Hacker News Reader

> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.

They just did this, and made the game much more of a slow grind.

Diablo 4's greatest flaw, IMHO, is that they apply difficulty scaling across all areas. At level 1 it can take two or three single hits to kill a goat man, and at level 60+ it can take two or three hits to kill a goat man; because the mobs scale to your power level.

If they'd simply allowed some areas to be level-restricted with difficult mobs, then there would always be a sense of reward and victory. A player tired of the grind need only hop over to a slightly easier zone to feel like a god among mortals. But you can't do that in Diablo 4, so it just remains a slog.

yes I totally agree.

After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way.

You can lean into it, like Disgaea, which just embraces the brokenness and writes them into its mechanics. You can just sort of write a standard game, but then, in the end, the solution to all problems is grinding. You can scale the challenges with the level, but then, what's the point of leveling? In fact all you're doing is running the risk of showing just how busted the mechanic is when you have a hard time matching the levels correctly because of the exponential power gains; see Oblivion, for instance. And even after such a mismatch, the solution to all problems is still grinding.

Obviously many fine games have used this and I still play some to this day, so I'm not saying it's never ever fun. I'm just saying, the ways in which it's kinda broken seem fundamental and there seems to be only so much you can do with them. Were I designing a game today, rather than treating it as a default as so many designers still seem to, I'd want to take a careful look at the disadvantages and be sure I'm comfortable with them before proceeding. And as a gamer I do have to say more and more I'm starting to mark a game using level-based mechanics down a point when I'm figuring out what to play.

There are games where the final score is primarily based on taking as little time as possible (e.g. the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which had its debut around the same time as Diablo); this tends to keep exponential leveling mechanics in check.

I always thought HoMM single player kind of just played directly into the “comp stomp” play style and only a few levels punished it.

The difference between single player and modern HoMM (it’s a thing!) multiplayer is absolutely stark. Entirely different games, basically.

It's another helpful one.

I like to play my own challenges now for minimal leveling; not formal ones for speedrunning purposes, just running more often and not grabbing all the resources. Due to the exponential nature of the game, generally if I do throw in the towel and level, by definition, the best place to grind is the latest possible place. Numerically you actually aren't missing out on much by trying to speed through the game and stopping only when necessary in most games.

> After ~25 years of playing this sort of game, I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that exponential-power leveling is just a busted mechanic. There's a variety of good ways to use it, but there isn't a great way.

Hero stories need to have a satisfying end, and I don't think many ARPGs acknowledge that this is even possible or design to allow it to coincide with the end of the story.

I imagine an ARPG designed to _end_ characters would level-gate content in such a way that unlocking, and defeating, the final content would be a satisfying end to the character. You would certainly be encouraged to start afresh, NewGame+ style, with a new character but it would be made clear that the character at the _end_ is also _finished_. Completed. Over. Done. The hero has finished their journey.

Ie, lock the character and have them just lounging around in a hub/town for your new characters to see.

There’s multiple ways of handling scaling, but all games need to deal with the player gaining skill even if their character doesn’t. FPS often have have player selected difficulty settings not because people want to suffer, but because skill is makes such a huge difference.

RPG mechanics are generally meant to minimize the impact of player skill. A Skyrim stealth archer doesn’t benefit from hitting the enemy in the head, instead aiming is closer to target selection and their perks determine how well placed the shot was. This actually simplifies game balancing because players can self select challenges based on their character’s abilities. Though Skyrim also includes a difficulty slider, it’s not meant to offset endgame gear.

Dark souls is generally considered difficult because the RPG elements are minimized. Speed running the game doesn’t require people to hunt down a huge list of gear it’s just not that important.

The latest updated tried to address this somewhat.

> Level scaling inside dungeons and most overworld territories has been adjusted in World Tiers III and IV. Monsters will begin to trail behind the player in Level after a certain point (up to a maximum of 5 Levels behind). This change does not affect World Bosses, Legion Events, Fields of Hatred, Helltide, or Nightmare Dungeons.

Due to the nature of level scaling, if you're 5 levels over an enemy you basically vaporize them. There is still level variance among the world zones as well. So with the combination of the two, you should always be able to find someplace a bit more challenging and when you're higher level you can find areas with lots of enemies lower than you. I haven't played enough post-patch to know if it's made the experience any better, but I'm not the type of Diablo player to seek out areas with weaker enemies.

What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4/5ths of the map no longer relevant because you're so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn't much to do at the high end other than run rifts. In D4 the entire world is a viable place to spend time during the late game.

> What Blizzard wanted to avoid is having 4/5ths of the map no longer relevant because you're so far above the area level that you no longer get usable XP, loot or gold. In D3 there wasn't much to do at the high end other than run rifts.

Alternatively, they could have:

1. Distributed high-level dungeons across the map

2. Unlocked high-level quests across the map

They have an open world with dungeons and "caves", and an open world quest system; they could've leveraged that to get high level players to return.

