Opinions and Suggestions - Stay the F away from Path of Exile philosopies

Feedback and Suggestions
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DISCLAIMER: These are my personal opinions from playing ARPG games for several years. Many of my Suggestions will be assumptions, please be patient and discuss them acordingly. Additionaly, this is a point of view from a skillful player. I always enjoyed challenges, but fair ones. Some may agree or disagree with what i’ll say, but regardless, stay civil, stay inside the discussion.

I’ve played Diablo a few times, but never liked it. I’ve played Path of Exile for over 4 thousand hours and enjoyed it a lot. Hated the recent direction, but more on that later.

I’ll divide this post in 3 sections: Pros, Cons and Comparisons and Suggestions.

Pros:

  1. I want to congratulate Last Epoch. In my 14h of gameplay i haven’t found any glaring bugs, everything is fairly well explained ingame and nothing felt out of place. Everything seems to work acordingly, the skills feel meaningful in their own way and seem to always work as intended.

  2. It’s the first time in an ARPG that a crafting mechanic really FEELS like i’m crafting. You start with some random base and you choose what it will have. Simple to craft, easy to understand, hard to perfect, as it should be. I don’t mind randomization, but randomazing every action you must take in order to improve your item and calling it crafting is simply bad gameplay.

  3. Gameplay is not slow, but not frenetic either, it’s in a great spot. Your skill tree matters, your passives skills matters, how you use your skills matters, that’s how the game must be and how it must remain.

  4. Ignoring redundant actions such as wisdom/portal scrolls. It just artificially bloats your game with boring stuff that is simply unneeded and outdated.

  5. Not tying necessary ingame improvements to real money improvements is a great step towards making the game enjoyable and fair.

  6. Hit boxes feel like they work as intended and graphics in general feel nice. The aestetic also feels really good.

Cons:

  1. Some pathways are badly lined when you use tab. Sometimes you can pass where it feels like you shouldn’t and sometimes it blocks you where it looks like it shouldn’t block.

  2. Trying to see where you need to go to continue the quest feels unintuitive and lacks dinstinction in some quests. Clicking in the quests and the map auto searching the location you want to go to would be a nice improvement.

  3. Some bosses abilities windup felt way too fast compared to others. Example being the Wengari Fortress boss.

  4. Zooming in, in the map feels kinda clunky when you zoom out too far. Maybe make the zoom in into where your mouse is.

  5. The dialogue from npcs sticks in the screen for a long time even after i am moving away. Making it disapear a little bit faster would be better.

Comparisons (to other games) and Suggestions:

  1. The first thing i noticed is that you made a similar choice as how you buy points for cosmetics as Path of Exile. I believe that is a bad, bad move long term. Even more so if you tie particular sets of armor to more expensive supporter packs. I’m a firm believer that all ingame customization must be paid with ingame money and as such, make no fuss about paying to play the game as opposed to it being f2p. I know that if you continually keep releasing more content for you game, you need to be paid some way or another, but it really never sat well with me making free expansions and making the cosmetics be the expensive part. At least make the cosmetics fairly priced and you won’t see me complaining.

  2. For the love of the immortal emperor, keep your game ingame. I always despised how you needed to keep third party apps and even sites to theorize how much damage your character is doing or to trade because the game simply forgets that that is important to have ingame. Work hard to keep your game well maintained and explained and you’ll never have to worry about other people doing your job for you and then having costumers complain about it.

  3. Don’t tie your game to strict montly schedules, make your own time table and adjust what you need to adjust in your own due time. The past few years, Path of Exile has been a full on joke, never releasing an expansion without having some people exploit it or full on failing at lunch. Cyberpunk, promising everything and in the end, giving nothing but bad press and furious players over unkept promises. Make your game well coded, actually deliver on what you promise, take your time, test everything and only then, release it. Trust me, people who want everything in the same second are the same people who will complain endlessly. Patience is the only virtue that matters if you want to succeed.

