to clarify, I mean games like Diablo 4, Path of Exile, and Grim Dawn!

I really love the genre (right next to roguelikes and looter shooters for me, I guess I just like shiny loot a lot hahaha) but I’ve been feeling kind of lost in it since I quit playing Path of Exile (with over a thousand hours in it) due to not finding the shifting meta builds fun anymore. my favorite build ever in that game (that I had even made myself!) was a tectonic slam juggernaut, and while it was never the best skill, it was an enjoyable one for me. later, things seemed to get more difficult for me to parse in PoE so I never went back. I also never really enjoyed trading, but found playing by myself hard and not as enjoyable since I played with other people at the time.

I’ve dabbled in Grim Dawn and Last Epoch, but couldn’t quite get into them. I keep feeling like I should give them both another go, because I like the genre, but I’ve bounced off of them multiple times. I also played Diablo 3 briefly but it was at the height of my Path of Exile phase so I didn’t really stick with it.

I’ve been curious about Diablo 4, especially with the summer steam sale potentially coming up soon. most reviews and such I can’t find something recent, but I know they had a big update not too long ago. I know a lot of reviews a saw before didn’t like it from the start, but I was wondering if anyone who played it could tell me about how it currently is right now.

what arpgs are your favorites, or maybe ones you dislike? what aspects do you like about them? is there something new you’d like to see in the genre, or maybe something that you want to become standardized?

  •  Inui [comrade/them]   ( @Inui@lemmy.ml ) 
    2•9 days ago

    As someone who isn’t a fan of ARPGs at all, the two biggest problems I have are that click to move feels significantly worse than using a controller in something like Diablo 3/4 or even Dark Alliance like 20 years ago. It’s a convention that I feel is representative of the genre in that most of the big games use it, but that its also an unnecessary limitation in the same way as Real Time with Pause (a design choice) and the DOTA 2 camera unable to zoom out further (a self-imposed technical limitation). I started getting wrist pain after playing like 20 hours of Grim Dawn.

    The other issue is that the builds are never very exciting. They all seem to be very focused on theorycrafting which skills combine best with which gear, but games like Grim Dawn and Titan Quest, which are admittedly older, boil down to picking the best 2 or 3 skills and stacking passives that make them super powerful. So then you end up mashing one button the majority of the game.

    If there are ARPGs out there that want to attract a new audience of people like me, like Monster Hunter with World, those are the two biggest pain points to correct. A better control scheme and more interesting buttons to press.

    I’m definitely open to any that already do this, but I’m not familiar with them outside of Diablo.