POE2 violates every single game design pillar that made POE1 great and successful
|
Before I start, let me say that I hate POE2 and I love POE1.
I hate POE2 for being tedious and unfun and so much different from POE1. In the title I am referring to Chris Wilson's speech from 2019 Game Developers Conference called "Designing Path of Exile to be player forever". https://youtu.be/tmuy9fyNUjY In the introduction, he clearly states that what he is presenting is a team effort, it's something they learned over many years, and he mentions Jonathan as one of the biggest contributors. I can only assume it's the same person who is now POE2 game director. Chris talks about 5 game design pillars. Since they are pillars, they are not really affected by the fact that game is only in Early Access and is not 'finished'. Here they are and what I think about them:
1. Visceral Action Combat
In my opinion this one is the biggest offender. In POE1, action is pretty fast, you have a wide variety of mobility skills. Using attack skills or spells is fast. You have a variety of effects like phasing, onslaught, rampage, movement speed from flasks etc. You have a lot of agency over your character. In POE2 it's all backwards. It's been replaced by 'meaningful combat'. What the hell does it even mean? Everything your character does is extremely slow. Attacking, casting, walking has been slowed to the point where it becomes tedious. All the agency you had in previous game has been taken away. Your character is so slow, but monsters have not been slowed down. As soon as you are in range monsters swarm you, they mini-stun you, because by the time you can attack or cast and kill the mobs, they already closed distance on you and they attack a lot faster then you. It's so bad I cannot even express it. You cannot even reposition yourself in combat because mobility skills do not exist in this game. Technically there are skills such as Blink, but they require high investment and have high cooldown, which makes such skills not that useful. Oh I am sorry, they gave us dodge roll. Why was this abomination of a skill has been added to the game? Am I playing Dark Souls, or am I playing hack and slash? Dodge roll was clearly designed with boss fights in mind. Every single boss has at least one mechanic that you are supposed to dodge with the roll. It's so boring and unimaginative. Dodge roll is completely useless against regular mobs, due to how slow and tedious it is, and when you are surrounded you cannot roll over monsters anyways. I hate that skill so much. Quoting Chris from the talk: " Why oh why did you go against this principle? On top of that game is quite clunky. Dodge roll or some abilities that move you, such as Shattering Palm, they either make monsters 'slide', or they displace your, or your enemy's model in weird ways. Skills that create objects such as Tempest Bell do not land where you clicked. Some skills cannot even hit certain enemies, like that big bone monstrosity boss. Game really lacks quality control on that front. Combat is simply tedious.
2. Randomly Generated Levels
This one is not violated too much, and can be fixed without reworking the whole game. Main issue during campaign is that maps are too big (it's been greatly improved and should be improved further), couple of zones are kinds like labyrinths and sometimes it can be difficult to find the correct path without backtracking. One of the gripes I have with the game is that in POE1, when you are in a zone, and on the world map you see that next zone is connected in North-East, you will find zone exit in the North-East part of the map. But on occasion in POE2 exit can be in a place that makes zero sense, like in the South. The amount of times I had to backtrack due to this is insane... However issue goes away in endgame, since you visit only one zone at a time. But zones during mapping are not great. There are a lot of zones that are quite linear, but they have kind of side paths that can be difficult to spot, and it makes you backtrack again. Backtracking is one of the most annoying things in games. If we had some mobility skills, it would be a much lesser issue. Here we need to address at least some part of the end game, which is not good currently. Once again we see how agency it taken away from us. In POE1 you could constantly run your favorite map type, which you could adjust with effects such as scarabs or with atlas passive tree. In POE2 atlas tree is currently really a placeholder, and it's so small and insignificant that it doesn't really matter. It will be definitely improved in future patches. POE2 has interesting idea where you unlock towers, which you then use to upgrade your maps. There're a lot of problems with it. You spend a lot of time setting up the towers, where you run boring maps with no real modifiers. Then you 'juice' overlapping towers, and you spend some time running those boosted maps which is fun. Then again you go back to setting it up. It's boring and frustrating again. You spend too much time setting it up, and not enough time running actually fun maps. There are other issues too. After a while you explore so much atlas that it becomes a hassle just moving it around. Connections between nodes are really bad, and there's a lot of dead space whenever you encounter larger bodies of water (why cant you just add like islands maps??). The thole system needs a big overhaul.
