Games

The only kind of scaling I am okay with is how new enemy types will only start appearing after level X. You still feel like you're getting powerful, but at the same time you start getting slightly more challenging enemies sprinkled in. However you only really need this in non-linear games where you expect and encourage the player to go anywhere they want instead of having complete control over the progression and how things ramp up.

Like Fallout New Vegas and 4 do. Though even those could be a bit better.

I still don't know what exactly it was about Assassins Creed Odyssey that made it work so well for me overall, but I liked the level scaling in it. Areas had a minimum level, so I'd try to go there at lower levels and get my ass beat. But being higher level didn't make the areas that much easier, because they would scale up to me. What gave me a feeling of progression was my available toolkit to deal with enemies as time went on.

When the dev doesn't have enough resources or time or werewithall to make different areas with different mobs, they reuse the existing areas to pad out the grind. Level scaling is a sign of lazy development.

At the very least, FromSoftware continues to prove that level scaling is not a requirement. I honestly think that without their influence, we would have seen a lot more adoption of the practice. It's the kinda brain-dead idea that comes from an MBA who's sole focus is reaching the widest audience possible .

It's funny you mention your first skills (basic skills) are just filler because this season some of the meta builds use basic skills as the main damage dealer so you don't need to even think about resource regen as they don't use it. Rogue and Sorcerer both have their best builds use the basic skills and work around them. There's still a lot to be desired with balancing and endgame but I feel they are turning things around gradually.

Honestly, I can't get behind d2r. D2 still runs perfectly fine, my Battlebox still installs, and I know it won't have any bullshit from this side of the 2010's

I agree that an item-filter would have been a nice addition, but with Blizzard you have to take a hardline #NoChanges approach. Otherwise you'll get something like the WC3 remaster, or every Classic WoW expansion. They did add a few small additions after the remaster was released, like Helltides and some new Runewords, but they're all thankfully ignorable if you want to.

I mean, releasing one of the worst ARPGs of all time isn't exactly a triumphant launch. I think D4 is fine now that it's effectively become a sequel to D3, which is why I tried to use the past-tense as much as I could, but D4 was only received well by casuals. Every ARPG fan I know and every content creator I watched played it for like 2 days, realized there were deep systemic issues, and dipped.

Eh, it sounds to me like they're saying "we tried to imitate D2 exactly, but people don't want it anymore." That's just flat out a lie though, because they didn't imitate D2 at all. In the article, the mention that a player could conceivably take years to drop specific "uber uniques." While true that it would take a lot of time to drop it naturally, D2 had a pretty robust trading economy in it's later years. Unless you were specifically going solo, you had the option to save up. It took time, but it was a goal that was accomplishable on ladder.

Unless they changed it when I wasn't looking, uber uniques are not tradable in D4 at all. I'm not necessarily going to argue for or against that, it's a game design choice, but it's specifically not the choice made by D2. Obviously players aren't going to want to grind for years for a specific item, but they never had to in the past.

Ik it's only anecdotal, but I played Brawl Stars when it was in beta and witnessed almost all its updates until global launch (and have caught up with some more recent updates here and there). It went from a genuinely fun mobile game with character and potential to a plastic husk primed for whatever monetisation and "engagement" strategies analytics says needs to be shoved into it next.

At the time I couldn't fathom how all those updates that often made gameplay and progression less fun could ever be more "engaging" (the change from portrait to landscape in particular felt like straight up poor game design, trashing its unique mobile control schemes in favour of digital twin joysticks and "autoaim"), but in hindsight it's clear what that really meant.

Did the opposite for me. I quit before season 1 lol