the primary mode of play and central to the game...there it is.

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KäsePizza#3007 เขียน:

We don't know since we haven't seen it succeed or fail.

Well here's the rub with this though: we HAVE seen it fail. A lot. We have never seen it succeed longer than maybe a single league or two. Remember: PoE 1 has been around for 13 years. It is pure negligence and oversight to simply write off all that history as "different game", given the fact that its the same company, with the same history and experience, basically the same staff, and arguably the same game with a new paint job. I listed some of GGG's past attempts at meaningful combat earlier. All have failed. Even worse, some lit up the playerbase like we had never seen before (*cough cough, AN, cough). There is absolutely no reason to think changes of this type would have any different effect in PoE 2.

And...we have seen it fail in PoE 2 as well. Examples? The combat difference from campaign Act 1 to mapping. The implemented changes across the patches so far. The difference in combat from early videos of PoE 2 gameplay, and what we have now. All of those are examples of FAILURES to offer meaningful combat.

Again....that's why this thread exists in the first place. There has been nothing BUT failures. I would even say the OP would agree with this statement wholeheartedly. PoE 2 has demonstrated failure in being able to provide meaningful combat in at least 90% of its gameplay.


Let's flesh this out: at the end of Act 1 when you fight the ice wolf bro, you only have a handful of skills, one aura, and no more than 2 support gems on your skills. Your items are generally pathetic, and your resistances are unlikely to be capped. You have not traversed much of the passive tree or gotten power. All of these things combined lead to a difficult, lengthy battle that has you seeing all the phases, all the attacks, and being forced to actually mechanically engage in multiple ways. THIS is engaging, pure and simple.

10 acts later, how can you still have that same engagement, while also being afforded the central goal of a game like this: getting more powerful and SEEING your character do more things? It becomes exponentially harder at each step up in character power because what you DON'T want is the "feel" of no character progress. This was the biggest complaint among the millions of D4 players: the enemies scaled with you and you never actually felt like you gained any power across the entire game.

This is where bosses come in: you can always make a boss super freaking hard, no matter what. You can add phases to force time into the fight. And because its a "special encounter", its unlikely people will complain that the boss fight interrupts their actual gameplay loop. After all, unless you are the type who wants to chain bosses, the boss fights will only make up a small percentage of your overall engagement time. They will be exciting BECAUSE they are few and far between, and special.

You strike the balance of: content that you can outpower and blast the hell out of (the "power fantasy" that is paramount in this genre of game) and content that slows you down and offers a test of your gaming and the desired "meaningful combat". And then eventually, you can CHOOSE what you wish to engage with, as per the whole PoE philosophy of choice.

Okay I think I'm about done with this conversation: I appreciate a lot of the good back and forth but I'm starting to repeat myself a lot.

The only thing I'm still looking for within this thread is for someone to offer a fundamental difference between the gameplay loop and design of PoE 1 that is different from PoE 2, besides a simple numerical slash.

If there is a FUNDAMENTAL difference in the foundation of the game itself, and not just "Jonathan said xyz", then maybe there is reason to believe that massive change CAN happen without a total overhaul. I just don't see it at all. Being a copy/paste of PoE 1, Poe 2 will follow the same design "path" because....it must. Whether you like PoE 1 or not, the game followed a LOGICAL development trajectory over its lifetime. The only thing they can do with PoE 2 is offer LESS power creep each league, and thus delay the inevitable breakdown of ALL gameplay before a blanket nerf attempts to reset it for a league or two a la 3.14.


Oh, and speaking of the whole reliance on Jonathan statements: Chris Wilson said MANY things about PoE 1 in the first few years when he was heavily involved in interviews, the forums, and pretty much everywhere. Nearly every single thing that he said about the game across all that time.......has been thrown out the window. And he had far more credibility than "current" GGG does. PoE 1 is still a great game. Different, but great.

PoE 2 can, and hopefully will be a great game. It'll be different than what was initially billed, likely closer or identical to PoE 1 down the line....but that's not necessarily a bad thing for most people playing imo.

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cowmoo275#3095 เขียน:

Same with choosing HC, or Ruthless in PoE 1. These are all designated challenge modes of the game, and are billed as such.

I don't think ruthless is harder that regular PoE honestly. I'd rather say the opposite.
Of course if you want to kill pinnacle bosses it is harder to do so in ruthless(take way more time, since you are not just skipping all the low level content). But overall game is more simple - you have less supports to choose from, slower gameplay.
It is also has easier challenges.

It is still the same game - you are killing monsters to become stronger and killing stronger monsters. You're just doing it slower, and have much less things to manage.

Same here with emgaging vs zoomimg combat. After all you're just killing monsters. The only difference is the amount of monsters on screen and amount of projectiles/effects happen per second.
It does not even mean you will have to get less loot if the game will be balanced around engaging combat.

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Nikuksis#6962 เขียน:

I don't think ruthless is harder that regular PoE honestly.

I mean.....it is. I don't really think that is a point that can be argued.

