PoE2 Early Access: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly

TL;DR: It's a rant. With added flavor text.
From a "filthy casual's" perspective, too. You have been warned.
No, really.

Ahem.

As a preface (and to let people know where I'm coming from), I can hardly be considered a hardcore Path of Exile player. While I have created a PoE1 account back in February 2013, I don't have thousands of hours under my belt. Maybe a couple hundred, tops, most of that on a stand-alone client and some of that on Steam. I never managed to bring myself to invest enough time into a character to reach Maven or Uber Elder, so I'd say I'm a long time *casual* ARPG enjoyer. To put it simply, I play for *fun*, not because my paycheck depends on it.

That said, PoE1 wasn't my first ARPG either. I count myself among the lucky ones that still remember that nagging "I sense a soul in search of answers" line every time we needed mana potions and have developed a peculiar skill of clicking a belt item *just* at the right moment when picking up valuable stuff... But I digress.

Now, with that out of the way... I currently have slightly over 70 hours in Path of Exile 2 and I feel like I've seen enough for a solid first impression to take shape. And my feelings are unfortunately, quite mixed.

First, the good stuff.
The overall style, the art direction, the visuals are top-notch. Bloodborne vibes in Act 1, a rotten, corrupted twist on Prince of Persia in Act 2 and whatever is happening in Act 3 can only be described as Nurgle and Tezcatlipoca running a joint landscape design project. Hats off to the art team.

Sound, voice acting and music - good. Really good, even. Maybe not "we've hired an entire symphonic orchestra to record a boss theme" good or "Where to find PoE 2 soundtrack in FLAC, I need it NOW!" good , but still good. Maybe I've been spoiled by those mobile gacha games with outrageous music budgets on my cellphone, or maybe I'm too old to be impressed by anything short of extraordinary, but at least I can't say it was disappointing in any way - which is a praiseworthy achievement in my eyes.

The look&feel of combat is also way above average - the way monsters react to being slammed, shot, fried, frozen or electrocuted, the whole feel of artistic butchery was very much to my liking - especially at first, when I was getting acquainted with the game. To put it simply, it feels *good* to hit/shoot things in this game. Unfortunately, this is where things started going a bit downhill as you progress, too, but more on that later.


Now, why am I not ready to sing praises to the game as a whole or even recommend anyone buying Early Access at this stage? Well, one of the most important things in any ARPG, at least in my opinion, is that rush of excitement you feel when you get to try out new, powerful toys. It's a game, remember? And games are supposed to be fun, first and foremost. For ARPGs, this means getting shiny loot and powerful skills that allow players to kill stuff in new and creative ways. The power fantasy, the magic of becoming an avatar of death and destruction, cutting through enemies and making things go BOOM.

In PoE2 that feeling lasts for... About two hours from the start of the game. Your first weapon, your first regular skill, your first Spirit Skill. Your first Magic-rarity items and maybe if you're lucky - your first rare. Afterwards, the whole thing rapidly mutates into something... Unlikeable, to put it mildly.

To provide an analogy, it's as if you're given a set of basic LEGO blocks as a kid, but as soon as you figure out what to with the simple stuff and say that you want more, a grumpy uncle comes in and says that you're not getting any more new blocks until you clean the toilet with a toothbrush and mow the lawn with nail clippers. To make matters worse, when you actually manage to pull that off, they just throw a bag of broken, grime-covered block pieces (and a half-dry tube of superglue) at you and say that if you want new stuff, you'd better start cleaning and repairing it all.

Simply put, the game's way of rewarding the player time investment sucks more than an industrial-grade vacuum cleaner at the moment. The loot we get is 99,9999% junk. The tools we get to make something usable from said junk are scarce and low quality. Most importantly, the joy of overcoming let's say, a boss level is completely and utterly ruined when you realize that your rewards are going to be junk for the foreseeable future with very, very few exceptions. It's like Santa's been gifting you coals for your entire childhood.

The fact that pretty much all but a few unique items in PoE2 have (apparently) been designed using a "fortune cookie with razor blade filling" recipe is not helping either. They look nice on the outside, but eating (using) them is likely to get you maimed or killed more often than not. Literally. Yes, I know there were a lot of outright useless uniques in PoE1, but hey, that was over a decade ago, surely whoever designed the items that way did it as a pratical joke, had their fill of making players sad and moved on by now, right? Nope, it only got worse. Try as I might, I cannot remember a single game (PoE1 aside) in decades that made me feel THIS un-excited whenever I saw a unique/legendary drop. An item has a useful affix or two? Wanna wear it? Oh no you don't, we made sure there's a negative affix in the mix that's going to make it useless. No negative affixes? Sure, but then it's going to have such ridiculously low stats that a well-rolled Magic item with two affixes is going to be better than a legandary more often than not. No fun allowed!

I don't know if it's some twisted sense of humor or a touch of poorly controlled sadism, but rewarding players with junk is not something I look forward to. It's simply not fun when you can't expect any awesome loot in a game about killing millions of monsters for loot.

Next, the combat.
As I moved through the levels, completing the campaign and starting to work through the maps, I started to get the feeling that the core design concept is suffering from a bad case of schizophrenia. The early stages of the game give off heavy Souls-like/roguelike vibes - it pays to be methodical, careful, and precise. There's hardly any rush, everything is perfectly visible, well telegraphed and tactical. If you die, it's easy enough to figure out what went wrong and what you need to do to improve. I really liked this part... Too bad it didn't last. It's almost like someone with a bunch of good ideas was working on the game's combat only for a giggling madman to sneak up on them, clobber them with a baseball bat and turn the mid/late game into a frenzied mess of overlapping AoE spam and insta-kill mechanics. Playing tier 1 to tier 10 (where I'm currently at) maps felt like a different game is trying to wear the flayed skin of the real Path of Exile 2, Buffalo Bill style. Yes, that creepy.