3. Randomly Generated Items
This one is huge. In POE1 you had so many item drops that it was impossible to play without a loot filter, but even with a filter it was overwhelming. Game was raining with white items, as well as magic or rare items of bases you are not interested in. It needed to be culled. And it's exactly what POE2 did. But they went way too hard on it, they nerfed item drops so much, that item drops drought has become a meme. Items in a game like this are an absolute core, and are by far the most important element. You play the game to customize your characters through items, to get power from items, to take on more difficult challenges to get even more items. This game loop is what makes whole ARPG genre. And POE2 flops hard here. Problem in POE2 is not simply that you are not finding enough good items, issue is much much deeper. That is because items in an ARPG are connected to every single system. POE2 takes out all the agency you previously had over items in POE1. POE1 has wonderful orb system. There are various orbs (and essences, resonators etc.) that let you modify or craft items from scratch. POE2 imported some of it from it predecessor, but once again for some reason developers think that players should have less agency over everything, so they abandoned orb with effects that gave you agency like alternations, scouring, or whole crafting bench. In POE2 not only you have no meaningful item drops, but you also have no crafting at all. POE1 has been around for over a decade now, it had many leagues that were great, and other that were disappointments. Almost every league introduced some kind of crafting. We reached the point, where you need to have PhD in crafting to really play POE1. From all those experiments in various league, if there is one lesson to learn from all of it, is that players like and enjoy some kind of deterministic crafting. Look at the leagues that were most successful, like Masters league where you could slap multiple mods of your choice on an items via crafting bench, Delve league that introduced resonators that have some agency over crafting, Harvest league or that graveyard league, where you put bodies into graves to get item with properties you want. Some form of deterministic crafting is what players want, it's something that works and makes game better and more successful (more people play). All POE2 needed to do was to streamline all the convoluted systems from POE1 that were stacking over each other over the years and make it simpler or just throw some of it away, since you can introduce something new in POE2 in new leagues. But no. POE2 has no item drops, no agency over items, no crafting. All you have is gambling pretty much, it's not ever worth to pick up crafting bases and use trans orbs on it, all you can do it just pick up every yellow items and gamble with exalts. It's depressing that all your upgrades come from trading. It goes so deep that I do not want to spend too much time writing about it. But lack of meaningful drops, and too many tedious drops are quite frustrating. Why do we even have this horrible uncut gems system? It just introduces useless item drops. It was much more interesting when you could drop actual skill gems, you could have gems with xp or with high lvl that were tradable. Why did you introduce this abysmal salvage system? Are you seriously asking people to pick up items with quality or sockets, just to use it on salvage bench? Just remove this horrible system, it's boring, tedious and frustrating. It makes the game worse. Just scrap it and increase drop chance of orbs that affect quality/sockets/regals. Why do we have gold in the game? What is it's purpose? How is respecing with gold better than respecing with regret orbs? Did you just introduce gold so that you can add gambling vendor? Seriously even more gambling in the game? Is this game being designed by mobile game devs? I am feeling like I am playing much inferior game like Diablo3.... Let me say it again. Picking up useless items just to sell it to vendor or use it on salvage bench is NOT FUN. REMOVE THIS TEDIOUSNESS. While you are it, remove wisdom scrolls, and let us identify items with a click, or just make items drop identified.
4. Secure Online Economy
I have not explored this one too much, since I play SSF, but looks like not much has changed since POE1. We really reached a point where all the trading should be done in game without need to use any kind of outside platforms. Hopefully it gets implemented before game is fully released.
