The "end game" is a term used to describe the play style, game features, and player behavior engaged in by expert players with high level characters.
At that point in the gaming experience, high level characters have completed all of the quests and other challenges, and players are no longer entertained simply by grinding through the normal game. Players want greater challenges at that point, and many turn to item finding, PvP dueling, or other non-traditional occupations.
Many game designers end up producing most post-release content for the end game, since that's where most players are spending their time, rather than simply making new level 1 characters and going through the whole experience again. The Pandemonium Event, added to Diablo II in the v1.11 patch, is a good example of added end game material, since it was only available on the realms, and only possible to engage in with very high level, well-equipped characters.
Official Comments
The D3 Team has not given many details about their end game plans, but they have stressed that they want players to have a lot of options and activities even with high level characters. [1]
- Jay Wilson: It’s definitely better if the players explore more of the game. It will be a lot more fun for them, but players will gravitate toward the route that is fastest for what they want. Even if that route makes them crazy… even if that route is not fun at all. It’s not their fault. It’s our fault as designers. It’s our job to make sure that the path of least resistance is also the path of most fun.
- We do have specific systems planned for the late game and our goal for those systems is to make sure that players are experiencing as much of the content over again as possible.
- The best example of where we feel we do this well in our other games, in World of Warcraft, is the quest system, which really gets you to move all over the world and do lots and lots of different things. The basic, core actions of the game are very repetitive. It’s not that they’re not fun, but the boredom with anything comes with repeating the same thing in the same way. If you could repeat the same thing in a different way it stays interesting a lot longer and that’s definitely going to be a goal for us.