This week on Slightly Something Else, Yahtzee and Marty discuss loot in video games.
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the most based men in all of gaming
I mostly agree, however, the saving grace of the diablo titles was that the sets and uniques could change the way you played the game and have interesting and fun interactions with each other and your abilities. Diablo 4 has this but it doesn't feel as good as d3 or d2 in that legendaries are just random stats with a special effect and you are endlessly rotating through slightly better versions of one item or transferring aspects to a slightly better rare. Diablo 4 also has the issue where a lot of the aspects are just not very useful or usable. D4 does still have uniques and i presume it has or will have sets, but they feel a lot less attainable(at loeast so far in playing the game for me)
I feel like loot in d2 felt better because the upgrades to your skills and the loot itself usually felt more impactful and when it stopped you could try another class or build, in d3 it felt less impactful fairly quickly because you could get stupid powerful really fast and then you are just finding a few points here and there to get slightly stronger.
D4 is even worse because the impact of most loot really falls off, i think i've only gotten items that are maybe 1-2 points higher and equipping the new item means i have to transfer aspects and spend gold re allocating skills or rolling for stats on the item to make it work with my build better, and so the gameplay loop grinds to a halt every half hour or so and it just isn't fun anymore.
To answer the question of is D4 an mmorpg, yes it is in a sense, Guild wars was considered by many to be an mmorpg(the devs had a much longer name for it that didn't catch on) and it has less mmo features than D4. D4 has world bosses and massive battles and legion overworld quests that allow many players join together(multiple groups). It is at least a Multiplayer Instanced Game with large in world lobies(towns) not unlike Guild Wars.
Zelda ToTK suffers from the same thing imo but in different ways because the rewards from some things feeling not worthwhile like you cleared this difficult encounter and you got 5 arrows from the chest! however you spent 20 arrows in the fight and one of the bokoblins dropped 15. but also totk it scratches an itch of exploration where for me at least part of the reward is the exploration of it and just finding interesting places.
My preferred genre name for “podcast games” is anaesthetic
Bag of worms?
Something that kills the fun of loot in a game is a bad interface for comparing it to your current equipment. Cyberpunk 2077 was really bad at this. I found it incredibly tedious to compare weapons and armor to your current setup because of how bad the UI was so it turned what could have been a lot of fun into a tedious task
"Multiplayer Puzzle Game with no combat"… so you mean URU Live from Cyan that came out in 2003?
I liked how Spiderman PS4 allowed you to swap the suit power to whatever suit you wanted (once you'd unlocked it) so I could just play in my favourite suit.
Something I love about Monster Hunter Rise is being able to make layered armor, which lets you dress your character any way you want without actually changing the armor that has the actual stats. I think more games should have that so that players have the option on whether or not they want to see the armor for the stats or just as a costume.
Currently watching so I have no idea if this comes up later, but I feel like Path of Exile belongs in this conversation.
Loot is handled very differently from most games. In PoE most of the "loot" on the ground are about absolute trash, only worth picking up to sell for currency. You could use the currency to craft your own special items but it can be prohibitively expensive. So instead you're incentived to use that currency to buy items/gear from other players.
Personally I dislike this system because there's nothing special about "buying" loot.
so which category would you place transmogs of your gear in? costumes or cosmetics?
These streams are way too low in volume. The worked on my cans that have since died. Every ad is audible, but the video really isnt. For people it's too loud for, they can turn it down, I cannot turn it up to an audible level. A lot of people will nope out just because on mobile it's drowned out by a background fan. This audio level just doesn't work.
Before diablo there was DnD for loot
Right so how do you spell "Pipper" then?
Lee Drummond being a made up name is big for the classic ZP lore ( 47:10 )
I played probably 4000 hours of Diablo 2, farming for unique and set items and runes. The drop rates were RIDICULOUS but the items were great. The itemization in D4 is incredibly boring, just stuff with randomized stats which change the numbers slightly. Really turned me off.
Yahtzee, are you going to make your own game?
I was rather amazed to find that Diablo 4 managed to make loot boring.
DIablo 2 felt like equality of opportunity, without any guarantee of outcome. Diablo 4 feels like equality opportunity and outcome. As such it feels quite empty and unrewarding. But boy oh boy, there is alot of it.
