Open weekend beta tester review, level 30 witch

First of all I want to say thanks for an engaging game. In this review I'll try to avoid focusing much on things I'm sure are already on your to-do list. My criticisms here are about issues that are important for my own enjoyment of the game. Let me say that I tend to focus on the negative when I do reviews like this, but don't take that as an overall negative impression. I've spent the last few days playing this game and enjoyed myself quite a bit. I would like to play more, but there are some things I think I can be improved.

SKILLS:

I'm not going to go into skill variety or graphics now, because those are luxury issues that can be improved later. First I'll say I really enjoy the skill gem concept. I think it works wonderfully, and it adds an element of variety to itemizations with sockets.

I also think it would be nice to have more hotkeys for spells. It would be easy enough to add something where you hover over the skills and click a key to set the hotkey. Five may be enough, but it doesn't allow me to experiment with less-used skills, even though I have plenty of sockets for them. A nice-to-have. An alternative that would help my witch, at least, would would be having auras separate from the skill bar, leaving more room for actively used skills to be hotkeyed.

SKILL TREE:

The skill tree at first seemed rather daunting, but I feel like I did alright with my tree. Even though I'm a math guy and a programmer, and I enjoy customizing and planning ahead with crazy skill trees, this one is a bit much for me. I would prefer something more simplified. I think the skill tree has a bit too much variety for the sake of variety, rather than to allow customization. I'm sure the tree won't be changed much at this point, but perhaps a sequel could have a slightly simplified tree. Maybe there are others out there who love the ability to customize this much, but in the end people will pick several *branches* of the tree to get the results they want, and the small nodes in between are just filler and required, though they have some small effect.

Perhaps if the big circles were labeled with a description of the focus of their nodes, so it was easier to look at the big picture without having to look at every little node, it would make the tree more welcoming. The big special nodes do this somewhat, as do the colors of the nodes for str/int/dex, but they're not really obvious. Heck, even making the colors brighter/more obvious might break up the tree more readily visually. It would really just be nice if the groups of nodes stood out more, so you still have all the minor customization of the individual nodes, but you also have a bigger picture to look at.

ITEMS:

I love the itemization, especially the ability to easily reforge items to suit them to your needs. This is a lot of fun to experiment with. The sockets work wonderfully, they really add a lot to this game. This is my favorite thing about Path of Exile, probably because playing with items to get what I feel is an optimal character has always been one of the most fun things for me, other than doing the killing itself.

I will also say that I've never been a fan of magic find type gear because it makes me sacrifice power in order to find items, and I'd prefer to focus entirely on power and have everyone on an equal footing for finding items. I don't like to have to *think* about finding items when I'm pwning stuff, ya know, I want to be rewarded for the butt I kicked, not for the % find I added to my gear. But I probably am alone in this.

MULTIPLAYER:

Multiplayer was quite fun. For me a game without multiplayer becomes boring quickly. I like to make friends and feel like we are accomplishing something together. It's why I loved Diablo 1's legit & mod community, but didn't really care for Diablo 2 that much, as everything suddenly because about ITEMZ and RUNZ, not about cooperating with friends or just playing the game for the fun of it.

As in Diablo 2, currently looting is open. I don't really care for it either, but especially as a ranged class, it's difficult to get any of the drops if you're partied with a melee. This could be solved in a variety of ways, including a different loot system. But it's also the mentality of ITEMZ ITEMZ that causes people to take all the good loot too. Also, I would like the ability to have harder enemies and better drops solo, if the looting remains open.

My last comment on multiplayer is that things get quite chaotic. Heck, even in single player sometimes I don't know if I'm trying to attack my own minions or enemies. Allies and foes need to be distinguished more obviously so it's easier to tell what's going on. As a melee I bet I'd be even more confused, and I know I'd have a hard time targeting enemies.

TARGETING:

I started the beta playing a Templar, but found it difficult to click on mobs. Often instead of attacking I would walk past an enemy. Targeting is a serious issue in my opinion, at least for melee. Does not seem to be a huge issue with ranged classes.

STORY/QUESTING:

I don't really care much about story personally, and I'm sure the voice acting will make it more immersive, but even so, the problem for me with the story is that I don't feel like there's an end goal. In Diablo games, I was on a path toward killing Diablo or Baal, and even though not every quest was directly connected to the story, they were necessary for progression, and I knew where to go. In this game, I felt like I was just doing random quests, random quests that took a very long time to complete. In Act 2, it wasn't even clear to me how to complete the act. There needs to be more direction. Yes, open questing is good, but we still need more guidance so we know how to complete the act. It would also be nice to have some shorter, quicker quests thrown in the mix to break up the long journey for the other quests.

