What is the appeal of ARPGs as a genre? D2 Resurrected is on a deep sale and I'm looking for something new to play, and this genre has always made me curious. From a distance it seems boring as shit, literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die. Why do people like ARPGs? Is D2R worth it for that experience?
I will not play POE.
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Have you played a non-Diablo-like action rpg? Stuff like Skyrim, Nioh, Dragon's Dogma or Dark Souls? If you do and like them, this has pretty much a similar appeal. It's an rpg but focused more on action.
I enjoyed playing Dark Souls. I fricking despised Nioh, but I did greatly enjoy Stranger of Paradise, that game has some awesome combat and builds.
My thing is that I see people go fricking apeshit over these games and I don't see the appeal. For the record I play hundreds of games and have touched pretty much every genre at least once and come away enjoying most. I can see the appeal of stuff like RTS games, point and click mysteries, FPS games, platformers, you name it. I just don't see why people go hog wild over D2 in particular.
They're great for just playing when you want to relax, maybe listen to music or a podcast on the side.It's the same with Civilization to me, I want to relax but still play something that requires some thought to succeed. With ARPG's if you don't build properly you'll probably eat shit, but the actual gameplay is really laid back.
>I enjoyed playing Dark Souls. I fricking despised Nioh, but I did greatly enjoy Stranger of Paradise, that game has some awesome combat and builds.
I mean Diablo is basically like these games. You evolve your build, gather loot, explore and sink in the atmosphere. Ther only difference is that it's isometric. It you disliked Nioh and Dark Souls there's a good chance you'll like Diablo, since the setting is also more dark fantasy.
And dark souls is closer to Diablo combat than nioh's complexity-wise.
>I fricking despised Nioh, but I did greatly enjoy Stranger of Paradise, that game has some awesome combat and builds.
How? Nioh, especially 2, has a much more profound combat system.
As a fan of MonHun, I do enjoy Diablo, but only up until the completion of the campaign. I could not for the life of me get into Diablo 3 end-game (rifts, the gear grind, paragon).
Things like seasons, and the gear grind feel a lot more shallow to me in comparison, not to mention the more impersonal gameplay, (zoomed out isometric perspective, clicking on things and pressing 1-2-3-4 to clear the screen instantly etc).
The appeal of Diablo and similiar games is that it gives you dopamine spikes because you find new loot every two seconds, something that doesn't happen in games like Dark Souls or Gothic
>From a distance it seems boring as shit, literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die.
That's what it is. Throw in some RPG elements and you have the whole genre.
>From a distance it seems boring as shit, literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die. Why do people like shooters?
Even at its simplest, a shooter has some actual threats in the form of enemies shooting back, requiring you to either dodge or use cover.
In an ARPG the likes of Diablo, you either endlessly kite enemies as they helplessly can not catch up to you until they get whittled down to death, or funnel their dumb asses to a doorway and kill them one by one.
There are a scant few games in the Diablo-style ARPG genre where there's even a modicum of actual "A" in the RPG, if only because enemies are aggressive enough to run you down, or there are actual combat mechanics beyond spamming your one skill you put all your points into.
Diablo is nothing more than a musou game by another name, something to mindlessly grind on to make your numbers bigger for the sake of killing things slightly faster.
Game mastery.
You play your first character and its a piece of shit because you didn't really have a plan. You don't have any gear. Everything is a struggle.
But then you find something obviously good, an item with a strange affix, one you could make a character around and reroll. And you do a little better this time. You learn a little more and get further more easily.
Repeat this ten times or so and you've probably sunk a lot of hours, seen some neat gear, found a cool interaction between skills and items and made at least one character you're halfway satisfied with.
Question is, was it fun?
Modern gamers usually don't find this fun because the meta for any game is readily available online. And you'd have to be a fool to be ignorant of the meta. Playing blind and improvisation are both crazy things for stupid people.
So it's mostly buildcrafting and interesting potential combinations of stuff? That seems fun, I did enjoy that a lot in Stranger of Paradise.
>So it's mostly buildcrafting and interesting potential combinations of stuff?
if you like this then you will love path of exile.
or maybe last epoch(early access probably a year from full release)
>Playing blind and improvisation are both crazy things for stupid people.
i love this quote
>From a distance it seems boring as shit, literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die
I thought the same way. Don't bother. It's exactly what you think it is. Every game I've tried in the genre is tedious. I think the only way I'd enjoy this genre if there was a story boss that beat your ass and you were required to grind and make a build to kill it to progress. Every single one of them I've tried is just beat story and mindlessly play the same dungeon over and over again to make number go up for no reason.
>I think the only way I'd enjoy this genre if there was a story boss that beat your ass and you were required to grind and make a build to kill it to progress
PoE has tons of pinnacle content exactly like this.
