Because the moment you separate them they view for the same people. Basically if you make a ‘second PoE 1’ then both games suffer for it.
The decision to make it similar in style but distinctly different in feel is something which is mandatory to cater to different flavors and broaden the spectrum of the possible customers.
Because if you make a second game which is catching basically only the people already into the first game… why would you pay double the upkeep costs for basically no extra revenue? It would not be a smart move at all.
Yes, to me as well. I was really really excited when I heard 'We’re making a second campaign and a second sub-set of ascendancies… while getting rid of the sockets on items! That was… fantastic! Amazing even.
And then it become gradually the current thing… which is understandable but disappointing.
No idea what you are talking about. It’s actually sustaining all of it’s players so far with a higher peak on Sunday. Even for a Mon there wasn’t a drop off. The real key will be next weekend since PoE 2 is a game that keeps a high sustain of concurrent players.
I’m 23 hours in now and they made some bug fixes and already changed outliers issues. One thing I will give GGG credit for is fast responses to pain points. Which is another reason why PoE 2 maintains players. People that might of quit on day 1 will likely duck back in today to see the adjustments.
EHG made the right call delaying and might get a few additional tourist because of it. PoE 2 is a monster when you also consider people playing on console and game launcher. Which brings up another issue. Last Epoch really needed to be on console, i’ve told friends about the game and they keep telling me let me know when it’s on console.
Any ARPG Dev is using their head by getting out of the way of goliath which is GGG and PoE2. Even when their is outrage there are people addicted to it and will play it. PoE 2 isn’t going anywhere and will keep adding to their player base.
Ehhh… they missed the mark a bit.
Mob health was quickly fixed, though that was a very obvious thing.
But standing by ‘Map size only feels bad because of other things’ is kinda hilarious. No, it feels bad because it’s too big to be enjoyable with the core game mechanic provided. Act 3 is ludicrously large and end-game maps need a lot of time to clear simply.
But they generally work quickly, gonna give em that.
Seems like it has a good chunk of responses.
So yes We do!
Even if nothing comes out of it it’s good to let people communicate their points, that’s worth a lot.
at the very least it’s better to keep all the discussion in one topic rather than multiple ones
as for the POE 2 numbers, no one expects en early access game to get the same amount of players each time there’s a big update, there’s a spike obviously but that’s it. The next real spike for POE 2 will probably be tied to :
1.0 launch
a huge marketing campaign announcing big stuff before 1.0
but regular updates like 0.2.0 is won’t tell us anything. If we see more than one patch making people that angry in a row, we’ll probably have more reliable data.
I think, actually, that 0.2 is indicative of their statements of making “slower, more meaningful content”, which is the direction that Jonothan seems to want to go with the game. Much of the outrage, aside from months worth of work by the players going “poof!” suddenly in one patch, is that this wasn’t the story at the start. When they first announced POE 2 and at the launch, they advertised it as an ARPG, much like other games in the genre. This sudden shift to a non-ARPG style has left a sour taste in many a mouth, and I don’t think players can trust GGG again.
Add to that the response they gave to the outrage of players who have either quit or plan to quit being “We realize the the maps may be too big, so we’re going to add checkpoints.” just goes to show how tone deaf they really are, or how far they’re willing to go to double down on their vision no matter how many players it costs them.
I’m not going to say POE2 is “bad”, it’s just not what I’m looking for. It’s not even close to what I’m looking for, in fact. Life is too short and I have too many other things going on for such a tedious grindfest. It’s not even that it’s “hard”, it’s just incredibly slow, unfun, and unrewarding, especially with the last patch. SSF is in a particularly bad place… drops are so miserable that you almost need to trade. That’s not even getting into how little respect for your time the POE trade “system” has always had.
In short, I uninstalled it, unfavorited it, and maybe I’ll check again in a year to see if they’re still intent on this being the experience. My time is too important to let them to quite literally deliberately waste it.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to 4/17 and more actual fun in LE.
There was no ‘sudden shift’. The ‘slower more meaningful combat’ was a inherent selling point of PoE 2 since the beginning. You missing it is your own fault over all the years GGG talked about it quite intensely even.
