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I would love to see a redesign of the major map conditions and raid bosses that require teamwork to accomplish but provide no system that requires it leading to a ton of bad behavior.
I’d love to see, sorta as you described, them turn into a PvE mode where the Arc are turned up to 11 and their unique rewards are all you’re really getting out with. This would be a good place to bring out and risk your best gear because instead of worrying about a never ending stream of rats, you can just worry about the large volume of arc while trying to accomplish the goal.
Like imagine if the raid bosses were PvE, the map was empty (because it was after another map’s countdown let’s just pretend), the Arc was omnipresent, and the raid boss guaranteed everyone who extracts 1 boss core (obviously the boss would still have more on it that was salvageable to reward players who actually fight and survive). I think that would be way better than the current implementation where they’re incentivizing players to 1) just break leg armor, get a core, leave 2) rat people who are doing the boss and steal their loot 3) rat the boss after it’s complete so people who did all the work get even less rewards.
I like what they’ve done with making it optional. I will say though I think it missed the mark of giving me the feeling of a real seasonal wipe. I didn’t get that magical feeling of playing with all my best gear, losing it, and then having that early game poor life style with everyone.
This is probably because:
- the 5 million goal had me selling everything and playing free kits for the last like two weeks, essentially soft resetting me before the hard reset. This sucked and I hope they never do this again.
- the season change came with zero new content or patches.Because nothing got added or changed or balanced it didn’t feel like a new season it felt like New Game+. Easily the worst season to season transition of a live service game simply because there was nothing new about this season. They dropped everything before the transition and so they became separated mentally. Even the mini event they had start before the expedition and that was a mistake.
- the flip side of the tight gun and gear balance, with very narrow banding, and a relatively quick jump from common to uncommon (and then rare where applicable) meant games didn’t feel drastically different between average end game kit and dirt poor. There wasn’t a bunch of people running around with ferros and kettles, anymore than there always is because free kits are so prevalent. And I barely feel advantaged with im walking around with a link augment, blue shield, and blue guns compared to someone with a stitcher and a green shield. Especially with how tightly packed some of the maps can feel.
All that to say, I think they should consider some changes on the economy and gun balance to make gear feel more deep and impactful. I think they absolutely need to improve their expedition system and season change over.
For the most part, yes. Not a guarantee but I played like ~50 some hours over winter break, all solo, all peaceful. Ended with like 3 deaths due to players.
It is, however, not smart enough to separate solo and party behavior. So if you play aggressive with your buddies but peaceful solo, there is a very painful transition period.
This is a very terrible take. Arc Raiders has aggression based matchmaking. If you want to play PvE you can almost guarantee that. Play 10 games on a free loadout, shoot no one ever, defib a guy or bandage someone if you can, help them kill arc, extract peacefully. Tell the in-game survey you like it when you get out peacefully and tell it you hate it when you don’t get out because of pvp and you’ll super quickly find yourself essentially playing pve.
For the last two weeks I have played hundreds of rounds solo, talking in mic to anyone who walks by, and have been shot three times. In literally hundreds of slow to fast rounds, almost always a major map condition, Stella Montis or otherwise.
Most of your points are equally as bad, but like this alone is easily disproven.
Bruh, this is a crazy, defensive rant. You’re defending multi-million dollar companies who are bad at their jobs and blaming the consumer who is getting poorer and poorer every year. Using COD as an example for normal, a famously repetitive franchise game whose developer is corpo as hell is not a good look. How many people at that studio are getting paid a good wage even relative to industry standard and not suffering burnout and other bad practices. Helldiver’s just proved that A) you can have something like 6x bloat for no reason which they themselves say will hardly impact HDDs B) this is largely technical incompetence as they vetted their initial assumptions and found them flawed.
This isn’t about them supporting HDD’s, they said they’ll barely be impacted. This is about a developer not knowing what they need to do to make a successful game and slowly figuring out what is unnecessary. If COD cared, they could lower it too.
See that’s interesting because it’s more cozy for me when I shoot on sight and more tense for me when I socialize. I’ve lost loot when I’ve tried talking it out and maybe that stings more because assuming I lose some of those engagements I must have saved more loot than lost when talking.
