Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We had a bunch of topics left over from last week that rolled over to this week. First, we talk a bit about Shinobi: Art of Vengeance, the Shinobi Metroidvania. From there, we talk a bit about Summer Games Done Quick and some of the better runs. Tam talks about his plans to adapt the Starfinder 2 game system to create a Shadowrun Campaign. Ash shares his initial thoughts about Draw Steel, a new RPG coming down the pipe. We talk a bit about the upcoming Last Epoch Season 3, which drops on August 21s and some of the significant changes. We also talk a bit about Path of Exile II 0.3.0, which drops shortly after that on the 29th. Lastly, Tam shares some of his thoughts on actually playing quite a bit of Burrows and Badgers, a squad-based leveling miniatures game along the lines of Mordheim. Grace talks briefly about the new Dwarven Realms season that has started, and Bel shares his suggestions for the Craft Sequence by Max Gladstone and both Weapons and Barbarian by Zach Cregger.
Featuring: Ammosart, Ashgar, Belghast, Grace, Kodra, Tamrielo, and Thalen
Hey Folks! We got the full crew and dived into the topic of what defines a game. Is it still a game if it mostly plays itself? From there, we talk about the recent acquisition of Eleventh Hour Games by Krafton and what it might mean for the future of Last Epoch. We reprise the topic of connecting with players since Kodra was out last week and had thoughts. This deteriorates into a general topic about Guild Wars 2 and chasing rare items. Tam shares the conclusion to his new computer topic from last week and what he decided to do. Finally, we talk a bit about how Hades 2 has released the last patch before the official 1.0 launch.
Good Morning Folks. This weekend on the AggroChat podcast, Tam brought up a topic that sort of went in a bunch of different directions. The idea basically was a discussion around how he as a game designer, could build a communications system in an MMORPG that encouraged players to interact with each other. We know that forced voice chat does not work, and in the games that have open voice chat… the first thing I do is disable that option. We also know that pushing players of wildly different skill levels into the same content only leads to toxicity. We also know that across the board… MMORPGs are struggling. While Steam only represents a tiny slice of the FFXIV player base… it has seen a 78% drop in players since its all time peak in June of 2024. While again not representative of the totality of the player base… Steam does tend to allow for viewing trends and if it is happening there… it is usually also happening in the larger pool of stand alone client players.
I think one of the challenges of MMORPGs is that they are effectively being driven off a cliff by the most hardcore and as a result vocal player base. Here is a hard truth that we need to understand. If you use gaming forums, reddit, discord, or post about video games on social media… you are already among the most hardcore players in a given fandom. If you are regularly engaging in raid or other challenge content… you are further filtering your bias down to the needle point of the most serious of players, and they cannot survive with only your support. The challenge for developers is that as a whole, the feedback they have been getting is that the content needs to be harder in order to cater to the most dedicated players. However doing so… continues to push things out of bounds for the most casual players to a point where they feel like they can no longer justify that $15 per month in order to log in and do some busy work each day. When you lose casual players… you lose staff and money to make significant improvements to the game.
I think in part, Classic World of Warcraft has been so popular because it hearkens back to an earlier game design ethos. Molten Core and Blackwing Lair are masterpieces of zone design, and in both case… the fights were not actually that challenging. You needed 20%-30% of the raid that had a clue what was going on… and the rest could more or less be populated with warm bodies that were pushing buttons, and also getting to experience content they might not be able to otherwise. I started out as one of those warm bodies, and then eventually over the course of years of raiding developed the skills necessary to lead and function at a high enough level of get recruited into more hardcore groups. The thing is though… the golden age for me were those first raids. We had fun. It was a party atmosphere with comms filled with bad jokes and even worse stories… as we all fail-boated our way through the content to eventually get shiny loot. When these games got super serious focus time… they just stopped being all that enjoyable.
If a game exists in this mode, where it is being driven by the most dedicated players… eventually it starts to shrink in size and with it comes downsizing of the studios. You can look back at all of the games that I used to play fairly seriously… and eventually dipped out of because of cost cutting and lower frequency of content. I played the heck out of Destiny 1 and 2, and got frustrated when they started vaulting content… in part because they did not have the resources to keep updating it. I played the heck out of Rift but eventually bailed because it could not consistently keep a player base interested in the game in order to do much of anything. Wildstar was amazing… but its raid content was way the hell too complicated for most players and the casual content while great… just did not have enough meat on its bones to keep people engaged. Both Guild Wars 2 and Final Fantasy XIV were driven by decade long story arcs… and both began to flounder a bit when they lacked the story chops to keep people coming back for more.
