I use a fundamental test I ask when considering if I want to play a game or not: “Does this game respect my time?”
Currently, Grim Dawn is failing that test.
I have multiple characters who have leveled exclusively through Crucible play. They are now level 40-60 and I want to take them to the campaign for a change of pace. But they each have to start at Normal, and since enemies have scaling caps I am going to get 0 experience and loot. It’s like being forced to play with god mode enabled: it’s just not fun, and it’s extremely demotivating to know that I’m going to have to waste hours of my life for each character to get them to level-appropriate campaign content.
It is a ridiculous ask of a user, and is especially frustrating given that this is a problem arising from paid DLC.
You made the design choice to have level caps in the campaign. If you are going to design content targeted at a particular user, then you need to give that user a reasonable method to reach that content. If you exceed the level caps for a difficulty, then it logically follows you are qualified to advance to the next difficulty.
I believe the Crucible itself is a great add-on. It is fun and challenging and allows quick exploration of builds. You had the foresight to allow reaching level 100 in the crucible to unlock the next difficulty for all of your characters - please continue that logic with the campaign.
Unfortunately that’s not how the SP story mode works. It’s a tad illogical to demand a “I have a lvl 50 character, I should be instantly rifted to Fort Ikon” modification to the game.
The only advantage you have now is the possibility of skipping big chunks of the campaign content, whole act 1 is skippable if you restore the bridge to act 2 (in the past a major part of act 2 was also skippable, though that was removed since people didn’t know how to read quest descriptions). From that point you have to follow the road normaly, enemies near Blood Grove have are around 40-ish so you can resume normal play there.
I think a combination of the current system with the proposed system in this topic would work exceptionally well. For example, the player needs to beat Log on normal to unlock Elite difficulty for ALL characters level 40 and above. The same could apply to unlocking Ultimate difficulty (beating Log on Elite), granting access to ultimate for all characters level 60 and above. The levels I chose are placeholders, but it seems like a reasonable concept. This way, once players experience the story once per difficulty, they can choose to level future characters in whichever way they choose. Want to play Crucible until 60 and then go straight to Ultimate? Sure thing. Want to play Veteran + AoM and reach 60 that way and then progress to Ultimate? That works too.
The only problem is that the player might miss out on the 2 skill points and attribute points in Elite difficulty. Some people might prefer to grab those later if they’re into min-maxing, and some might choose to skip them entirely. Maybe the quest could even be altered to reward double (or triple) the points in Ultimate if it detects that the quest wasn’t completed in Elite (or Veteran) and then barring the player from receiving the awards in the lower difficulties?
It’s a mostly single player game, there’s already an incentive to play on higher difficulties because of drops, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t give the power to the player to decide what difficulty they want to play on.
I wish Grim Dawn had a standard difficulty system, where you’d pick the difficulty you want to play from the very start and then only go through the campaign once.
It’s so excruciatingly dull to spend hours going through veteran and elite one shot’ing everything on sight before finally unlocking ultimate, even with my brain turned off I feel like I’m losing brain cells.
Or people playing Crucible to advance their characters just play Crucible.
It doesn’t seem to me people playing Crucible are interested in the campaign anyway.
Probably because back in the day when the game was being developed, that was they way things were. It’s only been recently that other ARPGs have shifted from the three levels of difficulties.
For GD to change as well, it would require a lot of re-work and basically be a new game.
At that point, making a new game makes more sense. And given the age of the engine being used, it really makes a lot of sense.
This is how the game was way back in early alpha/beta, and it was awesome. I bitched when they changed it and still believe it was a terrible decision.