I played the POE2 early access campaign with an AOE mage here are a couple of thoughts. I’d be curious to hear from others who have tried it.
pros:
graphics are nice
story was epic
it seemed well balanced, kind of hard but I could get through with persistence
cons:
way too many types of little currency token type things. I personally find it annoying to have to study that kind of minutiae
there is a brutal XP penalty that kicks in after you finish the campaign and start doing maps. You basically stop leveling because you die enough to kill all of your accumulated XP.
All in all, I think Last Epoch is the better game for a casual player. I complained about Aberroth in my last post before I went to try POE2 but I’m ready to give it another try now haha.
If you’re looking at content you’ll have 2 distinct positions… Aberroth is easier then content in PoE 1/2 for the most part, at least top-end content. Hence roughly as it should be.
If you look towards Uberroth though… that is completely messed up comparably. Nothing even comes remotely close in effort needed to invest to tackle a boss in any other ARPG on the market.
As for the XP penalty: Yeah, it’s really harsh and stops progression in terms of levels entirely. Very very few people reach level 100 in either of those games while in LE it ‘just happens’.
You can see it as good or as bad, a hurdle to overcome and providing a challenge or a major annoyance. It’s very split in reception, always has been.
Yeah, the skill tree is something which people argue about all the time… complicated? Actually no after finding out how the system works… but it’s a mess to get the optimal routing together. It’ll commonly be sub-par unless you sit down for a good while.
As for the positive aspects:
Yeah, PoE 2 crafting is the biggest shortcoming of the game. PoE 1 crafting comparably is the top-end of how crafting is implemented in the genre. Those 2 are night & day and GGG couldn’t get it together to make a coherent system for PoE 2 yet.
FIne-tuning difficulty is actually easier in PoE 2 then LE, not only do you have control over the layout you run, you also have control over the content you’ll encounter and the tier at which you want to run it.
This provides very very detailed ability for difficulty fine-tuning.
I think the biggest problem both PoE1 and PoE2 have with the passive tree is that even experienced streamers and build creators require using an external tool (PoB) to know if a build is actually good or not.
I’ve seen plenty of pre-league videos (mostly from Ziz and Ghazzy, but also other creators) where they analyze the patch notes and say that something could be a buff, but they’ll need to wait for the PoB to actually know.
So if even the most experienced players in PoE, that have played the game for years and created builds for years, require an external tool to even know if a change is a buff or not, or if it’s good enough to make a build good or not, that’s a sign that something’s not quite right.
That is only true for progression. Not for actual endgame. If you’re already wiping juiced T17 maps without effort, there really is no way to further increase the difficulty and get a challenge.
But I will agree that PoE’s atlas tree is very good in terms of buffing mechanics and, especially, at removing the ones you don’t want from the pool.
It’s something the woven tree tried to emulate, but without much control in this regard.
On the other hand, there still isn’t much content to buff and, especially, remove. They do let you remove the things most players complained about, namely arena echoes, arena keys and a few other smaller stuff, but if they were to let you remove stuff like tombs, nemesis or mages, the game would feel too empty. There aren’t enough mechanics yet to justify removing them from the endgame gameplay.
Yeah, absolutely.
But it’s also the thing which pulls people in quite a bit, the build-tinkering allows many options after all.
And yes, obviously with any complex math you want either a tool handling it for you or most people won’t bother. Could do it on paper too… but what a mess
And Ziz isn’t the fastest mathematician either, Ghazzy though commonly gets it right at a single look at it without using PoBs, pure experience there, that dude is a minion-master.
What you talk about with ‘further increase’ is not the topic here, it’s about tuning it to your needs, not to reach the difficulty ceiling. Two separate things.
In tuning PoE is king, both. In ceiling… obviously any endless system is doing that ‘better’ since it’s endless
And if someone wants that?
It’s called ‘player agency’ for a reason. Giving the choice to the player and not having it at the hands of the devs.
If someone wants to make it feel empty… be free! Better then being enforced to go through stuff you dislike I would argue.