AREAS:

Areas seem quite big. In Diablo II, you could get lucky sometimes and stumble from one level to the next quite quickly, without having to complete the whole thing. In this game it seems it's rare to get through a cave without having to complete almost all of it. I'd like to feel like I'm a treasure hunter who lucks out once and a while and finds the quick path through the maze. But that's a small point.

More important is that levels reset after 15 minutes. You have a game here where you could spend half an hour tweaking your items in town once you get a new one, but the levels reset after only 15 minutes, and there's not even a warning? I think instead, levels you're currently in or have a portal to shouldn't reset unless you're idle for half an hour. But that wouldn't solve the whole problem, because if you die in level 2 of a cave and your waypoint is three levels away, and they've all reset, it is really annoying to have to fight through all that again, especially since it seems uncommon to quickly find the exit of a level. If that happens, I feel like all my efforts to get there in the first place were in vain, as if I accomplished nothing, and furthermore it gets boring fighting the same levels again.

I think either all the levels you fight once you leave a waypoint need to be retained so you can get back there on foot quickly, or there needs to be a way to get back to your instance when you die, easily. A quick fix would be to auto-cast a town portal at the start of the level whenever you die, but this is goofy. It's best if levels are not reset so quickly. Maybe an hour or two, or heck, even 30 minutes would be better. And you need to make these limitations extremely apparent, perhaps add some suggestions in the level loading screen about putting up a town portal just in case you die, or making sure the one that tells you levels reset every 15 minutes shows up more often. Now, I can understand a game like Dark Souls where when you die you have to do it all over again, but this game does not work like that. Going through a bunch of enemies like that is annoying, not rewarding.

MINIONS:

A general comment on minions. Minions should be useful against most bosses. Why should I invest points to make my minions stronger when they are useless against a boss who one-shots them? Maybe things change at higher difficulties, but I doubt it. I don't want to be limited to skeletons that die instantly because a boss doesn't have any corpses to use and he one shots them then comes after me. And I won't waste points in a skill tree on minions when they are quite effective already for normal mobs, and useless on boss modes. If there's going to be so much customizability, we need to be able to customize and be rewarded for it, but I don't think, at least at lower levels, that you're rewarded for boss fights with your minions.

UI:

The UI is very nice overall, but I did notice a few things. It would be nice to be able to buy and sell at the same time. It would be nice to be able to right click on an item to sell it or put it in my stash. It wasn't completely obvious how to level up my skill gem, I didn't realize I had to be wearing it. If I pick up an item, I can't just right click to drop it back where it was, I have to go back and left click. All these things made it just slightly more cumbersome to deal with inventory etc. Yes, I'm used to Diablo UI, and I may be biased, but these are nice things to have in the future to make things more efficient for the user.

In conclusion, Path of Exile is a very enjoyable game. I could see myself playing it for quite a while if a few key things are improved. The most important things I think should be improved are #1 targeting, #2 a meaningful story with a clear path and end goal, an evil to destroy that you are at least somewhat aware of from the beginning, #3 ability to get back to the area you were at easily. I don't mean to insult the PoE team when I compare things about the game to the Diablo series, either, it's just my background. Diablo 3 is your competition, but I won't be playing it. I would like to play PoE more, and if the issues I care about most are resolved I could be happy playing for quite a while. Thanks for your time. I better get back to playing before the open weekend is over. Of course, I wouldn't mind a beta key either. :)

Regarding another topic that came up today, if there is going to be the ability to, for example, down-grade skill gems through a vendor transaction, the existence of such transactions needs to be made apparent in-game, not in forums. The default assumption is that transactions are simple: you sell an item, you get some sort of scroll/orb combination in return. It is NOT straightforward that selling a skill gem along with a certain orb will return a modified skill gem. Thus you must at the very least provide an indication in-game that such recipes are possible, even if you do not specify exactly what the recipes are. Not to do so limits the abilities and knowledge of newcomers to the game, unless they spend time on the forums they shouldn't have to spend, or a high level player comes down off his high horse to tell the lower level player recipes. In Diablo 2, the cube made it apparent that recipes existed. In PoE there is currently no blatant indication that recipes exist. There should be.

edit: I suppose as long as there is some sort of manual that comes with the game that mentions that recipes exist, that would suffice.

I agree and disagree with some of these points. However, the one that stands out as serious is, indeed, the targeting. I have no experience as a game developer, so I can only assume that this isn't an easy fix. I read some posts for and against the use of targeting circles, and I agree with the rationale for them not using them. So, I can't think of how better targeting could be improved. Hopefully, they come up with something because that would greatly improve the gameplay experience.

The one suggestion that I disagree with most is the problem with 15-minute mob resets. In my experience so far with this game, if I'm at a high enough level, then I can ignore the mobs (unless I see a boss that I want to fight). If I'm not at a high enough level then this is a great time to get some more XP. So, I see that as a win-win.