Idk, it’s the social pressure like in a fictional apocalypse of like “will these humans be friendy or not”, they’re unpredictable. Also I think the map has an effect on friendliness as well. Like Dam had a lot of friendly people but blue gate was like 50/50 at best.
It’s just so cool that the game can change so much from playing solo vs squads.
Arc Raiders is a fuckin blast. Having just as much fun with my group on this as we did in like helldivers and hunt showdown, but Arc Raiders has real depth that I think will keep us coming back. This game feels special and I hope it’s can go the distance for my group and I because it’s one of the best group games we’ve played in a while.
Solo is fun too, it’s just a completely different game. It’s more tense, more stealthy, and you’re 100x more likely to find friendly players which is really cool.
I’ve played it twice now (tech test 2 and server slam) and I’m absolutely pumped for launch day. This game is fantastic and I think it’s exactly what the genre needed, a great entry innovating in the space instead of trying to copy Tarkov (like most of them) or veering a bit too far away from the bits that make extraction games unique (like hunt showdown, which to be clear is a fantastic game).
I haven’t seen a single review that was mediocre. I know the algo can really silo people, but everyone who’s touched this game seems to give it glowing reviews minus some early third person perspective gripes.
Having had hands on time with the game, I wouldn’t sleep on it if you like fps games or PvE extraction games. My flatmate who hasn’t really played a single pvp game has really had a blast with this one too, starting out “not getting it” and then by the end of a two hour session saying they were going to buy on launch day. I think this game will convert people who give it a chance.
Very jealous, I’m excited for that game. I just hope they nail the fun aspect. Hunt showdown is so much fun but has almost no meta progression and very little customization - hunger seems to have that addressed (or is planning to). Grey zone Warfare is very cool, hardcore, and slow but it’s got almost no gameplay considerations; it’s like barely a game in the traditional sense and had a terribly short shelf life for me for that reason. That’s where I’m curious if Hunger can pull it off - from what I’ve seen it’s too early to say.
Thoughts?
Arc Raiders may be the most exciting PvPvE launch I’ve had in a long while. A lot of the comments in this thread seem negative, but I would bet money this game is going to be successful for at least the first 6 months. It’s just too good right out of the gate.
As for 1 year+, depends on how well the company is at producing new material. I think they have something special with this game. If Hunger comes out, or Marathon (lol), and does something just as compelling I could see Arc having a hard time but I doubt Hunger will eat the same player base and I doubt Marathon will feel very good (they seem like they have too many problems at this point).
It’s the best extraction shooter I’ve played in the genre by like a country mile. Obviously we haven’t seen what the full economy looks like or endgame but there isn’t a single component that doesn’t outclass the competition in my opinion.
Like the immersion is top tier with the sounds, the graphics, the feedback, the movement. It feels really good.
The gameplay is also top notch and does things others in the genre don’t do. Namely:
- variable game length that feels rewarding. I can do a 5-10 min run and get quick and dirty loot with a free load out or I can stay in the map for the full 45 and look for exactly what I want.
- the items themselves are compelling game play pieces. Like the rare weapons are full on laser rifles and mini missile grenades - they’re cool and change how you play, not your power level. Like in Gray Zone Warfare nothing I get feels meaningful different or cool, other than the bullet spongy nature of higher level zones and even that’s not super noticeable. I had no reason to want to chase loot in that game.
- the meta game is sick, probably comparable to Tarkov (although I didn’t play enough to actually compare this). Every match I feel like I’m working towards a goal of making the gear floor higher and gear ceiling easier to attain. Again, we need to see what the full game is like but collecting recipes, upgrading my workbenches, and collecting targeted materials feels good.
I’m positive I’ll get 3+ months of good fun out of this before I might start mixing other things back in. If the end game is really good I’ll be able to make it 5+ months with no content additions I think. The real question for any multiplayer game is can they add material at a fast enough pace to keep it compelling long term. We’ll have to see, but they have dozens of levers to pull on compared to a traditional fps or PvE game. New ARC, new bosses, new map mods, new events, new maps, new guns, new gadgets, new subsystems, new modes. Lot of different angles they can add to in parallel.
