I’m so tired of indie games that substitute mystery for a plot

[warty goblin]

As an ARPG dilettante, I can say GD suffers from a real slump after the first hour or so. I usually find the very first parts of an ARPG pretty involving - there's so much potential and everything is dangerous and finding pants is exciting! They don't even have to be good pants, just any pants. Then the combat usually evens out to pretty easy, the loot stagnates, and you aren't doing really cool stuff yet. GD's slump here is unusually slumpy, since you don't even get your second class for quite a while, and it takes even longer to really make much difference.

But if you push through those 5 or so dull hours, it does improve. Combat gets faster, you feel cooler, you get to finally leave the damn swamp. It's still an ARPG, and so fundamentally kinda brain dead, but in a much better way than it was.

[Anteros]

As an ARPG dilettante, I can say GD suffers from a real slump after the first hour or so. I usually find the very first parts of an ARPG pretty involving - there's so much potential and everything is dangerous and finding pants is exciting! They don't even have to be good pants, just any pants. Then the combat usually evens out to pretty easy, the loot stagnates, and you aren't doing really cool stuff yet. GD's slump here is unusually slumpy, since you don't even get your second class for quite a while, and it takes even longer to really make much difference.

But if you push through those 5 or so dull hours, it does improve. Combat gets faster, you feel cooler, you get to finally leave the damn swamp. It's still an ARPG, and so fundamentally kinda brain dead, but in a much better way than it was.

Maybe I'll give it another try again, but the older I get the less free time I have and the less patience I have for games that expect me to invest hours of time before they get fun.

[warty goblin]

Maybe I'll give it another try again, but the older I get the less free time I have and the less patience I have for games that expect me to invest hours of time before they get fun.

If it ain't your thing it ain't worth it. Once you push through the boring bit you get... a fairly fun ARPG. It isn't a wildly different experience, it's just a better version of the existing one.

I've only really managed to get to the better bits once, and that was because I had a really horrible cold combined with a double ear infection which made walking forwards and shooting zombies about the most complex gameplay I could handle. Once I had regained reasonable functionality, I kept playing for a bit, but it didn't really hold my interest.

The only ARPG I can say I really love is Sacred, because I've been playing it for years and years, and it nails this late 90/early 2000s silly fantasy vibe. I've pretty much always got a playthrough on the back burner.

[ShneekeyTheLost]

I keep trying and failing to get into Grim Dawn. On paper it's a game I should absolutely love, but in practice the gameplay feels too slow to me. Maybe it picks up after the early game but I've never made it that far. There's also the issue that for a hack and slash looter game none of the gear ever felt special or unique. I like looters, but only if there's a chance to find unique gameplay changing stuff, not just the same items with larger numbers.

I'm sure uniques do exist, but I certainly never found anything exciting in my limited play time.

Well, there are MI's (Monster Infrequents) that can absolutely be gameplay changing stuff, not just in terms of giving bonuses to skills but either changing or adding whole new mechanics to them. Granted, many MI's are just good gear pieces with a certain flavor and stat boosts, but they frequently do something else than just raw stats with the skill or skills they augment which can absolutely be build-defining. Some of them do drop in Act 1, but you have to know which mobs can drop them. But once you do figure it out, you can target-farm them for gear that can help a given build shine.

There are also several sets that start dropping around level 20 that are of Epic (blue) quality that can really shape a build or at least augment it, but they're generally more difficult to collect than MI's because the MI's can be target-farmed by killing the mobs that are known to drop them until they do. Then again, some of them have crafting recipes which are account-wide rather than character specific, so once you unlock the recipes you can just craft them once you obtain your smith.

However, it sounds like you're speaking specifically about Legendary items, which don't start dropping until level 50 (except for one specific instance of one specific legendary that is technically available as soon as you beat the Act 1 boss, but even then the item still has a minimum level of 50 to equip). Those can also completely change a build, or even have builds specifically built around the piece of gear and its mechanics, and there are Legendary Sets as well that function much like D3 sets (if perhaps not quite as OP).

[MetroAlien]

it's embarrassing how far I got into reading this thread thinking PoE stands for "Pillars of Eternity"

I remember starting Path of Exile. Didn't get very far. Maybe my friend whom I was playing with started another game, I can't remember...

But all this talk of builds reminded me of DemigoD....
it was a MOBA before LoL, from the now defunct studio gas powered games, and had two skill trees per character, which is interesting for a MOBA style game.
I remember the different builds being quite well worked out and fun to play, though the game itself didn't last very long.
It got pirated more than it actually sold and drove the devs bankrupt. Admittedly, they put it on an extremely obnoxious launcher (which doesn't exist anymore either, because nobody used it)
A shame, really. I loved most of gas powered games' output.