Which helped with the issues in 0.1 but not Act 3 issues.
Which GGG still thinks the reason is dead ends… and actually could be right with the feeling changing drastically because of those changes.
I personally also think ‘they’re just too big, nothing else’ but it’s a viable change they’ve provided for a start… until people tell them again ‘they’re too big’ and nothing to ‘fix’ is left
I think it’s on GGG too, because they stopped to mention that this is direction of the game right after 0.1 launch. During that season a lot of people, including me, weren’t sure what to expect next, and GGG did nothing to clarify it. As the result, there are a lot of people now, who expected that GGG will say “guys, we messed up with campaign, now you can zoom from the start, like in POE 1”. And now all those people highly disappointed of course. I think amount of negativity for each patch will depend mostly of how clearly GGG will communicate about direction of the game. I think they did set up few interviews, hopefully they will make it clear now, for those for whom it’s still not clear after 0.2 patch. I personally happy that POE 2 will be the game for me after all, as it was initially advertised
Well, to be fair… it’s a ‘doomed if you do, doomed if you don’t’ situation there.
On one hand they wanna provide a good feeling game which has that slow meaningful combat they envision.
On the other hand they don’t wanna fixate 100% onto it rigidly… because if they can’t deliver that and people hence don’t play the game it would be a massive waste of resources.
So what we’ll likely see is GGG trying their damnest to make it happen… before backpedaling and making it a bit different instead from what they envisioned. Like the usual way it goes with em
Yes, totally. But in the long perspective, there is a light after long dark tunnel, when more people not from ARPG community will notice POE 2 and it will become more independent from the current playerbase. I think after release 1.0, when it’s become free-to-play, a lot of non-ARPG players will try it and some of them will be surprised in the good way.
That won’t happen though, not with the current design at least.
PoE 2 is designed for ‘nobody’ plainly spoken. The focus is on skill combination gameplay with slow meaningful combat. A sort of souls-like but in Hack’N’Slash format. Lofty goal to achieve I gotta say.
But the design choices go counter. If combinations are wanted then the timeframe to allow those to happen needs to be there… which isn’t. Single-button builds that are slightly worse then the combinations hence are what players seek out.
In comparison I look over to Grim Dawn and see tons of combination plays because skills work together and are needed together to CC enemies and increase the respective damage… in the right order to not let enemies kill you as well! Hence meaningful rotational combat gameplay. Nice!
Then we have PoE 1, it doesn’t have that, but what it has is the power dream of making a whimsy character at the start which feels slow and clunky into a speedy pack-exploding and swiftly rushing death-machine. Or into a hard-hitting boulder of power… no matter what, it’s a fulfillment of the power fantasy, very very enjoyable!
And then you got PoE 2 in the current state. Combos can often not be done since the enemy speed is too high for most of them. Defenses don’t uphold sustaining through the attack to finish them either. Small stuns reset your rotations relatively often too for quite a variety of builds.
Mercenary with grenades is a mess currently for example. Summoner is still a mess as well since already in 0.1 it was a awful experience to run around endlessly in circles since it feels like your minions are always dead… now they’re basically never up.
And there’s tons more types of characters which simply don’t feel ‘good’ at all.
It has no ‘meaningful combat’, it’s utterly unbalanced and currently badly designed simply.
It fulfills no power fantasy since you keep on struggling non-stop throughout the game.
You can’t showcase your skill off either since the higher your rotation goes in skill amount the less often you get a chance to pull it off… but the damage of those rotations is nigh similar to the ‘1 button build’.
You don’t get rewarded for effort currently in PoE 2, that’s the basic issue. Yes, some combinations work… but ‘some’ is simply not good enough.
It’s like providing a fire- frost- and lightning-mage in a basic game… but only the frost-mage feels at least ‘ok’ while the other 2 are abysmal.
So no, a hard disagree with ‘non ARPG players will try it after 1.0’, in the current state of the game design from GGG it’ll simply fail if they keep the same route. It’s a half-baked bad product currently because of their self-imposed balance direction. It can be really swiftly solved as well… but then the ‘meaningful combat’ is gone.
