gamer dad's review

Hi there,

I feel like my demographic barley gives any feedback. You won't find us on youtube or on discord or on reddit that much. Personally, I want to keep this as constructive, transparent and relatable as possible, so I’ll start with some context (and sorry for bad english btw.). I'm in my forties now and I grew up with Diablo 1 and 2 - those are pure childhood memories! Now it's job and kids and councils and yeah; you know the drill ... I play games every few months and sometimes it's years without touching any. If I pick them up, however, I tend to binge play them until I get bored again. There might have been 2 or maybe 3 games, that I carried past the 100- or 200-hour mark in the last 15 years. And POE 2 is one of them. So, first of: yeah, the game is great - no doubt! I not only enjoyed it, I got outright addicted. I played 218 hours over the last 1.5 months, which - for a working family man - is an insane amount. And it's fair to say that POE2 was 100% of my spare time since the new year.

I'll bring up some points in chronological order as they occurred during my game experience

a) NAMING:
This might earn me some laughter and 'lol, casual' slurs but this is also a hill I’m willing to die on. The game starts with a real immersion killer because you can't put any reasonable name on your char. I tried like a dozen names in multiple variations before settling on a butchered writing (Only to return 30 minutes later with some other flawed attempts). I get that there is a technical layer to this, but I’m also sure that it can be solved. I know, that it is the game mechanics, that keep you hooked by the end of the day but nevertheless: at the start I came for the lore - it's an action ROLE PLAY GAME after all. Why the f* can't I role play here. 9 out of 10 ppl in the chat are named 'dildo_icemonk' or 'Hannnzzzzy'. GGG, please, ... ROLE PLAY game. at least make it possible for those who try. This bugged me hard many hours into the game to be honest. And even now, 200+ hours in, I’m still bothered by my char's names.

b) SEKHEMAS:
This was my first real wtf-moment and i'm certain that you lost people here (in fact i know by reading comments elsewhere). For me? I fell in love with the trial some time later. it's a great addition. I also do like the difficulty and the RNG-mess on the next floors. However, this needs better framing imho. You have those mini-vids on the skill-gems. Just make something similar for the trial. Introduce the most core principles like relics, honor-resist, max. honor, defenses and merchants. players can figure out the other stuff (and there is enough micro to figure out for sure) by themselves. Doesn't have to be much, just a short 25 sec vid or something to point in those directions. Oh, and btw. let it be known, that it's okay or even wise to over level here.

c) CAMPAING AND LORE:
Somehow Act 2 didn't click for me, but that's a me problem, I suppose. After watching some lore vids, I have to admit that the POE lore is incredible rich. However, this flies over the head of the first-time player. Who knows, maybe there are ways to improve here - not the most important thing though

d) TEMPLE OF KOPEC:
my second wtf-moment. And again, what a blast! The final game should have at least another zone with such great changes to the mechanic. I absolutely loved and hated this at the same time. great experience and most welcome change of flow. (Also i probably did this with like 5-10 resist, so it really made for a difficult challenge) .

e) SSF, TRADING and LOOT:
The game almost lost me here and I’m sure this is, where most 'casuals' check out. Again, I’m not asking for a change of mechanics but for better framing. background: I had not traded until late act 6. I didn't follow any build guides, because why would I. My demographic doesn't binge youtube. I haven't played POE before, so this was my blind attempt to play and enjoy the game as a new player. By that point I died like 300 times. Huge chunk goes to the gorilla fight btw., that felt absolutely great and just the perfect mix of, 'there's no freaking way' and 'I can almost do it' so I threw like 100+ sub 1 minute attemps at this and had a great time trying (background: on my map, after the first death you had to fight the boss and all the mobs at the same time, right after the respawn - where they rushed you... so it was guaranteed to be action packed - great!). Some time after this I decided to sell all my inventory to gamble stuff, Alva-traded all my currency into 8ex and started player-to-player trading. I replaced every item for exactly 1 ex (mid January) and I didn’t die for the next 100 hours of game play (well, maybe once or twice by negligence much later, but you get the point). This felt like cheating and in a way it absolutely is. Granted: maybe I wasted some ex during my campaign by noob crafting, maybe I overlooked one or two good items... But there is such an insane difference between the quality of loot and trade - it's surreal. You absolutely have to frame this for the new players. There is no in game clue, that trading is highly recommended (it's an off game trading site ffs) there is no warning that SSF is for experienced players and requires quite some understanding of all the stats and the multiple in game mechanics. New players do - without a single warning - run into a wall here and this needs to be adressed

f) ENDGAME:
well, we're all in the same boat here, I guess. And my feedback will probably cover what most players have already said about the end game. For me it's two major complaints that in the end made me quit.

-> Death-penalty: Yeah, of course - it's an issue. Since lvl 83 or so I found myself using the ESC-out strategy to avoid losing hours of progress. And that alone tells the whole story, if you aks me. unfun mechanic - forced work around, huge motivation killer.

-> Map choice: this sealed the deal for me. Why can't I choose which map I want to play? It's not just a question of preference. Some maps really do perform bad on the FPS front (btw WTF is wrong with 'Blumenwiese'!?), some are full of visual clutter. Some are 50% backtracking ... It's just not fun. Other players might enjoy other maps - that's fine by me. But having this semi forced Atlas-route. That's really not the way to go, GGG, and it should be obvious. Let's step back for once and ask ourselves, how humans do handle things. Imagine a restaurant where you must pick a certain meal, because, yeah reasons, dude. Would you recommend treating a customer that way? Hell no. You make sure everything on the menu is great and let the customer decide. If all they want is spaghetti, then shrug it off and let them pick. No questions asked. Just make sure the meal tastes good...


well, I could write a whole essay but I have other thing to attend to, so I'll leave it at that. I've had a fun time playing for almost 220 hours, which might be a 20 year record or so. Honest and most sincere congrats on that. You have a fantastic game with a solid foundation! However, I'd probably spend double the amount of time if it wasn't for the things mentioned above. Well, we'll see again someday, I guess.

There are a few of us but mostly we're used as a stick to beat the game with by people who want everything to be easier.

wrt naming - as every character needs a unique name, most of the best names are taken in an early rush of people creating buttloads of characters and reserving names. I tend towards theming my names, for instance prefacing everything with Captain_<name I want>, it just needs to be unique. But don't expect any level of roleplaying at all in here! the "RPG" is just down to the style of game, no one is living as their character in here.

wrt trading - it is a problem, if you don't use the PoE website to create an account, how would you know of its existence? You say you didn't do any trading until act 6, and that's by design - the campaign should not require trading. For maps, it's inevitable unless you want to spend hours farming for gear, something I don't have the time to do and others I imagine don't either. But for whatever reason, other than the cash shop, GGG don't have external links in the game.

wrt death penalty - it takes some getting used to, but it's not worth getting frustrated over. I have several years in PoE1 to get used to it - the takeaway is that by the time the penalty is super impactful, I've either reached my play limit or I take some time to upgrade. I don't log out when I'm likely to die, I just eat it, but play to avoid it in the first place. The only time I worry about penalty is when I'm around 80% of the way to the next level, and I have a set of easier maps I work on when I'm there. I consider anything above level 90 as a bonus, not a requirement.