This topic has been on my mind for a few months. Only just recently put enough thought into it to get to the below.
I don’t think I’ve ever had fun playing an (isometric) ARPG in multiplayer. Yes, I’ve had fun/funny moments, individually, like watching a friend get assblasted by Gutworm in Hardcore. But the general gameplay loop of ARPGs seems very antithetical to doing things cooperatively - and I don’t just mean minor stuff like looting problems, who gets what, etc. But the combat and questing and adventuring doesn’t seem to work with multiple people.
And let’s be clear - I understand that other people do play ARPGs with their friends and have a great time. But I think that happens in spite of the systems inherent to ARPGs, rather than being supported by those systems. I also understand that people have done in multiplayer things that seem impossible in singleplayer, like ultra-deep Shattered Realm. That’s really cool! And I’d never argue to take that option away. But I think that’s more of a “yeah, you can do that” rather than a “here’s a fun opportunity” kind of feature.
From my perspective, the first issue multiplayer in ARPGs runs into is one of pacing. People play at different speeds, some are just more familiar with parsing loot or building a character than others. When I play GD with some of my friends, I would be a mile ahead of them if I did not slow down and wait for them to read every item that lands on their screen or spend five minutes debating whether to put their skillpoint in the mastery bar or in Devouring Swarm. Meanwhile, when I play something like PoE with others, for as good as I am at the base genre, I always find myself needing to play catch-up to people blasting zones multiple screens ahead of me. These issues first present while leveling but they don’t really stop existing in the endgame; in fact, some such situations exacerbate as the possible “max speed” increases, and in the extreme case, one gets stuck waiting for another while said-slowpoke gets to enjoy wading through dozens of screens of slain enemies without contributing in the slightest.
The second issue is one of synergy. There really isn’t anything that multiple people can do to synergize with each other other than, say, “Here have some more RR to this damage type we share.” ARPGs aren’t built with the MMO trifecta of “healer/tank/dps” in mind - and I’m not saying they should be - so everyone kinda just winds up playing their own version of dps. And if they didn’t do that, they wouldn’t really be able to play solo. Like sure, you can make a healer-like build in Grim Dawn, or an ultratank build, but other than uber-niche circumstances like facechecking Ravager, those builds aren’t really going to let you hop on in your own free time and enjoy the game.
Characters don’t feel inherently unique enough to justify playing them together. We all just kinda hit things until they die. And to that same point, enemies don’t feel as though they have enough in their toolkit to warrant such uniqueness either; why should we bother with making functionally unique characters if Steven Scrumblo, The All-Powerful Dingus can just be smacked a bunch and he’ll explode into loot?
The third issue is maintaining quest/progress parity. Even without server desync problems, which exist in every ARPG multiplayer implementation that I’ve ever seen, there’s also questions that arise along the lines of “How far are you in the story?” “If I make X choice does that fuck the plans for your character?” “Do you have anything around level Y?”
Finding answers to those questions presents a barrier to entry that I feel most game genres don’t run into. “Hopping on” for a group ARPG sesh has a lot of upfront, preventative topics that grind things to a halt before they even begin. And if you make the slightest bit of quest/character progress on your own, separate from your group, that decision is going to cascade into a host of other issues down the line when next you try to play with your friends.
I don’t really know how to address any of the above, and providing solutions wasn’t really the point of this thread to begin with; rather, I just wanted to point out how, for over a decade, every attempt I’ve made at playing ARPGs with others, be it Grim Dawn or anything else in the market, has fallen apart after the first session. I’ve never experienced that with any other genre; sure, other games may have that happen, but never on a genre-wide scale. Are ARPGs just utterly inimical to cooperative play?
I do have some ideas that I think approach solutions but are not fully-concrete “fixes” to the above. One such notion is that of map design; most if not all ARPG maps are entirely linear with no clear stop-gaps. Sure, it may wind or appear labyrinthine, but ultimately you start at point A and kill monsters until you reach point B, all without the slightest hint of needing to slow down. Contrast this with something like Borderlands where worldspaces are mostly open and players don’t necessarily need to be glued to each other to be getting things done, or where there are progression-blocking arenas that need to be cleared before even the fastest players can continue.
I’ve also been on a lot of Helldivers 2 recently–
Oh dear.
I’ve been on a lot of Helldivers 2 recently and it struck me how my group of 4 largely splits up off spawn and pursues mission objectives entirely independently, or maybe in groups of 2, unless one such objective proves particularly challenging at which point we all re-route to the problem-point and reconnect. This presents with a dynamic situation where people are free to play the game at their pace and still contribute, and can call in aid as needed for some epic cooperative teamwork. But ARPG worlds aren’t a Helldivers 2 mission, which - for the uninitiated - presents as a big circle with a smattering of things to do throughout that space. ARPGs, like Grim Dawn, meanwhile, are “First one to the Warden gets to play the game!”
I could go further and think of other examples from other genres that don’t suffer from the above problems, but I think I’ve put enough paragraphs into this first post. For now, I’m curious what others think about their multiplayer experience in Grim Dawn or in other ARPGs.