How POE1 felt after coming back from POE2
" sorry if i miscommunicated. many players did try to save silk/nessa but its simply most likely impossible. i dont think the devs have made an official statement about it. but back in the day its was one thing that players did try and do. which led to the same result. most players have given up at this point as its reasonable to believe that the devs simply needed them to go the way they did. you mentioned a lot about the circumstances of ff7 and why things are. i agree with you. you mention da2 about lacking drive. yes i see the irony of it. but i wanted to point out a very specific part of it that gave some drive instead of "explore town" the way ff7 does. in that specific example DA2 did handle it better where they got the player to "go home" which many gamers would translate to "you can explore now or you can progress the story". in a more meaningful way. but i guess i could have given other examples. but that said, there are parts of da2 with a lot of drive. the very start of the game you're smack in the middle of combat, trying to survive. the drive is very strong but afterwards. it so lacklustre. as for ff7. actually now that i think of it many jrpgs really lack drive at the start of the game and actually expect players to WANT to play the game. for example. ff6, you control terra and your objective is to investigate an esper. you have no emotional bond with any characters nor do you really care about why she has to investigate. you do it simply to progress the story because its an FF game. FF games are "always good". chrono trigger is a personal fav. at the very start you literally just explore the town and shit hits the fan only when you get to lucca's device. ff7 does have this issue too. once i get to the world map. i m expected to explore the world map and to stumble upon a new area for something new to happen. [Removed by Support] Last edited by exsea#1724 on Mar 9, 2025, 8:39:46 PM
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" Its super common in ANY rpg, actually, scratch that, every MEDIA, to have minimal drive on the start For a simple reason: You dont know anyone yet Yeah, on ff6, you prob dont care about terra on the start and likely is more curious about the monster you are investigating that you barely even interact with. It dont matter, the game makes clear on the opening hour that finding out that shes amnesiac and youll likely find more about her with the character itself Okay, you might not want to be too engaged on the first few hours on ff7 as the characters seem to be stereotypes that will still be developed But thats fine, people DO "suffer" tro a bland start because the audience always expects some sort of development both on the setting and on the characters on stories that are not independent episodes You seem to equal "drive" with "action", i remember chrono trigger there was urgency, but i hardly cared about the story itself at that point And about the "go home", that is a largely outdated approach, games have long started to insert the sidequests in more organic ways rather than make an obvious cue that its time to put the main story aside and look for side stuff. Even on games like the trail series that have clear intervals between the various points in the story, the player should always expect hidden stuff every time a story event concludes and they got control of the character(another example: ff7 also dont cue you that hidden stuff is available, most notably, aerith limit 4) And honestly, dont take offense, but you sound like a FF hater. People like the FF stories because they are good, they tend to break stereotypes and tend to have good twists. Yes, some havent aged well, the stereotype breakage might have became the modern normal and the plot twist may have been copied too many times and thus, the story aged poorly, but they were legit good at the time People dont automatically praise a FF story just because its a FF, to give tree solid examples: FF12, 13 and 14. Fandom made clear that FF14 in general sucked and it almost tanked square-enix before realm reborn rebooted the whole thing. A large portion of the fandom is also not shy to tell that the original FF13 story was sub-par at best and the characters were straight up irritating. FF12 i personally found not bad, but even i will readily tell that the narrative is all over the place and its night incomprehensible mess on a first playtrough And to give my 2 cents on poe1 vs 2: Poe 2 for me feels like its focused on bossing, witch im not found of, i find boss fights tend to lose the flavor fast In general feels like a game tailored towards epic encounters on every turn, witch kinda, sorta, maybe goes in line with the idea back around 3 years ago when they forced AN down on our throats. Maybe its why it reminds me so much of dark souls with the rolling and stuff. But i didnt liked the DS-PoE mix, plain didnt worked for me, i hated the rolling, i dont think inv frames, even if just for non-aoe, have a place on this kind of game, i also dislike animation-canceling. Even on fighting games, i dislike when there is free cancels on big swings and option select, i prefer having to commit to my buttons and eat the consequences for a wrong input. Damn thing feels even more necessary than dark souls's roll |
