It's just all too slow.

I have been playing every League since 0.1, and I think PoE2 has a lot to like, genuinely. The visuals are stunning, the skills feel like they have weight, and there's a lot of depth to the systems. But I'm starting to feel burnt out, and I think it boils down to three main things.

1. The campaign is just too long. Act 3 in particular feels like the game is punishing you. The maps are huge, they're maze-like, and you can't even reliably just run the borders of them to progress because they often contain missable side content/upgrades. I have multiple friends who are struggling to want to continue in this League because of how repetitive it all feels by now. I've powered on though, and just today I got trapped in the mansion part of the Interludes, died, and almost quit the game for the day when all the mobs respawned and I realized I was going to have to do all of it again. PoE2 often feels like I'm having fun in spite of the design, rather than because of it.

Movement also just feels slow throughout all of it. It feels like your character is walking through syrup, and sprinting often times is risky and still doesn't feel fast enough.

I can't imagine running this campaign, in potentially an even longer form, League after League.

2. This League doesn't feel rewarding. The Temple was really fun my first few times, giving me some valuable boosts in Act 1 and 2. But then I realized the rewards didn't scale, and the design aspect is confusing. It feels so limited by predetermining the path tiles and the directions they face. My issue is that I'm sure I could sit down and figure out the puzzle and method behind maximizing placement, but at the end of the day, does it matter? Does it provide that much of a benefit? It doesn't seem so. I loved Abyss, but this feels like it rips me out of the action to do an unrewarding chore. I've honestly started not caring if I hit the circles or not.

3. I'm placing this last, as I want to give grace to it being Early Access and I'd rather there be innovation, but the overall stability and bugginess is still pretty rough. I had to reset instances a couple times during the campaign because quests would not progress or bosses would get stuck, lengthening the already long acts. I get random disconnects and crashes frequently. I have a very beefy PC, and other games just do not do this. I chuckled when I tried upgrading my graphics driver yesterday to alleviate issues, only for PoE2 to admonish me upon login that the newest driver may cause long loading times.

I hope the best for this game, and I hope to put hundreds of more hours into it. But in its current form, it's hard to imagine repeating this process over and over.

I guess poe2 is not for you, better stay in poe1

Yes, make it Mario Bros, so we can out run the boss in every act and then, maybe include Luigi, yes yes, make it for kids so we can have fun together. And with no shades or something, make it like Tom and Jerry, a cartoon, or way better, an Anime, yes an Anime would be cool. So we are like, Sailor Moon characters.

be real here, really really serios, you all don't say nothing better just "meh, my PC is lacking, cuz is so beefy and can not enter small corridors", "the game is to slow", "the game is to fast on movement speed boots", "MVS+GW is bugged" whatever that means.

BE REAL HERE AND STOP ACTING LIKE A ROBOT with so many ACRONYMS you look to me as a motherboard, are you a mother board or something?

"

PathOfChungus#0633 wrote:

1. The campaign is just too long. Act 3 in particular

2. This League doesn't feel rewarding.

3. I'm placing this last, as I want to give grace to it being Early Access and I'd rather there be innovation, but the overall stability and bugginess is still pretty rough.

1) act 4 is like twice as long and I agree that campaign length should be cut by at least half

2) yes

3) my PC doesn't even meet minimal requirements and I seen no bug, disconnect or stability issue. The only issue I have is very rarely, the first time I encounter a boss, they won't load for couple seconds and their ground attacks don't show. I think its the shadders issue, cos on second try it works fine. If anything their optimization is awesome. You may have beefy computer, but either your drivers are bad, your components are not working well together, or you have too many other stuff running in background, or your connection is bad (just cos you have lets say 500mbps doesn't mean your latency is within 50ms, thats how they get you)

Yeah, you're right about that.

Unfortunately any such criticisms run into instant trolls who will spam "Go back to poe 1 zoomer"

I totally, agree. Unfortunately, they won't listen to the commited players, since there are thousands ~30 hours of gametime per league players, who are looking to play single player hack and slash game, who will btw quit and never return after 3 leagues of replayable campaign.

The entire gameplay is slow, choppy, and feels extremely bad. Tripping over everything in the game, sometimes feels like playing Death Stranding.

I don't even like the visuals - yes it may look good, but you cannot see the important things - there are maps that make even walking through them wihtout mobs feel slow and choppy...

1- I'd be willing to start the season a day later if they allowed me to skip the campaign. It is simply a chore, an unnecessary barrier to enter the endgame. However, I think they will change campaign when we actually have an endgame. Currently, campaign is the only playable content in the game. There is no endgame and they are trying to mask it as much as they can.

2- It was fine early game. Late game, I do not know. I'm struggling to find the will to play this season. Knowing there is no endgame makes the campaign even more insufferable.

3- I'm not having any connection issues other than rare (very rare) hiccups. Game performance, on the other hand, leaves a lot to be desired though.

I believe game performance would be fine if their vision for the game wasn't "add more visual clutter". If they added "invisible skills effect" as an alternative skill effect option, it might become a best seller.

When it comes down to "creativity" we have great developers.
When it comes down to "playability" we have OK developers.
When it comes down to "visual clarity" we have pillagers, bandits and looters.

"

hardcore91#7385 wrote:

I totally, agree. Unfortunately, they won't listen to the commited players, since there are thousands ~30 hours of gametime per league players, who are looking to play single player hack and slash game, who will btw quit and never return after 3 leagues of replayable campaign.

The entire gameplay is slow, choppy, and feels extremely bad. Tripping over everything in the game, sometimes feels like playing Death Stranding.

I don't even like the visuals - yes it may look good, but you cannot see the important things - there are maps that make even walking through them wihtout mobs feel slow and choppy...

True.

I played 0.1 a lot because it was a new game and I wanted to try… didn’t like it that much but hey, it’s beta so things will change.
0.2 was a bust since the core issues were still there and GGG, or J. didn’t want to change them.
0.3 had some changes, some good and some bad. We got the market because Mark decided to play the game and didn’t like to suffer what regular players have been suffering for years. I played with a new archetype, for me, and I really enjoyed it (chronomancer, btw). That being said, that was the only char I made, as opposed to 0.1 where I made three, because the campaign Is just sufferable.

Then came 0.4 and I waited a week to make a char… I entered Mud Barrows and, in an intersection, I got swarmed by mobs, couldn’t dodge roll out of them and died. I was level 3, quit the game and I’m not going to touch it again.

Dodge roll is a crappy mechanic that GGG, or J., thought it was a good thing to add and replace the movement skills. It’s not. It’s another knee jerked option he or they make.

They game is too slow, too long and too boring. I’ve been saying this since day one. I guess that, and instead of saying that the game is bad, I’ll say that the PoE2 is not for me.

Just to add a thing that would be nice for the game’s health. Make anything that you buy in the market untradeable. Let’s get rid of the flippers that are ruining the game.

Problem with listening people who whine about campaign length is that if you give them what they want, then they will 100% start whining about low level mapping next and want to skip straight to tier 16s. Give them what they want again and they start whining how they can't find mageblood in the first Act.

Its never a good idea for a game designer to listen to people who don't want to play video games, who instead just want the red button that allows them to skip it. You don't want a video game, you want the congratulation screen.

I really wish GGG would release a statement that they're never ever going to allow players to skip the campaign, maybe that would reduce this incessant yammering in the forum about "having to run the campaign".