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

They do not communicate properly with the audience. From what i saw in podcast they have their own data that they gather. Too bad it doesnt work that way. Devs fail to watch any YT video that adresses many of the problems. They even fail to understand their own game and how it works. Streamers also could not even ask decent questions cuz they are afraid of loosing future access to such podcast.

Not a single questions about outdated mechanics
Not a single question about the point of accuracy and why mace AOE skills can miss
Not a single question about why towers are still boring AF.

Mostly agreed. I am a long-time player and most of what you have articulated ring true. It's just that I have basically given up on GGG changing these dumb decisions (e.g. wisdom scrolls, frustrating map layouts) and just lowered my expectations since the alternative is even worse (cough deefor cough) and Last Epoch is probably gonna die with still no interesting endgame after years of complaints.

I have 25 deaths on my monk....22 are after death explosion even now that i wait a couple seconds to pick up the loot.......It is a horrible mechanic in PoE1 and still is in PoE2....remove it, it doesnt add anything only frustration.

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Blasphemous84#2190 wrote:

(...)

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.

+1
Somebody call a judge because OP is speaking the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth.

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Blasphemous84#2190 wrote:

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.

+1 Agree on most of the points, especially the trade. I want to play the game, not spam 1000 people that don't reply. I don't want to leave my game constantly on and check every 5 minutes if somebody messaged me for a trade and be late 99% of the time for a trade opportunity.

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Blasphemous84#2190 wrote:

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?

You don't say...

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ocping#1733 wrote:

the alternative is even worse (cough deefor cough) and Last Epoch is probably gonna die with still no interesting endgame after years of complaints.

yep.


heres the thing with that too, and this is not a comment aimed at you ocping or anyone in particular just thoughts on the general subject, i think the reason LE doesnt have an interesting endgame, neither does D4, is because things don't matter in their game.


i agree with a lot of the thoughts of do we need friction everyhwere? does poe have to feel like someone stamping on your balls at every turn? but this is where i think some of the criticisms fail to see the bigger picture somewhat.


people say "D4 has no endgame, theres nothing to do". But D4 actually has a lot of endgame, theres so much stuff to do. whats actually happening is it feels like theres nothing to do. this is because they have failed to instil fundamental aspects of the game with a sense of value which is required to fuel the gameplay loop.


your items dont rly feel like they matter, i dont care about my gear, even an uber unique, theres no feels. levels dont matter, anyone can hit max level fairly easy. achievements dont matter, everyone can kill uber dur/andy easily. when things have no sense of weight, importance then farming for them feels worthless. theres loads to do in D4, theres just no motivation to do any of it.





LE, great systems, but they encourage everyone into this little single player world where gear is really easy to get. theres no sense of shared experience with others, you dont envy anyones gear, no one cares about your gear. its a dead lonely box in a world where everyone is used to being connected. thats the true 1999, SSF last epoch pretending people are in their bedroom alone most evenings doing completely solo hobbies completely out of contact with society. life has gone mmo. in poe, even in ssf you are finding items whos value to you is influenced by the value you know they have in the wider community, some people refuse to accept that but its true.







the thing with poe, while it can seem like they are just dinosaurs a lot of what they do is there to add a small sense of weight to a system like items, levels, the achievement of beating something.

why are the items big in my inventory? why cant i have perfect gear? why cant i get to 100? why am i losing maps on death? why scrolls, why does trade exist? why is trade hard? why doesnt ssf exist with a hard barrier and increased drops? why do they befriend and encourage streamers, 3rd party aps and communities? why why why...

a lot of this is adding a sense of value to game systems. people dismiss that. but if you drop an absolutely sick rare you can go an link it in the communities online and people will think fuck, thats a sick rare, i wish i found that. you cant link me anything in D4 i would give a shit about at all and in LE at best youd get an oh, yeah thats cool i guess.




if theres no friction/effort/community then nothing matters, and when nothing matters theres no motivation to farm for anything and your game falls apart. this is D3, D4, LE, Grim Dawn, wolcen, this is all the other arpgs. they are all great in a way and also all shit and either dead or dying while poe1 grew for 12 years because they put a lot of stuff in their game that causes the kind of friction and obstacles we see so much complaints about.





dont get me wrong, im not flat defending ggg, they dont always get it right and they dont pretend to. but they dont act in bad faith or out of stupidity. they are trying to make a great game and while they get it wrong sometimes there is a reason they are overprotective of the sense of importance in their systems.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

if theres no friction/effort/community then nothing matters, and when nothing matters theres no motivation to farm for anything and your game falls apart. this is D3, D4, LE, Grim Dawn, wolcen, this is all the other arpgs. they are all great in a way and also all shit and either dead or dying while poe1 grew for 12 years because they put a lot of stuff in their game that causes the kind of friction and obstacles we see so much complaints about.