I really enjoyed PoE2. I play as an infernalist summoner and the dificulty for the campaign is a little high for my taste but not bad. The graphics are top notch. The build variety is amazing.
The endgame is what drives me away. The end game is all about farming the currency not the gear.
Yeah, I think the issue with the passive tree is the same as with crafting and is mostly a UI/presentation one.
But that is mostly also because of GGG’s philosophy when growing PoE, in that the target playerbase is the hardcore player that knows a lot about the game and can generally navigate its obscure systems at easy.
So they never bothered (and I don’t think they ever will) to make things easier for everyone else regarding the interaction with crafting or with their trees.
GGG’s policy is mostly “We’ll only do that if we really have to and if someone else doesn’t do it for us”. So we get PoB, FilterBlade, Craft of Exile, etc. All external tools that do the job they don’t want to do.
I don’t think we would even have the trade page if someone else hadn’t already done pretty much almost everything for them as well.
That’s fair.
You do realize that that’s the exact argument people asking for a campaign skip use?
Player agency only happens when you have a decent amount of content. Like you pointed out in the campaign skip thread, LE already has a low amount of content to keep players busy. Letting them skip it is actually detrimental to the game.
The atlas tree for PoE only came around once you already had a dozen mechanics in the game. Until then it wasn’t really justified.
And there’s a fine line between player agency and stuff the devs want you to interact with. Otherwise you could apply that argument to any game and say that a game like Spidersilk should have the option to play as an FPS, so players have “agency” to play as they want…
That player agency will come later once LE has enough systems that you can’t really focus on them all, like what happened in PoE.
The biggest problem of POEs in the end-game is not the penalty at all, but serious problems with the performance, regardless of the system. I don’t believe that I’m saying this… but, in terms of the number of monsters and special effects, their performance, POE’s developers should learn from Diablo 4.
Yeah, the difference is with that you get a upside, faster progression, reducing engagement time.
With removing content you increase the timeframe needed.
One’s fine, the other is not.
It can already be added… but it won’t do much since not much is here, that’s the current issue. But there speaks nothing against allowing the option at least for the moment.
And yes, also true:
There’s a distinct line, I don’t think enforced weaver content during simply rushing Monoliths is a mandatory aspect the devs intended. That would change the base premise of the game, PoE did that… didn’t bode well there either. So I don’t see why it would fare better in LE, especially if more things come along.
One… excusable… 2? Still… 3? Starting to get iffy… the more the worse it fares simply. It has no distinct use-case yet to enforce it, like creating a specific premise which creates a distinct gameplay feeling… or being a preample for another follow-up step and ensuring this is upheld.
For me, a really important factor which can often determine whether or not I even give a game a shot is how long it takes to learn enough to actually be “playing the game.” What I mean by this isn’t about how long it takes to get good at the game, but how long it takes for you to be familiar enough with the controls and mechanics that you are engaging with the game on it’s own terms or in the “intended way.” A simple but familiar example of this is in fighting games. You can “play” the game by button mashing and maybe have a little fun with it casually going over to your friend’s house who had a console, but you aren’t really engaging with the game. You’re not using skill or making decisions, you’re just hitting buttons. You can’t ever get better than that if you don’t learn what the buttons do, so there’s only so much you can get out of the game.
In the context of ARPGs, the controls tend to be fairly simple to learn: Use your mouse to move and aim and hit one of 4 buttons to use skills, although usually most of the time only hitting one. The part that’s difficult to learn is everything that goes into making a build. And again, I’m not even talking about learning to create an optimal build, I’m talking about learning even enough about what the stats, abilities, and passives do and how the math works out that you can even begin to try making a build in any way more methodical than the build-making equivalent of button mashing. ARPGs generally suck at this. A lot of unclear or obfuscated mechanics and formulae; a lot of tiny decisions which taken individually are hard to observe the impact of but which matter a lot in aggregate. When you have a system like this, the only reasonable way to interact with it is through external tools or even just looking up a build guide to skip it all together. But at that point you’re not REALLY playing the game. If the game is about making builds and getting loot, then if you take that away you’ve taken out a huge portion of what makes the game what it is. Honestly looking back, I’m a little surprised I got into ARPGs as much as I did given that I pretty much only looked up build guides until fairly recently witht LE. But PoE is just this taken to the extreme. You have to fill in what, over 100+ passive points? And the vast majority of those are spent on + a little bit of stats.
