[Poe 2] Personal suggestions and feedback regarding the good and bad

Hello exiles, in this post I will explain my impressions of the game after 45 hours of in-game progression. I will also add some of my suggestions on what can be improved and how (however I trust the judgment of the development team in coming up with better solutions than what I might provide here. These are my personal opinions so take them with a grain of salt.

Please note that I will be ignoring every bug in the game considering this is a beta early access and all of those should be fixed anyway.

The Good

- The art direction of the game is phenomenal. I can't help but look around and appreciate how much detail is put into it, both visually and thematically.
- Sound effects are amazingly well made, each attack you make in-game makes you feel the actual impact of it.

- I can't say the story is "extraordinary" however this is a massive step forward from Path of Exile 1 where the story was obviously an afterthought. I can't wait to see how the story will continue with acts 4 - 5 and 6.

- I played Path of Exile 1 for roughly ~3000 hours but never even attempted to create my build since it always feels like a massive loss to even attempt it. In Path of Exile 2, I especially avoided every content that might give me even a little bit of insight about the game just to see if I could figure it all out myself and I can say that even I was able to figure out how I should be building my character, especially with the way skill gems work now.

- Each ability having descriptions on status/debuff/buffs is a massive improvement. I was extremely happy to see what "maim" does within an ability, really appreciate that.

- Quest rewards are a lot more meaningful, in Path of Exile 1, it felt really bad to complete any quest other than the ones that give passive skill points but here there is more variety with that which is appreciated.

- Monster variety, there are so many different types of enemies in the game! During the entirety of the campaign (excluding hard mode of course), I kept seeing new enemies all around the place and we don't even have half of the campaign. It's refreshing not to see repeat monsters all around the place in every new zone I visit.

The Bad

- Dodge roll is not phasing through or pushing the enemies. I have seen many people saying that the player should avoid this by better positioning but in this game, we have many zones with tight corridors with monster types that rush you super fast or literally jump at you.

- Campaign zones are too large with checkpoints that only function as respawn points. I think it is ok to have the zones this large but I think we should be able to use the checkpoints to teleport between checkpoints we have previously unlocked. This would be a massive help in cases of a player needing to backtrack.

- I understand monsters respawning when you die but not loot on the ground disappearing. There have been quite a bit of cases where I killed a boss and then immediately after died to some sort of explosion and missed out on the loot. This feels horrible, I can't imagine how I would feel if I dropped something extremely valuable.

- Ascendancy trials as melee classes. "You shouldn't get hit at all" is not a good mechanic when you have to be face-to-face with enemies. I have no idea what the solution for this would be, but surely there should be better ways to do this.

- Lack of "Map Stash Tab" in the game. I don't understand why we don't have a map stash in the game right now. We are still getting the maps as items, so why did we lose the stash tab for it? This makes no sense.

General Suggestions

- When you are in the menu for the support gems and looking at all support gems rather than the suggested ones when you click on the ability itself, you should be able to tell immediately what skills that support gem can work with. (just like how you can tell when you have a support gem in your inventory)

- I almost cannot tell the difference between objectives that are complete and incomplete in the campaign zones. The slight dim is not the way to go to show that, surely the UI/UX team can come up with a better and more legible solution for it.

- Abilities have no description shown in Hotbar, I think it would be nice to see them over in Hotbar too rather than having them exclusive to the Gem menu.

- I feel like this game shouldn't need an item filter considering the balance of item drops so far, however, the valuable currencies should be highlighted differently than others. If we are going to end up needing item filters again, please provide us with an in-game item filter configuration.


Conclusion

The amount of love and tears put into this game clearly shows and it is clear we have an amazing base game to improve upon. As a freelance game developer, I don't regret telling my commissioners that I was taking a week-long vacation to play Path of Exile 2.