Players have:
1) less power in passives
2) less power in skills
3) less power in gear
4) less power in mobility
-among other things.

Meanwhile, the content you are pitted against remains the same.


That is the very definition of "harder", in almost every possible way short of directly buffing the enemies too.

But that's a pure digression from this thread and we don't need to go down that road.


Regarding whether neutering your character power results in engaging combat....eh, I would say it doesn't. LONGER combat in general doesn't equal engaging combat. Sitting there casting a skill 100x to kill a white mob doesn't mean its "engaging". And ruthless mode is "unpopular" by comparison to the number of players in trade and SSF. Ruthless is a tiny community of players.

Consider this potential PoE 2 scenario:
1) In order to deal decent damage, you need to combo 3 or 4 skills together. Each skill takes at least a second if not longer to fully cast.
2) Monsters also have enough health to survive many hits at full strength from your attacks, so you need to do #1 loop many times for EVERY pack of monsters.
3) Meanwhile, you are getting attacked or have to dodge or have to kite, which interrupts your ability to do #1 and then further prolong said fight.

-and this would be a NORMAL pack of monsters. Repeated millions of times. With no respite, no feeling of power, no monster crushing. Is that TRULY engaging? I would argue that design like that is actively DISengaging for this type of game. Again...I could play a game like Dark Souls or a different arpg that focuses on encounter-to-encounter extended combat like that, without the need to also grind for gear and play within a temporary league timeframe, and explore almost endless amounts of endgame customization and exploration. I could play a game designed for THAT type of content. PoE 1 and PoE 2 isn't it.

I want to clarify one thing, how much of zooming players really like this combat or do they like to be effective and loot more?
My guess is that its not much players really like dashing through the map popping the screens, barely looking at the screen. and slower gameplay would be more interesting and thus more satisfying and less of chore. Currently the game just dont let you much of choice, since the faster you are the easier the game for you and gives more loot.

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Nikuksis#6962 เขียน:

My guess is that its not much players really like dashing through the map popping the screens, barely looking at the screen. and slower gameplay would be more interesting and thus more satisfying and less of chore. Currently the game just dont let you much of choice, since the faster you are the easier the game for you and gives more loot.

You'd be....wrong. No nicer way to say that. If they DIDN'T actively like it, why in the world would they choose to continue playing THIS game, and not the thousands of other games available to them?

lol.

I mean that certainly doesn't mean its the ONLY thing every PoE player likes. But if they LIKE playing PoE......then they also like blowing up screens of enemies and moving real fast. Because that's the game they are CHOOSING to play. No one is forcing them to play PoE and ONLY PoE. What an odd thought.

And when they do finally get the things they want for their character through the superfast and expedient farming, do you think they just.....stop? What actually do you envision players "liking" about PoE if it isn't the game?

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cowmoo275#3095 เขียน:

Players have:
1) less power in passives
2) less power in skills
3) less power in gear
4) less power in mobility
-among other things.

It is just a numbers, this game is just slower and offer less things at once (less gems to choose from, less supports)
But in the same time it gives more real content:
for example a player can spend a week in regular trade league to get to the pinnacle boss and kill him.

at the same time this player can finish acts in ruthless. and just have mostly the same game ( he is just killing mobs and bosses)

but the first player already at the end of the game, while second has plenty content to do, and killing kitava in ruthless is way easier than killing maven in regular.

i mean they have different goals and measures.

^by its very definition, all of that equals difficulty. The fact that you cannot progress as far in the same amount of time is quite literally a measure telling you that Ruthless is more difficult.

I mean, the level of difficultly overall of Ruthless and PoE 1 isn't all that high....its just a grind after all. But those are STILL measures of difficulty.


I mean....hey I could go into my trade character right now and equip him with only blue items and half of my skill tree and attempt the same content I was doing before......you bet your ass its more difficult.

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cowmoo275#3095 เขียน:

You'd be....wrong. No nicer way to say that. If they DIDN'T actively like it, why in the world would they choose to continue playing THIS game, and not the thousands of other games available to them?

lol.

I mean that certainly doesn't mean its the ONLY thing every PoE player likes. But if they LIKE playing PoE......then they also like blowing up screens of enemies and moving real fast. Because that's the game they are CHOOSING to play. No one is forcing them to play PoE and ONLY PoE. What an odd thought.

And when they do finally get the things they want for their character through the superfast and expedient farming, do you think they just.....stop? What actually do you envision players "liking" about PoE if it isn't the game?

There is literally no alternative in genre with such deep gameplay.
Im in poe1 from breach league, and back then it was waaay slower and less zoomy, the power creep in poe is drastical.

And I am still playing every league, just because theres no other game offer so much quality content.
But i really hate powercreep, exploding screens and lightspeed movement.

I was hyped so much about poe2 being poe but slow and engaging and meaningful gameplay and with vision clarity.

That is why im extremely upset that already in 0.3 the game turning to the poe1 because of poe1 playerbase and streamers feedback.