What I like more out of an RPG build system is one which provides fewer, but noticeably impactful choices. D3’s skills were great in that respect. Each skill was distinct and within them you had choices that very obviously changed how the skill worked which you could understand WHY you would want to pick one over the other. “Do you want to deal more damage or do you want to freeze the enemies to keep them away from you?”
WoW briefly (I think this was during MoP?) made a change to their skill trees with a similar idea but for a different purpose. In an ARPG you make your build and stick with it. In WoW, the altered skill tree gave you sets of choices which you could adjust based on the context you were in to gain an advantage. For example I played Paladin, and there was a movement tier where the choices were a passive increase to movespeed based on your current amount of Holy Power which was great for general use and for any fights where you were moving around a lot but didn’t need to go particularly fast. Another one gave you a bigger short term burst of speed whenever you used Judgement, which iirc was a ranged ability that had like an 8ish second CD? So it was great for situations where you wanted to close a gap quickly or for fights with semi-frequent movement demands. Those two were also complicated a bit by being tied to things you use in your rotation, so managing them created a little interesting set of micro-decisions for you to manage in fights. Finally the 3rd option was a movement CD ability which gave a massive burst of speed for a short time on a 1 or 2 min CD. (don’t remember, but it doesn’t really matter.) So you’d be slower in general, but if you had a fight where it was REALLY IMPORTANT to move fast at a specific point that wasn’t too frequent, you pick that. Also, I won’t get into it as much, but just for a damage example, there was a tier where the choices were between more consistent passive damage VS 2 variations on a damage CD for when burst was really important.
Rogue-likes tend to work this way too where they provide you with sets of choices that make big, obvious impacts on your character build.
It was really obvious what impact these had on your gameplay so the player could reason about the choices they made without the help of outside tools. As long as you have enough options so the player doesn’t run out of interesting things to try really fast, removing all of those smaller math decisions doesn’t decrease depth, it just makes it more likely that more players will engage with the depth which is there instead of choosing to skip it entirely.
LE is a bit of a compromise in that respect. It still has some of those more boring +x% damage passives, but there are a lot less of those and deciding how to path through them is relatively inconsequential compared to picking out the big flashy options you actually care about. LE is actually the first time I went and made a bunch of my own builds in an ARPG. So while I think I’d still prefer some of it get streamlined, but I can accept what’s there for the people who like that for some reason.
The initial learning curve to get it going is important.
You also gotta take into consideration one thing though: The more complex a game the higher the learning curve by design.
Take games like ADOM (Ancient Domains of Mystery). Top-tier game, got horrendously complex controls, several pages long of stuff which applies once in a full moon.
Dwarf Fortress, especially before it came to Steam. Not only the UI is harsh but you also gotta learn how units behave, how to outfit em, how to make the dwarves happy, that some enemy types can have toxic blood, spew toxic stuff, how to decontaminate them, taking care of vampires, were-people of all kinds. Really complex.
Or CDDA (Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead), which is even more complex control-wise. You gotta learn the base controls, how to handle building a vehicle and building a base, where to find specific materials, how to craft stuff, how to keep from not getting parched to death, starving or succumbing to illness.
All of those have a massive learning curve… but worth it.
The willignness to engage with the learning curve is something which turns people off, that’s true. But you’ll be hard pressed to find top-tier games which provide thousands of hours of engagement without those being present.
The alternative is ‘long grinding’, which this genre is prone to have.
Not quite.
It’s by learning how the game handles those things, in detail.
The formulas.
When something applies in the chain of effects.
It’s absolutely not for everyone, which is why there’s a variety of those games available… from extremely simple (like Chronicon, good game!) to really complex (like PoE).
The question here is only: Where exactly do you fall in there?