This looks kinda bad but I can’t place my finger on what it is. I think it’s the like clay like textures and mobile phone like graphics.
This isn’t giving next gen to me and the trailer felt was less put together than they usually do. I guess I like the more realistic or hyper realistic style the cinematics have always pushed in my heads.
That being said, I hope it slaps. I miss a solid dawn of war that my pals and I can play. Nothing like Dark Crusade LAN parties back in the day.
It’s on my to do list. It seems like it’s lacking the playstyle customization that I’m interested in but I look forward to playing through it.
PoE2 promised engaging, methodical combat but as of right now has failed to reach that mark. The end game is that of PoE1 which the developers claim they don’t want but I’m not seeing the design choices to slow things down in a meaningful way. Let’s hope they figure it out, I have no doubt the first ARPG to figure this out will bring in larger numbers than most have seen to date.
I’m arguing some of the developers know it’s broken (including arguably all PoE leads and No Rest for the Wicked leads)(I would extend this to an even larger group but I won’t to keep it verifiable).
I don’t think all isometric ARPGs copy D2 because they think it’s not broken, I think they do it because it was an innovative genre defining game for its time, most of the devs look back to it with nostalgia, and it was a blockbuster hit. And I wouldn’t minimize the innovations in the scene to just QoL. I think what PoE1 and 2 and LE are doing around their systems is very innovative, including their financing model and tech. I would argue that they’re still fundamentally maintaining the moment to moment loop while expanding all the subsystems that give the game as a whole massive complexity and content - and that’s great but will inevitably pale in comparison to a game that innovates the moment to moment gameplay. I think most genres have innovated their core moment to moment gameplay compared to their genre defining counterparts 25 years ago, but that ARPGs haven’t.
And I completely disagree on my expectations being “unrealistic, unknown to the genre, or incompatible”. That’s laughable imo and something only a player incapable of imagining change would say.
- to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
- Diablo 4, LE, and PoE2 (going forward “the big 3”) all do this well to extremely well. Diablos transmog system is peak, PoE2 has unbelievably good cosmetics and they’ve just started, LE is a small studio but I still feel like I’m playing my wizard when I play a wizard.
- I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
- the big three all do this but do it poorly. Diablo has low variability in abilities, poor customization, and my load out consists of mostly number go up choices. But importantly the bones are there, this makes it neither non-compatible nor unknown to the genre, it just means these devs did a poor job implementing it. PoE has a ton of this but fails to provide a meaningful load out or mechanical skill expression because nearly all builds converge to press a single button to blow up the screen and a second button to move around the screen fast. Again, they have all of the bones and far more customization than I’d ever expect from a game, and yet a lot of it is meaningless the second you close Path builder and actually start playing because it trivializes the game.
- I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
- the big three have varied down, and arguably uniquely rewarding down (D4 sucks at this imo) but they all falter on challenging or good moment to moment gameplay. I would argue PoE2 campaign is pretty good for this, but mid-end game is pretty awful and it really only ever shines in the boss arenas. They seem incapable of further innovating the mob combat because they seem to differentiate good combat in a boss arena (engaging) from good combat while mapping (mindless). LE’s Pinnacle boss is fantastic for this (and I like it better than all PoE bosses at this moment). Even as I heap praise in these areas, I’m rarely using reactive abilities, I’m rarely using multiple skills in a fight that aren’t just buff my one damage skill. Again, none of this is incompatible, none of this is unknown to the genre, all of this is achievable, and in a lot of places already in place just used poorly from a design perspective.
- I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery.
- the big three do this perfectly, as that’s essentially one of the ARPG innovations - fight fight fight and then plan/craft/prepare then fight fight fight. I think poe has some work with their towers and LE has some work with the size and rewards of their maps, but it’s hard to tease out changes here when this is typically the most mindless portion of all the games. They keep me clicking blow up screen at the right pace, I just wish I didn’t have to. Again, this quality is completely inline with the genre and done well.
- I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
- again, the big 3 all do this well. I wish the qualities on items were more impactful and not just number go slightly up, but generally they’re doing okay. The uniques being added to PoE2 have been awesome to see, like the song crossbow and stuff, so I’m hopeful. Diablo let’s you collect transmogs. Again, totally typical of this genre.