But is it like D4 where you have to grind 200 hours to get to it? I liked the idea of Uber Lilith in that game, but they are out of their mind if they think I'm getting to level 100. I got bored by level 55, and apparently level 85 is the actual halfway point or something insane like that
>But is it like D4 where you have to grind 200 hours to get to it?
PoE is WAAAAAAAY more about knowledge. You'll need 150 hours to just learn the game at an adequate level, while also reading guides and watching videos. It's not just a mindless grind to reach some sort of "now my character is strong enough to roll over the entire game".
>150 hours just to learn the game at an adequate level
Holy shit I'm so glad I never listened to the people recommending me that game
Man you must be young. I'm 200 hours into oxygen not included and I still don't know shit. Been having fun the whole time though.
>You'll need 150 hours to just learn the game at an adequate level, while also reading guides and watching videos
lol. Why would I waste so much time doing randomly generated dungeons when there are dungeon crawler games just as long that have dungeons that are actually designed by a human
PoE has 1000 different systems that can keep you playing for a decade. It's an autism simulator, but if you are into that kind of thing, there's literally no other ARPG that come even close.
>You'll need 150 hours to just learn the game at an adequate level, while also reading guides and watching videos.
Not even remotely true. Just download/install Path of Building, google 'top 10 poe builds this league' or similar, import your fav, and copy it. The game is basically autopilot from that point forward.
But by doing that you aren't actually learning anything.
Yes you are. You're learning the most efficient way to play the game. You can obviously create bricked builds if you want
Pretty gentle curve then.
Half of 99 is 92.
>I got bored by level 55
The problem with D4 is that the difficulty content with actual mechanics starts in world tier 4 after you finish the capstone dungeon. Try to beat the capstone at level 55. I did it at 59 and it was hard because the boss would 1-2 shot me with some of his attacks. And after you get to tier 4 run a nightmare 20+. D4 was made for fluoride stare mutts.
get big number and then get bigger number and then...
Honestly just play Median XL
I'm really conflicted about whether I actually want to play D4
Should I just buy D2 Resurrected on sale and play D2 for a 274th time?
How do you feel about always online games?
Find something else to do. You've played a peak ARPG enough times.
Do the souls series if you haven't.
>literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die.
what's the difference between that and any other video game?
You usually do things other than clicking or the clicking is disguised in a cool way
My thing with ARPGs is that the entire game is wandering around a bigass map killing things and collecting stuff. All other games have a level of abstraction on top of their basic gameplay (level design, mechanical complexity, engaging strategy layer) that ARPGS seem to lack. Unless I haven't noticed it yet
hmmm yes i would say arpgs and especially poe take this videogame gameplay fundamental to the functional extreme.
the second to second gameplay is the game and the designers try to not take away from that as much as possible while also trying to fill in the edges with as much eye pleasing window dressing as possible without gimping gameplay feel.
and poe is the extreme of arpgs, the biggest, the deepest, the "best" as it excels in everything that makes arpgs their own distinct genre
>My thing with ARPGs is that the entire game is wandering around a bigass map killing things and collecting stuff.
poe and other aprgs in the end want YOU to come up with your own goals and aspirations instead of the game telling you what you should be doing next or where the next area is or desperately trying to get you to care about the story.
the story and lore usually exist to varying extents and sure some people care about it but its all to funnel back into the gameplay.
i would say give it a try.
but others will say dont follow a guide and just dive in blind, which sure you can do but it will be banging your head against a wall until either you break or the wall breaks and you walk 5 feet before finding and even thicker wall
i would say follow guides, build guides, tutorials, use third party tools and wikis.
because you will objectively learn faster because you will actually be making progress and hopefully you will be asking yourself "why does this work like this, why does the guide tell me to play this way, why take those nodes instead of these ones" and hopefully you will take the initiative to go out and find the answers you seek.
I like grim dawn because of its mechanical depth on defensive mechanics, there's a lot of them and plenty that are class specific, making a character build is pretty great with it's divination system. Offensive mechanics are quite nice too like weapon pool skills, which is one of my favorite melee mechanics in an ARPG. I like target farming for loot rather than pure random, random drops are nice to make you think of the next build you can make, the worst part about these games tends to be the leveling process. The campaign needs to be really good to make you want to do a new build, I quite liked grim dawns. PoE, torchlight, titan quest, D2 I really have a hard time wanting to level without shortcuts. Also I tend to prefer static maps which grim dawn does.if you play these games for action, PoE and D3(if you're a gearlet) have some fun bosses and fights, every other game blows when it comes to bosses. Strategy layer is planning for content, it's what makes hardcore fun for me.
ok back to your containment board grim troony, no one cares about your shitty dead game.