Because there’s only 2 options (and I think the second one should be given in-game absolutely). And that’s a) to shove it into tooltips, which will push away people very quickly or b) to provide them inside a ‘advanced game guide’ which you can open and which is as extensive as the wiki is. A massive undertaking.
Companies generally don’t use that effort, especially not with the localisation quality of the third party company they hire which is already screwing it up beyond end. Would be unreadable.
Absolutely fine! Not mich finetuning there though then.
You can only have it one way or the other… and we got LE, which tried to take away the finetuning by overtuning their passives so far it makes them build-defining rather then build-guiding.
Yeah, but isn’t that not against the spirit of a loot-based ARPG? We’re acquiring interesting loot to adjust and tinker around with our builds, to enable new situations.
Shouldn’t those be in the gear rather then the tree hence?
I enjoy - surprisingly so - the ‘major nodes’ and ‘cornerstones’ of PoE a lot for that reason, even if I’m not a fan of the tree-setup there otherwise for personal reasons. But those… they work well. You work around them and have to adjust your pathing accordingly, more or less jewel sockets in favor of cornerstones? One will likely be rather out of the way… so the downside of not getting other places is a thing. As well as nowadays the cluster jewels which can be rolled with very powerful options, and jewels that can be build defining as well.
Makes it interesting, and is essentially gear and not the points directly which you spend during leveling and hence making it feel ‘static’.
Try out ‘No Rest for the Wicked’ and then say that again.
It’s a really really good example of a bird’s view which still provides the same feeling as Dark Souls has. Great level design as well, many secrets, well designed spacing which makes encounters dangerous because you don’t have endless space to maneuver, really well designed.
But PoE 2 was never designed to be a ‘Dark Souls clone’ of any kind. The only aspect it does - and does actually well - is that it enforces positioning and hence downsides for ranged characters while making maneuvers in melee a necessity for the majority of the game.
And that’s a flavor thing, it’s actually really well designed… and not for me, I do enjoy the blasting of PoE 1 more actually, didn’t think so before I felt the difference but it’s simply the case.
Yeah… nah The slime behind a door on the ceiling which mandates looking around 2 corners is definitely not ‘fair’. And neither is when they counter that by having a staircase which can cause a enemy to come from above and below while if you look at the wrong angle you’ll have a blindspot form where the strategically placed enemy will hit you.
Fromsoftware games have never been fair, and their design is based around being unfair actually, doing that really well.
But… bossfights leave always the option to act, they’re - commonly with a few exceptions - not unfair.
Good examples of games which are quality-wise very close are Lies of P, Nioh and Blasphemous for example (albeit the last is more a mixture between it and a Metroidvania).
There are plenty of games that are simple and long lasting, Tetris being just the more obvious example.
One of the games I’ve played the longest is simply minesweeper. Very low learning curve, I’ve spent more than tens of thousands of hours on it over the years.
Bejeweled, object find games, even animal crossing are all games that are very simple to learn but that you can play for thousands of hours, as long as the gameplay is entertaining.
I’m not talking about engagement through repetition but about the engagement related to vanity… new experiences.
After 10 minutes of Tetris you’ve seen all the game has to offer. Same with 10 minutes of playing ‘Breakout’ or a minute of playing ‘Pong’.
They stay engaging through mastering the individual aspects, not by experiencing new things.
You’re right with your argument, but it’s not quite what I wanted to point at.
I mean… you gotta agree that ‘Animal Crossing’, a cozy game with loads of decorative elements (creative aspect) is kinda different in what it engages the player with compared to ‘Factorio’ for example… which has also a high bar in relation to mastering… but also a huge one for learning and overcoming vanity mechanics over and over as you progress along the way.
Sure, I don’t disagree with you, but the way you said it made it seem that only games with more complex mechanics that have steep learning curves are the ones that are good/successful.
I just wanted to point out that many games are also very successful with simple mechanics that don’t require a big learning curve.
Oh certainly. I love a good unique and most of my builds start from picking one that looks interesting and going from there. I do kind of understand why we don’t just put them on every item like D3 did though. When you build the game around wearing all legendary items, most of those effects end up being fairly generic, which kind of cheapens the excitement of having these unique effects.
