GGG has to decide whether or not they want this game to be mainstream or remain niche

OPs premise that if ggg does not do x this will be a niche game is false. ARPG in general is always niche. It will not become mainstream unless it is enjoyable. It is way to uninteresting to be so slow or soulslike. Mechanics, bugs, and what is still missing in the game put this at more than a year away if not 1.5-2.

I know the game is in early access, but it will need some major revisions if they want it to appeal to a wider or mainstream audience. It has to be fun for players of all levels of experience/expertise, otherwise they will continue to be a niche game like POE1 which is not new user friendly.

I will just say this: people who use vague sky is falling popularity narratives in their feedback almost always have terrible feedback, extremely superficial understanding of game design or why things are intended to work a certain way.

In any case every game has to pick an audience to some degree.

I'll never not find it annoying that everyone who has feedback insists that their personal feedback is existentially important and by implication or quite often outright assertion: if you don't do what I want the game will die or be less profitable.

You can't please everyone and when you try you will end up with a shallow game.
This doesn't mean your game will be a hit or a flop though given triple AAA games recently it does seem to be tending toward the latter.

I played of and on poe 1 for over 1000 hours.but i still absolutely loved the poe2 campaign. Its worth a triple a priced game in it self and we only seen half of it. Release wont have the same over again.

But that said. It was a great experience but i also dont wanna do that over snd over again. Its a insanly good made campaign..but everything gets old pritty fast no matter how much you generate the maps. Its still the same ish.

Totaly agree that we need campain skip atleast on 2nd character Atleast in softcore.

"

MarsAstro#7928 написал:

"

NickyRick#1268 написал:

"

AliquamGames#5952 написал:

>artificial difficulty
Stopped reading

Imagine the following scenario. You use a melee class that is so slow that it seems to be in Slow Motion (Warrior). And you are in Trials of Chaos, with the modification that makes any mob, when it dies, release an ultra-fast energy sphere that chases the player.

I don't even need to say that this does not go with a melee class at all. And it gets even worse when everything causes a oneshot and there are 10x more traps chasing the player.

It's definitely not artificial difficulty, right?

I think their point is that there's no such thing as non-artificial difficulty. There's no "natural" difficulty in games. Games do not sprout out of nature on their own, they are designed by people. That makes every single part of a game artificial by definition.

The word you're looking for is "unfair", not "artificial". That is an unfair scenario where you're not given a fair shot at beating the difficulty with skill, but a more fair version would be just as artificial as the unfair one.

Artificial difficulty means difficulty that is not related to acceptable player improvement/learning nor related to meaningful/acceptable character progression.

There exists non-artificial difficulty. Just look at the first Dark Souls game, which was deemed as "THE difficult game" after being released (in fact, just look at any Dark Souls franchise game the first time someone plays them).

All of them have a lot of what PoE has: hard places to walk around, hard bosses, getting basically one-shot, dying a lot, stupid deaths (like falling from cliffs), "harsh" death punishment (going all the way back to the bonfire and losing stored sould).
People rage-quitting playing sessions were even a meme back then.

But with almost every death you learn something: disengage mobs if they get to you while you're on small ledges because you'll likely fall and die, you learn the optimal routes between bonfires and the boss you're trying to kill, you learn the best ways to kill some mobs. After almost every death against a boss you practiced dodging older attacks or you learned about new attacks they have. It was a genre-defining game for a reason. It was difficult but it was rewarding and no death really felt cheap. Lots of deaths felt unfair even, but never CHEAP.

You want more non-artificial difficulty?

- Guild Wars 2 CM raids: hard and complicated mechanics, most of them being party-wiping. But endless attempts, no death penalty, every attempt you learn something new or practice optimal ways to do the raid and mechanics. Again, no deaths feel meaningless or cheap. You're always progressing forward instead of being pushed back.

- Super Meat Boy/Celeste harder maps: what you have to do better is almost always very clear. Maybe it's more precise movement, maybe a different timing, maybe you need to learn a new way to get through an obstacle because you have to save a dash, etc. Again: always moving forward, not really being pushed back.

PoE is the complete opposite of these games, actually. The game is very complicated and that's where the valid difficulty lies: learning curve of the theory. But after that, the game doesn't have any more valid difficulty in itself. After you know how to reach mid-mapping 99% of deaths feel cheap and basically unavoidable (unless you invest streamer-level hours into the game)

"Niche game"

POE 1 top 60 Steam games of all time by peak player count.
POE 2 top 15 Steam games of all time by peak player count.

POE 2 #5 by 24-hour peak.

Top 15 by viewer count on Twitch.

Seems pretty mainstream.

What souls games also have are punishment windows where you actually have time to damage enemies. POE2 enemies are relentless and the windows do not exist unless you somehow manage to fill their stagger bar. Also in souls games not every mob engages you at 1000mph so you have actual time to react, identify the enemy type and deal with it accordingly. Some rare boss mobs in this game kill me before I have time to finish reading all of the modifiers they have mainly because there is too much visual clutter on the screen. Souls games lack the visual clutter giving the player clarity even during some of the most difficult battles.