- I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).
- multiplayer is possible and rewarded in all of the big 3. Only Diablo has content designed for multiplayer. I think PoE has a ways to go on making this experience more multiplayer friendly, in fact it’s my least favorite to play with friends despite it being my favorite of the three by miles. I wish they’d design more multiplayer content but I understand why they don’t. If the combat wasn’t so screen explosion based it would probably be a decent enough experience. Again, another quality entirely a part of this genre already just not fully implemented well.
So what exactly is incompatible here? I think the answer you’d give is engaging combat, because that’s what I always get when I have this conversation. “All changes that have already been made to the genre are great but no more changes to the genre would be good.” That’s the sentiment I always get. “I want to mindlessly grind mobs while watching a show I can only partially pay attention to on my second screen.” Is something I get a lot as well. Which just feels like a mobile game, an idle clicker, but not what most people want when they go to play a video game including in the ARPG genre. Even if we said there’s room for idle clickers in the genre, why are our stand out examples all idle clickers, that to me feels like a clear sign of stagnation in a genre. Dota, rainbow six, BG3, BioShock, portal 2 - none of these games would be better if they were less engaging such that we could watch TV on the side, so why is it okay when talking about the genre defining games of our Gen in isometric Diablo-like ARPGs?
I think you’re getting the wrong impression.
I absolutely like isometric ARPGs, I just like them exponentially more in theory. Most of them have barely innovated on Diablo 2’s core moment to moment loop and it’s something that seemingly everyone is aware of but no studio has yet to be able to fix. I’m looking for good combat, which was what PoE2 pitched in all of their videos, in most of their dev interviews (although as of late it feels like they’re pulling back on this), and has so far failed to deliver outside of the boss arena (and sometimes in the boss arena too).
I want:
- to be self-insert character or at least one of many characters as a form of self expression
- I want mechanical self expression ideally in the form of dozens or hundreds of skills and their customization along with a skill tree that enables further customization on how your character plays. My load out of 10 abilities should look and feel and play very differently than your load out of 10 abilities.
- I want to fight monsters and bosses that are varied, challenging, and uniquely rewarding ideally. Challenging and varied are putting in a lot of work in that sentence so I want to further expound and say combat should feel like a dance, a puzzle, high octane, and skill rewarding (not simply build skill or farming skill, but actual play skill).
- I want the pacing around playing to be focused on fighting and clearing encounters more so than exploration and discovery. Elden Ring is fantastic but it’s slow between clearing mobs and escalating the stakes/rewards - relying on the underlying exploration to be meaningful (and it is and it’s a 10/10 but not what I’m talking about in this post).
- I want an additional system of collectibles that further modify the way I play and look, most consistently this looks like loot or crafting (this however should not be primarily satisfied with #'s go up).
- I want to do this with friends in a multiplayer format, ideally at times requiring multiplayer because that opens up a lot of unused design space (looking at you remnant 2 which was awesome or only theoretically Diablo world bosses and black dungeon).
In theory this describes games like Diablo/LE/PoE as well as remnant 2/destiny/borderlands. But classic ARPG’s have so much of these needs theoretically covered that if they’d just tweak the moment to moment gameplay they’d have a perfect game for me. Where as games like Borderlands barely has a dozen skills in the entire game and they barely change how you play (coming from B3 and B4), the combat by the nature of being an fps is more engaging but it’s not much past that - it’s very repetitive and the number of mobs that are interesting or good is low imo. If each quality I’m looking for is scored 1-10 borderlands may have some of them but they score lower than most ARPGs. Remnant 2 was fantastic but it didn’t have the hundreds of hours of content and systems to do that wasn’t grinding story paths (I’d still rate this experience at 10/10). Hades and Enter the Gungeon and most roguelites have fantastic moment to moment gameplay but lack most of the other qualities I’m looking for. Wo Long and DS and all of those are fantastic games with good moment to moment gameplay but similarly lack multiple qualities I’m looking for.
