Former Diablo 3 Developer Examines Loot & Rewards in Anthem

Former Diablo 3 Systems Designer Travis Day (now with Phoenix Labs / Dauntless) has been playing Anthem a lot "for the past week" and has been enjoying himself, according to a new post on the Anthem Reddit. In it, Day takes time to examine some "reward system related traps" that he's discovered and to "offer some possible solutions in an effort to help make this game, which I'm enjoying, more compelling". Day targets five areas he believes would radically change the two systems.

• Dead Inscriptions - Affixes that cause confusion when they do not actually affect the item they rolled on despite the description saying they do
• Risk vs Reward - "there doesn't seem to be any reward incentive to justify the scaling between the 3 dungeons within a given difficulty setting" which leads to players generally going for the simplest of the three available Strongholds. To solve the situation, the greater risks should yield better rewards
• Player Agency / Targeted Farming - "Giving players a degree of agency over their RNG is great, in this kind of game players will always set goals "I want item X" "I want to make build Y" - the typical point of frustration is when players can't deviate their gameplay patterns to work towards whatever goals they set."
• Lack of Granularity in Difficulty - "the difficulty jump between GM1 and GM 2 is big enough that once you reach the point where GM1 feels trivial and attempt to enter GM2 you find enemies feeling like bullet sponges who 1-shot the frailer classes in the party. I love a good challenge, but going from "this is trivial" to "this is hard and definitely not worth the time and energy" causes players to continue farming content that is "easy" without ever feeling they should put themselves in positions where they are reasonably challenged".

It's an amazingly informative post, one that was acknowledged as such by both the community and by one of Anthem's developers, "BioCamden", who wrote that he would be passing it along to the team.

Check out the full post on the Anthem Reddit.

Have you noticed any of the issues Day mentions? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Via VG247