You're making an ARPG in 2025, but you're stuck in 1999

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cowmoo275#3095 написал:

Functionally, in PoE 2, you have INFINITE lives to try bosses an infinite number of times to get used to them and learn their mechanics. This is easy in the campaign when you have a checkpoint by the bosses. It's a little harder in general mapping when you see the boss less frequently. It's AWFUL for the pinnacle boss. But no matter what, you have infinite lives. You'll never de-level. You'll never brick a character. You'll never get "weaker" in any way if you lose a fight. Even with all the penalties you incur on death, NONE make you weaker.

No. Failing pinnacle boss requires you to regrind citadels for anothe try which easily translates into 100+ hrs of playing if you are not lucky. It's nowhere near 'infinite'. Anyone who values their time will just quit the game at that point.

Out of my 14 friends in steam who tried PoE2 only two are still playing (and one of them only runs campaign on various classes because endgame is awful from his POV, and I agree with him). That's horrible retention. Some of them quit before reaching maps, some quit before lvl 90. And almost all of them have hundreds of hours in PoE over multiple leagues. They wanted to like this game but they are not masochistic enough to do so.

Generally good post.

What gets me is GGG's "vision" of a slower game, and yet, they have a "crafting system" that is literally 90% orb slamming like a zoomer and praying you get a good result. It's a gatcha mechanic that is totally at odds with their "vision."

Honestly, Last Epoch's crafting system is vastly superior. It is a perfect blend of deterministic and RNG.

And speaking of LE, man, if SSF in PoE removed the transfer over to trade and gave us buffed loot drops like what LE does for SSF, it would be perfect.

GGG's insistence on balancing the game around trade is just lazy. If a player has trouble getting over a content barrier, but they got lucky along the way with a divine drop, they can literally just go to the market and get a power boost and overcome that barrier.

The way to interact with the market is ass and archaic.

The result of this process is also at odds with their "vision" of having a slower and more methodical game as well.

10 minutes of trade and I can now blast maps and zoom around because I got a lucky div drop which allowed me to buy an item that increased my dps by 300%, or survivability by 300%.

This game is honestly just as lazy as the AAA crap that Blizzard puts out with Diablo 4. GGG justifies their laziness by saying they have a "vision" and people follow that like sheep. And since we mentioned D4...

PoE2 is objectively not good.
Diablo 4 is objectively not good.

Both are not good for totally different reasons.

GGG's "vision" compared to what they've put into the game is, as mentioned, at odds with itself. It is lazy and they are using it as a crutch to forego adding thoughtful content.

Diablo 4 is bad because it exists in a corporate safety zone. They want the game to be easy and accessible and casual and they don't take risks with it.

Moving on...

On-death effects are sheer laziness and brain-dead mechanics. It is an easy way to add artificial difficulty without putting in time to design thoughtful content. PoE2's visual clutter and ODEs are just ass...
- My eyes are shit after years of welding, so a lot of this garbage I can hardly see sometimes underneath green plants with green acid degen ODE aoes, etc...

Somewhere along the way, GGG also forgot that you can make a challenging game without it being tedious or frustrating.

You can have a challenging pinnacle boss that can one-tap you if you're a bit slow. That is a-okay.
- My hands cramp up bad after a while because of years using tools and the like. Carpal tunnel as well. Sometimes I can tell my thumb to dodge roll... but getting down to a movement to hit the space bar to dodge roll faces some delays... My bad eyesight also plays into this as well.

But you only get one chance at it after you've farmed up to it for 20 hours? Frustrating AND tedious. All your work done before that is gone. Man, in my working life as a tradie, never have I been punished for putting in 20 hours of time into a project the way this game punishes you for failing a pinnacle boss/content. It kinda honestly baffles me that there are more consequences to failure in this game than if I happen to not do a machine alignment properly.

So, personally, for me, because I'm old and broken, this game and GGG have set up barriers for me that simply don't need to exist. I don't know how many people here are in my boat... but for me anyways... I want to love the game because it makes me feel somewhat nostalgic at times and I was lured in by the promises that GGG had for it. But I'm just... punished for playing the game because I may be a little slow and a little blind and old and broken, and honestly, it pisses me the fk off. It is frustrating and tedious and NOT challenging.

I'm NOT asking for D3/4 levels of easy. Spent many hours in them already. What I am asking for is that GGG actually respect time invested into the game by people like me who are a little old and broken. Make pinnacle content challenging, but at least respect me with my issues and give me more chances to actually beat it when I get up to it. I don't get up to it often, but when I do, I want to beat it (giggity), even if that means the ol' 6 portals in PoE1 or whatever system that may come in the future. If I can't beat it in the allotted 6 portals like in PoE1, then I know I have to do some soul searching. I honestly would not mind bosses resetting their HP on death if I get 6 portals back to beat it.

And for the people who will say "this game isn't meant for you" because of what I've stated...

You can politely go and get bent.

