little discussion about campaign skip

campaign skip will never happen....jonathan pretty much confirmed this in the interview with preach

I think there far more people like myself who actually don't mind amd even enjoy the campaign while leveling a second character. It's just a far more meaningful experience which I think is what separates this game from the rest is you need you need to put in the work in order to improve. No free lunches here!

For those who think it's meaningless drugery I'd say attempt to learn the campaigm better. When I started practicing to improve my time I started to appreciate everything more, and suddenly it became fun to try and best myself.

Please Campaign skip. Just give us all the waypoints, and completed quest states for the point quests.

Sure, keep the labs....we can do them as we progress levels.

With all the waypoints, Access to harbour/delve/beastiary/forbidden sanctum we can grind levels as we see fit.

Just scale some of those mechanics down to level 1.

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TempestMind wrote:

I think there far more people like myself who actually don't mind amd even enjoy the campaign while leveling a second character. It's just a far more meaningful experience which I think is what separates this game from the rest is you need you need to put in the work in order to improve. No free lunches here!

For those who think it's meaningless drugery I'd say attempt to learn the campaigm better. When I started practicing to improve my time I started to appreciate everything more, and suddenly it became fun to try and best myself.

I have cleared the campaign over 100 times since they came out. It is a meaningless drugery after the first clear every season.

At leaguestart, I enjoy that first clearthrough as its been 1-2months since i have done it last. But these last few leagues, I find it too much of a chore to go through it again.

I understand you enjoy it. But unless you have been deleting chars needlessly, you have only done campaign 9 times. and 5 of those were in affliction. Your viewpoint is valid but mine is completely different.

I wouldn't mind an alternative path for leveling after finishing the campaign once per league like delve or something similar just to have a bit more variety but I have no issue with running the campaign every time either. I've done the campaign every league at least 3 times (8 times in Affliction) since the start of open beta which is ~150 times, not including races back then.

However, I'm very much against a full skip that let's you go from 1 to 68 or whatever level it would be with a single click. It being a paid feature or just an unlockable does not matter to me, I dislike them both.

I also feel like that if the campaign poses such a big issue for someone that it puts them off completely from playing the game a skip wouldn't solve that issue when the game features similar repetitiveness right after the campaign with benchcraft unlocks, lab and T1-T15 map progression. Should these things then be included in the skip as well?

The TikTokGen hitting hard lmao

Johnthan straight up said it will be a cold day in hell before you guys get a Campaign skip

BASED AF

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SpaniardPuss wrote:

The TikTokGen hitting hard lmao

Hold up the boomer arrived

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BloodBaneBoneBreaker wrote:

Just scale some of those mechanics down to level 1.

I don't think it's a good idea, the ideal would be to create special content for it

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Coconutdoggy wrote:

Johnthan straight up said it will be a cold day in hell before you guys get a Campaign skip

BASED AF

Yeah, like Action House lmao so based wow poe 2 will have an Action House, sooner or later on poe 1 so based af.

I can understand why someone who plays the game a full-time job would be all jaded about the campaign, and wanting to skip it. And I can understand why someone who's trained on MMORPGs would be subconsciously anxious about getting to the end where all their friends, and thus all the fun, would normally be found, and thus be wanting to skip the process of leveling alts.

But ARPGs are mostly played solo - Chris Wilson gave a 95% solo number for PoE a few years back, and I have no reason to believe that any other ARPG is any different. And in a game where 95% play by themselves, and where most of the player base isn't approaching it like an aspiring streamer, campaign skipping options send a very specific message to the game's players, and in particular the game's new players, about that campaign.

What that skip campaign option says is that the campaign sucks, and that the developers know it sucks. Not just that it sucks to do 100+ times, or that is sucks after years of running through it multiple times per league: a skip campaign button says that the campaign sucks, full stop, and that will alter the way players perceive it from that point forward... regardless of the developers' actual intentions.

In Diablo III, the campaign sucked; having nothing to do except run through D3's campaign over and over again sucked; and so the Reaper of Souls expansion added a campaign-skipping option so that a player would never have to do it more than once. It did not make the game better; people who like D3 anyway still liked it, and rest are playing PoE now.

Diablo IV's campaign was better received, but to engage with it means engaging with D4's open world, which is flat, lifeless, and lacking in landmarks or any other points of interest. Seriously, that thing may as well be a blank, white void. As a result, D4 got a skip campaign before it had even launched, which means that new players started the game with full knowledge that the experience of playing the campaign sucked, and that the game's developers knew it. Campaign-skipping did not make that game better, either, because the content of the campaign was not the issue.

Even Last Epoch, which is otherwise pretty solid, has a pretty weak campaign, something that the game's developers are probably conscious of, which is probably why it also has short-cuts that you can use when leveling alts. I'm not convinced that makes EHG's game better, in the same way that a better campaign would have made their game better. I'd rather LE's campaign just felt better to play, rather than feeling under-written and incomplete.

So, no, I don't want campaign skipping in PoE2. I think that adding a campaign skip caters to a very small segment of the player base, while undercutting the experience for the majority of players, and especially for new players. I think Jonathan's instincts are spot-on, on this one.

If playing a game, any game, is starting to feel like drudgery, then take a break and play something else for a bit. Skip a league; believe it or not, even I have skipped a couple of leagues over the years. When I came back, PoE felt fresh and new and fun again, and GGG didn't have to degrade the experience for anyone else to make that happen.