Or it needs massive reworks from the ground up - which hasn’t been done since all those years before EA?.. - to make the meaningful part happen. It’s PoE 1 ‘adjacent’… not a separate style of the genre.
To be fair, I’m pretty sure that GGG doesn’t want you zooming in maps either. It’s mostly that they ended up focusing on them for release and that lead to a huge balance issue in endgame.
Even though I can’t really see how they reconcile “Slow and meaningful combat” with Ritual or Breach.
But current state is not 1.0. It might be quite different game, with much better balance, where combos will be rewarding enough. They stated that they are working on it, and it looks like they do indeed.
Yes, me too. My point is, that in 0.1 many players were sure that mapping experience is “real” part of the game, and campaign’s more methodical gameplay is just some glitch which will be removed soon. And when 0.2 came out, those players were… well, frustrated.
I’m currently at T10, they are a bit better already, things like parry works well there. But sure, they still need a lot of changes. I think GGG just didn’t have much time to properly adapt all mechanics to POE 2, or create new ones. But they clearly moving there, it’s not like they didn’t change anything about it in 0.2.
Sure, but my point is that they don’t seem to fit at all with the way they want the game.
You could argue that blasters have a hard time because they only think of speeding up and they end up aggroing too many mobs, when you should simply engage each pack with clear space behind you so you can retreat without aggroing more mobs. Which would be fair.
But both Ritual and Breach work by dumping 50-100 mobs on you without a way to retreat. Either you blast them all or, as could be seen in 1.0, you don’t interact with it at all with many builds. And if you can blast 50-100 mobs in a few seconds, then you’re already zooming.
The basis of those mechanics seems, to me, to be completely opposed to what they want their game to be.
But what if density will be low enough? If it will be 10 monsters in the ritual instead. It looks like just a balance issue. If there will be only fair amount of mobs in the ritual, can’t ritual be interesting? It’s like Arena in LE, in smaller scale. Sure, with such limited space you can’t spawn dozens of monsters at once and expect it to be interesting, but that’s just a numbers issue, not fundamental problem. It can be normal fight, just with some space limitation.
Concept of the breach doesn’t really fit in POE 2, I agree. Hopefully it will be completely changed eventually.
Might is the word. Empty dreams are just empty dreams, we can only discern properly how something goes by what we’re provided. Anything else is wishful thinking.
Yes, I got that too, I want the game to suceed… but wishful thinking is wishful thinking nonetheless
Also to be fair, campaign became awful in 0.2 and end-game for some builds simply broken. Yes, power needs to be reigned in, especially one-shot builds existing, general ‘blaster builds’. But what was done was not only reigning them in but actively nerfing skills which already were at the bottom rungs. That’s just… nonsense plainly spoken.
Agreed, they are the antithesis of ‘slow and methodical’. If their mechanics would fit along with the gameplay I’m all up for it, but they aren’t. So I can only say ‘yeah, the game feels bad there’ hence.
Then you stand around waiting for something to happen. The space is not available to maneuver in Ritual simply… and as for Breach? It’s a problem there as well since you’re in the middle. You don’t go and see enemies popping up at the edge of your vision and react accordingly… you have them spawn on top of you, randomly, without a chance to adapt accordingly.
Both are a antithesis design-wise simply.
Also we’ve already seen what ‘slow and methodical’ does to strongboxes. They were reduced in speed so much in 0.1 compared to PoE 1 that they felt utterly mind-numbing and boring… since it doesn’t change how dangerous or quick those enemies are, or how many options they have to put you in danger. The whole AI system of PoE 2 doesn’t work with the heavy mechanical playstyle of ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ or any common souls-like.
Quite the contrary! Strongbox space is not limited unlike the others.
You click the box and move out of range to the edge. That’s the way to deal with em no matter your power level, there comes the ‘slow and methodical’ gameplay to fruition.
For Ritual and Breach this simply is not a possible outcome.
It would not be a smart move at all.
We do!