As far as tinkering goes… I think my point is I want options to be different enough from each other that a player can easily reason about them or at least test changes out in game and see the result. You can’t do that if most of the choices are very tiny buffs. If you swap one point between a thing that gives you 1% crit to 1% attack speed… you aren’t going to notice the difference. So to tinker at that level of detail, it stops becoming something you do in game and becomes something you turn to a calculator for. It’s even worse when it takes a little time to relevel whenever you respec so you can’t even easily do a back and forth comparison.
The effects of these kinds of decisions really only become apparent in aggregate once you get a lot of something. So if it’s only going to matter once you’ve taken like, 30% crit vs 30% attack speed, why not just lump those together into one choice? Like what if we made it so that for any given stat you could have taken passive points in, we replace all of that with a 3 tier passive: Low, medium, high. Do you not care about this stat? Do you want a lot of this stat? Or do you just want a moderate amount? Obviously you need to balance the numbers accordingly, but I think that would potentially be a good way of doing it. You still get to express how much you value various stats without needing to evaluate and click on like 30 of the same passive nodes.
To boil this all down: I want game developers to be efficient. I want them to maximize the amount of depth while minimizing the complexity. I think things like big passive trees in ARPGs are a lot of complexity for which you get a relatively low return on depth. Meanwhile there are some amazing roguelikes out there that get incredible amounts of depth out of very simple game pieces. Slay the Spire cards and relics have only a few lines of text at most and have nice discrete numbers so it’s pretty easy to understand what they do and how to compare them. And yet it’s an incredibly deep game. You could spend hundreds of hours playing the max difficulty and still not master the game. And you get to see quite a lot of unique decks that play out in interesting ways.
Obviously it’s a different genre, but they share some of the important principles of what we like about these games: Making builds, cool interactions, variety, meaningful strategic decisions, they even share the randomness for that gambling dopamine hit. I think a lot can be learned from that kind of design even if you have to do a lot to adapt it into a different genre.
Yeah this is what I’m getting at. Games with relatively low learning curves can still give tons of depth and variety if designed well. Perhaps the most notable example of this is chess. It’s a game which in it’s current form has been around for over 500 years and versions of it have been around even longer than that. It has a grand total of 6 distinct pieces and each one has a single, easy to explain movement rule. (I guess pawns have a bit more, but it doesn’t add that much.) Despite this, the game is still being played without being solved. Computers can’t even solve it yet. And it’s not even random. That’s an absolutely mind boggling amount of depth for such a simple rule set.
Oh, absolutely, that would be disastrous. Nothing gets as unfun as everything being odd unique interactions and having to figure out which does what half-way decently.
Though one thing I gotta say is that PoE and TL:I do it decently right in that regard. TL:I with holding it simple but offering more rare and powerful Affixes… but all rather generic… one way to go.
And PoE by providing such a massive variety of different items with different effects. Cluster jewels, normal jewels, eye jewels, uniques, influenced items. Basically everywhere ‘something else’ and you have to tinker around with all of the stuff and get a decent combination going.
LE kinda doesn’t do any of that, it tells you ‘here is a item, that’s for this skill’ and then leaves you at that most of the time, which is kinda a shame.
A unique weapon focused on fire-related stuff for example? Nah… not really there. Instead we have stuff like ‘Palarus’s Sacred Light’ which… yes… does things like melee damage for attributes or spell damage for attributes… but then goes along with having 2 effects specifically for smite. And that’s a very vast amount of the items there.
So if I look at - for example - 1 handed weapons which are non-skill specific we have instead of 13 suddenly only… 7. Basically halved.
That’s a shame I would argue to limit items this way. There’s generic ‘minion skill’ ones available… but rather I would love to see secondary effects or overall changes with the rare specific item adjusting skill behavior directly in some fun way rather then ‘buff that skill up!’ solely like ‘Transcriber’s Graver’ does, which pumps up the effectiveness of having 2 skills scaled… and simply that, ‘number goes brrr’.