  4. Don’t strip away your game. Games sometimes have to change to reflect more current times, but try to release it as you intend it to be 50 years from now. Path of Exile for the last few years simply can’t make an expansion stick, always striping it to bare bones, nerfing or deleting it all together. Think hard and well on how you want your game to progess, even more so if it affects core mechanics or add new ones. I don’t expect that if i leave Last Epoch and return in 10 years that the game will be the same, but i at least hope that my character will be playable. That is the most important aspect of any game, consistency.

  5. Keep power creep in check. It’s tempting to introduce more mechanics, more ways to make a character customizable, but that is a trap. The never ending cicle of improvement may appear alluring, but over time you will have endless mechanics that will need to be balanced and rebalanced with current mechanics. Improvement to near perfection in an ARPG is welcome, but after a certain point it’s just detrimental to the game itself.

I believe that every game has their own strength and weaknesses, but it’s important to learn from others games mistakes and improve upon, as many mistakes, independently of the game genre, are pretty similar.

Again, these are my points of view. None are set in stone nor are necessarily right or wrong. I just want the game to be enjoyable and the best it can be so anyone can enjoy it as much as they can.

For those who read it all, thank you. And let the blood bath begin.

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Big agree. The more transparency we have to the stats on the fly the better the game experience. It lacks right now.

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Most of this game is developed in PoE’s shadow, LE’s development cycle is molded by another company directly, same as PoE’s January release was molded by Cyberpunk

Terms from the game are taken directly from PoE as is to say ‘we know you play PoE’ so they add ‘Recently’ and other terms…theres no hiding that

Cycles are basically designed AROUND PoE leagues with same premises, The MTX system is the same…because it works.

Theres a reason its the top aRPG where the lead developers are worth millions now, why wouldnt EHG want to be millionaires and still make a good game…they can and it will be very similair to PoE but slower, easier crafting and no XP loss…

Also you should play for longer than a day to form a more constructive opinion than to say 'this game shouldnt be like PoE because I dont want it to and heres how you can make less money and have less players:"

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Then you have read nothing that i wrote.

Being molded by another games shadow is how you stay behind another games shadow. Furthermore, the reason PoE is worth millions is because they consistently and persistently promise one thing with their trailers and take that away in a few months time. For the past 5 leagues, i want you to tell me which one can still be portrayed as they promised that was actually improved upon, not striped nor delete altogether. And not even to say on how at least 20% of those numbers are basically bots milking the game or playing “Path of Trade” instead of the game itself.

Also, you should play PoE for longer than a day to form a more constructive opinion than to say “this game should copy everything another game is doing because you’ll become a millionare”.

And those are just the glaring mistakes i can find on a 5 min search. Imagine what LE devs can achieve if they learn instead of copy anothers mistake.

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As far as I am concerned EHG still plans to introduce a exp penalty.

And I hope they will implement this sooner or later, so we can give feedback about the leaving curve.

I am a Big fan of this. There is a great discussion about this in the forum :slight_smile:
Having a the last few levels being something not everybody can achieve is very good, but I talked about this extensively on the mentioned topic.

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Aware, not concerned. “As far as you are aware” means to the best of you knowledge.

There is a difference between slavishly copying something/someone (which is what you are referring to) and being inspired by or taking the best (in your opinion) concepts and ideas from something (which is what I think Shrukn means). GGG are as much inspired by other games in the genre (& other genres given some of their league concepts) as any other company (including EHG & Blizzard). EHG are never going to blindly copy insert game/company here to the detriment of their vision of what they want LE to be. But that doesn’t mean that LE when it launches is going to be identical to what they thought it would look like when they started.

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Which i understand. However Shrukn steered the conversation into a “just copy them to make as much money as you can” instead of refering to my suggestions points.

I have played PoE for years. I know their strengths and their weaknesses. My suggestions were clear and simple, steer away from PoE bad decisions and strive to do better. If my suggestions were bad or lacking, sure, that’s his opinion, but i want to see LE be better. And honestly, it doesn’t take more than a day to know if a game is trash or not.

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I agree. Without penalty, there isn’t need for improvement.

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I think the current penalty for MOF is great, because you don’t lose “progress”, but you only lose your chance of very determinsitic potentially great loot.