In truth… I shifted my focus away from MMORPGs and began devoting the majority of my time to ARPGs where I could group up with friends if I wanted to… but the majority of my time was spent soloing. Other games have similarly become way more solo focused, like Elder Scrolls Online which churns through regularly story content updates… all of which can be completed in their entirety without the help of other players. We’ve lost this whole era where doing group content was a heck of a lot of fun, and I believe it is in large part because the players driving the narrative are the players craving challenge in their games. This also coincides with the birth of Streamer culture, and the focus on showing off how good you are at games in a public manner. If you are not doing something on the hardest of hardcore difficulty modes… then you are wasting your time… or at least that has become the prevailing public sentiment. However none of this takes into account the fun factor. Players who get their satisfaction by doing the sweatiest content ever… are a minority in the total player pie.
What you don’t hear publicly talked about is the number of players who bounce because they realize that none of the content is actually designed for them. The majority of folks don’t storm out the front door raging about how bad the game is. Instead they simply slip out a side door, cancel their subscription, uninstall the game… and then gravitate towards games that are giving them a better experience for their limited game time. There is a reason why Gacha games have seen this massive rise in popularity over the years, because they really hone in on the feeling of giving the players power… without actually increasing the difficulty terribly much. It is very easy to busily chase a bunch of objectives and feel like you are doing important things… regardless of whether or not the game is largely playing itself. They feel just connected enough so that you know you have friends who are also playing… but unfortunately there is no real meaningful multiplayer experiences.
I feel like for the most part Guild Wars 2 has done a pretty good job of catering content correctly, however there are still numerous cases where they drank the hardcore Kool-Aid and it shows. With the most recently expansion Janthir Wilds, they introduced a zone meta that is quite honestly… not capable of being completed without a large number of ringers in zone participating. As a result it is pretty rare that you actually find a group doing it, and succeeding at it. Similarly Dragon’s End to this day still fails more often than not. Contrast this with old classics like Tequatl, Octovine, or Chak Gerent that pretty much succeed damned near 100% of the time… and have full zones of players showing up every time they are run. The events that are being completed are just better designed, and it does not matter how much the “hardcores” turn their nose up at them… the participation proves it. People will come out of the woodwork for something that is chill, fun, and rewarding… and honestly does not ask that much of them.
Ultimately my theory is that MMORPGs have been struggling and shrinking… because they have been listening to the wrong voices. They lost sight of the inclusive content design that made their best zones great… and have leaned into chasing and ever shrinking piece of the player-base. World of Warcraft was a game changer. The number of people that I knew that had never really played another game seriously before that… was pretty freaking massive. However as the content kept getting more and more finely focused… the folks who did it for fun and did not have the time to devote to all of the prep work… quietly faded away. Essentially there are two paths to take… either you make it so that class design exists in a way that the difference between the most hardcore player and the most brain dead casual is about 10% efficiency… or you make the content designed in a way that you only need about 20% of the player base to be really paying attention to complete it. The best content tends to follow that second path. I am not saying do not put the double mythic extra plus hardcore content into your game… but make it for bragging rights only, and in no way connected to the flow of necessarily content.
Granted take everything I just said with a grain of salt. The fact that I have a gaming blog… already puts me on the narrow end of the “cares about games” spectrum. However I am very much a burnt out ex-raider who used to take this shit super seriously… until I realized that I would just be happier if I did not give a fuck about passing arbitrary skill checks in the games that I am playing. I mostly play ARPGs like Path of Exile and Last Epoch, where I only have to care about myself and my actions in order to complete them, and that reset on a regular enough basis that I can ignore a season/league if my devotion is elsewhere. That said… the whole conversation this weekend… did make me miss those glory days of raiding and a lot of the nonsense that used to happen on voice chat. To some extent I am getting some of this back with my small group shenanigans in Guild Wars 2, and I hope maybe we gather enough mass to be able to do some strikes at some point. I miss us progressing through Binding Coil in FFXIV and quite honestly… that was the last time when raiding with a large-ish group of people was super enjoyable for me. I had a blast learning the Arcadion with the release of Dawntrail, but that was pretty short lived.