I honestly think I want an open world Diablo where it’s designed more like a Gauntlet and DND-esque groups in mind, with better combat and better loot and more skills. I want exactly what PoE2 was promising and delivers in their campaign (by and large, some things would still need to improve to score highly in my desired qualities) but which they completely abandon in the mid-to-late game. I want something in between No Rest for the Wicked or Hades or Remnant 2 and PoE 2 or LE or Diablo. And listening to the developers in this space on various podcasts and dev interviews, they know that is what’s missing but seem unable to get there quite yet. I think PoE2, if it doesn’t fix combat, will be an innovation on PoE1 but will be remembered as PoE1.5 and lumped into the age of ARPGS that were still Diablo 2 successors or the age after of innovators instead of the next generation of ARPGs i think we’re on the cusp of.
I think an ARPG without meaningful combat would require a significantly good story for it to be worth it for me. At least at the 20-25 hours of depth level. PoE 1/2 at thousands of hours of depth are struggling to hold me because their combat isn’t very good, and I really like the PoE2 campaign so far.
I guess as someone who loved Titanquest when I was a kid, I’m a bit disappointed in Titanquest 2 as of right now. And there are other great slot machine ARPG’s and I don’t have much desire for them as is, so it’s hard to justify this games asking price when the reviews are saying a play through is 4 hours at act 1. Maybe when the story is complete I’ll pick it up, but can you imagine it being €50 instead of €30. I mean even €30 with no crafting and minimal legendaries… Idk, not trying to be a downer but ya - those are my honest thoughts.
I generally agree with you, a fun short game is worth more money than a forever game to me right now.
It looks like it falls very short of the engaging combat I’m still looking for in an ARPG. €30 for less than 10 hours of an incomplete ARPG at that makes this a wait to buy if ever for me. I’m not certain I have the faith it’ll ever have 30 hours of content, this release feels like a “we’re running out of money” situation more than a “we’re confident in our product” scenario.
I burned out of Last Epoch in their last patch I think for good, because the combat is so bad. And PoE2 is approaching that for me as well - at least they have an engaging story and a long guaranteed road ahead of content - so maybe this is the slot machine ARPG I keep on hand (but I wish they’d just fix their combat). And I’m waiting for multiplayer to play No Rest for the Wicked, but I suspect it’s not ARPG enough to be a long term game.
The technical alpha slapped and I’m fuckin dying to get back in. I was really hoping for them to open up a beta but now I’m just sad I have to wait till October to play this.
I understand the delay to get things right, but there’s almost half a year where no game is satisfying this itch which is a shame. Marathon hasn’t been delayed yet and I know Hell Let Loose guys are making an extraction shooter that looks sick as hell that’s due to release this year as well.
All I’m saying is I would have paid €40 for that alpha it was so good, October will be a slam dunk, but the genre will be more crowded by that time.
I mean, I guess you’re right as far as I’m willing to debate the point. Does that change anything? I don’t feel like the franchise has done the Lost thing where every episode (in this case game) only asks more questions and never answers them. I also don’t feel like I’m dying to learn more about the world or that the small scope of their answers takes me out of the experience. Like, it’s perfectly encapsulated to what I need to enjoy the “movie” that is this game.
I completely agree that this has costs, and that it probably can’t go on for forever. Like one of the costs is I don’t super care about this world, it’s not a world I want to run a TTRPG in, or could envision a hundred spin-offs. I want the end of this story and I’d be okay if it stopped. Idk, that’s a fine thing to make imo. And again, it’s been top of it’s class in execution since it’s inception (never played the smaller games like Blue something or other) so idk - hard for me to nitpick the world or the game.
Now Valve please release your new VR set so I can buy it or the Big Picture 2 and get back into VR.
I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it’s a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.
My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we’ve all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they’d encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they’d provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.
Speaking entirely personally, I thought at least Half Life Alyx’s story worked on two levels. It was about freeing the gman as Alyx but gman sorta represented… Oh man, now I’m worried I can’t remember the game well enough to communicate my original thoughts. I remember playing it and feeling like the gman represented the writers or creativity, a bigger picture concept or something that went meta. And if that was the case it felt like Valve creating a piece of art that said Alyx and VR have revitalized our desire to tell stories and GMAN is free again.
