Absolutely disapointed -- This game is hard, and not in a fun way.
" This is funny. POE 1 has always been free to play? POE2 is going to be free to play. WTF you talking about. Die right here. |
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Sounds like PoE1 is where you belong, no offense.
PoE2 was designed to be different from PoE1, not a NEW PoE1. I'm enjoying it quite immensely, haven't enjoyed a game like this in over a decade. It's still early and I think there's a lot of tuning and squashing to be done, but it's early access, game has not officially released yet. Hats off to GGG - Keep it coming! |
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" agree |
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" +1. I agree. Please keep the game fresh and different. Let these people who don't like it go back to POE. Let us have this beautiful, difficult, wonderful game. Please don't ruin it by catering to people who want to play POE. |
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I have to add my voice to the OP. I am not elite. I am a gamer with some skills but play most games with "Normal" difficulty. I am not good enough to attract a user base as a streamer or participate in any competitions.
My highest character is a level 14 Mercenary who hit a wall with The King in the Mist, but I've ventured through Act 1 with all classes except the Monk. This is a long read. I'm sure it will spawn a bunch of "git gud" or be totally ignored, like most posts, but I don't care. Wasting my time writing this was still a better use of time than actually playing PoE2. That's enough for me to see that the designers and Game Director conflate "challenge" with things that aren't typically considered "challenge" in an aRPG. This seems to be to snatch Diablo 2's "Hardest Game Ever" crown thanks to their Hell difficulty, which took forever to beat. If the designers can't create a gameplay tail that lasts that long, they may feel like they have failed. Diablo 2's Hell difficulty was not intended to appeal to the masses, and the masses knew it wasn't for them. There was lots of D2 to go around. In PoE 2 the team arguably jumped to hell difficulty immediately and there is no alternative for the normies. I was there, and Hell didn't bother me because I knew it was a bonus for those who cared. It's not the primary way to experience the game. What do I mean by conflating the wrong things with challenge? 1. The game replaces strategic challenges with a reliance on timing, massive numbers of audio/visual cues, and artificially extending encounters—essentially a reliance on luck over strategy. 1a. For normal mobs, you need to be able to beat the rush. The mobs will bum-rush the character, get within range, and attack. That's the extent of normal mob AI. That "challenge" can be compounded by the number of mobs attacking. One army ant is worthless, but a swarm tears down almost anything. So - kiting is king. Death is inevitable if the mobs manage to corner the player where they can't dodge-roll out. 1b. Bosses are exercises in timing, audio/visual acuity, and health pools or phases such that the odds of missing a critical tell are exponentially likely. So kiting, animation canceling, dodge-rolling, and slowly whittling away an immense health pool, usually over multiple phases, while never missing a tell, is what passes for a "challenge" on bosses. One missed tell results in death and restarting. And, just for kicks, some mechanics cannot be reliably dodged or defeated. 2. Reducing the capacity of flasks further artificially increases the "challenge." Flasks have few charges, and there are few ways to recover charges, particularly in a boss fight. 3. To ramp up the "challenge" even further, good drops are miserly, and getting one that is good for your class is extraordinarily rare. I suspect people having less trouble with the difficulty cliff have benefited from great drops and/or lucky crafts. 4. More "challenge" is added by having anemic skills and cumbersome play mechanics. This is one of the few I feel mostly OK with. In many ways, this is where the "skill gap" can come into play and where practice can really make perfect. Many of the rest are pure (bad) design or luck-based. Manual dexterity is a boon when switching full load-outs on the fly and in the heat of battle to maximize your attack or rotation second by second. People with fast reflexes will be able to mitigate this issue better. Without the ability to "toggle" something with a single button, skills often rely on executing six or more buttons in very rapid sequences for even standard tasks. Any professional UX researcher will tell you this is too much to expect from a regular player. For example, with the Merc it would be helpful if I could toggle between ice and fire shotgun blasts with ONE key instead of dedicating a key to switching, then pressing to load ammo, then finally being able to shoot then pressing a DIFFERENT key to load the other... and so on. If I could change that to press key 1 to switch to ammo type 1, then press again to switch back to the original ammo type, it would be helpful managing all the buttons and simplify rotations. Strategy 1: Outlevel everything by three to five levels - or more for some classes. This is especially true of bosses. Strategy 2: Pray you get lucky with crafting. Strategy 3: As Joshua said in WarGames "The only winning move is not to play." I don't know what telemetry GGG is capturing but after nearly 100 pages of mostly regular people proclaiming, "Enough!" they have yet to comment. I hope it also calculates how many people bought and abandoned the game. I wish I had bought the game on Steam to leave a negative review, but instead, I did it on the GGG site, so they kept every penny (Steam takes 30% of all sales). Hell, I wish I hadn't spent the $100 at all. |
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" Agreed. It has been a lot of fun. |
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I enjoy PoE 2 a lot but it needs tuning. A lot of tuning. Bosses have way too much health currently and some (Geonor, Jamanra, VIPER) hit way too hard/are too tough to avoid
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" does the show have a forum with a section called "Early Access Feedback"? do you think that this section of the forum exists only for glazing GGG or something? they already started making changes based on feedback just like they have done for the entire history of their company |
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" Agree, overall it has been fun, I'm still 'only' mid act 3 but apart from some frustrating boss encounters and the poxy ascendancy trials it's largely engaging. It's still early access so I am hopeful that things will improve. I know they've done a lot of end game tweaks but most of us were mortals are nowhere near there yet so some love for us plebs would be welcome though! |
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"+1 totally agree, game is beautiful and i do like its so different and not just another zoom zoom, 1 button clear entire screen game. Besides im pretty sure the game will be even better once EA is done and its official release is up, after all we are not even a week in and a lot will still be changed and balanced i just hope they stay on the right path |
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