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" i agree with you on most of what you say about drive, and how stuff was added. its not to say i m an FF hater. despite saying FF6 has low drive, it was one of my fav games growing up. the reason why i bring up drive is because i want to highlight how modern gaming has changed what players expect. back during FF6/Chrono trigger times, players were STARVED of games. people who loved jrpgs would flock to FF. not because of their story or anything but because it was a square game. it was Final Fantasy. all FF were celebrations. i still remember me and my friends being super hyped about FF whenever an FF title would be announced. so even tho you say the fandom agreed that ff14 sucked, back in the day FF always got a free pass. because of such, it was common for games to start with low drive. i would say its not necessarily a bad thing but it is heavily dependent on the game type. also older games had hardware limitations so games were slower by default. if you say i m an FF hater, i would say i love FF except 7 and everything after 9. i dont know if its accurate to say i had the fortune to skip 7 or not. i was really hyped for it but my parents didnt want to get me a PS so i was forced to skip it. by the time it got onto PC i had already experienced so many other games that i was coming in fresh without any of the "omg its FF" hype. i was no longer hyped coz of cloud with his huge ass sword. i was not giving FF7 any free passes. sometimes when we revisit older games that can happen. like what i mentioned about chrono trigger. unlike FF7, i liked CT. i finished the game many different times to get so many different endings. but when i replayed it over a decade later, i found myself lacking the drive at the beginning of the game. this is not the fault of the game. it's simply that games "back then" took the time to flesh things out. similarly FF7 took time to flesh things out. but even then i would say CT did it better. CT has a slow start, but once the first time travel happens, you're sucked in. every part of the story you have a strong drive. why am i exploring this area? i am doing it because of this and that reasons. i am hyped. FF7, why am i bombing shinra? coz i m a paid merc so even tho i m not invested, thats my mission and i ll have to see it thru. after that, go back to town. discover cloud is so unlikable as a person. then as i mentioned. what happens next? just explore the town. i do know what happens. shit does happen later when you explore a certain part of the town. but before that you have literally zero reason to keep going except that the game needs you to. and as i mentioned about the world map. when you get there your drive is quite minimal too. all this is a result of my exposure to modern gaming. you can explain terra is an amnesiac and the esper is the interesting thing. but before all that, a big question that older games always neglect to answer is "why should i care?". newer games always answer this question. as mentioned in one of my previous posts about mass effect. mass effect makes me care a huge lot on saving people. baldurgate 3 makes you care because theres a parasite in your brain and you just survived escaping a flayer ship. anyway i dont see any offence in your response. we are seeing different it from different angles. you have not been rude to me i appreciate that. as for poe2 its pretty reasonable to not like poe2. it really isnt for everyone and many people dislike poe2 for many different reasons. and so far almost all reasons i've read are quite valid and boils down to preference. like for your case is you would prefer it if bosses were more like poe1. nothing wrong with having a preference/opinion [Removed by Support]
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" But it isn't useless, because D2/PoE1 ARE that kind of game, centered around items (among other things, none of which are characters/story beats) where it makes sense to do this. Also like how these "partial secrets" added to PoE1 are about guaranteed league mechanics / item type drops. Meanwhile FF7 and the like ARE the kind of games where you might be able to change the story (though still not in major ways in most RPGs - that would be too expensive in most video games). " Huh, indeed
Spoiler
You find him anyway in Act2 : he says that he got saved by Rogues, and then forever charges you 100g/id.
But then it effectively changes nothing to the story, and is the opposite of «getting rewarded»... (Also play D2LoD (and its MP mods !), not D2R, which is a travesty with its added DRM.) " AN being ArchNemesis ? https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Archnemesis_league " Sounds pretty cool, but I guess it didn't work out due to how PoE1 is built ? Might have been a beta test for PoE2, after which GGG decided to do radical changes for PoE2 ?? |
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For me its exaclty the opposite i cant see why anyone would like poe2 ... RNG is what makes game interesting. A bad situation is what makes a game good. There is no such state in poe2 oh no the item didnt get mana next 6 slam until it happens. The game is plain boring. No Fusing No consequences for fucking your skill tree. Its like a baby simulator where you cant fail.
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Uh, people are complaining about PoE2 crafting being too much left to chance (rather than also having more fixed crafts like in PoE1).
