The vision behind FoA or the vision behind FoA’s balance?
The two are not the same.
The vision behind FoA was to breathe new life in the game’s campaign overworld. To give endgame players reasons to participate in it. Has this vision been achieved? Do endgame players farm Ascended mode for Ascended resources/drops (the idea of Ascended items dropping raw came a bit late into development so it’s no surprise it was not there for release); do endgame players use the Ascension altar to tweak their farming experience/routes? If the answers to these questions are yes, then I imagine Crate is relatively happy with having come up with that vision and managing to achieve it.
For those that feel SR has been neglected from this expansion…duh? Given the above, the entire point was to incentivize campaign farming against SR farming. One shouldn’t be more prevalent or respected than the other, but rather the two should be competitive options with one another. Basically since the release of Forgotten Gods seven-point-five years ago, SR has been the dominant spot players have spent all their time. It’s understandable, then, to feel a bit hurt when this game mode sees a period of neglect from Crate - it has consumed so much of your time, after all! But can you really blame Crate for this? SR has dominated the core identity of Grim Dawn for almost a decade. It has taken an expansion’s effort to relieve the game of some of that dominance. I’m sure SR will not be left in an unplayable or unfun state for very long, in the grand scheme of things, but I am also sure that addressing that was neither FoA’s launch’s priority nor is it likely to be the priority now, still so soon after launch. The vision, and the focus, is on the campaign.
The vision behind FoA’s balance is another story. I won’t really be able to identify what Crate’s intentions are here. And truth be told, for all my years with the game, I don’t think I’ve ever really had a finger on the pulse to know what they want either. Certainly I have had my vision for what the balance should be, but just as sure as the sky is blue, my vision is not Crate’s vision.
If it was…something something Cadence.
Just yesterday I had an hours’ long talk with a friend about this video and some related subjects.
Bear with me if this seems unrelated.
Veneer of Warhammer aside, in that video Warhammer is merely the lens through which the topics of identity politics and “fandoms” are discussed. In my…err…departure post, I wrote the following:
And after having had this discussion with a friend, I think this is close to the truth, but not quite there. I think there’s a nonzero chance people are prone to identifying themselves with their feedback, and feedback given to feedback, hence resulting in both personal ties to the points being made as well as viewing said-criticisms as personal attacks against them.
Just so, people are prone to identifying with certain elements of their hobbies. When those elements are buffed or nerfed, there can be a personal affront in one’s interpretation thereof. I’ve never done this, I’ve never really taken much personal offense to having my builds nerfed (hey what’s up with that Discordant Gem nerf, Z?), but sure as the sky is blue, nerfs have definitely rustled some jimmies here and certainly in other games’ communities. One topic my friend and I discussed was Warhammer 40k Darktide. (We’re both big Warhammer enjoyers, if you couldn’t tell) Shortly after Darktide released, one of its classes, the Veteran, saw some targeted nerfs. In response, the Chinese Darktide community reviewbomed the ever loving hell out of the game.
Since then, Fatshark - the developers and publishers of Darktide - embraced a “buff only” strategy to the game’s overall balance. This has been advocated for quite a bit here, with people asking why a singleplayer/non-competitive game like Grim Dawn, or like Darktide, would ever see nerfs. But the results of Fatshark’s “buff only” approach created a game state harrowingly narrow in terms of endgame viability. In buffing everything the players had access to, the enemies have had to be turbocharged likewise to prevent the game’s hardest difficulties from feeling too sandboxy. So endgame Darktide is now a spam of minibosses, heavily-armored targets, and enemies that heal or grant DR to others. This, in turn, means that endgame Darktide necessitates anti-armor weapons and weapons with huge burst potential. The remaining swathes of itemization in Darktide are just not playable at the game’s highest echelons of difficulty.
This is not to say I do not understand peoples’ aversion to nerfs. You’re playing something in a game and you’re having fun with it. When a developer nerfs that something, they’re nerfing your fun! And that sucks! You paid good money to have that good fun! But sometimes the bullet has to be bitten all the same for the betterment of everything else, and I’d be willing to bet that even post-nerf gameplay can still be a source of good enjoyment.
If it seems I’m getting too philosophical over here, it’s because I am. I have not been following the public test patches, for…reasons. I have not been following much community sentiment as of late. So I no longer have the same understanding of the game’s state as I may have had just a few months ago.
But this thread asked for a vision and a vision is not going to be revealed in patch notes.
While I can’t know Crate’s vision for balance, I can know how they intend to get there. Iteratively. Change by change, feedback by feedback. Their vision for balance will not be achieved tomorrow. And no amount of cooking balance changes behind closed doors would have resulted in any finer a product.