I’m saying that it wasn’t the itemisation that people kept playing. There was a reachable end to V2’s itemisation, but the people who kept on playing kept on playing despite there being an end.
In DT’s case, its itemisation/progression is frustrating enough to drive people away despite the solid core gameplay.
DT’s itemisation is horrible partially because it was designed to be engaged for the entirety of however many hundreds of hours they were hoping people would play and they try to achieve that by:
- Hard timegating item acquisition and removing the RNG mitigation associated with it (item crafting)
- Decoupling itemisation from gameplay by having core gameplay not affect the quality or quantity of items
- Adding so many layers of RNG to the items that they admitted that it was harder than winning the lottery to get one piece of “finished” equipment
- Having arbitary restrictions that force you to choose between bad choices (refine perk lock)
- An incomplete crafting system (blessings)
- A frustratingly low resource acquisition rate (or high crafting cost)
- Siloing character currencies, material and gear.
V2’s system wasn’t great, as it still had a good chunk of RNG and some bad UX design, but you could get at least one character kitted out in about 100 hours and be able to share your crafting materials/currency and even drops with your other characters.
With DT’s system having no reachable end in sight, nothing to actually progress or build or aim for because of the RNG, a remarkable lack of player agency with itemisation and arbitrary restrictions that seem to have no purpose other than to extend engagement time with systems that feel bad to interact with, is it a wonder that DT is criticised for having bad itemisation/item progression systems? Pure RNG is not progression, it’s waiting until the right numbers come up.