Yes Titan Quest 2 looks amazing, I can’t wait to try it
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On the slower gameplay/dodging: I don’t really think an ARPG is built for this kind of thing. There’s way too much clutter even early on to see all the shit you need to dodge. And at least for the melee skills, they’re so hard to make use of when you need to dodge so frequently.
As for loot… what did people expect? It’s GGG. They make good designs and then ruin them by being stingy with loot drops to force people in to trading. When I was still playing PoE 1 it was really funny seeing the same thing happen every new league: Cool new mechanic, but the droprates are so bad you barely get anything out of it. And then people forget and get hyped about the next thing.
Maybe you didn’t spend 480$. If you did, you should have received a message from them about a free key.
There is (or was) some online calculator, where you pasted your transaction list and it told you how much you spent in total for PoE. I know that my spendings over the years totalled only 300$, so I wasn’t eligible.
yea I got the $40 one, guess it didnt come with anything
I truly believe that if they make an offshoot of PoE/ PoE 2 with Harvest + Essences + the other crafting mechanics as the core crafting system (rather than an addon to the alt+regal+exalt part) it could be a much better game.
The argument that trash modifiers like Light radius and extremely low rolls need to be there to add “weight” is ridiculous to me. The only point of these modifiers is to punish players for crafting.
Item rarity being a stat you need to build is also something I don’t agree with. Loot should be based on the content you are doing, not on how you build the character. Otherwise it just becomes a mandatory tax to ensure you are getting the same amount as other people.
Huge dissapointment and wasted opportunity IMO seeing that crafting is basically the same just going backwards in PoE 2.
I haven’t gotten it yet. The recent patch makes it more enticing but I think I’ll wait.
The campaign is definitely waaaaay too long from what I’ve seen. And after recently playing the mind numbingly dull Undecember campaign I just don’t have the energy for another long campaign. I may even wait for launch to experience it for the first time so it at least feels fresh.
What’s so bad about Sanctum? I actually like it, but didn’t get to play a lot of it since I rarely got the books for them or didn’t feel like buying them.
The problem isn’t that Sanctum exists. Some people like it and it’s fine. The problem is locking a crucial part of your character progression behind this mechanic because there are many people that don’t like it or even have the skill to play it properly.
While Ultimatum is basically a matter of smashing your head on the wall until it breaks, either through lucky RNG on the mods or because you overleveled it enough to make it easier, Sanctum is a mechanic that you might never overcome.
While you can heal the damage you take if your build isn’t optimized or overleveled, you can’t really heal the sanctum damage, except if you luck into having a few rooms that will give it back. Which is how I eventually got past it.
And I can’t even imagine if I was playing melee. The decision to lock ascendancy behind sanctum is especially punishing for people that are trying out any melee skill, since it’s almost impossible not to get hit in that case.
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I played a mercenary with a crossbow and bow ('cause mobility, jumping over enemies) and got hit three or four times for minor damage during the whole trial, and I never played sanctum in PoE 1, so I didn’t really know what to expect.
It was surprisingly easy to dodge everything, monsters aren’t the fastest in the world. And I am not exactly the player with the best reaction time or map awareness.
PoE: you spent $480+ on our first game so here’s a free key to the early access of the second one! (honestly, really cool of them to do this, but that’s a lot of money if you don’t consider the game being 11 years old lol)
GD: you participated in a community initiated forum guessing game to figure out what we’re calling the new Mastery combinations so you get a key to the expansion.
Grim Dawn also rarely provides updates and has no dedicated servers. Their model is better than nothing but other models provide much more frequent and substantive updates overall.
I’d take significant and major updates once or twice a year than a “game as a service” model. But this post was about how one company only gave free keys for people who already spent $480+ on their game vs a company who gave keys out for just hanging out in their forums and goofing off. So I’m not sure what the service model and update frequency has to do with anything
Crate said they were going to stop working on GD years ago, yet apparently they’re still doing updates & an expansion…
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Ditto. But I think we’re not the target audience around here…
(Come to think of it, given the choice, I’d take a polished, finished product and no update at all. I am having a blast right now playing Titan Quest because the game hasn’t changed in the 6 years I haven’t played, and I get back all my old memories and feelings. That wouldn’t work in PoE, it changes too much all the time.)
Now, my views about models: they both come with advantages and flaws.
Traditional: Full game with occasional expansions (i.e. Grim Dawn).
It is far more demanding at release. You need a polished, “complete”-looking product. Easier later on, you are not trapped by a schedule, but while expansions can be far apart, they are expected to be huge, bringing new areas, quests, classes, something massive each time.
Modern: Seasonal game (i.e. PoE).
Much more forgiving in many regards. You can release any half-baked stuff you want, people will accept it because it is expected to disappear or radically change every three-four months (as an example, I have complained many times here about the campaign, and each time someone tells me “it’s ok because it is a live-service, it can be completed later on”). So, altogether much easier to pull off than the first model. But it comes with a catch: you have to come up with new stuff 3-4 times a year. It doesn’t have to be huge, not even polished, but it has to be original, fun, and most importantly, regular.
Blizzard, having considerably larger resources, does both: they release a polished, complete product AND add quarterly (roughly) seasons to it. The best of both worlds.
Right now, EHG, with their smaller resources, is in danger of taking the opposite path, the worst of both worlds: an incomplete, unpolished game, BUT no regular innovations and fun seasonal ideas.
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I completely agree. I’ve been playing GW1 lately and it’s been on life support basically since I stopped playing like 6-ish years ago and it’s been such a blast to go back through that game.
Also, I agree with the rest of your post as well
Played poe2, hate it. I’m not the target audience I guess. I love arpgs and souls-like games… Whatever poe2 is trying to be ain’t my cup of tea.
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I want to pushback a little bit on this … One of my biggest issues with POE2 is that the progression is so slow and incremental. I haven’t experienced any big game changing progress in the forms of abilities, items, or passives, only small incremental changes that eventually add up to game-changing factors over a long time.
I’ve played about 35 hours of the mercenary, and what bothered me about the trials and unlocking ascendancy wasn’t so much the difficulty and tedium, it was that the ascendancy was such a minor power boost … Having to go through such tribulations to unlock such minor abilities for my character made it incredibly frustrating for me.
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I haven’t played merc a lot yet, so I don’t know how that one goes, but for witch there are some big bumps. For example, I picked up a unique that gave me 100 spirit early on and that was a huge increase in DPS. Also when I picked up my SRS/Arsonists. And the last bump was when I crafted a good sceptre with a huge spirit boost and +2 to minions.
It might be more noticeable on witch because summons are really crappy early on, but at least some uniques/rares do provide a decent boost.
As for the ascendancy, it usually gives a decent boost (better than a passive) but overall your bump comes from the 2nd ascendancy or 3rd. The nodes further on tend to be stronger.
Otherwise, I agree with you.
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I’m in mapping now with my gemling merc. It would be funner if I moved faster, lol. I actually branched out in my passive tree to get the movement speed nodes. Any time I get into a fight I have problems with, I put on boots with 25%+ movement and even with stinky stats things work out. It’s that or take off my chest for the extra speed, lol. I must’ve gambled 200k gold in boots and while I got lots of nice rares, none had movement on them, so complete loss there.
Gemling legionnaire is really fun thou. I’m all grenades and ballista totems 
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Imagine people complain about rng in LE…
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