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_ZLoBny_#7128 написал:

No. Failing pinnacle boss requires you to regrind citadels for anothe try which easily translates into 100+ hrs of playing if you are not lucky. It's nowhere near 'infinite'. Anyone who values their time will just quit the game at that point.

come on man....at the very least read the part of my post that you quoted lol. You disagreed with me even when I had already AGREED that its terrible for pinnacle bosses.

But that doesn't change the fact that you STILL have infinite chances. Regardless of the grind time to get back to where you where, you still CAN grind back to where you were. Every time. Without fail. AKA infinite chances. You choosing to quit before that happens doesn't change the "infinite" part. There are no gameover screens for your character (unless you play HC) nor are there any bricking penalities.

But I agree: The unreasonable part is the time to regroup for pinnacles, something I very much predict will change in about 2 hours time.

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cowmoo275#3095 написал:

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Gwonam#5505 написал:

It's really not like a 1990s game, though. 1990s games were arguably more forgiving, because you were often given multiple lives to attempt a level or boss. If you ran out of lives, you'd get sent back to the beginning. But at least you'd know how long it would take to get to where you left off.

Incorrect. You missed the part where I said "rpg or arpg games". There were NO (zero, zilch, nada) arpgs in the 90s with a "lives" mechanic. Very often, what we now call "Hardcore" was the default. If it wasn't that, it was severe penalties such a durability damage or loss of resources, levels, progress, or all of those. Very often you could completely brick a character if you died too much, simply because you run out of resources to fix the damage.

You are speaking about an entirely different genre of game when you talk about "lives".

Not only that, but everything you described about the "y" system of practicing bosses or whatever....is exactly how PoE 2 functions. With only ONE exception, the highest pinnacle boss. And I agree with you, and I have in many other threads, this is the WORST design flaw of the game right now.

Functionally, in PoE 2, you have INFINITE lives to try bosses an infinite number of times to get used to them and learn their mechanics. This is easy in the campaign when you have a checkpoint by the bosses. It's a little harder in general mapping when you see the boss less frequently. It's AWFUL for the pinnacle boss. But no matter what, you have infinite lives. You'll never de-level. You'll never brick a character. You'll never get "weaker" in any way if you lose a fight. Even with all the penalties you incur on death, NONE make you weaker.

Many of the RPG genre's most celebrated titles in the mid-late 1990s let you reload from savestates upon death: Diablo 1, Baldur's Gate 1, Fallout 1 & 2, etc. I wouldn't say hardcore was the genre norm back then. In fact, Brevik wanted HC to be the standard punishment for death in Diablo 1... but was overruled by the rest of the team. He admits it himself here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=KSAi3gyY52A

Permadeath and severe punishments for dying haven't really been the gaming norm since, what, MUDs and early MMOs? Even then, the issue isn't so much severe punishment as it is individual deaths making you feel like you wasted hours of your time (e.g., old MMOs, KMMOs).

Here's a Ys boss, by the way. From an ARPG. It's harder than anything PoE will throw at you, but overcoming it is so much more satisfying because you get as many chances to improve your skill or stats as you need:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=TLWaleqwT5I

It's clear that the campaign bosses are meant to be fought like this, at least early on before you get good skills and gear. Now imagine if every time you died to this boss, you had to spend anywhere from 10-30 more hours searching for a new citadel on the horizon just to get one shot at the boss. That's stupid.

Which is why GGG is bringing 6 death attempts to the Arbiter next patch, and later to the other pinnacle bosses. That's progress, I guess?

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_ZLoBny_#7128 написал:

No. Failing pinnacle boss requires you to regrind citadels for anothe try which easily translates into 100+ hrs of playing if you are not lucky. It's nowhere near 'infinite'. Anyone who values their time will just quit the game at that point.

Out of my 14 friends in steam who tried PoE2 only two are still playing (and one of them only runs campaign on various classes because endgame is awful from his POV, and I agree with him). That's horrible retention. Some of them quit before reaching maps, some quit before lvl 90. And almost all of them have hundreds of hours in PoE over multiple leagues. They wanted to like this game but they are not masochistic enough to do so.

yeah this is me at this point. i wasted too many hours and im just over the whole boss at the end

watching a youtube video does not replace the 6 portals to experience mechanics properly and learn timing

you can watch stupid videos all day every day if you want....youll never actually learn unless you were properly put into the situation

if youre telling me to play a better build or gear better.....thats bull shit too...no one gets into these fights without properly gearing especially after wasting so much time

if youre telling me to play a better build, then thats a game issue and limiting their BS build diversity message they keep sending

i quit yesterday and uninstalled already because i tried the arbiter once....i got 5 iron citadeals and 5 copper citadels. i could not get any stone and just bought the fragment. then just got one shot for a stupid 0.5 - 1 second mechanic dodge.

sorry if you think this game is good because of that. you need to re-evaluate what a good game it. without a learning curve or opportunities to figure out a game....its just punishing for no reason what so ever.

