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

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toxiitea#5772 wrote:

This will be the last time I engage because it's baffling at this point but I posted the webster definition as another example of YOU INTERJECTING a definition that wasn't asked for while adding nothing to a conversation that you weren't even apart of. add to why xp on death is good or bad for you and the game not why others opinions are wrong. Or not deflecting playing victim nsaying people can't read, and I can apparently read your own words a little better than you. Stop playing victim and coy to what you're doing. Cheers enjoy the new year exile!

Just so you are aware because the assistance seems like its sorely needed....ignoring all the very real feedback I (and many others) tried to give, only for you to completely sidestep and pivot every single chance you got, or just outright ignore it, just like you've done in this latest back and forth.....is not the same as understanding. It's not baffling, you are just a little young for these forums. Give it another 10 years.

For someone who seems to have such a problem with me offering my own thoughts on other people's posts, you spend an AWFUL LOT of time doing exactly the same thing. Against anyone who has ever once questioned one of your posts. Look at your own post history dude.

You want to stop this now, fine. I'm perfectly fine stopping this. But I would encourage you to think long and hard about your next post. Did you read what you responded to? Did you quote the right thing you are commenting on? Did you comprehend what was said, and does your post actually have anything to do with what was said? If the answer to any of those things is "no", then don't post. Because that's what constantly results in foolishness and bait.

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Blasphemous84#2190 wrote:

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?

100% agree with these points.

+1

+1

I went back to play Poe, then some last epoch yesterday after grinding out 300+ hours in the game, and both poe and Last epoch has more QoL's then the game that's going to come out in 2025/2026, especially Last Epoch, I'd say GGG to take a page out of their ideas of QoL and probably make it to the game? it's probably not going to hurt anyone and make the game better for it's own sake.

I get it, nostalgia plays a big part in PoE universe about being D2 successor, doesn't mean you can't implement stuff that wasn't in the game which came out in 2000, it's been a while D2 was good for it's time with all the stuff they had, but it's not good for a game that taking everything about D2 to the bone of it in 2025/2026.

Hope GGG applies some QoL for it's game that OP mentioned.

+1.

I'll thrown in some conspiracy thoughts: Companies have a lot of good ideas on their products that they know would benefit the consumers. But they don't exhaust all of these and implement in one go, so they can apply it slowly, giving the impression that they "continuously" improve the game. I think it's same with phone companies like samsung/apple. They already have features ready for the next 5 years, and they don't just apply it in one launch.

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Battousai21#8595 wrote:

+1.

I'll thrown in some conspiracy thoughts: Companies have a lot of good ideas on their products that they know would benefit the consumers. But they don't exhaust all of these and implement in one go, so they can apply it slowly, giving the impression that they "continuously" improve the game. I think it's same with phone companies like samsung/apple. They already have features ready for the next 5 years, and they don't just apply it in one launch.

probably true. all hail to capitalism. kappa

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Blasphemous84#2190 wrote:

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.
-cuz its more fun with identifying

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.
-cuz it takes skill to decide what to take and what to leave behind

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.
-the loot is way to good in my opinion as a player currently can finish the game in terms of loot in about 100 hours

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?
-cuz some of the uniques are usefull for leveling and others make builds possible that wouldn't be without them

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.
-pfff... just don't pick them up then Oo

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.
-cuz in poe 1 mana flasks have been entirely useless and so was bloodmagic and this has been fixed in poe 2

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).
-higher requirements lead to higher build diversity

Why are maps so big?
-they are not
Why do I have to backtrack so much?
-cuz you don't know where to look for stuff
Why do runes / catalysts / distilled emotions only stack to 10?
-cuz stashtabs are about the only usefull mtx and finance the game
Why does a single crossbow take up 1/4 of my inventory?
-cuz inventory management takes skill
Why do I roll fucking light radius or accuracy rating every time I exalt something?
-cuz those stats make sense for some builds
Why is movement speed not implicit on every pair of boots if every pair of boots is totally worthless without it?
-true
Why are charm slots not implicit on belts? Higher level belt = more charm slots. Easy.
-true
Why is there no auction house?
-there are plans to implement one
Why can't I just buy something immediately from someone on the trade site? You're actively encouraging price fixers.
-by one click buying stuff you encourage people to flip items in order to controll the price

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.

All in all there are very few solid points and the only really relevant question for me was not even in there... Why do we get huge black bars on ultra wide screen setups? Cheers

There is too much PoE 1 in our brand new PoE 2 game .