The moment they drop their new headset I’ll buy it and play again just to relive the experience but I’d say I’m excited about Half Life because Valve makes A) good games B) they make solid diegetic games which I find to be kinda rare C) their games often feel like they came from a team of artists than just a team of coders. Maybe that’s the polish or maybe that’s the massive amount of testing I’m led to believe they do but when valve makes a new game it often feels like the guy who made Stanley Parable just made a new game - easy to recognize art because it’s so good.
I assumed pretty immediately upon hearing him in a couple of interviews that he was exactly this right winger camoflaughing as a centralist. I gave the game the benefit of the doubt because I hadn’t seen any hard evidence but I’ll stop talking kindly about the game based on this info.
Politics is how we organize our society. Most of everything is political. When society starts organizing movements against groups of people, stripping away rights, and generally being Nazis you have to get more political to stop them. Taking no position is taking a position. Join the rebellion or support the empire, there is no in-between.
Unfortunately, the snippet from the Wikipedia article you quoted exactly exemplifies my understanding of the genre tags and how I’ve seen them used since I was old enough to get on the Internet and read such things.
Zelda has, for me, always been an action adventure game. I don’t think I’d called Zelda breath of the wild an RPG game or an ARPG game but that’s because the item portion of the game felt incomparable to a game like Witcher or Diablo where every piece of your character is an item that can be upgraded.
That being said, I’m not exactly the biggest Zelda fan and BotW was like 10 years ago for me.
I guess I haven’t heard Souls-Like or games like Zelda or Witcher 3 (what I’d call Action Adventure I guess or RPG) called an ARPG although they fit the name well enough that maybe I have and today I’m falling on the other side of a fuzzy line.
Yes, I was referring to Diablo, PoE, Last Epoch, and the rest of the “looter” ARPG’s or what I’d just call ARPG’s. Maybe this is why the Diablo-like meme came up? To further drill in to the genre.
Totally valid take. I just think the text to voice system is hilarious, the animations/models are more enjoyable, the actual item gameplay loop has more fun and interactive components in repo, I like the items in repo more although shout-out to the boom box in LC, and the monsters in repo are way more interactive imo - I miss the coil head and the turrets and the teleporting randomly into base but otherwise the monsters are really fun in repo. I agree that Repo’s difficulty doesn’t scale too well currently but I expect them to balance things as it goes on.
I think LC is a great game and I hope everyone tries it out as well. Repo just feels like a more polished iteration on the concept and I’m happy to see the genre expand.
Sorry about the motion sickness, that’s rough.
To elaborate a bit on what Harrk said. It’s a linear dark souls-like with a heavier emphasis on rhythm gameplay (parrying) and only melee combat (no like magic or full ranged). It’s got a decent story that has most of its payoff in the final moments imo.
I’d recommend it for anyone interested in the dark souls experience with a the sharp edges rounded off and a more linear story using familiar characters.
That’s totally cool by me, it’s a fun game. PoE2 is probably the best ARPG on the market, it’s just falling short of what they sold me (and the community at large) on. But for now, it’s definitely an idle game during mapping with the right build (and the wrong build will see you roadblocked progression-wise).
I mean to say “idol” as in… Oh fuck. Omg I’ve been misspelling idle in literally weeks worth of comments. Woooooow. Okay. Feeling a bit dumb.
I meant idle mechanics. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense but just in case - I’m making the argument that most modern ARPGs since Diablo 2 have not innovated on the gameplay directly but have innovated on the systems of the genre. This behavior has led to what I consider to be a stale endgame game to game that often or exclusively boils down to trivializing the content such that it’s comparable to a slot machine, an idle game like Eggs Inc., or a “phone” game.
I think PoE2 is working hard to evolve the genre to what id consider to be a “next gen” ARPG, where most or all previous games fall into a large “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket. I think No Rest for the Wicked is similarly attempting to evolve the genre. A counter example for the genre is Titans Quest 2 which seems to be falling squarely in the “Diablo 2 inspired” bucket.
I’d like to see more “No Rest for the Wicked” level of swings regardless of if you consider that EA game a hit or miss in its current state.
It’s a profoundly amazing game and amazingly innovative for a moba imo.