For some time now I’ve been thinking that I really want to sink my teeth into a new Diablo-style action RPG. I crave the satisfaction that can only come from mowing down hordes of monsters in spectacular fashion, and while The First Descendant scratches this itch somewhat, I’ll always prefer an RPG to a shooter.
But when the time comes to choose a game, I come up short. None of the current offerings quite seem to be what I’m looking for, and increasingly this is starting to feel like a trend. I’m starting to think the genre is drifting away from being the sort of games that I enjoy.
Let’s start with Last Epoch, which feels like the most obvious choice for a new OARPG for me to jump into. While it has more than its share of rough edges, I did largely enjoy my time with it when I tried it at launch.
The trouble is it still isn’t finished. More than a year after launch, the story campaign still just stops in the middle. They haven’t added the ending yet. While what I saw of the story wasn’t exactly riveting, I don’t like the idea of being left hanging like that.
The same thing happened with Wolcen: Lords of Mayhem, a game where I very much did enjoy the story. The game ended with a cliff-hanger, promising a final act for the future. But it took years to finally release the conclusion, and when the studio did it, it was less a full new act and more a tiny thimble of story stretched out with a janky rogue-lite mechanic. It was also accompanied by a disastrous revamp of the endgame that undid years of player progress and effectively killed the game.
I’m not willing to invest time in Last Epoch until I can be assured it’s not going to repeat Wolcen‘s mistakes, but so far the game’s updates have been entirely focused on improving endgame, without a peep about finishing the story.
Path of Exile 2 looks interesting, but I never enjoyed the original much, and I still find the community around those games very off-putting. While putting together this piece, I decided to check if POE2 had selectable difficulty for the initial campaign, as the lack of such was one of my biggest issues with its predecessor.
The first result was a Steam forum thread, where I learned that the answer was no and also found that the vast majority of the comments absolutely flaming the OP for even wanting such a thing. And the OP was asking for the game to be harder. Do you have any idea how much of a grognard someone needs to be for them to get elitist over asking for things to be harder? That doesn’t even make sense!
This isn’t an isolated incident, either. I found similar discussions in the past when researching difficulty options for POE1.
The next best candidate would be Diablo IV, and I’m still not ruling out getting it at some point, but aside from my various other complaints with it, it feels too heavily focused on the endgame treadmill to the exclusion of all else, like Last Epoch. It at least has a complete campaign, but so much of its new content and development is focused on seasons that it feels as if there’s no point in playing at all if you don’t do want to start a new character every three months.
Diablo III may have added minor gameplay gimmicks to its seasons, but any actual new content was available for all characters, whereas D4‘s seasons add exclusive new items, quests, and more. Playing a non-seasonal character there feels like be playing only half the game.
Seasons and endgame grinding have been a part of the OARPG genre almost since its inception, but the idea that they’re the default way to play and nothing else matters feels very new to me. To me, OARPGs have always been about the single-player campaign first, and the endgame was more of a side feature.
That’s not to say that I have no interest in OARPG endgame. I sunk a good few hundred hours into Diablo III‘s endgame and a few dozen into Wolcen‘s. Indeed, it was losing all those hours of progress that drove me away from Wolcen when it launched its catastrophic “Endgame” update.
But here’s the thing: I didn’t go grinding that all at once. It was something I’d pick up here and there between other games over the course of months or years. That, to me, is the strength of the OARPG genre: It’s something you can casually poke your head into whenever you want to relieve stress with some mindless violence. The idea of constantly rolling new characters so you can go hard grinding for a couple weeks, just to repeat the process later, feels antithetical to what the genre does well.
Generally lacking the breadth and depth of content you’d find in an MMORPG, OARPGs don’t seem like good games for intensive grinding to me. They’re better for sporadic pick-up play that allows you to slowly progress your characters in the long term. That doesn’t work with the time-limited nature of seasons.
To be clear, I have nothing against the idea of seasons existing. A lot of people clearly do enjoy playing this way, and that’s great. I have no desire to take away their fun. I just don’t want their way to be the only way.
I also need that initial story from a complete campaign to get me invested enough in a game to find the motivation for endgame. If I’m going to spend that long in a game, I need to have an attachment to the world and its characters, and that’s true regardless of genre. I don’t keep playing World of Warcraft because I’m addicted to the archaic clunk of its tab target combat; I play because I love Azeroth as a setting and I like spending time in it.
Even after I’d finished the main story, rare lore notes and random companion banter gave colour and life to my time in Diablo III. Even once those things finally started to run out, slaying monsters with Eirena and Kormac felt like visiting old friends. Characters worth loving and a world worth exploring are as essential for keeping me playing as are gear upgrades and paragon levels.
I’m sure a lot of people are rushing to the comments to tell me that no one cares about story in OARPGs, that the stories are terrible, that endgame is the real game, and so forth, and I don’t deny those are common sentiments. But if that’s the case, why give these things story campaigns in the first place?
The current paradigm of paying lip service to story fans while dumping most resources into endgame feels like the worst of all worlds. The people who don’t care about story still have to slog through the campaign, and those of us who do care about the RPG aspect get treated as an afterthought. If the gear grind is really the only part of these games that matters, just make a game where that’s all there is.
I have some other issues with current trends in the OARPG sector, as well. The backlash to Diablo III‘s build system seems to have built a genre where complexity is confused for genuine depth. I weary of massive skill trees where only a tiny minority of choices actually impact how my character plays in a meaningful way. I want something where every choice is fun and exciting — oh, how I miss Magic Legends. But that’s a problem I’d be willing to get over if a game otherwise appealed to me.
I am willing to acknowledge that I may be the weird one here. It’s possible that no one else cares about these issues. My suspicion is that people like me — who mostly play the campaigns and then only play endgame sporadically if at all — are actually the majority, but that the minority who focus fully on endgame dominate the community narrative and spend the most money on micro-transactions.
Of course, that may be a distinction without a difference. If the endgamers are where the money is, then that’s where developers are going to focus, regardless of whether they’re a minority or not.
The one thing I will say is that this feels like a new phenomenon. I never had these problems with the ARPGs and OARPGs of yesteryear. Seasonal and non-seasonal play, as well as endgame grinds and rich story campaigns, are things that co-existed happily for many years across many games. I don’t know why that balance got broken, but I hope a game comes along that can restore it, and soon. I really want to sink my teeth into a new OARPG, but the current crop just don’t seem to be made for players like me.
The world of online gaming is changing. As the gray area between single-player and MMO becomes ever wider, Massively OP’s Tyler Edwards delves into this new and expanding frontier biweekly in Not So Massively, our column on battle royales, OARPGs, looter-shooters, and other multiplayer online titles that aren’t quite MMORPGs.
