ARPG/MMO Discussion

[Inquisition8]

Hi All,

I wanted to get some insight/thoughts on the state of more traditional ARPGs and what you think we can expect coming up (maybe even in 2019). Let me explain what I mean. I've sort of given up video games, partly due to real world responsibilities, partly due to maturity, and partly due to lack of interest in my genre of choice - ARPGs. It seems like ARPGs are trending towards the MMO route, which is fine, but even there seems to be a massive lack of - everything. When I was a teen and into early 20s, I was pretty serious about gaming, and afterwards I would go on binges, to eventually settling on a casual approach. This is where the "slow acquisition of power" concept of properly designed ARPGs/MMOs appealed to me. To give you some background, I played most Blizzard titles for countless hours:

WC1
WC2
WC3
SC1
SC2
WoW (up through the middle of WotlK)
D2
D3

And spin-offs:

Titan Quest/Immortal Throne
Grim Dawn

I'm ashamed to say I never touched D1, but the games that really captivated me were D2 (what I consider to be a perfect game if you could remove the duping and add some QoL improvements), WoW through most of WotlK, and D3 for the first few months before massive system overhaul (Inferno nerf). The RTS games were fun and I dabbled in others as well (Age of Empires, C&C). I also tried other genres, mostly FPS (at one point I played in CS:S tournaments), but kept going back to this. In the interim, I enjoyed Titan Quest and most recently Grim Dawn, but they are both primarily single player games with no perceived reward of "having something someone else doesn't" since you can just hack them as they are generally "offline".

Which brings me to my next point: is the traditional, "cheat averse", ARPG dead? Will there be another MMO akin to WoW where one can start fresh, play regularly but casually (let's say 2 hours/night), and feel like they're progressing with the eventual hope of "digital riches" (which made D2 grinding so much fun)? I've played these games for almost 2 decades so I have no illusions of grandeur, I just want a fairly engaging game with good replayability and quantifiable progress per-session. Grim Dawn and Titan Quest both have this, but again there's no real social structure within the game (since they are mostly single player) and eventually it makes both not so fun, in my opinion.

Yes, I'm begging for a D2 remastered or a Diablo MMO - neither of which are likely. Maybe someone else will rise up to this task. Maybe I'm just getting older and losing interest in video games in general, but I would play either of the latter in a heartbeat if they were available. No other games I've researched seem to come close. What are your thoughts?

 

[GoodRevrnd]

Path of Exile is an incredibly well made game if you enjoy that genre. It out Diablos Diablo in most respects. I suppose it isn't as charming tho.

 

[DrMrLordX]

PoE vs. Torchlight 2, which is better? I haven't played PoE, but I got Torchlight 2 on sale awhile back and it was pretty damn good despite its most-obvious flaws (and there's a new Torchlight game on the way).

 

[Borealis7]

the upcoming ones i know of:
Warhammer Chaosbane
Wolcen
Last Epoch

i'm more interested in SP and not MMOs but if you do, you can wait for Lost Ark when it's released in 2044.

 

[Inquisition8]

So I have looked into PoE (several times over the years), and maybe it's just my ignorance, but it seems unnecessarily complex with the giant skill trees and item-skill combinations. I'm also suspect of the F2P/P2W (if the latter is the case) design. I'd rather just pay for a game. My final reservation is that it's been out for so long. I guess I'm looking for something new where pretty much everyone is starting from scratch, from a game knowledge standpoint. I'll check out the 3 listed above.

 

[Craig234]

Well, there is a PoE II that's less than a year old, and youtubes on upcoming games.

 

[Borealis7]

PoE here means Path of Exile, not Pillars of Eternity although both are isometric RPGs

 

[zink77]

Yes, I'm begging for a D2 remastered or a Diablo MMO - neither of which are likely. Maybe someone else will rise up to this task. Maybe I'm just getting older and losing interest in video games in general, but I would play either of the latter in a heartbeat if they were available. No other games I've researched seem to come close. What are your thoughts?

Your post reeks of everything that is wrong with modern gaming, the reality is game companies want to shift to multiplayer and avoid big expensive single player titles, if they can sell skins and gacha gambling in a popular multiplayer game they can maximize profits. There is a big rush to mobile to get the new wave of china kids since an entire generation in asia is gaming on smartphones. That's what diablo immortal is about. So that means there's huge pressure to produce those super profits that those exploitable mobile games are generating.

ARPG's for me are long in the tooth because the designers don't know where to take the genre. The reality is arpgs really are action games with bad combat and random loot, the random loot and progression was hiding the fact the combat is weak. That was how I figured out why titans quest didn't become a hit - the combat was simply bad and poorly designed they aped diablo 1+2's design too closely not understanding that diablo had the dark gritty art, probably the best item progression system ever designed thus far and cool world going for it, diablos combat was rather weak in places and Iron lore never had a clue because they were blinded by diablo's success. Basically when diablo 1 + 2 were made the original diablo devs had no idea they were simply making god of war in D&D clothing at a fixed isometric camera angle minus the cool tight controls.

If you look at the combat moves for say paladin - shield bash, dash, etc... they are moves coming right out of action/fighting games we were playing. In psychological scientific reality, all games involving combat (even if they appear different superficially) are actually related because they are pressing the same buttons inside our primate brain. That means, fps, fighting games like steet fighter, dragon age, mass effect, they are all about the same topic - combat.

The closest we have to diablo is Path of exile. Torchlight was a herculean attempt but it fell flat, the itemization and combat wasn't very good. The big suprise were Grim dawn and PoE. So Grim dawn and path of exile are more 'spiritual' successors to diablo then most other games on the market.

Most mmo's today are grindathon with not much interesting combat wise... I was never into wow, in fact I hated wow on release and most mmo's because their combat systems are so god damn awful having to cater to people with lag for most of their existence to get the widest audience.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Torchlight was a herculean attempt but it fell flat

Torchlight 2 was a massive improvement over the original, though. It had some funky balance issues, but a lot of the movement-based abilities gave it interesting gameplay. Also I didn't like the superficial limits on draw distance for enemies in Torchlight 2 (I guess that was baked in to accommodate netcode for multiplayer). Itemization was actually pretty good.