The problem with proximity

I was talking earlier about issues with pets in Diablo 3.  They are the same issues other games face - pets either always live and are overpowered or always die and are useless.  People love pets though so I want to talk a bit about the real problems with pets and how we might go about fixing them.  The problem with pets is not that they do damage, or that they do too much damage.  Rather, it is that their toughness matters.  It is very easy to create a balanced class or ability based on a pet that beats up the monsters as you can simply balance it against whatever else you do to kill things.  The problem is that pets can completely invalidate the enemies' attacks and that wrecks everything.

One way to fix this is to have pets that are very short duration.  In this model pets are more like an extended nuke spell that run up to the enemies, bash for a bit, then vanish.  In theory this works just fine but in practice I think what players expect from a pet class is a bunch of pets that follow the character around.  If all the pets only appear when the player is spamming then a lot of the flavour is lost and flavour is really what we are after.  If we were after balance we would just shelve pets permanently because they are a neverending problem.

D3 is actually far worse in this regard that it has to be because pets are on long cooldowns.  If my Zombie Dogs required real resources to summon I could keep recasting them as they die and that would fix the all or nothing problem a lot.  I would have to choose between casting damage spells and resummoning pets and although my pets dying would suck at least I could continue to move forward.  With big cooldowns on pets though there is no middle ground.  Either the pets are immortal, or they die and I can't play and there is nothing in between.  I am not super familiar with Path of Exile but as I understand it that game did things a lot better because you can spend your time resummoning pets so you don't fall off the cliff quite so dramatically.

Really though if you want permanent pets I think the way to make them work better is to fix enemy aggro.  Right now in D3 and indeed most games of its ilk monsters operate purely on a proximity aggro system.  They happily stand and bash on the zombies and ignore the summoner in the background.  If the enemies ignored the pets and all went after the player then things would be much smoother since the player would have to be able to tank, kite, CC, or do whatever else to deal with the damage just like any other player would.  The pets could happily bash on the monsters and do the damage that they need to do without worrying much about their toughness.

This suggestion has the flavour issue that people really want a meatwall that makes them invincible.  I think though that the invincible meatwall desire intrinsically creates intractable problems.  In any case the meatwall is going to interfere with enemy movement and keep some of the enemies away from the player, it just won't be a complete defence.  With this sort of design pet toughness isn't much of an issue as long as they don't die to AOE effects but are still killable in extreme circumstances everything is fine.

In short, I think the best way to fix pets is to make them into weapons rather than armour.  You don't summon zombies to get punched, you summon them to do some punching!

It goes up smooth

I have been playing a bunch of Path of Exile lately and I have been impressed with the way the endgame works.  In particular I am impressed with how well POE compares to Diablo 3 when it comes to endgame progression and the difficulty curve.  When playing D3 I just smashed through all of Normal, Nightmare, and Hell without stopping and then suddenly got brutalized when I arrived in Act 1 of Inferno.  With a combination of playing better, figuring out better skill combinations, and some gear tweaks I managed to get Act 1 down pretty fast and then hit the brick wall of Act 2.  Not only was I dying a dozen times to every elite group but it was also abundantly clear that it would take a truly monumental amount of farming to change that.  The prospect of farming Act 1 for a hundred hours to allow me to be able to slowly and painfully make progress in Act 2 was extremely unpleasant.  The difficulty curve was just a wall rather than being a smooth increase throughout.

POE seems completely unlike that.  As the level of zones goes up the monsters get consistently more difficult; although there are definitely prime levelling places I definitely find that I get a little more gear and a few more points and then I can move on to the next area comfortably.  The progression into the map endgame seems smooth as I was able to tackle the first map I found at the listed level.  I died some but a lot of that was just cockiness and inexperience and once I took the enemies seriously and regeared a bit it was quite doable.

The key here is that I consistently get the sense that I am getting better.  I get a new piece of gear and then I can farm the Docks instead of the Fel Shrine.  I get another piece of gear and I can farm the Cathedral instead.  Another piece yet and I can start effectively farming my first maps.  The trouble with the Act 2 wall in D3 was that even if I got several upgrades I would still be doing exactly the same thing as before - clear out the whole second half of Act 1 again.  There was no feeling of progression, no sense of being able to do new things.  Having a really good difficulty scale that gives that constant sense of progression is key to making the game fun.

A major factor in making that happen is the inevitability of damage.  In D3 it was quite possible to avoid nearly all damage and building a character that would be one shotted by everything was the only sensible choice.  In POE that isn't reasonable because you are going to take damage and you must be able to survive it to accomplish anything.  That allows the difficulty curve to be much easier to construct because if the monsters do 10% more damage that *matters*.  When all monsters do infinite damage it becomes extremely difficult to actually ramp up the challenge of encounters in a granular fashion.

Ahead of time I hadn't realized just how important a feature this was but it definiltely is - there needs to be a lot of damage flying around that is nigh impossible to avoid and which the character has to be able to survive to make sure that being tough enough is a constant struggle.  A smooth progression curve is key to a fun experience in a RPG and achieving that is so much easier if you can do so just by ramping up the damage the players take by 20% and be sure that doing so really matters.

What am I doing again? Killing dudes, that's what!

I have been playing Path of Exile a lot.  It has been described as the spiritual successor to Diablo 2 and after testing both Diablo 3 and POE I definitely agree with that description.  D3 has its own charms but POE definitely *feels* like D2 and honestly seems like more fun than any of the games that actually bear the Diablo name.  The funny thing is that a lot of the things I find I most like about POE are things that were specifically engineered out of D3.

In particular I like that I often have no idea what is going on.  When I finally went to kill Piety at the end of POE I honestly didn't have any idea why I was doing that.  I knew she had shown up and mocked me once or twice and definitely killed a guy once but other than that I really didn't have any awareness of why I should bother.  This is definitely the sort of thing that happened in D2 - you could end up fighting nearly all of the act bosses without really knowing why aside from Diablo himself.  D3 very deliberately had the enemies pop onto the screen to mock you and tell you their plans so that you absolutely could not fail to know what you were up against.  It turns out I really like being able to just wander around butchering stuff with no clue why.  Of course if I really wanted plot I could go around to everybody in town and hear all the speeches and get all the backstory but the wonderful thing was how optional it all was.

That optionality of various parts of POE is absolutely key.  I am completely able to skip quests, wander into zones for no reason, ignore lore, and just do whatever the hell I want.  There are gates to progression of course but they aren't always in your face and they fit nicely into the world.  A truly open game with no direction isn't really what I want and the utterly regimented plot of D3 was stifling but this middle ground with some plot that needs to happen and a bunch of stuff you can do or not is fantastic.  I think D3 was deliberately designed to avoid the scenario of the player having no clue what is happening, probably because people ended up wandering around in D2 being completely clueless about what to do next some of the time.  Unfortunately that choice really makes the game feel less like a series of interesting choices and more like Progress Quest.

The loot decisions in POE are also absolutely fascinating because sockets and gems are just so damn flexible.  A piece of gear has not just a series of random properties but also a random set of sockets with random colours with random connections.  All of the dimentions offer incredible variety and make gearing choices very complicated.  Do I want to wear the gear that lets me socket more stuff onto my primary attack, or gear that gives me more resists?  More movement speed, or another aura?  Can I afford the loss of mana?  So many questions!  More options, both to be bad if I want or awesome if I can figure it out, make POE by far the game for me.