But depending on how many otehr endgame modes they implement, they all would need their own “death penalty” if they don’t add any “global penalty”.

And i am totally for not locking anything major behind an “exp wall”.

Lvl 80-85 should be reachable for everybody and from there onworads, so the last 10-15 levels for thise extra passive poitns and base hp/mana it’s enough incentive to not die and min max those last few stats with those passives.

This is not build enabling, but still enough incentive for min-maxers.

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Have you checked out the extensive (and growing!) in-game guide? Press G and you’ll see one of the efforts that EHG is making to lesson the need for third party apps.

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I did, and it’s alredy leagues better than PoE. What i dislike is that for min-maxers (such as myself), you always need a third party app to accuratelly tell your damage. I hope that such need is lessened in LE (or even implemented into LE, if they choose to).

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I think he meant, you should play LE longer than a day, because you said

While I agree with your point from my experience (1300+ hours in LE), there aren’t glaring bugs and most stuff is well explained. But there are also things that aren’t too well explained. But that’s not the point here. I, too, think that this general statement of ‘everything is…’ comes a bit early after 14h of gameplay. You haven’t seen everything, so theres no way that you could judge this objectively.

I don’t mean that you are not able to judge the things you have seen or should not give a first impression feedback. It’s just that some points might not hold true if you have not seen the whole picture.

Regarding some other points:
I think there are several different types of players:

  • Players that don’t know PoE so they have no clue about these comparisons and just walk by
  • PoE veterans that came to LE because they like the similarities to their (former) favourite game
  • PoE veterans that came to LE because of the differences in some core designs compared to LE
  • Many more…

For me personally it’s hard to judge some of the statements that come from either of the PoE veteran factions. They say “in PoE everybody likes this, so copy it”. Others say “GGG is doing everything wrong, don’t copy it. Nobody likes it”. The thing is, that we will never know exactly if some features are popular or not. Reddit post also are no 100% proof of a general opinion, from my experience. Because reddit is overwhelmingly negative on most popular gaming communities.

My personal rule is that I don’t take reddit or steam forums as a proof for something.

All I see, objectively, is that PoE is very successful and has fucking awesome active player numbers that are relatively stable over years. And I’m certain that the league mechanic of adding new content every X months is one of the key aspects that makes PoE that successful.

Bad us that they overwhelm new players with stuff they can never experience without help and guides and 3rd party stuff.

If EHG can prevent that kind of stuff and keep new stuff accessible for newcomers, this would be awesome.

But if I was a game dev of an ARPG dev studio, I’d defenitely copy that season model. This is what keeps things fresh.

People play WoW classic, because they got fed up with the new stuff Blizz was adding. They go back because if nostalgia and because they haven’t had that classic experience for years.

But if they just had WoW classic without addons since WoW launch, the game would already have died a while ago.

So I can’t agree to these two if your points. I think they are well-meant, but I don’t think these suggestions are (don’t know how to say…) good.

Edit: The rest of your suggestions I mostly agree with!

Welcome to LE!

:rainbow::v:

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I should’ve elaborate more, yes. They were meant to be more generalistic, but still could use more explanation.

The lack of gameplay hours: with that amount of time, i alredy finished the “main quest”. On that note, i haven’t found any game breaking bugs nor anything out of the ordinary in that section. I’m starting the endgame now, so indeed, we’ll see if that holds true.

Edit: As for the copy/don’t copy debacle, the developers are the ones that have to choose if they want to cater to noobs, avarage or pro players. A noob might say loot is bad, but a pro might say they are getting too much loot. In PoE, both are objectively right, but for the wrong reasons.

I also agree, PoE has a really great player retention, but as you said, it’s desproportionally overwhelming how they lack foresight on how to explain their own game comparing to LE. If i see something in LE, i just press G and it’s most likely there. In PoE however, god help me if i even find the right solution to what i’m looking for.

Now for the two suggestions you disagreed, yes, i could’ve elaborated more, so here it is:

  1. Don’t tie your game to “strict” time tables. They more than often say that they have to keep player retention, but also need to spew out a new league every 3 months so they can keep the players engaged, so there’s never time left over to correct other needed aspects of the game. In that regard, it would be great if LE could stick to their guns and release on their time table as to avoid unecessary… back lash. Or creating their own constriction, so to speak.

