PoE2 is neither "Diablo 4.5" nor "PoE Permanent Ruthless Edition"
" I like this post, and in my head it makes a lot of sense. The difference here? Loot-based games let you compensate for lack of skills with good loot/gear: Your gear is the main driving force, not your skill. In skill-based games, loot/gear is only a supplement; your skill/timings are what matters the most. It's still unclear to me where PoE 2 will end up on that spectrum. What is clear, is that they WANTED us to think PoE 2 is more skill-based than PoE 1. What the reality is for a well-geared, well-rounded character, we don't really have a clue. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you.
| |
|
I imagine PoE, kinda through sheer necessity, has to land somewhere between PoE 1, i.e. player skill mattering not one single miniscule iota and your success being 100% determined purely and solely through your level of overgearing, and your Dark Souls/Elden Rings where gear determines your general style but it's on you to execute that style.
If Grinding Gear can successfully keep player recovery from being effectively instant across all characters, they've put the basic tools in place for reactive gameplay, and reactive gameplay is kinna the foundational element for "skill-based" games. You can't have a skill-based game without interaction between Game and Player, and that means the game both the game reacting to the player and the player reacting to the game. It's also the thing PoE1 completely and utterly lacks - if you try reacting to the monsters in PoE1 instead of overgearing to the point of nuking them before they can move you generally just fail and explode. This is, I imagine, the real sticking point - Religion of Zoom people do not want, and in fact actively hate, any form of reactive gameplay. If they cannot outgear the need to react, respond to, or acknowledge the game's enemies, then they see the game as "too slow" and pitch the legendary forum shitfit we've seen over the weekend. I keep seeing people say stuff like "I just wanna zoom, chill, pop monsters and get showered in loot" - these are people who do not want to have to watch the screen or pay attention to what they're doing, which is sort of a hard requirement for reactive gameplay and reactive games. Nobody uses Elden Ring as a podcast game, after all. The problem I see is that Grinding Gear has no reason to produce another game with zero player/monster reactivity. They already made the best ARPG on the market for that style of gameplay - Path the First. Hell, they have the market for nonreactive, boom&zoom Cookie Clicker-style "murder & chill" ARPGs pretty much 100% cornered, no other game comes anywhere close to Path the First in that regard. if that's the sort of game you like? Path 1 has your back and is more than happy to serve your needs. Path the Second being made to serve the exact same playerbase in the exact same way with the exact same gameplay makes no damn sense. The two games would then be directly competing with each other and we really would get the Awful Community Splitting everybody's so angry about and the eventual death of one of them. Path 2 being made as an evolution of the game and genre for people who are dissatisfied with the state of Path the First and allowing Grinding Gear to produce an entirely new product for an entirely new userbase? That makes a whole lot of sense. That way the games are complementary, not competitive - Path 1 draws a certain type of crowd, Path 2 draws a different type of crowd, but both games also feed into each other as those different crowds stray from their native games to try the other side of the equation for a while. And who knows - maybe those strays will stick around and decide to switch games entirely. Not that any of the Religion of Zoom people are goinmg to accept that. Always gotta be all about increasing the mirrors/hour rate and making sure nobody else gets to participate in the game for those guys. Bleh. | |
" If you think the average Joe will "participate" more if you need gear, skill AND total, constant attention, I think you're mistaken. Especially as they "see no reason to change trade or the economy". You're on a rampage, I see. I'll let you go on with it. Discussing the same topics in several threads with you is futile. You were blown away by PoE 2, I was not. Both are fair assessments. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you. Last edited by Phrazz on Jul 30, 2023, 6:14:09 PM
| |
" IDK Elden Ring is sitting on 20+ million copies sold and I'd wager most of them knew they were getting into a game that demanded skill and constant attention. Maybe the way this shakes out is PoE 1 is the podcast game and PoE 2 is the sit-up-in-your-chair game. |
|
" I think, or at least I hope, that the difference in Path of Exile 2 will be that you do not need remotely as much gear to be competitive, or at least to get going. In PoE1 the difference between "Good" gear and "Great" gear is four or five hundred divines and jumping from 500k-1M run-arounding DPS, i.e. clearing through white and yellow maps, to 20M Pinnacle DPS. The jump from "Great" gear to "Awesome!" gear is four or five thousand divines and jumping from 20M Pinnacle DPS to 250+M Pinnacle DPS, which is an utterly non-negotiable hard requirement to even see "endgame" content, let alone try and participate in/experience it. No one can make those jumps. Not by themselves, not without jumping into the market, and that means the overwhelming majority of the playerbase is more or less completely locked out of the endgame. The gear requirements to actually participate in Path the First's endgame are arbitrarily insane, and furthermore make no sense to a large number of players. Path of Exile has substituted "do you know the mysterious magic of Making Infinite Currency?" for any form of skill, knowledge, or investment in the game. Someone who knows the mysterious magical secrets of Making Infinite Currency finds Path of Exile pathetically easy and extremely chill and casual because they can just throw a few thousand divines at whichever random build they feel like and not care what the game does anymore. Anyone who doesn't know the mysterious magical secrets of Making Infinite Currency is gear-gated to low red maps at best, left floundering in the muck with no way to buy their way into the content they actually want to see. In Path of Exile 2, my hope is that you can compensate for haviong good-but-not-great gear with Being Good At Game, or compensate for having Great-But-Not-Awesome! gear with same. If you are Good At Game with Awesome! gear, congratulations - you win PoE2 and can put whatever Path the Second's version of Uber Maven is on farm status. But I'd like the ability to use strategy, versatility, and superior tactics to at least partially compensate for the fact that I can't just throw a few thousand divines at every build I make to get an entire loadout of mirror-tier gear and ignore the game. Path is a loot-based game at heart so you'll always need to manage some gear progression. But man. Wouldn't it be nice if you could get into endgame by being an excellent player instead of just an excellent market flipper? | |
" I don't trade until I reach at least yellow maps. I still think you're hyperboling every part about PoE 1, from the speed, the requirements for "success" to the effort needed to get somewhere. And I NEVER flip. " Maybe. I'm probably out, then. I mostly play video games to relax and wind down from a pretty stressful job. Sometimes, just sometimes, you should really consider adapting to the world, instead of demanding that the world adapts to you. Last edited by Phrazz on Jul 30, 2023, 6:41:36 PM
| |
" Players do it in SSF all the time. When does this gating start in your opinion? |
|
