I’ve found myself lately a lot more interested in games that don’t focus heavily on graphics but instead allow other parts of the game to speak for itself. This allows for the imagination to fill in the gaps, as you mentioned.
I’ve been playing a lot or Caves of Qud recently. It’s a rogue-like game with tile graphics and colourful text. Somehow this menu simulator game has drawn me into it’s harsh and unforgiving world. The tile based graphics actually allows for an amazing amount of creative freedom both from the developer and player point of views. The developer has created this futuristic planet with mutants and cybernetics roaming the planet trying to survive. The player has the freedom to play as they like and create the most unique characters they can imagine. My current character has two hearts, a scorpion tail, a fanged beak, two dagger wielding claws and a habit for stabbing.
I think the rise of constantly better technology has inadvertently encouraged a focus on better graphics over other aspects of video games. While there are some absolutely beautiful games with higher hardware demand, I think as of late, I’m yearning for games that focus more on story or gameplay. Games where you can feel the developer’s passion. Games with polish and attention to details in the most unexpected ways. Games that attempt to push boundaries within certain limitations (think hardware or graphic styles for example).
I think what I want is a game that feels like I’m reading a fiction book in a way. What I mean is that when you read a work of fiction, your imagination is filling in all that visual information. A game can provide you more than just text, but if it can balance graphics, gameplay and story, it can really transport and immerse your imagination into that world.
It also means more people can play on more hardware, it typically focuses the experience, it makes the interactive elements more visually distinguishable from the background graphics, it’s cheaper/faster to produce so less incentive to bloat with MTX to recoup massive investments, the scope is smaller so can be better aligned with a singular cohesive artistic vision, and the limited graphics encourages stylisation and artistic decisions when ‘photo real’ becomes not an option to target.
Also you don’t need to wait 10+ years for a game, just to receive a bloated mess where you only engage with 20% of the content yet had to wait for 100% of the development time, since at that point the investment demands it has to appeal to every possible consumer, only to still get a buggy unfinished release due to the massive scope. /rant. Anyway, indies are great and i love short games too.
They can be fun for a bit. I tend to get overwhelmed with all the crap I loot. I have the same problem with games like The Elder Scrolls series. I’m alway afraid I’ll accidentally sell something important or useful, but I usually end up with a lot of junk. Lol
While I had some fun playing torchlight 2 with a friend back in the day, in reality I never got on with the entire genre (or its sibling the Looter-Shooter)
It’s like
Every video game is on some level a skinner box, but arpgs and lootershooters are the most transparent and cynical about it, idk. Well no, the SECOND most transparent and cynical about it, MMOs still take the cake.
You should check out path of exile 2 it seems like they might be addressing a lot of your concerns with the genere. And GGG (the makers of poe2) are actually a really good company to support
Some thoughts on Diablo 4 (D4) as per your question. In terms of ARPGs, I came from Diablo 3 and, way back in the day, Dungeon Runners.
From my feelings as a player, as well as reading from the community, the primary criticisms from D4’s launch have been the way it handles items and endgame content. At original release, I know a lot of people who tapped out around level 75-80, with level 100 being max.
I am personally quite pleased with how the latest season addressed these issues. With the elimination of yellow (rare) gear as candidates, good drops feel a bit rarer (more time spent playing; less time scanning items). Reviewing loot can still feel a bit tedious at certain points in the game, but you eventually reach a point where a legendary item needs to drop with an asterisk before you look at it, again allowing you to focus on playing over sorting.
You said in a comment that you are in it for the progression. I find character development rewarding but skewed; the early game is fast paced and incentivizes rushing to get to the final difficulty level, when progression peters off and becomes rather marginal. In Diablo 3, you wanted to play higher difficulty levels to have better drop rates. In Diablo 4, it’s not so much the drop rates as the quality. Items from the highest tier completely outclass items from even the second-highest tier, meaning you have to keep starting over from scratch as you move up. I’d rather it be balanced in terms of drop rates, thus still having a small probability of carrying a midgame item all the way to endgame.
Some endgame activities are more enjoyable than others, but they have different rewards that encourage you to have some gameplay variety. Boss farming is probably the most tedious endgame activity. It is done to get the most valuable and rarest pieces, the uber uniques, but requires you to also grind bosses that realistically won’t help your character other than to get materials to summon the higher chance bosses.
My friend who plays PoE and has tried D4 is well described by @Neuromancer49’s post; the lack of complexity turns him off. If you’re okay with trying something simpler and are at all interested in the campaign/story, I think it’s worth getting. I know there’s a vocal group that prefers Grim Dawn and the Diablo 2 die-hards seem to dislike D4, for what it’s worth.