If you ask me, the game needs to make up its mind regarding combat pacing and balance. The spammy approach has its merits, true, but there are plenty of games that utilize it already - not to mention some skills, and sometimes - entire classes (*cough* Warriors *cough*) have clearly been designed with the "tactical" approach in mind and fit the rest of the game like a square peg does a triangular hole.

On a side note, for the love of <insert deity of choice here> someone should tone down the late game visual clutter. It may look impressive on an animated skill thumbnail, but when you need to tiptoe around a dozen things on the ground that can get you killed while dodging a literal bullet hell, having your own abilities flashbang you at every step feels horrible. And don't even get me started on multiplayer - partying up with an Infernalist or a WH/Gemling with grenades feels like staring point-blank at electric welding. It literally hurts, not to mention, it's really, REALLY hard to tell what is safe to stand in and what isn't.

While we're at combat, it seems that this game has three and a half, maybe four classes. Weird, since Early Access was announced with way more. Yet, as of writing this text, the top 1000 positions are take up by 465 Stormweavers, 152 Deadeyes, 141 Invokers and 116 Infernalists. The rest of the classes... Exist, I guess. Too bad they're not really viable as a first pick without having a full stash of currency and items to make leveling them less painful. Yes, I realize it's Early Access, but still, it's not like it's GGG's first ARPG, balance could've (and should've) been way better. That, and whoever decided that Sanctum League (Trial of Sekhemas) is a good way of getting ascension points needs to be fired or demoted to cleaning coffee mugs full time. Core class mechanics like Ascension should not be locked behind gimmicky challenges that require cookie-cutter builds.

The builds, by the way, deserve a separate downvote. One of the game's biggest selling points is how much you can (theoretically) experiment with how your character does things. It would make perfect sense to allow creative freedom in that aspect. Instead, we're looking at ridiculous respeccing pricing (even after the patch), even more ridiculous prices of obtaining a different set of gear and skills with more than three sockets. It seems that it's cheaper to roll a whole different character than to respec if you want to try new things, and it doesn't feel good at all.

Another big, rusty nail in the coffin (ok, maybe I'm exaggerating a bit here, but it gets the point across) is that the game is trying to be the Souls-like of ARPGs without really understanding what makes a good Souls-like. It's punishing the player at every step with single-use boss keys, one-portal maps, experience loss, wiping events from map nodes where you've died... I'm almost surprised we don't have to repair our gear, too. But where a Souls-like game punishes you AND teaches everything you need to know to get better at the same time, Path of Exile 2 punishes players WITHOUT making it a learning process. I died dozens of times while learning the Malenia fight in Elden Ring. That "...and I have never known defeat" line still rings fresh in my ears even after a couple years. But eventually, I learned the fight in and out and beat her to my great satisfaction. In Path of Exile 2, I typically die to surprise one-shots, some of them - off-screen or from a corpse I can't even see exploding in my face... Simply because a rare mob decided to roll a combination of affixes that produce more spike damage than my entire HP pool, capped resistances or not.

Now, while I'm not particularly surprised that fun game modes like Delve and Heist from PoE1 didn't make into the game yet, early access is early access after all, but current "endgame" content is lacking in so many ways that it causes a serious aversion after very little playtime. Thanks to that, the more I play, the less I'm looking forward to challenging new content. It seems that even attempting to tackle the pinnacle bosses or harder game modes is going to take such prohibitive amounts of grind (remind me, how much does it cost to run a Simulacrum nowadays?) that I'm better off watching fights like Arbiter of Ash on YouTube. While it does take some skill to complete those, it also takes headache-inducing amounts of grind to get anywhere - and even if you do, it's very likely to end up in a failed attempt and "back to square one you go". Remember when I said "games are supposed to be fun" a couple lines back? Well, not only is what I see in current PoE2 endgame not fun, it doesn't play like a game. It feels like another full-time JOB instead, with no bonuses, no joy and a sadistic boss itching to kick you in the teeth the moment you stumble and fall. The way things are going, it seems like the only logical choice is clearing the campaign with a different character and forgetting the game exists for another year or so.

And finally, I can't help but mention one other aspect - why does the game feel like it's been released in the year 2000 or so QoL-wise? No sorting options, no "stash all similar items" buttons, no built-in WYSIWYG UI to make a loot filter unless you're willing to write a text config file or copy someone else's homework? And trading requires you to open a website in another window of all things, and whisper people one by one, hoping someone will answer? If this is a "design philosophy", the philosopher in question needs to crawl out of the cave/from under a rock they've been living under. It's laughably bad compared even to other modern indie ARPGs.

Long story short (well, that WAS a wall of text) I cannot recommend anyone except for the starved-out ARPG fans and long-standing PoE fans (verging on fanboys) to purchase the game in its current EA state. What we have in the current build is a rough, almost blank slate that needs taking a hammer and chisel to it - it's just way, way too raw and as soon as you're done with the campaign, you'll be in for a sore disappointment.

My biggest fear is, while many aspects can be fixed by patching this and that, no amount of band-aid solutions can fix the inherently flawed and self-contradicting core game design - and I sincerely think it needs and overhaul before it can be called a game and become a source of fun, not frustration at the time wasted.