Sorry, no. Most of the other arpgs "failed" (and I use the word "failed" in quotes because that's a highly debatable statement. There are still huge communities around D3 or Grim Dawn) due to lack of strong post-release support. The only thing that kept people returning to PoE in huge numbers was constant flood of new content (and as far as I remember as soon as people were done with it the online curve would start to slide to the bottom untill next season) and a lot of the season mechanics making it to the core game for people to ocassionaly return and tackle them. This is the huge difference and sucsess of PoE compared to other games.

There has to be what you call frictions and sense of acomplishment, I absolutely agree, but some of the frictions you mention feel like you've just had a bullet removal surgery without anesthesia and all you feel is "fuck, it's finally over" (I'm overdramatizing, ofcourse but I was really hoping PoE trading system would be a nightmarish thing of the past)

Would it be great for PoE2 if GGG removed minimap (embrace the joy of exploration), if they left us with only one portal (choose you loot wisely), if... I don't even want to give them ideas. My point is - you can justify everything by the definition of "sense of achievement" and sacrifice last bit of QoL for that. But should you?

I agree with a good chunk of OP's points, and I absolutely agree with general sentiment. Number of outdated design choices in this game is staggering. Strangely enough, in some ways they managed to make a few steps back even from PoE1 standards (crafting, salvage bench).

Then, some old problems became more pronounced because of PoE2 design. For example, I never cared much about inventory size in PoE1 because the game never wanted me to pick up much ground loot; but here, as I'm supposed to constantly pick up/id/slam/throw out, and with EVERYTHING taking up inventory space (quest items? really?), I keep hearing equivalent of "too much clutter" way too often. Some inventory tetris is fine, having to stop all the time to solve another "why TF doesn't it fit" riddle is annoying. There's a reason why no notable game ever replicated Diablo II charm system.
Heh, at least we're over with Diablo I 5000 gold pile limit.

Unfair deaths from random oneshots and on death effects were common in PoE1, but one portal thing made them feel much more frustrating.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Lots of things seem way under cooked, or just mechanically imported from PoE1, and not necessarily mesh well into new the game.

Phew, at least they got rid of TP scrolls. Somehow, heavens didn't come crushing down on our heads.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

LE, great systems, but they encourage everyone into this little single player world where gear is really easy to get. theres no sense of shared experience with others, you dont envy anyones gear, no one cares about your gear. its a dead lonely box in a world where everyone is used to being connected. thats the true 1999, SSF last epoch pretending people are in their bedroom alone most evenings doing completely solo hobbies completely out of contact with society. life has gone mmo. in poe, even in ssf you are finding items whos value to you is influenced by the value you know they have in the wider community, some people refuse to accept that but its true.

While I generally agree with your balanced approach to the subject, I think you missed the point on this one. LOTS of people play ARPGs as single player games. That's why Diablo III being always online caused an outrage, and even with Diablo IV this caused lots of complaining, despite "always online" being the standard these days. Offline mode for LE was added because people wanted it and were vocal about it, as LE and Wolcen are probably the only modern ARPGs that can be played this way.
Gearing in Last Epoch being too easy is another thing entirely.
Speaking just for myself, I couldn't care less about social aspects of PoE. If I want to play MMO, I go play MMO.

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Snorkle_uk#0761 wrote:

if theres no friction/effort/community then nothing matters, and when nothing matters theres no motivation to farm for anything and your game falls apart. this is D3, D4, LE, Grim Dawn, wolcen, this is all the other arpgs. they are all great in a way and also all shit and either dead or dying while poe1 grew for 12 years because they put a lot of stuff in their game that causes the kind of friction and obstacles we see so much complaints about.

Eh, the games from your list that actually failed (Wolcen and probably LE, at least it seems it failed rn) had tons of problems more serious than lack of "friction", and developers failed to fix them in a timely manner.
Grim Dawn didn't fail, it's simply a single player game at heart, which had last big expansion in 2019 and doesn't offer regular content updates. Of course it feels dead by now.
Neither of Diablo games failed, them being good or not is subjective.
PoE1 succeeded mostly because of regular content updates, I'd argue it became successful DESPITE all the "friction", not BECAUSE of it.

This said, I generally agree with you, with the caveat that those things need careful balance. Personally I think "friction" is way overrated, and that goes both ways. Ultimately, QoL will rarely make or break the game. People discussing those things tend to be very "all or nothing" in their approach, but as they say, too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.
When everything gets overly streamlined, the game feels like it's "playing itself".
When everything has a downside or opportunity cost, the game feels tedious.

I think PoE2, as it is now, is definitely on the "tedious" side of the spectrum.

Look at this, people still think that discussing something here would change shit) GGG don't even read their own forums)

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Prof549#3579 wrote:

Look at this, people still think that discussing something here would change shit) GGG don't even read their own forums)

100 pages of feedback by random players, ggg sleeps

1 streamer says something bad about a mechanic, it's fixed next week

classic ggg