And you still need to farm those orbs for crafting, as well as you need to farm gold to re-specialize (in PoE1 too, at least from 3.25/3.26 on...) Last edited by BlueTemplar85#0647 on Mar 10, 2025, 2:49:04 PM
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" Yup, i indeed was talking about Archnemesis but i wasnt talking about AN league itself, witch i think people were fine with. Not a spectacular league, but not offensive The issue was when they implemented the thing into core. Kalandra league by itself was unspectacular, but again, not offensive, but it became offensive because AN going core. The AN we currently have is result of a long string of nerfs and reworks because the vanilla core AN was a shitshow: loot goblin meta, extremely rippy or unkillable yellows and all. For the whole league the community was practically begging to remove the damn thing and they insisted hard in keeping it into the game and took a long while to finally get it into an okay state But anyway, im not willing to dig into the announces and news videos to dig the quote, so im gonna drop a "trust me bro", but the whole point in making AN core with the mods as they were in the original league intact was to make memorable encounters. They mentioned that they felt yellows were too much just fancy trash and they wanted to make memorable encounters that were not just bosses, hence, the AN buff. And yeah, i think similar ideas went into the making of poe2 |
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" I disagree that weak initial drive is something that we are moved past from To give a few examples: A classic with basically nill initial drive: Dark souls. Who tf are you? What are you even trying to accomplish? Why would you even care? I have to ring those bells, why? Because you are chosen... And? ...you are chosen... but what will happen when you do? Turns out, gonna have to do it to find out, by the time you meet a serpent and the game FINALLY gives something resembling an actual goal, how many hours worth of playtime you have? And you mentioned Baldur Gate 3, what about that game's elder sibling, Divinity OG Sin 2? Any initial drive that game gives is given on a wall of text on the character select screen and if you start with an original character, the drive is basically nill. Yeah, magisters are assholes, the people with power on the prison are assholes, the sympathetic souls are the ones on the receiving end of the abuse, why the fu should i care about anybody there? Really the "drive" you get on fort joy is to get out of there asap, less because any urgency, more to get away from those unpleasant individuals and the crappy place. And indeed, you just leave these sods to their fate(and likely will say good riddance). Seriously, the only reason to even get to the point you meet Gareth is because thats the path the game presents to advance forward And talking about more obscure games: Lots of people play blazblue for the story. It really dont show it if you take the first few hours of calamity trigger. The game trows you in the skin of a VERY stereotypical edgelord that feels came straight out of a comic book from the 90's, he also is doing stuff that feels came straight out of a comic book from the 90's. In fact, on the surface, every character on the first game perfectly fits some stereotype. Its a very compelling series, if only because the cast is so surprisingly colorful and really makes you want to see what will happen to them(plot becoming increasingly impenetrable on each game notwithstanding) And honestly, i think you are just not giving a fair chance to ff7, the gameplay aged very poorly, but the story still holds pretty nicely. Its kinda similar to dark souls in the sense that you need to make some effort to search the pieces, and the game does some things very well. I already said cloud codified the deconstruction of the edgelord, but outside that: theres a reason Sephiroth is so remembered, as the hype behind him was well build, aerith's death is something that even today, have very little equal(developed characters dying is common, but its very rarely done with: 1-A party member that is central to the plot 2-That is not replaced with another similar character 3-Isnt revived and the death dont happen in the last act) its a plot twist that forces the audience to deal with loss in a level not many pieces of media dares to. And more obscure... its one of the stories where the true bad guy gets away essentially scot-free, the audience being denied payback karma is something not terribly expected on media that is not marketed as mature |
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"doesnt change the fact that my mentioning of deckard being unsavable was your entire premise of me grasping at straws and you're just huh-ing away after throwing such a statement at me. " i would agree partially about crafting. my take is its too difficult to get a "decent" craft in poe2. to get 2-3 decent mods with no alteration orbs is a little too harsh imo. as for getting 6 mod items, i would say the game is balanced around players having 3 good mods and the rest are bonuses. as for being a baby simulator, i would give the counterpoint that in poe1 theres so many player traps in the passive tree. i would add, that i find it bloody ironic that so many poe1 lovers would laud poe1's skill tree as a grand feature (which it is) but at the same time the best way to play the game for the vast majority is NOT engage with the tree but instead rely on build guides. i would even argue saying that relying on a build guide is in fact playing like a baby. you're doing what you're told and not experimenting. ggg realized this and designed poe2 so that players actually engage with the tree. you can go meta and follow builds but you're not required to. in fact my first character in poe2 was a mace ranger. i got to level 87 or so doing my own thing and completely off meta (mace+ poison in fact). if you prefer poe1 thats fine, but just coz poe2 isnt something you like, doesnt mean its shit. so many people have enjoyed it. and if i m being honest a lot of my friends prefer 2 over 1. [Removed by Support]