Diablo 4 somehow manages to have a great story and boring loot, none of the depth from previous games or build diversity on offer from other games in the ARPG grenre and forcing it to be an MMO now adds very little and in some instances actually makes the gameplay experience worse and the dev team working on Diablo 4 seems to hate the traditional loot shower or at the very least the idea of players getting it for free and keep nerfing monster density, who knows maybe we will see a legendary item bundle pop up in the ingame shop in the very near future
What actually happened to Jack being on here? I don't actually know. 😅
I never finished darksiders 2 and I recall it was mainly because the randomized loot system had me constantly opening and closing a laggy menu.
I'm all for a good loot system but you also need a good inventory system or it just becomes work.
Wo long went crazy with the loot in a bad way.
1:20:00 Serious Sam Double D did this with 'gun stacking'. I don't remember if it was actually a good game, but I thought the concept was hilarious.
mmorpg = 'massively multiplayer' online rpg. not massive multiplayer orpg. has nothing to do with the size of the world. the discourse is semantic here.
A lot of loot complaints for D4 are entirely valid, but it does become a non-problem when you're in the end-game. For mechanics nuts and loot goblins like myself (and an avid PoE player), min-maxing a build in the end-game is half the fun, and in D4 you eventually stop caring about most loot you drop because you have a nearly perfect item in that slot, so you hunt for very specific upgrades, no longer needing to sift through an inventory of rare trash each dungeon. You have to be really into mechanics and build-crafting to get into loot systems like PoE and D4. And it's all in fiddling around with legendary aspects. That's where all the power for a build is. It really changes up how you play the game and how you synergise things.
Something i've noticed, especially in "open world" games, is this use of half ass looting or htis sort of line looting system. we've seen it in All the Ubisfot games, BoTw, TotK, elden ring, Witcher 3,even going back to Fallout 4 where you have this lazy system of going out grinding out material or gear and its just a progression up a line. You gain more damage because the devs ballooned hp, you gain more hp because devs ballooned mob damage. This really shows us when loots systems go bad, their just lines, you run the hamster wheel while nothing actually changes you just gain power because the dev intentionally nerfed you power one way or another. it's the lack of transformative value in looting that really seems to be it's problems…. it just for lack of a better work destiny style light levels, a meaning number that goes up to waist your time.
Which one of you kept messaging Marty during the stream? That boy was distracted.
Loots are infinitely collectable, whereas despite its insanity, there is a finite number of moons in Mario Odyssey. Loot == Equipment.
I'm probably one of the few Souls players who wants to play around with just about every new weapon I find — that's my kind of loot!
That approach doesn't really work for magic or Massive Beating Stick class weapons and makes my builds generally quite mediocre, but that's how I have fun with Souls-likes.
-good loot rewards exploration by giving you dopamine hits AND helps define or modify your playstyle/build
-collectables reward exploration by giving you dopamine hits AND an increase on the to do list for a future dopamine hit when it's completed
-bad loot makes you regret exploring by making finding stuff disappointing AND is often mandatory if mobs stats increase
I recently learned that I really like level scaling. Removing the ability to grind past the difficulty ensures the level of challenge is more consistently what it was designed to be. That, and it means no fight will be mindless pushovers.
That being said, it should definitely be optional so those who do want casual gameplay can still have that
About the "fun loot" part – for myself i have a perfect comparison (idk how much it would mean for others tho :D)- wow (up to the legion) and current ff14. It can (and should be) separated into "leveling" and "endgame" parts, and at both wow excelled.
While leveling: in wow gear feels for me much more impactful due to just the right amount of imbalance, with some pieces being so good that they serve you for quite some levels, but in ff14 it is so sanitized and streamlined that you just don't really care about it, even if we disregard how MSQ literally showers you with gear you just know that you open a new dungeon – you get slightly better items there as there's a whole "set" for you there, that that's it, with the whole "quality" system being completely redundant.
At the engrame: while at it's core the gear in these games are the same, with you going to guides/simcraft to get the stat priority for your class/spec, but in wow it had enough layers to spice things up – trinkets usually having some semblance of changing your gameplay, class sets quite literally applying a "patch" to you, with very often making you to change your talents and rotation and in some cases even going for different itemization priority, and in rare cases some items that enables at competitive level a wholy other build/playstyle (like nightblooming frond for outlaw rogues). As for FF14 – it is still a streamlined and sanitized "meh", you have your bis list for your class, you may have a speed variation that just slightly changes your rotation and that's it. Quite underwhelming in my opinion, especially considering the lack of any class customization whatsoever, but maybe it's just me, a guy to whom diving into the spreadsheets for the next build for PoE is the fun part.