> In D4 the entire world is a viable place to spend time during the late game.

Spending time doing what? Killing mobs? For what purpose?

Killing mobs should be a means to an end like cosmetics/achievements/trophies and those usually give you bragging's rights.

So ok, all zones are viable to spend time in D4. What do you gain with that?

It be nice if they split the game. They already have a Hardcore mode, so they could just split the ruleset. "Normal" could have things like level-gated areas, unlimited respecs, and a stronger focus on group play and HC could remain an infinite grind… which I think HC players would enjoy, since it would give them more cred and let them look down on mere casuals.

> Once you get to the endgame it's pointless, and people basically blaze through the base game on purpose. And once you get there it really is no more than a slot machine that caters to people with serious gambling addictions.

Feels like you're missing the point of end-game players. It's not the slot machine. It's pushing further and further into end-game content. It's a race to see who can dive deeper into dungeons and what builds are necessary to push to the true "end game". Diablo, the campaign, is and has always been trivially easy. Super high levels of these dungeons stack up so many resistance penalties and the level difference adds so much damage reduction (for enemies) and increase (for you) that it becomes much more of a skill based game. This is what I play these games for. Not the campaign that you can sleep through.

For my wife, the game ends when we kill the big baddie together on normal difficulties. For me that's when the content just starts getting interesting. There is a lot of grinding involved, but you're having to pay so much more attention to what abilities / upgrades / paragon selections you make none of which are important at all for the main campaign.

I don't know how you do it, but I'm actually fascinated by it. I like watching Diablo players rant on YouTube, but for me the game pretty much ends after the campaign too. I wish it didn't because I find the campaigns great. Even just exploring the map and all the different atmospheric elements. It just feels too short.

I don't want to optimize my character. One thing I loved about D3 was that the entire skill tree was accessible to you. In D4 that's true right up until around 50 when it becomes cost prohibitive to respec.

One way I look at it is by the time you beat the game for the first time unless you've done quite a bit of side content, you still may not be a high enough level to unlock all of the abilities. You've only seen a fraction of the unique items floating around since most don't even drop until World Tier 3 or 4. You've likely only gotten the chance to play one or two themed builds based around the items which have dropped. You've probably not touched the paragon board or glyphs which can change things up quite significantly and enable a number of other builds that aren't really viable without the boost. I'm "only" level 78 on my main and I'm still upgrading glyphs and working my way through the paragon board. Or I was before the season started, and now I'm playing a fresh barb instead of sorc.

I wouldn't mind more free respec opportunities, but I don't think it's exceptionally expensive. Just verified on my 78 sorc that it would cost just over $1MM gold to reset all of my points. That's maybe 3-4 dungeon runs. However to reroll an attribute at the enchanter, it's now costing me above $1.5MM for a single role, it also requires forgotten souls. Refunding skill points is much cheaper than upgrading end game gear! It also took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize you don't have to reset all skill points. If you right click on a skill it'll remove it one point at a time for under $20k / point.

I don't understand the appeal of these things. For games that are not skill and/or reflexion oriented like Diablo once you've finished the campaign you have experienced what the game had to offer, a good hero journey. Replaying for other classes, missed side quests or simple monster bashing can be fun too. But what you describe seems not to be the satisfaction of discovering, only on collecting and checking boxes for the sake of it. This is akin to trying every parameter on a slot machine and trying to get every combination. That's very close to gambling addiction or OCD for me.

Forget the endgame, how many hours of my life can I spend comparing one piece of equipment to one very-barley-sort-of-slightly-better piece of equipment until I've cycled through literally hundreds of pieces of equipment, each promising an imperceptible improvement to my ability to kill another thousand samey bad guys?

I don't know how many hours exactly, but I know I hit that limit sometimes in my early 20's.

With Diablo 3 they added so much QoL and grind protection and then people flipped their shit. So for Diablo 4 they discarded everything good from Diablo 3.

By and large, Diablo players want to be flagellated by the RNG.

You can be god-tier in Diablo 3 with a simple autohotkey script. At least with Diablo 4 you have to _sometimes_ evade. ;)

> I feel like, particularly with the new Diablo 4 they could make the leveling curve on the base game last MUCH, MUCH longer and it would actually be far more enjoyable for far more people. It would piss off the endgame crowd though, because all they want to do is get to max level as fast as possible so they can start farming.

Didn’t all of this literally just happen?

Sort of, but not really. The real grind kicks in around level 50… so again, after you've already beat the game. I don't really care about the "endgame". I think this game would be much more fun if it was a bit more like am MMO, where you are maybe looking for a group to do a dungeon.

Below 50 is, IMO, the best part of the game, especially because respecs are essentially unlimited.

I agree that's what it's evolved into for the most part, but also consider the point of Diablo is to "defeat Diablo." Simple as that. The endgame of min/maxing came because people continued to play after the main objective was done.