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" i actually agree with you on many of your points. dark souls has bad drive. then again i didnt play dark souls. as for divinity OG sin2, it also has bad drive. ff7 also has bad drive. but do they make them BAD games? nope i did not say that. my premise of talking about drive is because we were comparing campaign mode between poe1 and poe2. lore/story/drive are all crucial parts that go hand in hand. like what you mention Divinity. i loved the fuck out of that game. finished it using just 1 (or was it 2?) person party soaking all the xp. theres a lot of customization. but i m not going to shy away by stating the fact is it has a bad drive. similarly, you mentioned a lot of good points of FF7. i m pinpointing one particular point that it objectively is bad at. the drive. i cant argue with you on the other points because i agree with you. theres a lot going on with ff7 that are great. but it simply doesnt take away from the fact that it has a bad drive. when we talk about campaign experience, to me story is something looming in the background. drive is what keeps us moving forward thru the campaign. a good story can be hampered if players are not motivated enough to continue down the story. the way i see it. if you want to objectively determine if a games campaign/storymode is good is if you take away all the cool character designs, take away the game mechanics, take away any "it gets good later" notion, you take all that away and the player keeps pushing themselves forward. THAT is a good campaign/story mode. when you mention blaze blue. i ll point out, that the drive comes from the players but not necessarily the game. the players want to know what happens to their fav characters. what they do is not too important. they fight whoever they're thrown at because they just want to know what happens next. not because the game is telling them a complex story. neversoft does storytelling for fighting games on a whole different level. you WANT to know what happens to the story regardless of which character you prefer. injustice/mortal kombat. their story modes are damn solid. you fight enemies because of how you encounter them in the story with clear motivations. but even then the drive is dependent on the game/story. some of their titles have stronger drives than others. in ff7s case. the drive simply wasnt enough to get me to continue onwards. is it unfair? perhaps. but thats why i mentioned theres a lot of factors to consider. ff7 came out when we had gaming droughts. we didnt have too many options. we enjoyed gaming differently. if got mindwiped and was made to play chrono trigger, i MIGHT quit early too. walk around the fair? thats not enough drive. i say that despite CT being one of my fav games "back then". and to that extent i would say poe1 suffers from that greatly. the only drive players actually had for the longest time is we needed an excuse to kill stuff. without referring to wiki. can most players tell me WHY the exile wants to go thru the prison? why peity talks to the exile as tho he has been persistently been a pain in her butt? why the player wants to go back to oriath? the "why go back to oriath" is actually a huge deal to me. coz different exiles have different motivations. it is not clear what each exile would do. in fact, lorewise for most of the characters theres no real reason for them to go back to oriath. for example marauder. he's not even from oriath, if he went back to oriath it would be for revenge. karui are not always vengeful. we see in ToTA that there are many factions with different ideologies. the marauder could even prefer to live in wraeclast rather than return to oriath. i would argue the ranger would even just make wraeclast her home outright. theres nothing "init" for the exiles to move on. as for poe2 i would admit that the drive is NOT too strong. "survive", get to town, help people out. but it picks up real quick when you're nudged towards helping the local townsfolk, getting revenge on the count, discovering the beast. etc. it picks up. but the drive in poe2 is much more stronger compared to poe1. in poe1 things keep happening with little interconnectivity. we fight malachai because we're told to fight him. malachai never did anything to us directly. perhaps dominus sentenced us, but we fucked him up already lol. after that things just keep happening that we have to deal with. a lot of people are saying poe1 story is real good. to me, the LORE is good. but the story is shit. i m not giving GGG a free pass on this. POE1's story was never a priority. the priority was making a good game and selling their game. GGG cobbled up the story out of nowhere and we were stuck in act 3 for the longest time before ggg cobbled up a continuation of the story that made us revisit past areas. why? to save cost. saying poe1 story is good is almost an insult to the large amount of effort ggg made to make poe2's story have more drive and interconnectivity. they even spent resources on making the absolute banger of an opening cutscene. i might be digressing away from the our topic. i m just saying some games have better drive than others. ff7 was just an example i used of a game with a bad drive. it objectively has a bad drive. [Removed by Support]
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