5. Deep Character Customization
The last point is hard to judge at the moment, as it will definitely improve with further patches. We are currently missing a lot of stuff like weapon types, support gems, perhaps other systems like Pantheons from POE1. But we clearly see how various design choices hurt character customization. Here we need to get back to items again. As items are the biggest part of your character. Lack of agency over items diminishes your agency over your character. Devs made a big design decision of tying skill gems to item types, which I think is massive mistake. This severely limits your options. Other issues are linked to balance, which should and must be improved. Most skills in the game are useless, and there are a lot of very bad support gems. This goes back again to - in my opinion very bad - design choice, where you can only use one copy of each support gem. It's interesting in that it makes you think harder about your setup, which is good. But most support gems are so weird, are convoluted with weird conditionals (hello Alignment support) or just straight up bad (like gems that increase cooldown by 8s for example). They removed life nodes from passive tree with explanation that nobody likes taking boring mandatory nodes. Well, this is true, but all it did is made energy shield that much stronger. This kind of effect is so easy to predict that it makes you wonder how devs missed it! There are big issues with balance of defensives. Player power progression is completely off. During campaign getting item upgrades is extremely difficult. You encounter a lot of issues like inability to get attributes for skills or items, you cannot get resistances, movement speed on boots, or if you find weapon type that you can use with your attack, which is of higher item type that you are currently using, but it did not roll increased attack%, you cannot add that modifier. A lot of skills, mostly melee drain your mana so fast, that it is better to use basic weapon attack on lower levels. It's absurd. All of those issues were already solved in POE1 with crafting bench, or you could buy items you needed from the vendor, or you had easy access to attribute (I am talking about +30 stat nodes) or resistance nodes on the passive tree, that you could respec later. I am sorry to say this, but your terrible socket system does not work. It feels like I'm playing Diablo2. Diablo2 is a great game, but playing fresh melee character in that game is a chore. Why are we evolving backwards? At this point I am shocked you did not implement stamina so you cannot run too much or weapon durability... During campaign you are so weak, that many people cannot defeat some bosses. Chat is filled with people asking for carries for bosses or ascendancy trials. In campaign you should be able to literally take any skill and blast through with it. But the balance is so bad, that most skill are utterly useless, and already there is a meta on how you should level. It's absurd. And we got to the ascendancies, boy, are they bad... Compared to POE1, ascendancies are so extremely weak and unbalanced. One of characters I tried is a Ranger. I decided to go with Pathfinder. Boy is this ascendancy terrible. Apparently it was quite good in previous patch, but devs could not stand of it, and from what I understand they nerved every single ascendancy that was actually good. Pathfinder has option to take one of concoction skills. By default Ranger is character using bow skills. But for some reason concoction skill can only be used while unarmed. WHAT!?!? Not only that, but they drain your mana flask, drain your mana, do very little damage. There is no way that you can kill enough enemies to sustain the flask. It's slow and horrible to use. There are ways to help with that, like aura that helps with refilling flasks, but it's not even listed as suggested option when you use uncut gems!! Is this skill good and viable in endgame? I am not a masochist to try to find out, sorry. This is just one example of a skill with failed design and progression. In maps you very fast reach a point where all your item upgrades come from trade. It's a really big problem. All in all, character customization is affected by early access the most, and I hope they will put a lot of effort into improving it. There are some other major issues I have with the game. But the biggest one of them is game performance. I absolutely love how the game looks. However it runs like crap. Forum is filled with people complaining about performance, even on higher end systems. On top of that european game servers are still experiencing issues. Other major issue is visual clutter. There are many effects that can easily one-shot you, but you cannot see them since they are overlapped by monsters or other effects. Game has tons of tedious elements like volatile purple plants, or enemies such as water hags, ascendency trials... At the end of the day, in my eyes game is nowhere near being ready, and it needs at least 2 more years before it becomes playable. But more than anything, it needs complete shift in design philosophy. Just take all the lessons you already learned from POE1. Do not go against it, but rather embrace it. Or if you do not want the game to be like POE1, than rename it. At this point naming game Path of Exile 2 is false advertising. I am extra salty since I was denied refund of the game. GGG, you should take responsibility for delivering faulty game. ขุดครั้งสุดท้าย เมื่อ 1 มิ.ย. 2025 04:50:07
|
|
" I'm a bit lazy so i'm not going to retype the reply i just did in another thread but i'll quote it here :p " [url=http://ibb.co/WpDD8K6T][img]http://i.ibb.co/qF00q1dZ/1681807032435.jpg[/img][/url]
|
|
|
So basically you're saying: poe2 should be poe1 with better graphics.