Lastly, the art and sound design team did a spectacular job if you like Diablo’s aesthetic.
story is usually an important part for me! it’s one part of PoE that never impressed me. I might still check out Diablo 4, and I’m glad you laid out a lot of things for me. most of the stuff I could find online was still harping on previous issues that I now know some have been addressed.
funnily enough, I used to love running “lab” (I believe it’s short for “labyrinth” but my memory is shot and it’s been a long time) in Path of Exile, which was running through traps to rush to a boss. they nerfed that route shortly before I quit, too. but you got a lot of rewards at the end that had the potential to be good, and a blessing on existing equipment that you picked. a shame that boss farming in Diablo 4 isn’t as fun, but it’s something I’ll keep in mind when a sale rolls around.
sorting was probably one of the things I disliked the most in PoE, I could never grasp what was worth using or selling that well. goes hand-in-hand with my inability to roll with theorycrafting builds, so to hear Diablo 4 eases that some is nice.
Ah, the labs sound similar to a type of dungeons that were part of last season’s theme. I liked them too. There’s a new pit mode that is similar to greater rifts in Diablo 3 if you remember them. Not quite running through traps, but running through procedurally generated dungeons to reach and defeat a boss as quickly as possible. Those bosses started out with some cheap one-shot kills (now nerfed), but I find them pretty fun and prefer this mode of dungeon + boss to the regular boss rushing.
As Grim Dawn has been on my list, do you mind sharing why you couldn’t get into it? Anything I should know going in?
I’ve really enjoyed the ARPGs that I’ve played (D3, a bit of Grim Dawn, Last Epoch, and hell as of the recent update even D4) but I find that I am terrible at build crafting - and the really bad brain fog that I’ve had for over a year now doesn’t help that at all.
I find that I just constantly hit a wall that I can’t push past, and then run into the “Now what?” - every now and then I’ll play with some build guides online and tinker with them, but for me that isn’t as fun as coming up with something completely on my own.
That all being said, LE has been my favorite as of recently - it’s definitely still a light on content (1.0 just released this year), but over time I think it’ll be very high up there on everyone’s list.
I feel like I had a much easier time understanding the systems in LE than the other games (except for maybe D4 which was a bit too simple, though they’re starting to change it up a bit with the recent patches) but LE’s item and skill systems also clearly have a very high ceiling of what you can do with them.
I guess for me, what I really liked about it is that even with all the brain fog I could still get into the systems and pick it up quickly, yet also still see where it can certainly get more and more complex as you push your builds higher and higher, even if I’m not completely at that point yet.
I hope some of my ramblings made at least a little bit of sense 😅
I too have brain fog and memory issues in general. I’m glad to hear that systems seem simple to understand but have the high ceiling, I love that kind of thing. I just need to push on I think and try LE again, when I get my desktop back.
No problem! I’ve really enjoyed Runemaster so far since I’ve always been someone who favored magic based classes. With Runic Invocation there are so many different spell combinations that you can pull off (I can’t possibly memorize them all, I think there’s around 50 of them?) which is really fun!
I need to try out Spellblade at some point, that’ll probably be my next class that I try out. Their new season (“Cycles”) launches at the beginning of next month (July 9th IIRC), so I haven’t decided if I’ll try to wait till then or if I’ll try to give it a go before then.
Torchlight I & II are easily my favourite ARPGs. I wish Runic also did Torchlight III but sadly the studio is closed and its just an abomination with Chinese mobile game aspects.
Grim Dawn is easily the best commercial (which is to say, not free like PoE) ARPG out there. If you like PoE, it's probably the closest you'll get to something similar in that character builds are more complex and customizable than in other games.
I’ve played Last Epoch, PoE, D1/2/3, and a LOT of others, and Grim Dawn just knocks it out of the part for me. I really want more from Crate, once Farthest Frontier is wrapped up.
I enjoyed the D4 story for my first play through and the recent changes for season 4 have made levelling to endgame much more enjoyable. It is much simpler than PoE and I play it knowing that as something fun that I can pick up and put down at will.
Last Epoch I’m playing to try out each mastery. Even though it’s now a 1.0 release it’s still a bit barebones. Give it a couple of cycles and it’ll be more fleshed out especially in the endgame. I think of it as a middle ground between the simplicity of D4 and complexity of PoE. I like that I can easily try off meta builds through passive refunds and make my own builds.
PoE scratches the D2 itch for grinding. I’m an addict who like spreadsheets.
I don’t think I was very good at the start at making my own builds in PoE, I think the tectonic slam build magically functioned somehow despite that, hahaha. I do miss the game, I played for a really long time. but it’s not for me anymore.
I’m glad to hear that Last Epoch is still going strong with new stuff. I backed in on Kickstarter long ago because I wanted more PoE-like games, so I’m glad it’s succeeding. I’m hoping that giving it another go will make it stick, because it being the “in-between” sounds like it’ll be just right.
I mean, it’s no Diablo but I love the Hades games. If you’re in it mostly for the progression and build construction than you won’t have a great time, but if you’re looking for SOLID arpg gameplay they’re a good fit.
There’s a lot more focus on clean movement, it’s very much an arpg through a roguelite lens rather than an mmo or pure arpg.
Strong recommend, I’ve already put more hours into the sequel than I did the first game. Nyx’s mirror is replaced with a card system that allows for a bit of build customization, you might really dig it!
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