This thread is inspired by the neighboring thread. We all know that the game starts to shine only on the 4th difficulty (legend), after fully leveling up at least one character. Before that, a new player will have to grind for hours and play literally walk+left click simulator. By the time they finish leveling up one character, they will most likely have already completed the main campaign (Helmgart), and two shorter campaigns, thus closing almost half of the story content in the game, without really knowing the game. It’s like the game has a reverse entry threshold.
I think in order to attract more players in 2024, in addition to new game mode, some changes should finally be made to the initial stages of the game to better retain the attention of newcomers.
Let’s imagine that we can convey this idea to the developers and they will listen. What would you suggest changing in the game in order to better retain the attention of newcomers in the first, say, 30+ hours of the game?
First of all, I’m interested in the opinion of players with total playtime of more than 500 hours
I think you can make deeds necessary for progression (I don’t know how). As far as I remember, there’s a requirement to complete 4 lords on Legend to progress into Cataclysm. What if we add a similar requirement for lower difficulties, but instead of lords, it would be just a deed (or multiple) like HBFS+Vanguard/HBFS+Specials/Back to Basics? When I started playing, I never thought about progressing as fast as possible to the higher difficulties (I’m noticing this approach quite often lately) and instead played a lot of deeds (mostly HBFS+Vanguard+Sudden Death) solo with bots or with one friend and bots, learning quite a lot along the way (maybe HBFS+Vanguard+Sudden Death wasn’t a good idea for a pair of new players, but I guess we learned a lot from this deed).
Reducing the team size makes the game noticeably more difficult and requires you to be able to take care of yourself (and bots) instead of just being a “walk+left click simulator,” where you can rely on the other three players in the team almost at all times. So, maybe locking difficulties behind achievements like “complete smth with bots only” would make it much more interesting (in terms of requiring more attention from the player).
There are quite a few things that this game can offer besides 4-player co-op on the main difficulties, but most of the new players just don’t know about them and acquire quite a lot of bad habits (such as the inability of melee careers to deal with specials and ranged players struggling to stay alive comfortably without melee support), which leads to overall issues with understanding career abilities (i.e., the typical “melee only can’t deal with specials”).
Well I’m at 313 hours so I hope my opinion still counts.
They should remove Recruit and make Veteran the “beginner” difficulty and incentivize moving up to Champion as soon as possible somehow. Champion is really where you start having to try to win with Legend being where the fun really begins but isn’t really viable without close to 300 power and lv 30. So maybe extra exp gains in Champion and/or better loot
IIRC, you gain the same exp in recruit as you do in any difficulty, so it’s faster to level up in recruit, with Veteran and Champion giving the same loot boxes? It’s been a while since I’ve played Veteran/Champion. I know Vaults start at Legend though