video game gripe
why does grim dawn still do the thing where you replay the game again but everything has bigger numbers
i know diablo and diablo 2 did it, but in a 20+ hour game it's soul-suckingly repetitive
path of exile got rid of it when they pushed their game to ~20 hours. they kind of still reference that by sending you back to where you started and running you through new things in the same areas, which is a neat nod even if the new story is... pretty damn yikes
but like aaa how do we help the completionist part of us be okay with stopping here, because we know it's not going to be fun to push further
re: video game gripe
@juno yeah, added variety definitely helps. have to try that out sometime
thinking about it more i guess it's mostly a pacing thing we were thinking about?
diablo 2 (as a caster class, on later patches where you can buy mana potions) hits a sweet spot where you can just blow through late normal & most of nightmare without issues and get to where the difficulty curve catches back up to you. you're not missing anything because there are 6 quests per act and they're pretty trivial to find even if you haven't been playing the game off and on for 15 years
grim dawn, on the other hand, incentivizes full-clearing areas on basically all difficulties, and hides secrets all over the place. we don't have the patience to do that more than once because the maps don't change at all
and older versions of path of exile were still pretty slow through the main game, though that might just have been because we were lacking map knowledge