What We're Working On

i dread how much of a clusterfuck of league mechanics the game will be with the next expansion once betrayal goes core on top of everything else that was integrated this league.

Please GGG,

Lots and lots of player in South Africa / Indian Ocean => we BADLY need a GATEWAY for this part of the world !

I love PoE but stop playing because 250+ ms latency and ragequitting DESYNC are killing all the fun !

LOCKSTEP is NOT the solution !

Thanks in advance.

♥u

Just picked up the Sin and Innocence Armor and Wings since they are all on sale!! Thank you GGG!!

increase delve frequency !!!!!!!!

"

aska974 wrote:

Please GGG,

Lots and lots of player in South Africa / Indian Ocean => we BADLY need a GATEWAY for this part of the world !

I second this!

Maybe next language versions in 2019?
Polish version is announced few years ago. But since that we (Polish players) get nothing :(

Sign me up for PS4 Beta!! We started planning weekend LANs back in December with my trusted PoE henchman, it's about time! 😅

"

RPGNoobANKA wrote:

"

ಥ_ಥ wrote:

I'm stilling waiting for cinematics [...]

If you follow game design & storytelling (eg there are same good YouTube channels out there). Not every game needs cinematics.

Spoiler

Cinematics have upsides and downsides. Cinematics could also be seen as a crutch in storytelling.

eg Half-Life was the first game to not use Cinematics explicitly, but use the engine, the game itself, to its fullest extent possible to tell the story.

Vanilla WoW does not have in-game cinematics to tell the story.

Sure, GGG could hire a company to work on a fancy cinematic trailer for 4.0. But that would be money not going into core development. A one-off expenditure. People will watch it once, twice, but not more.

That Blizzard makes now expensive looking cinematics for WoW and other games is because they can ('Blizzard money').

Why Diablo 2 had cinematics, I don't know, have to ask David Brevik next time when he is streaming with his significant other. We could also ask if Diablo 2 needed cinematics in his opinion.

I think you're underestimating the charm of a good cinematic, especially for a style of game were story, lore, and world building is limited to the areas you go through, lore interactables, npc dialogue, and quests. Most of Diablo II's story was told through its cinematics.
It could have been done through a very long and boring npc dialogue, sure. Just like how one can make a sandwich with nothing but two slices of bread..
PoE, as the spiritual successor to DII happens to have similar limiting avenues for its story, lore, and world building. It could do the cinematics in game like Half Life 3 and more modern games, as you brought up. I personally think there's more charm in doing them not in-game. It allows for different perspective from our forever eagle-eyed top down view. It would also allow us to see the cool content the artists have done over the years as more than just concept art. Most of its lost behind the screen filled mtx effects of a party anyway.

Much more important than cinematics is the story itself. DII's was simple, Demon lord, players racing in pursuit. Nothing all that fancy. Yet it was done with such style that it's still one of the best rpg's of all time. It had pacing and build up. And that's really the reason I keep bringing this up over the years. PoE has focused on core development and its resulted in a game that by all rights is superior in everyway to DII but I would give up all of the Quality of Life features for a compelling, immersive, and fun story. Surely after all these years of core development, some emphasis could be allowed for a cohesive proper narrative.

All we have right now is each new expansion adding some new development, usually at the cost of what came before. Just look how trivialized The Beast became. We started off chasing Piety, dealing with her master Dominus and getting tidbits about the looming threat of The Beast. It turned out to be one of the biggest let downs in PoE history, just a trail of intestines. I remember waiting for months between expansions. Dominus in 3.x had the best buildup and execution PoE has ever seen. Music, Voice acting, powerful sfx from his lightning attacks, etc. Then act 4 came out, it had a very strong start but everything after the Mines was a huge letdown. Just half a dozen figures from the lore all shoved down your throat one after the other.
Then to top it all off, act 5-10, all at once. Completely trivializing everything coming before it.
And that's the problem with the state of PoE's story, it's not a build up from act to act, it's a build down. Kitava was a good try, but suffers from act 1-4 being virtually unrelated. They really could have just made Kitava the Beast waking from its slumber without Malachai holding the reins.
And revealed that the last time it woke up it devoured the Vaal.
Swap Utula for Dominus so the High Templar actually means something. Remove his phase 2 from Sceptre of God, so the last we see of him he's being dragged down through a portal. Introduce Dominus to act 5, as the orchestrator of the Beasts return and the fall of Oriath. The Beast would have taken him because he would be more maleable to the Beasts wishes than Malachai. It might mean redesigning the Beast or Kitava visually but atleast we'd get to fight the Beast properly after all the lore build up.

I'll stop at just those notes of a story. The building blocks are really all there, they just need to be properly fitted and molded for cohesion.

Will betrayal mechanics go standard or not?

SO.... i guess that's that then. We are done with patches for this league...