Preface: This is a just a thought that crossed my mind after looking at drop chances for double rares, no underlying intentions in mind. Also the opinion is baseless, it’s more of a feeling of where the industry might or need to be going towards.
Diablo 2 popularized the gameloop of farming: going through the same content over and over, pulling the trigger to gamble your time for loot.
It might be my age acting up but it feels that this gameloop is loosing its grip on the players. Modern market is very saturated for entertainment and people have progressively higher demands for dopamine per hour rates.
As such, with the evolution of the entertainment market the aRPG gameloop has to evolve too. First it was “I don’t want to kill Mephisto for 500 times, i want to kill Superduperformidable Mephisto of Vitality 5 times with +7000% chance at good loot”.
And maybe the industry is due to the next step. But what’s the step gonna be? I’m not a gamedev to have the answer but as a tryhard myself i see a big opportunity in rewarding skillful gameplay with better loot: you play very well = you save a lot of time farming. Not a little. A lot.
Imagine the progression curve that tends asymptotically to some plato of absolute power level, but the highest challenges are a leap above that plato, you can’t trump them with raw stats, can’t follow the bestest build by the book and have an algorithm to victory and best loot layed out for you on the fresh and shiny game.wiki.ogr
You can say it’s a blend of aRPG and roguelike. I recently played Hades 2 where there is no endgame farming. To my understanding the game is already a massive success just in EA. And i really didn’t feel that big of a gap in gameplays between Hades 2, the rogulike, and GD, the aRPG. I really want to see future aRPGs incorporating more skillbased challenges as endgame, or making other drastic changes to this slots gameplay loop that overstayed its welcome. You have to compete with AI sexbots somehow.
What do you guys think?