|
|
" Errr ... I'm assuming that was a reply to me since i referred to the possible re-using of some POE 1 mechanics ? If so, i guess you could infer that from my post if you'd like to, although i don't fully agree that both are automatically identical, nor was it my intention for that to be implied. Nonetheless, if you inferred that, and strictly speaking of my personal preference and opinion, the answer would be yes. It is a sequel to an existing game. It sort of makes sense to re-use some of the things that were really good in the original. However, what i was suggesting here was not that, but rather, using the best of both combined, to end up with something that would probably be better received, having the advantages of both systems combined. [url=http://ibb.co/WpDD8K6T][img]http://i.ibb.co/qF00q1dZ/1681807032435.jpg[/img][/url] แก้ไขล่าสุดโดย keppie#6373 เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2025 13:29:35
|
|
" Basically yes. It's in the name after all, it should be Path of Exile game. POE1 graphics are really ugly and dated. It's not that big of an issue, since gameplay and systems are so good, but it would be nice to have it improved. POE2 is just POE1 ruthless mode. I wish devs would have told us that. Instead they created this illusion that poe2 is going to be poe1 but improved. Like when they made a video talking about free, unlimited, no cooldown dodge roll. They made an impression that all movement skills are going to be free with no cooldown. It made you think that this game is being developed with pro-player philosophy in mind. But it reality it's the exact opposite. Game is anti player, anti fun, tedium to the max. Take a good game series, for example Heroes of Might and Magic. First game in the series was not that great, but it created a formula what was used in second game. Second game used the same formula, but it was bigger it better, it ironed out a lot of issues, it was all around amazing. You thought it could not get any better. Then they made Heroes of Might and Magic 3, which is even better. It was the same exact formula, but bigger and better. It was high point of the series. After that they completely changed the formula, and 4th game was an abomination. Every other sequel after that was quite but (some people like 5th one, but I still think it's bad). Damn, take even Dark Souls games, series that so heavily inspired POE2. Every single game in the series is considered quite good, and that is mostly because they stick to the formula that worked. GGG, if you are making a game called POE2, but it's nothing like the game that come before it, please, for the love of god, give it different name and stop wasting my time. Instead poe2 is unplayable for me, it stopped development of poe1. It's just all bad. I guess Larian Studios is the last company that is trustworthy. |
|
" Good thing you're taking Dark Souls as an example, because Dark Souls 2 differed quite heavily from Dark Souls 1 and received much hate, mainly from people playing Dark Souls 1. Yet there we're people liking it. And there were even DLCs, after all that hate. Changing formula isn't always bad. This game still isn't even finished, so there will be much change. Maybe even some you like. P.S.: I've played Dark Souls more than enough, and I love the series (except 2, but I don't rant about it on a forum and hate the developer for it and complain about EVERYTHING like the rest of the forum). แก้ไขล่าสุดโดย bloomhead#3858 เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2025 15:03:34
|
|
" there isnt anythin TO EXPLORE. trade in poe2, is done from the fucking same exact site as poe1. do you... want to know what he difference is between the 2 games since you play ssf? a fucking drop down menu. where you fucking click. dawn of the hunt. instead of clicking the fucking year long settlers league in the drop down menu. thats. literally. it. |
|
" That's really tough. How 'meaningful combat' should looks like in ARPG. Should players spent 1 hour to learn each mob timing on every map in atlas or? Jonathan mentioned parrying and dodge roll which is fun when 99% of mobs are faster then you and it's not like one mob, but 5-10 in a pack, how you are supposed to do that? Also, just one mod on mob or waystone could destroy all yours 'meaningful combat' tactics: proximal tangibility as an example, or invulnerability aura or not the mob but invulnerability shrine inside of pack of mobs XD, or my beloved temporal chains. I guess some developers were inspired by Dark Souls and Elden Ring and tried to add something to POE2 without understanding how it should be played. " It's not existing in the game at all. Ascendancies give literally almost 0 improves, skill tree has passives that you would like to pick if there isn't make your character weaker with "reduce global def" or "reduce attack speed", masteries for passive we will not see I assume, because developers don't like them, attaching skills to item type is just bad in a current state I'm just disappointed how we comes from POE1 where players are "God Slayers" and it feels like we are to POE2 "I died because was rushed by pack of wolfs and stuck in the corner with no ability to dodge". Hopefully, one day some developers that's are making decision regarding game design and balance will play their game from scratch and show it to the audience as some day one popular guy from HC top ladder did. I would like to see it. แก้ไขล่าสุดโดย ForsesGIT#6499 เมื่อ 31 พ.ค. 2025 17:14:29
|
|
" You are not the target audience. Plain and simple. |
|
" That is exactly my point. All trading should be done in-game, without need of a web browser. " Then name the game more appropriately, like Path of Ruthless for example. So people like me can simply skip it. |
|