>I like grim dawn because of its mechanical depth
Why are Grim Yawn shills always so fricking delusional? The is fricking garbage. It's slow as frick and completely uninteresting. You need to play the game with a dozen mods to make it fun and interesting.
t. 200 hours in Grim Yawn
>What is the appeal of ARPGs as a genre?
dopamine from finding loot with bigger numbers and watching mobs die fast. Also you can enjoy poe without all the autism as long as you can just understand how a gems link together and just use common sense on your skill tree. go for whatever increases your damage and health.
>literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die.
It's true, if you want a good ARPG experience unironically play Warcraft 3 Custom Campaigns that are hero-focused. The Chosen Ones is by far the best one. Interesting level design, interesting loot, interesting characters (gameplay). Don't forget to put your heroes in separate control groups (CTRL+Number pressed) to have them on hotkeys.
But for the sale you may as well pick up Diablo Prime Evil Collection. The biggest appeal is going through it on normal difficulty, getting fricked on higher difficulties and then buildcraft. I personally never liked randomly generated levels and Borderlands loot unless it's a roguelike shooter or something. Also for some reason Diablo II: Resurrected is better played on controller cause you get 6 skill hotkeys instead of 2 on keyboard and mouse (Blizzard wtf???). This is especially egregious when you consider one skill hotkey is used for your basic attack.
Those custom maps aren't ARPGs, they are just RPGs.
Maybe I'm missing something but why? You're collecting loot, fighting special bosses, using your abilities, some allow you to even choose your abilities, having to move your hero(es) around when certain attacks/enemies/effects come in.
What is the difference aside from the possibility to control multiple heroes?
ARPG = fast-paced and fighting hordes of enemies.
Yeah, you get that from The Chosen Ones, try it out if you haven't yet man :). But to be very fair, that is essentially the best one.
For the rest of the campaigns. The other ones are definitely a bit slower-paced, but I would not say they're not fast-paced or not dealing with fighting hordes. I feel the pace difference is more akin to the difference between Dark Souls and Bloodborne for example. But hordes of enemies, I mean, I would say taking out 100 food Warcraft armies counts as a horde.
I haven't played The Chosen Ones specifically, but I played tons of other RPG maps back in the day. I probably have 10k hours in WC3+TFT custom maps. I was much more of a TD/Maul/Enfo/Footman Frenzy/etc. guy though, because I loved playing against others more than doing Co-Op styled games against AI.
Are there mods to de-muttify the D2R characters yet?
I think I saw one that makes the assassin prettier, but it's been a while. I usually play as amazon, and the voice actor who reads her lines does NOT go well with the way her face looks now.
The entire genre is a predecessor to gacha. Its main point is clicking around watching enemies die until they drop some homosexual Scepter of homierdliness with a 0.000000000000000000000000000000001% chance that will complement or even complete your build and let you kill a little faster.
But what's the point if you have beaten the game and keep clicking the final boss to get lucky enough for him to drop endgame gear?
D2R is probably the best way to experience it in the first place, yes.
If you like that then there is plenty of opportunity to branch out
it's very much a game you can play for 1000 hours just grinding your life away and making small numbers into big numbers, but if you're not into that it gets quite boring quite fast
I wouldn't liken it to dark souls or the elder scrolls like previous anons have, it's a lot more of a detached experience from your character with even less opportunity for roleplaying than either
Putting a build together is fun, that's it
Not everyone has to like that or want to do it. And there are other games for people who don't care for the genre.
Download d2 from archive dot org unless you enjoy manly females or fat/boomerized adventurers
>literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die.
that's actually all there is, people will say the fun is in "trying and make a build work" or some other bullshit but most will just copy the current meta and even if they don't the end result is the same: rush through maps as fast as possible, level design doesn't matter, enemy design doesn't matter, boss design doesn't matter.
those who like these games are a special kind of addict and they'll keep playing these games for that high of getting some loot after hours of repetetive mindless gameplay and they just won't stop.
Blizzard knows this, that's why they keep putting more and more predatory monetization into Diablo because theyir fanbase is literally made to be exploited for money.
Hi, I've been playing Diablo 2 off and on since LoD's release twenty years ago.
It's a great game to play while listening to audio books and podcasts. Want to game but only have 15 minutes? 30? An hour? Diablo 2's got you covered. There's always something to do in D2 whether you're gambling for rares, crafting equipment, rerolling charms, and so on and so forth. Add in multiple classes with multiple builds plus the optional hardcore modes and you've got a lot of playtime.
Maybe it's because I love Diablo 3 and consider it the best in the genre (have yet to play Diablo 4), but I will never understand people like you. How can you listen to podcasts? Are you insane?
>How can you listen to podcasts?
With your ears.
>love Diablo 3 and consider it the best in the genre
Why?
Because it's fun, because I hate stamina in D2, and because I love having rare drops every few seconds instead of 1 every 3 hours, and the game is relatively fast (in terms of movement).
>literally 20 hours of just running around clicking on things until they die.