+1. Agree to 80% of this post. Especially with identifying items and inventory space. GGG, please learn from Last Epoch, they solved both of these in that game.

Based on what I've seen, I loosely agree with the original poster...with the qualifier that this is coming from the perspective of a PoE 1 veteran, and one who enjoys Poe 1's depth and complexity (but not necessarily its pace).

Has PoE 2 been developed to appeal to a broader audience? If so, ideally, PoE 2 must still appeal to a large part of the PoE 1 die-hard club in order to garner vocal support and draw them in as part of the player base, but this game is (at least so far) hugely dumbed down from the original. PoE 1's appeal is largely in its invitation to micromanage (and possibly master) extremely complex interactions of game variables in order to consistently succeed as a player. If GGG wanted to cultivate sustained appeal of their product in those who would appreciate a less intensive experience, without the titanic learning curve presented by PoE 1's complexities, they needed to reduce game complexity...which they have clearly done. Additionally, if they wanted to slow the pace of PoE 2 compared to often-frantic pace of PoE 1, that would also be a reasonable step toward attracting a new contingent of players, and this fact is at the core of the thread. I don't mind the idea of a slower game at all... But, how has the void left by absence of PoE 1's complexity been filled, and how has the pace been relaxed?

Rewarding complexity having been removed in order to tone down the learning curve barrier is one thing, but it seems to have been traded for tedium...an unfortunate and poor trade...the latter, being a dismal replacement for the former...and a winding, shadowy path through colorless doldrums of an elaborate and intentional time sink.

Ignoring, for a moment, emotional factors among players, development time would have been better spent by following the original plan to integrate PoE 1 with PoE 2... but (no longer ignoring emotional factors) to have actually and realistically made that happen would have necessitated monumental changes...upheaval...in the PoE 1 hive and probably stirred up far too many hornets to anger and stinging rage who were still comfortably nesting within the familiar status quo.

That path having been abandoned, making maps...interesting, engaging maps...take longer would have been enough, on top of the simplified game experience, to slow things down in general. That has been achieved by means of lowering character movement speed, making maps larger, slowing down integrated map mechanics (strongboxes as an example), and reducing player power (this last one maybe not carried out as successfully as intended...yet). Was this not sufficient? I like big, graphically-pretty maps; Many of the new maps, however, have needlessly tripled-down on the slow theme by taking impassable terrain too far and bringing the action to a grinding halt.

There is such a thing as overcompensating, and my Feedback, in part, is a suggestion that GGG's developers collectively and briefly review its definition.

On a similar subject, I can't say I am a fan of the end-game mapping system. The interface is sprawled, offering too little in the way of practical purpose for that sprawl, and its mechanisms effectively force repetitive interaction with aforementioned repulsive map layouts. Graphically it is nice, but those graphics, as overhead navigation / management interface system and as (many of) the maps themselves, are simply the overlay, and the underlying framework is tedium...prime food for the sibling trolls, Frustration & Aggravation.

Yes, the "crafting" system might as well have been salvaged from the figurative landfill of someone's 1999 code dump...though my suspicion has been, and continues to be, that this desolate landscape has been blasted clean (relative to PoE 1) as a fresh start from which move slowly toward determinacy, in order to avoid the baggage of overly-determinate mechanics permeating the game from out of the gate. Players will need to be patient here.

Many of the new monster designs are outstanding...I am excited to see more.

Off-Topic: The carrying over of so much reliance on and weight in on-death effects from PoE 1 is an absolute (and surprising) disappointment, particularly in light of so many successful new monster creations. Well designed (read: visible, of appropriate severity, with telegraphed and appropriately-sized effects) and as rare occurrences these can be great; However, many are barely visible, too severe, have little-if-any visual cue as to what might be coming, and/or cover an area that is too large to be appropriate. As such, as a group they strike me as a desperate, perhaps even pathetic gesture following failure to design mechanics that are clever and interesting...which is weird, because new, interesting monster mechanics have been designed, and collectively no such failure has occurred. Is someone desperate to punish players for winning, or to "slow things down" through deaths delivered by these mechanics? Refer back to "overcompensating", above.

In and of itself, in PoE 2 (so far), I see a game with a lot of development investment in eye candy and storyline flow / storyline boss minigames / low-end testing, and that is largely lacking in the end-game, but which at the same time has a ton of potential, especially with the assets of PoE 1 within easy reach as both source, and comparative, material. Hopefully there is much more in the pipeline for integration and balance, as well as willingness to revise (or abandon) unpopular functional systems and end-game maps, over the months to come.

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