So for us to deal with everything coming at us in POE2 we have to build for speed, speed and more speed to get out of the way fast enough or to cast quickly enough to dispatch foes before they can do anything. The one thing that a good soulslike game gets right is the amount of ways you can deal with an encounter. You can go as fast or a slow as you want, buff up for a big bonk or chip away in a war of attrition. You have options and many ways to build to meet those options. You can even go with a lv1 character, learn all the moves, sidestep all the damage and win the game wearing only your underwear with a basic wooden club. Try that in POE and tell me how that works out.

"

Waitn4D4#0477 написал:

"

_rt_#4636 написал:

The 580k player peak and 400k+ players online on Steam after release are proof of that

250k right now in the middle of the day on a weekday, still as high as the best POE 1 league and we are a month into launch.

I do agree though that end game needs massive changes. We should never slog through low tier maps just to "get somewhere" and waste our time, especially when we are hundreds of hours into a single character. Every map should be juiced and/or somehow worth it to run, not feel like a chore.

You can't judge POE2 on its population now. You need to wait until at least 1-2 standard seasons in.

Right now you are getting D4 players that will come for the hype and play once, but they won't come back and play multiple seasons. Once the tourists have left, then we will see what the real player base is.

"

dkp#0523 написал:

"Niche game"

POE 1 top 60 Steam games of all time by peak player count.
POE 2 top 15 Steam games of all time by peak player count.

POE 2 #5 by 24-hour peak.

Top 15 by viewer count on Twitch.

Seems pretty mainstream.

Yeah and lost ark was organic and not full of bots. The chart has a very healthy down trend right now.

"

_rt_#4636 написал:

All the design choices that made PoE 1 a niche game are here in PoE 2, and they're worse to an extent that even PoE 1 players are frustrated:

1) Long and boring campaign that has to be repeated for every new character is now even longer

Скрытый текст

Even MMOs already give you an option to skip the initial phase of the game after your first character. Let's not forget in MMOs you're not creating several characters every few months and the universe needs to be more immersive.

The fact GGG still hasn't given us that option only makes me doubt their skill as game designers. Development? Decent. Visual design? Very good. Game design and choices? Bad.

2) Cheap and artificial difficulty mechanics that are unavoidable or exist only to push you into senseless grind

Скрытый текст

Phantom one-shots, detonate dead mobs exploding stuff from outside the screen, exploding mobs, dying to a random set of small and hidden mine-like attacks thrown by mobs that died 2+ seconds ago = cheap and artificial

One-death maps = artificial, and if you want the adrenaline of avoiding death as if you'd die in real life, go play hardcore

One-death bosses = senseless grinding into trying to get to a boss only to learn the fight, die, grind and go again to learn a bit more

Honour system = pushes senseless grinding (becomes a non-factor when you acquire decent relics)

Chaos damage = cheap and artificial difficulty. The amount of time and resources required to max out chaos resistance without running CI makes no sense. And if you're not willing to do it, prepare to get one-shot by some random chaos damage source later in maps. Just make Chaos resistance much easier to obtain or remove it completely from mobs and bosses.

And let's not forget the extremely outdated notion that EXP penalty on death should exist in any game played primarily by adults with limited time. One extra point towards my belief that GGG lacks in the game design department.

3) Lack of diversity

Скрытый текст

Very early into mapping I already knew melee was going to be a no-go unless I was prepared to invest way more time in grinding and farming than I was willing to.

Then, as I approached T15 maps, I started to see the same pattern I saw in PoE 1 repeat itself: even among the ranged ones, most skills weren't going to be viable due to a lack of damage (unless, again, you spent a ton of time grinding for high-end or specific gear.

4) Lack of sense of progression

Скрытый текст

Gambling, I mean, crafting, actually got worse than it was and feels less an option than it was in PoE 1.

Trading has had zero actual improvements and the amount of bots, price fixers and players that do not respond turned trading into a time waster unless you're desperate for a given item.

Item drops got worse: drop quality hasn't improved at all but drop quantity was severely reduced.

The endgame Atlas feels awful and a chore if you want to sustain T15+ maps:

1) Exhaust good nodes with your T15+

2) Run very low tier maps in shit notes and lost towers

3) Activate lost towers and use tablets

4) Run very low tier maps in shit nodes

5) Exhaust good nodes with your T15+

6) Repeat endlessly

I've played 80h of this game, all on a single character, and have been running T15+ for a few hours. It feels like I've finished the game and have nothing else to strive for.

Creating a new character is definitely not an option in the current state of the game. The campaign wasn't fun even the first time I've played and it felt like a chore: just farming for lvls because I was forced to, getting the permanent buffs because I was forced to. There's no way I'm doing it all over again, even if I have some gear to speed it up (it'd still take 15+ hours anyway).

This game had potential to be mainstream. The 580k player peak and 400k+ players online on Steam after release are proof of that. GGG's stubbornness on keeping nonsense mechanics catered towards streamers and hardcore players will ultimately push PoE 2 out of the spotlight and back into its previous niche corner very quickly (and considering how many players dropped the game for the holidays and did not come back, it feels like it has already started).

Or maybe GGG is aware and this is their intention.

they already decided, on developing it by making the same as poe 1, more of the same crap.

game wouldnt be in this state if they didnt want to keep it like a niche game.

This game is absolutely a horrid experience for new players and it'll stay like that because they would have to change so many core aspects that i dont see it happening.