Mostly I think we would be better of if games were designed to allow more casual players… to ride all the rides. I think the bar for entry for a lot of content has just gotten too high in order to keep the masses engaged anymore. That is the problem with the MMORPG design model… you need everyone bought in for them to succeed. We’ve spent the last decade filtering out who can reasonably play them… and they are going to keep shrinking unless that line of thinking changes. I say this as someone who has only one foot left in the genre… and could probably happily cancel the few subscriptions I have remaining without seriously impacting my enjoyment. If I am almost out the door… someone who is already well into the more serious end of the community… you’ve got problems.
The post The Hardcore Filter Problem appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
Good Morning Folks. This morning I hope you will indulge me in a bit of a rant. I feel like it is time for the humble Wisdom scroll to go away… permanently. For those uninitiated into the world of Path of Exile, or ARPGs in general… any loot in the game that has affixes on it… aka Magic (Blue) quality or higher drops as unidentified. You cannot equip it until you have spent a piece of currency called the Wisdom scroll on it to reveal its statistics. In the beginning of the game this creates a subtle pressure of having to pick and choose which items you identify, because Wisdom Scrolls are a scarce resource. However you rapidly reach a point where this is just busywork. You either dedicate one inventory slot to a stack of wisdom scrolls so you can identify items out in the field, or you have a trip over to your stash so that you can perform the process of everything you decided to pick up… before often chucking the items anyway because they were not actually that good in the first place.
We can blame this trend on Diablo, and creation of the Scroll/Tome of Identify. Since Path of Exile was essentially a giant love letter to Diablo 2 specifically… we got the wisdom scroll and also the teleportation scroll. I feel like it is way past time for both of these concepts to die. I get that there is something interesting about picking up an item and taking the risk that it might be useful… but we don’t play games in the same way that we played Diablo 2. You might clear a level and find two or three items that are even of the right type for the character you are building. In that scenario it is not that big of a deal to chuck it in your inventory in the hopes that it might actually be good. The opportunity cost of the Identification scroll is minimal, especially given that players are already used to sacrificing inventory grid real estate for charms. It is quaint and anachronistic… but still something I would consider to be poor game design.
However when you consider what loot looks like in Path of Exile it becomes less forgiving. I am already running fairly strict loot filters and still see lots of items that are potentially good… but most likely vendor trash. The GGG team has said countless times that they want loot on the ground to matter. However so long as we cannot see the stats that roll on the item… I am never going to pick up that random Imperial Skean that is sitting there on the left side of the screen… even though it is entirely possible it could have rolled with +2 to skills, and two Damage Over Time Multipliers making it far better than anything I am currently using. It was generated… cost processing cycles to do so… and is effectively dead on arrival because it is not worth the time to pick it up and identify it in the vague hope that maybe it might be useful. Instead as players we chase currency drops that we can then use to buy ideally rolled items from other players, when those items might have been rotting on the ground all along.
The thing is… even Grinding Gear Games knows this is bad design. They have all but removed the Wisdom Scroll from Path of Exile II and have entirely removed the concept of a Teleportation Scroll. Essentially they matter briefly in early Act 1, until you unlock and NPC called The Hooded One. Once you have done that.. you are never going to pick up another Wisdom Scroll or manually identify an item ever again. You can click on the NPC, choose Identify Items and it will unmask an entire inventory full of stuff. Diablo III for example still had unidentified items… but they just required you to click on them in your inventory… and by the time Diablo IV rolled around everything drops identified. Last Epoch has no concept of unidentified items and allows us to fully filter items based on the quality of what dropped… and is a much better game for doing so.
Why did I write an entire article complaining about this common practice? Not sure honestly. You can do something a million times and then one time it feels like it is a bridge too far. It mostly started as me mourning not having an NPC that would identify all of my items for me that Path of Exile II has. Then became a little stab of frustration every single time I had to click on a scroll. I only picked up this Full Wyvernscale because it is a good base and I am trying to grab some level 85 bases for Kodra to craft on. I did not expect it to be a good item, and were I mapping for myself… it is highly unlikely that I would have picked it up. Most uniques I completely ignore unless I know that it is something that might have value, or it is something like in this case that I have not picked up yet this league for the unique tab. It just feels like it is time for this practice to die.
Maybe it had a reason for existing… like for example maybe loot was not treated as itemized until you unidentified it in Diablo and as such required less memory as it was simply a stub. I know this is not the case in Path of Exile because attributes are assigned to the item regardless if it is hidden by identification or not. There have been exploits in the past that allowed people to see what the stats were on an item before using a wisdom scroll on it. This made it super risky to buy any item from another player that had not been identified. Mostly I just feel like it is time for this entire construct within the genre to die in a fire.
The post Wisdom Scrolls Need to Die appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.