  2. This one came from PoE constantly butchering their own expansions and hating how they handle everything afterwards. What i could reiterate is that change is sometimes necessary, but constantly tuning down or even out may alienate your player base pretty quickly.

Also, yeah, i don’t take Reddit nor other popular gamming communities seriously, it’s just that the second dude that replied showed complete lack of empathy and it felt it would be reasonable to reply in kind.

And thank you for your reply. I’m almost lv60, builds been coming along pretty nice and i hope i enjoy the many updates to come for LE.

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Subjective vs. Objective

A lot of what I don’t want, because I don’t like it, is my opinion and thus subjective. Even in situations where say EHG had player-power available to purchase via MTX could not be portrayed as an objectively bad decision. It boils down to how the majority of the player base experiences the decision in a subjective manner.

This brings me to the thought: telling EHG, or worse them taking this to heart, is assuming that what you or I tell them is objective. In all likelihood it is subjective instead. I don’t want EHG to feel as though they are stifled with their design ideas because they saw someone’s feedback and felt the need to retract. I think the best approach is what they’re likely doing:

  • Try something out they believe in, and
  • Look at the player feedback (both in metrics gathered from servers/steam and forums) and respond accordingly
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It is worse than just that, the map cannot zoom out far enough. Usually it is only one or two rooms.

This is more a “some bosses are harder than others” and is to be expected in pretty much any game.

I could tolerate a cosmetic shop if there was a transmog system and every piece of gear can be used for appearance instead of stats. Then you would have a lot of cosmetic stuff that does not require the shop.

I agree, I would love to have lost epoch database ingame and damage tooltips as reliable.

this reminds me of this video

basically don’t put in systems that do not enhance the general gameplay, if you can remove it and nothing changes then there is an issue - PoE keeps doing this, Heist league is the biggest offender.

Power creep is inevitable in a game like this, it is probably a easier to give additional ways to make endgame harder for a reward(such as if you had curses as well as blessings, which can be optionally turned on for people wanting a challenge). The real issue with power creep is when specific builds start to dominate and everything else isn’t viable(the issue with PoE right now).

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first of all

Secondly and more importantly after the expedition changes it has become clear that the PoE devs do not understand what the players want out of it - nor do they understand that build diversity relies on low power builds to be viable, so when they nerfed flasks along with everything else they ended up pissing off a lot of their fanbase.

The PoE devs have noticed the power creep beast and are trying to put it back in the box, not realising that the power level has become the APPEAL of the game

Long and short - my suggestion for LE devs DO NOT BALANCE MINION HEALTH AND DAMAGE AROUND THE BEST POSSIBLE BUILD, If you do so you only force players to go meta.

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Can’t agree more. It’s agregious how Chris himself said that increasing hp of monsters is bad video game design, but lowering overall player power is effectively the same thing…?

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It is, however, largely agreed upon that buying your way into power is regarded as a cheating way to improve. Giving power to those that may not have earned it, most generaly angers those that which power has come to them from their own merits. From an objective point of view, LE will be possibly getting more money, but for a player, their merit is basically nulified, their merit means nothing if it can just be bought, and i would absolutely feel that way.

That’s why, what i’ve iterated here are just that, suggestions. In the end, they need to gather their own data and form a conclusion of their own. And from what i’ve seen so far, they are completely capable of doing so.

Exactly, but without a real player feefback, data can be misleading. It’s imperative that players voice their concerns and then, with apropriate data, pave their own way.

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it also kills the new player experience. For the player that has to spend 10 hours to reach monos - it feels bad levelling when someone else can just skip it.

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That’s your opinion and I share it. You can see the exact opposite happen though – players have and will play games where player power can be purchased. From their point of view it might be a great idea, less time spent to get right to the fun and be somewhat competitive. Maybe they have little play time and this works quite well for them?

Who knows, I don’t support that kind of view point, even though another game’s metrics might show we’re wrong.