You're making an ARPG in 2025, but you're stuck in 1999

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Gwonam#5505 wrote:

Marvel Heroes 2016 "solved" the inventory tetris problem by just making every piece of loot occupy its own 1x1 square. That was almost ten years ago.

Maybe PoE2 would really benefit from having David Brevik back at the helm. Funny, the period where he was advising GGG and helping port the game to the Chinese market (2015-2016) was arguably when GGG made many of its most meaningful changes to PoE1.

For a game that worships at the altar of old school Diablo, you'd think they would want the man who literally invented it guiding them.

Marvel Heroes post-2015 rebrand and pre-Omega/console launch was some peak ARPG innovation. Really breathed new life into the genre and redefined what you could do with it. Patrol zones, terminals, one-shots, and raids were all fantastic endgame content. The hero synergy system was a super cool way to incentivize level capping multiple characters. Guilds and party search actually felt alive.

Sadly, there were a lot of factors that led to the game's demise, starting with the initial state of the game in 2013 (It was apparently extremely rough and the approximately 12K players fell off pretty quickly). It spiked back up to about 8K with the 2015 rebrand but again fell off to about 1300.If they'd done something similar to PoE's leagues or Diablo seasons instead of relying on new hero releases, it might have retained players a lot more effectively.

Also really bad gearing — up until the launch of Omega, your endgame gear was basically all unique, and almost all hero specific. So for any given slot there were maybe a couple of choices, and it was just about grinding for top end rolls.

But it was FUN

GGG please remake marvel heroes, enough chatter

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Hammerhorn_Oathsworn#4887 wrote:

+ 1
Way too much “Friction” they need to get with the times, all the micro management is just BS, add a sort button , let us pack more items , stop inflating difficultly by having 1 death maps. I love challenge and will leave a game if its not challegeing enough. I also hate busy work. Last Epoch has done alot to modernize the Arpg scene, if they had a better end game thats where I would be.

Last Epoch does a whole lot right. Honestly the QOL is so much better than anything we have PoE it's ridiculous. The monoliths are far better than PoE 2's implementation of the Atlas – biggest issue is just that they're too generous with loot.

I think I speak for everyone my age when I say:

"We're all stuck in 1999"

Welcome aboard, zoomer. Stay for just as long as you want. There's plenty of us to keep this great game alive.

If you want D4 concepts, then thankfully you have that to play too.
If you want deterministic crafting, then you have no clue what that does to replayability in general, just like all the rest.

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Strangehill#1736 wrote:

But it was FUN

GGG please remake marvel heroes, enough chatter

There's private servers now from the guys who do Star Wars Galaxies. Currently on version 0.4.0, they still need to reconstruct a lot of lost code before everything works right – I think resources don't spend, and power effects other than straight damage don't work (DoTs, slows, etc.). But you can log in and play provided you still have the install or a way to get it.

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Immoteph#2974 wrote:

I think I speak for everyone my age when I say:

"We're all stuck in 1999"

Welcome aboard, zoomer. Stay for just as long as you want. There's plenty of us to keep this great game alive.

If you want D4 concepts, then thankfully you have that to play too.
If you want deterministic crafting, then you have no clue what that does to replayability in general, just like all the rest.

D2 Resurrected is thataway, boomer. 👉🏻

We don't want fully deterministic crafting. We just want crafting that isn't a complete blind gamble. PoE 1 has that but it's a mess of cobbled together subsystems that require you to do half a dozen different league mechanics and it's just not fucking fun.

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Xenus_Paradox#7530 wrote:

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Xzorn#7046 wrote:

It's a shame Devs try so hard to be Diablo 2 and miss that Diablo 1 did quite a few things better. Itemization being one of them. If you played late-game the classes also had more variety.

Weapon Swapping wasn't invented with Diablo 2. Just given a hotkey. I can't really say there were any outstanding flaws in Diablo 1. Meanwhile I can pick apart Movement Speed, Set Items, Magic Find from early D2 and further pick apart the skill synergy patch added later which turned it into a 1-2 skill game. Where players just skipped anything Immune.

Diablo 2 was far more flawed than Diablo 1 despite the extra features so I don't see the point in trying to emulate either, esp D2 for any modern game.

They're also acting like Diablo 3 doesn't exist when it did quite a bit right.

Not to mention other games like Torchlight, Marvel Heroes, Grim Dawn, Lost Ark, Last Epoch, just to name a few.

I have various things about most those too. Good and Bad.

Marvel Heroes started turning around seemingly because of Brevick. A lot of characters were more fleshed out and fun to play though they at best had 2 builds you could tell the difference. Marvel Heroes had raids. Not very common for ARPGs not always liked.

Unfortunately that was kinda all it had. The rest of the gameplay got old real fast.
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Grim Dawn embraces the fact players will only use 2 skills. Which I guess? I would try to fix it. It also has target farming which I've never been a fan of. The Story is good and class diversity is decent. The dual 'Job system' makes character building straight forward and interesting but it's still rather limited. For some reason many of the skill VFX are very minimal also which doesn't feel great.

Granted I don't own all the expansions which are needed for the full experience now.
I have seen some builds that use a good amount of skills. I can't make them though.
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Lost Ark. Oh man. How do I summarize what is essentially two games in one. Literally. The part of the game I liked. Exploring, Character stories, very impactful and fun abilities and managing to balance fodder with big boy enemies. This was all so great and also when the game wasn't doing well in Korea. I can't help but wonder if they had given the west that game what would have happened.

The other game was the successful one in Korea. The bosses, Gear Score Checks, Terrible gearing upgrade system. I played that game as a Free 2 Progress player and managed to keep two character raid ready for each new one. It was soul sucking though. Living every day by a video game clock.

Lost Ark really stands for successfully making interactive and fun support classes.
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Diablo 3 never really fully captured my interest. A friend had to buy me RoS just so I would play again. It was too arcade feeling. There were a few builds I liked but you could rarely make your own build. Esp later on. They got rid of Movement Speed and Magic Find which is a big plus.

For some reason the few support builds you could make in D3 they killed.
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End of the day there's good and bad in most of these that can be cherry picked.

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kumogakure#7381 wrote:

Of all my years of gaming, I still think the best inventory implementation I saw, the one that I enjoyed using the most, is a simple list of items in the inventory. The list is not capped by number of items at all and I could carry as much as I want, but each item has a weight and being over-burdened slows me down until I can't move.

No need to waste time arranging inventory. No need to mouse over items that look alike because each item is listed by name. No need to search because the item names are immediately available and sorted alphabetically.

That game knew that inventory management, while novel and fresh when a player first starts the game, becomes dull and tedious quickly. So they opted for better user experience by providing the most tried-and-tested form of presenting inventory that humanity has perfected over centuries: a simple list of item names, quantity, and weight.

But to be fair, POE2 can't do that because there is an artificial need to limit inventory size even though it adds nothing be tedium to the game. Once the devs have decided they want a Diablo 2 inventory system, all of that just followed naturally.

It's another case of being so fixated on implementing a Diablo 2 clone inventory, that they forgot to stop and consider whether they should.

i like the visual aspect of items in the inventory. Imo it should as a consequence requires to drop less loot but what do i know.

[edit] in poe 1 it works because you end up hiding so much

+1

They really need to innovate and raise the bar.

PoE2 is just quite simply a downgrade in every way aside from graphics compared to PoE1. It does nothing better, it doesn't innovate, it doesn't invent new stuff. It's just the same, but worse.

+1

It actually fatigues me how close GGG comes to making a truly amazing game, but refuses to, because of their hatred of QoL from things like trading, to flasks, to movement speed.

Nostalgia is a helluva drug, for sure.