i only stuck around to see if the devs had any sense or empathy in their hearts/minds about this game...and clearly they do not. so ill be very glad to spend my money elsewhere


sorry but everyone saying you have "infinite chances" its kind of BS. infinite for how long? how long are these leagues gonna last? how long is your bad luck gonna go on for? how long does it take to find 1 citadel that you NEED? how long can you sustain t15 maps? how long can you mentally deal with ridiculously grinding the same maps over and over again to get little to no loot drops?

infinite to me just sounds like a very convenient excuse to tell players to grind endlessly

at least poe1 set defined lines on how many you had to grind to get to the boss. how many of this and that you had to do to reach the next level

poe2....there isnt a how many....its infinite....how many maps will you need to do before you find a stone citadel? somewhere between 5-infinite sounds about right...and if you think that is a good system....you must be into BDSM

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Vinsdvalh#0247 написал:

Are you trying to define RPG around the amount of crossbows you can carry ?

Only if you've got the strength to do it.

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Blasphemous84#2190 написал:

Why are we still identifying items? If you're going to smother my screen with loot, at least let me mouse over each piece to see if it's even worth picking up. The hooded one / Doryani will identify my entire inventory in one click, but why? Just get rid of this.

Why do we have so much loot dropping, but such a small inventory? Who wants to leave every map 1-3 times just to sift through loot? Inventory management is not a feature. It's just obnoxious and boring.

Speaking of loot, why is the loot so bad? In the 200+ hours I've put into the game so far, I can count on one hand the number of good rares I've seen drop. Every piece of gear is just a shit base that needs "crafting", but crafting is really just a nice way of saying RNG orb slamming. It's awful. Your company is called Grinding Gear Games, but there's no exciting gear to be had. It's just orbs. You should call yourselves Grinding Orb Games.

Why are there 500 uniques in the game that are absolutely awful, and ~5 that are game breakingly amazing (but impossible to find)? When I see a unique drop I should be excited. Instead I'm just left with another shit drop I have to carry back to some NPC to disenchant. Why even have these?

Why are tier 1 to 10 waystones still dropping in my tier 15+ maps? This is a perfect example of the flawed game design that plagues PoE. You make obsolete maps drop in high tier content for literally no reason, and then you expect players to "solve" this by wasting atlas passive tree points on garbage "waystone chance to drop a higher tier" nodes. Just stop already.

Why are mana costs so high? Do you expect everyone to use Inspiration and/or spam mana potions constantly? The combat in the game is great, but having to use a potion every 5-10 seconds is boring. Sure we can put mana leech / regen on multiple pieces of gear and/or waste precious passive points on similar fixes, but why? If the mana costs weren't so insane in the first place, this wouldn't be necessary.

Why are attribute requirements so high? Does my Witch really need 100+ STR? Does my Ranger really need 100+ INT? Some gems require 13+ of an attribute just to go from one rank to another. This is just silly. I can only imagine how bad it is playing SSF with these insane attribute requirements. At least in trade we can just go buy whatever we need (because let's face it, there's no gear dropping).

Why are maps so big?
Why do I have to backtrack so much?
Why is there no indication of where the citadels are located?
Why do runes / catalysts / distilled emotions only stack to 10?
Why does a single crossbow take up 1/4 of my inventory?
Why do I roll fucking light radius or accuracy rating every time I exalt something?
Why is movement speed not implicit on every pair of boots if every pair of boots is totally worthless without it?
Why are charm slots not implicit on belts? Higher level belt = more charm slots. Easy.
Why are level 20 gems non-existent? Better yet, why can't we just level our gems with experience rather than praying for dog shit RNG?
Why are Perfect Jeweler's Orbs so rare? It's somehow easier to make a properly colored 6L in PoE 1 than it is to find a single orb in PoE 2.
Why is there no auction house?
Why can't I just buy something immediately from someone on the trade site? You're actively encouraging price fixers.

I could go on and on. GGG, you seem highly capable of making a great game, you just need to get out of your own way and make the game more fun. Everything doesn't need to be annoying as fuck all the time. It's perfectly OK to add some quality of life to your game. People might even feel compelled to play it longer.

+1000

Like you I could also go on and on and make the list you started even longer. It’s truly mind boggling to me how anyone who has ever played an A-RPG, let alone the developers of one of the world’s most well known A-RPGs, can purposefully create such a frustrating experience for their players. And yet we’ve seen it twice now in as many years, first with D4 and now with PoE 2. It’s truly disheartening especially to someone like myself who has been an avid gamer for so long.

+1 tedium does not equal difficulty does not equal fun

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Blasphemous84#2190 написал:

Tell me, how is it fun to have to leave every single map multiple times to go see an NPC? Is that fun? Or would it be more fun to just keep killing monsters?

Why would you have to do that? just leave trash on the ground, scrolls and transmutes exist for a reason.

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Battle_Baboon#3734 написал:

there will be instant buy out
its an interview with ggg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RskRFwgoQ5g&t=6842s

Hes talking about the currency echange which is in the game, it was tested in Settles of kalgur poe 1, nothing to do with ah for items, the chinese had that for years ggg do not want an ah in there version