There is already a successful Souls-like ARPG -- GGG please learn from it!

Or I should say "looter" game. It just didn't use the top down Diablo-clone format. It's called Nioh 2, and it already solved how to make a endgame grind looter game combo well with Souls-like gameplay.

If PoE2 was like Nioh 2 in every way except it was a Diablo-clone it would be an amazing game.

It has everything PoE2 wants to be, great loot, parrying, perfect timing attacks, weapon swapping, incredible build diversity where literally every play style and weapon is 100% viable. Completely skill based gameplay.

But guess what it didn't have? Giant ass maps filled to the brim with hundreds of monsters which take ages to kill and drop no loot. It had dungeons, yes randomly generated, but with thoughtful encounters with specified challenge.

It also didn't have monsters that were far faster than any of your combos, and they had thoughtful move sets that had well defined openings

Guess what it did have? LOOT, an INSANE amount of loot, and ways to upgrade and reforge it that didn't remove RNG and gave you a reason to keep farming.

It also had spears, two handed ones, that were badass and actually behaved like spears and had unique mechanics specific to the spears that made them play different to every other weapon (as every individual weapon did).

It also had epic boss fights that made you feel like a GOD if you managed to win.

Here is a random video showing a boss fight.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdXypxafMzw

PoE2 right now is lacking in every single way from what a successful Souls-like ARPG looks like. It lacks in intentionality, it lacks in loot, and lacks in build and core mechanics, and it lacks in a sense of achievement.

Conflicting design philosophy is a major PoE2 hurdle right now. They need to be able to shed old, archaic ARPG design philosophies if they want the slow, methodical, tactical approach to combat to work. There's so many of them left over, even all the way back to Diablo 2, that just don't fit the vision they seem to be going for.

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PyramidSwim#5866 wrote:

Conflicting design philosophy is a major PoE2 hurdle right now. They need to be able to shed old, archaic ARPG design philosophies if they want the slow, methodical, tactical approach to combat to work. There's so many of them left over, even all the way back to Diablo 2, that just don't fit the vision they seem to be going for.

Exactly! They seem to want to eat their cake and have it too.

They want PoE1 level build customisation and endgame power and enemies with wide open Musou like fields. Fine, but then combine that with Souls-speed methodical gameplay with Souls style bosses, bonfires and respawning mobs, and Souls-level randomised loot drops (i.e. virtually nothing from killing things directly other than exp/souls), but they don't want to put in the guaranteed special items from bosses/exploration.

We don't know exactly what they're thinking, which is why I've been begging for a long essay on exactly why they've been taking the approach they have been taking. But it seems to be that their entire design bible for PoE2 is incoherent.

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We don't know exactly what they're thinking, which is why I've been begging for a long essay on exactly why they've been taking the approach they have been taking. But it seems to be that their entire design bible for PoE2 is incoherent.

I wonder if the reason they can't commit to a unconflicted direction is a fear of alienating hardcore ARPG fans (like myself). They want to retain their old playerbase but also send the genre into new horizons. It's ambitious but I don't think they're pulling it off, and I would say that a lot of the things could be balanced to the right levels and it'd be fixed, but no, the design portions that don't fit their new horizon seem baked in at this point; there's no getting rid of most of them.

Not really

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PyramidSwim#5866 wrote:

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We don't know exactly what they're thinking, which is why I've been begging for a long essay on exactly why they've been taking the approach they have been taking. But it seems to be that their entire design bible for PoE2 is incoherent.

I wonder if the reason they can't commit to a unconflicted direction is a fear of alienating hardcore ARPG fans (like myself). They want to retain their old playerbase but also send the genre into new horizons. It's ambitious but I don't think they're pulling it off, and I would say that a lot of the things could be balanced to the right levels and it'd be fixed, but no, the design portions that don't fit their new horizon seem baked in at this point; there's no getting rid of most of them.

Is it really just that they want to leverage PoE branding for the new game, which is why they're making this incompatible compromise?

If they just named it something else they could have gone all in on making a completely new Souls-like ARPG experience and not worry too much about appealing to the PoE audience, then they could work on a PoE2 later that was a true successor. (Although, they probably should have done this 5 years ago, so we wouldn't be waiting on a true successor 10 years after PoE launch).

At this point they'd be better off just actually making a true PoE2 and giving the Souls-like a few years to ferment before spinning off a new team to make it. I wouldn't be surprised if we see an FFXIV ARR situation before 1.0

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DreamAgain#4820 wrote:

GGG messed up by calling this game Path of Exile 2 and not something brand new. This game is so close to being amazing but is being actively sabotaged by a contingent of the player base who insist path of exile 2 should be nothing more than a carbon copy clone of path of exile 1 with prettier graphics.

But they can never escape this sea of disturbingly unhinged poe1 vets who spend their entire days ranting and raving on video game forums about how GGG "betrayed" them and "broke their trust" as if they were in some sort of intimate relationship with them. A truly harrowing display of a bunch of people in their mid 40's throwing temper tantrums online because a video game wasn't catered specifically to their needs.

I wouldn't call myself a vet of PoE1 but I DO want a PoE2 that is an improved PoE1. I also would love to see someone take a shot at Souls-like Diablo-clone and produce some good work there. But what we have now is neither of those things!

And I do think it's greedy to abuse the name of a property a lot of people love to get better branding/marketing for your unrelated game, which might very well be why they're trying to shoehorn in some kind of relationship to PoE1 to justify building on top of that IP.

Yeah, in my opinion right now their only option is to commit fully to the ARPG portion of the game. I think they eventually will. It's not a bad thing, I think this game will be probably the best ARPG of all time still if it is balanced properly with as much player choice as the first game.

If GGG just said: "Hey, we're making a new game. Yes, it has some ARPG stuff in it, but we're trying something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. This isn't aimed at the PoE audience though we hope a lot of you will enjoy it, we're really aiming at a completely different market" I would be absolutely thrilled to see what they do.

But why call it PoE2, and then put a bunch of incompatible PoE1 stuff into the game resulting in a clusterfuck of a game? Just so you can hype people up and leverage a community that is a decade in the making into a huge sale on day 1 before reality hits them like a truck?

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RedaOu#0533 wrote:

If GGG just said: "Hey, we're making a new game. Yes, it has some ARPG stuff in it, but we're trying something COMPLETELY DIFFERENT. This isn't aimed at the PoE audience though we hope a lot of you will enjoy it, we're really aiming at a completely different market" I would be absolutely thrilled to see what they do.

But why call it PoE2, and then put a bunch of incompatible PoE1 stuff into the game resulting in a clusterfuck of a game? Just so you can hype people up and leverage a community that is a decade in the making into a huge sale on day 1 before reality hits them like a truck?

I'm new to path of exile and MAAAAAAN reality hit me like a truck. It was more like sucking in hot exhaust fumes and waiting for air that never came. And then being hit by a truck.