You just answered your own question. For me it's a nice way of switching off certain parts of my brain after a day at work and just letting the primate parts of -kill- -consume- -explore- take over while still actually engaging those parts of your brain and making them think. D2 is the pinnacle of the genre because it was the last ARPG that actually felt like a properly paced dungeon crawler before the genre devolved into: "speedrun through area, spam 3-4 spells to massacre 1000 enemies, rinse, repeat".
>What is the appeal of ARPGs as a genre?
Lore, worldbuilding, the journey in search for both, killing demons or the enemies of the setting and also farming cool weapons and equipment to kill the same enemies but much faster and painlessly than before, when you get to the point of diminishing returns it gets boring though, that's when you make a new character and start the cycle anew.
Experimenting with builds and the synergies of different skills can be fun too.
>Lore, worldbuilding, the journey in search for both
Yes.
name 1 arpg that people care about the lore and world building
>inb4 muh diablo
lol dont even try it.
You never understood it, Blizz. You never understood why Diablo 2's story was so good and that is why your new game under the direction of Ferguson failed.
>lol dont even try it.
"Try"?
I immersed myself in Diablo 2's world and lore when I played it when I was younger.
I'm sorry for you Anon. I hope you find joy in vidja someday.
>Diablo 2
d2 gays are the same level of mental moronation as halo 2 gays.
They invoke the feeling of power. When you start Diablo II, all you have is a short sword and a buckler. You hit the first Quill Boar a couple of times - and after 2 hours you can already blast lightning out of your hands and kill even stronger enemies.
What's the difference between Diablo II and Cookie Clicker then? In Diablo II progression is not fully automatic: you need not only to minmax your build to deal more DPS, but learn what enemies do and work around their strong points and magic immunities (there are enemies that are immune to certain damage starting from Nightmare). How not to get one-shot by a pack of Gloams. How to deal with Unraveller boss and minions, who resurrect the nearby dead and stop your progress. Some areas will be impossible to farm on your character unless you reach high enough level. It's not so easy and automatic once you reach Hell difficulty. But Diablo 4 and Cookie Clicker have more in common, you just click on enemies until they die. But with that said, Diablo II has a lot of game design errors, such as noob traps, where putting more than 1-3 skill points into a skill is useless - and a lot more.
>cookie clicker
You're right, but that was the game. Any revolution on this genre is a failure
I'm playing Necro right now and I think the appeal is the same as cookie clicker since the game mostly plays itself.
This is why I can't play skelemancer. Too much staring at the screen, twiddling my thumbs. I like a more active role.
Have you played before? Try doing Nightmare - and you will already face difficulties unless you do something with your build. Even many bosses on Normal quickly dispose of your minions. The game surely plays itself, but without your personal effort everything will fail.
I question the people who say you just mindlessly hold left click and watch things happen. You can't even do that in Diablo 3 without dying and that's on the easier side.
They're probably just exaggerating.
>hold left click and watch things happen.
RF in poe is worse
you dont hold anything you just move and things die around you.
character customization, and when really interesting loot drops from an enemy it gives you an an itch to make a new character to center around using that item in their build.
getting the drop you've been running mephisto for 20 hours for, or getting something else valuable to trade for a high rune, or straight up getting a high rune drop, is like cocaine.
But for what purpose? You run mephisto for 20 hours so you can run mephisto more efficiently for the next 20 hours. That is the content.
>That is the content.
Well actually there's a timeless classic RPG in there as well but if "endgame" is what you're obsessed about then real games won't be of any interest to you
What timeless classic RPG? D2 was good when it came out but it's a very outdated game now.
Timeless classics can't be outdated anon
it't not so much the action of killing things but the strategy of building a character that can kill things well
and sometimes you get a cool item or skill that enhances your strategy further, sometimes it can be a surprise or something you planned for long term, either way it's satisfying
I will never understand the junkies playing diablo likes over and over. And I spent thousands of hours on MMORPGs, at least that shit has some decent social aspect.
I will give you an honest answer of what D2: Resurrected is without rose-tinted glasses. You pick a class and then start leveling it up but you better look up a build guide because you have only 3 respecs (you have to farm 4 bosses to drop 4 items each with 7% chance to combine together to make another respec). After you get through the very easy campaign, you repeat it on a harder but still joke difficulty and then on another joke difficulty but this time you need elemental resist ignore if your damage is elemental (inventory charm). Your end goal is to get a piece of armor that will give you teleport if you don't play sorceress so that you can skip through 99% of the content and get to the glorified "boss" mob that will stand there and get raped by you. You farm the boss to get items that will let you farm it faster. There is no endgame. It's autism fest for people who love to farm big numbers so they can farm even bigger numbers.
Diablo 4 is way better than Diablo 2 but it also has major flaws, like having to complete 40+ hours of slog so you can finally play a challenging content, and even then you have to play 10+ levels above yours because the game is otherwise too easy.