The companion limit for raptors is more interesting then that for example.
Isn’t the passive tree commonly only there to provide a direction though? I mean… in Chronicon it’s ‘which stuff do I wanna use item-wise?’, in TL:I it’s ‘which Affix-direction do I wanna go?’ and in PoE it’s ‘Which archetype is my main skill based on’ kinda deal, with the bonus of the cornerstones for rather unique behavior.
It’s only in LE I’ve seen so much power in them that in some cases items are nigh useless even. A VK with only a weapon and a helmet for some Armor? Does surprisingly well! And I find that a major shame.
I think the power of the passive tree should’ve instead been put into a proper idol system, which allows more mix&match play which is fun. The gearing is a sort of puttle to solve after all at least to a small degree, doesn’t need to be massive like in PoE… but a bit would be fun there rather then throwing ‘generic crap’ into the idols only and then expand them with a bit more ‘generic crap’… exceptions applying.
Mainly to give people a piece of it every level, could also do a point every 5 or 10 levels, it’s solely a thing because it gives a direct reward to every single level up outside of ‘wow, my attributes increased’ for example.
Sure, definitely a workable system, all up for it.
As long as it’s not a backwards-ass system like Wolcen had all’s fine
Yep, that’s ultimately the goal!
EHG is really… and I mean really… bad at that though.
I mean… look what they did in 1.2
A separate arena for re-rolling LP items? Why not a consumable for re-rolls directly?
A separate area for extracting set items?
One for attribute re-rolls?
One for experimental crafting?
Re-running for every idol enchant a Monolith?
If we get a few more crafting options it’ll be a massive slog and bore to run through 15 times of different content where you hate 5 of it utterly solely to then stand around at the end and ruminate over ‘which item again did I wanna use that on?’ instead of letting people do all of that in town or… even better… a friggin personal place which you can decorate a little, have friends come by, maybe make people move over to pick up stuff they bought from the bazaar from you, acting solely as a middleman and allowing to show off your stuff.
Ya know… the thing which gets companies to sell MTX-crap since it actually gives at least some reason to buy it without it being a functional thing.
Fair, but the relics are the game-changers which cause it to become complex.
Simple to start, hard to master. Great game definitely! And a good example for it.
Overall yeah, you can reduce complexity a lot indeed.
Eh… if you’ve ever played Magic: The Gathering for example you have a relative immediate grip on the game. Unless RNG screws you over you kinda get a win most of the time. Much like for example ‘Noita’… but there it’s even less RNG and far more skill-based situations.
True. I did enjoy POE2 0.1 even it was balance mess. Each new major update it still goes heavily towards poe1 again. There is no point playing that game in endgame unless you download pob 3rd party tool to figure out if ITEM you are buying or using is actually better or worse. Horrible system to compare items. Not even going to the tiered affix system on items. There many many leyers if you plan to craft.
I don’t have anywhere near the perspective that some of the posters on this thread have about the genre. But I did a bunch of D2 play throughs back in the day, played through D4 (once) and created several LE builds and this recent POE2 play through.
The POE2 experience has made me appreciate what the LE devs have done with this game. Yes, playing through the campaign is easy (trivial even) but it gets challenging when you out level the content. I started a rogue after creating this thread and she’s now level 70ish in normal monolith level 90ish areas. The first harbinger encounter at 90 is hard enough to be interesting. Even before end game begins.
The skill trees are not overly complicated but have enough complexity to be interesting too. The crafting is fairly simple but offers enough complexity to make you think about it.
You can log in and play a map fairly quickly then log out. The whole thing is kind of relaxing. It feels like a game made by people who have done a lot of gaming and set out to eliminate a lot of the annoyances they’ve encountered.
I’ll add one more thing about builds in general - there is enough complexity in LE for you to make a lot of build variations. If you think about it, the unique items available just make that variation greater.
How good you are at playing a build is something different entirely. A lot of muscle memory and reaction speed is involved in these crazy fights. I guess what I’m trying to say is that LE provides pretty much everything you need to stay engaged.
