After playing POE 2 over the winter break

PC General Discussion
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It put into context what a solid game D4 actually is and also highlighted some issues that seem to be ingrained in the genre.

“Endgame” seems to boil down the each players taste on a spectrum of grinding repetitive activities, gameplay variety, rewards. Those with more of an affinity to grinding will appreciate POE2 because of the variety and power chase built into the mapping system. D4 has the much more simplified Pits/Undercity/Boss Ladder/Citadel. Both feel very repetitive but POE2 feels more cohesive. You work through maps to fight boss ladder esq encounters, you can “juice maps” to enhance drops similar to Undercity and increase difficulty akin to pushing pits. D4 feels more like a buffet and POE2 a 3 course meal.

I thoroughly enjoyed the campaign playthrough of POE2. The slower paced, dangerous feel, and depth of skills. This is why I probably enjoyed Season 0/1 more than some.

I think the lack of shared open world masks some of the normal complaints about OP builds in POE2. You are not going to run across a random player lvling or otherwise outside of towns, but you really feel it when you party with a buddy that has just bought his massive upgrade weapon through trade and is clearing everything before you can touch it. This means you can go through hours and hours of play without ever having to compare your build/char to someone else.

D4 on the other hand is just a much more efficient game. After dealing with the sprawling maps on POE2 I appreciate streamlined dungeons of D4 along with the VOH dungeons that are more open ended.

D4 is severely lacking in the depth and connectiveness of those endgame systems but I am not sure if it is a priority for a seasonal game. IMO it would add a lot of value for those that blast the game and those that play eternal.

The argument that POE2 is in EA and can iterate on some of it’s issues imo are the same as D4 being live service.

I hope the successes of POE2 encourage D4 to add development into difficulty and pace in certain areas of the game to provide variety and iterate on progression/rewards/chase items. The sheer creativity/number of boss encounters of POE2 is an inditement on the values of the dev team. D4 does not even do a great job in reusing some of the better campaign encounters which still don’t hold a candle to most of the POE2 fights.

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I think this is the key takeaway. More depth typically means more grinding and being in the game more, to an extent. Lack of depth means less grinding and less time spent on the game. This is also highly subjective depending on the player, as we all expect different things.

For myself, I would argue that I don’t necessarily want to be playing a Seasonal Based game the entire season. That’s just me personally. PoE 2, as it currently stands, will be that game due to my limited amount of playtime each day. I don’t have 10+ hours a day to get through the campaign in a week or two.

Hell I just finished the campaign and got into maps last night, and I’ve had EA since it launched mind you. This is how slow I am within the game due to limited playtime, and to do that every season just isn’t plausible for me. Now granted each time I play I’ll get better and faster to an extent, but even in PoE 1 it was just a grind at times to get through the campaign over and over.

This isn’t a bad thing though, as has been said many times before, PoE is more for people who have the time to fully indulge in an ARPG as it caters to that audience. D4 is more for those who don’t have a lot of time to play but can still enjoy themselves in an ARPG. D4 cuts out a lot of the grinding and streamlines itself to the casual audience, to an extent anyway.

Agreed. D4 has the issue of just throwing out content at us without thinking of the reason why this content should be in the game beyond its initial purpose. Pits for Glyphs, Undercity for target farming, etc. PoE 2 in particular has the other issue though of adding everything including the kitchen sink to its systems and making things overly complex.

I think both games could take away some core practices from each other. Not a 1:1 mind you, but just small tweaks in either direction that would help out both games in the long run.

Good write up.

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D4 can fix a lot of problems by allowing all item/mats drops everywhere and drop more. Instead they forced you to play the way the PM/Dev wanted you to play. If not because of hell tide, no one will play the open world. The open world is beautiful and should be a focus point of this game but nope, you see nobody in the open world.

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You are totally wrong. No need to change drops. D4 need that drips to be obtained through challenge and not just tedious grinding of mats. For example, I and my 2 friends are playing d4, usually on the weekend we are running bosses and it’s like 3 hours both days to spend them all, because each if us have a lot. And how it feels: 3 hours 0.1s killing boss, grab loot repeat N-times, go to the city, sell and again. It’s so boring. We need at least a boss fight to feel something and not to play loot manager game

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Not everyone want to fight boss.

This is the issue I talked about, locking items to specific events. IT IS NOT FUN.

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What is fun then? Maybe just create char and blizzard will provide you the whole set of items? Or you want each mob to drop the whole game loot table?

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PoE 2’s end game is, currently, widely regarded as its weakest feature. They pretty much just slapped it together for early access, so it would at least have something of an end game.

They took a number of league mechanics from PoE 1 and put them into PoE 2 maps – maps that almost all have very different layout structures than PoE 1 (nearly all PoE 2 maps are a series of narrow corridors with dense terrain/ objects) . The result is you get something like Ritual spawning in a tiny corner that basically breaks the encounter, or Breach spawning on a narrow bridge. This content wasn’t originally designed to be played in layouts such as that, and it shows.

They’re trying to make the game more challenging or narrow the gap between melee & ranged by making their entire end game a never-ending series of hallways, apparently (melee is still less desirable, so that didn’t work).

Combine the above with the end-game crafting being some of the worst ARPG crafting I’ve ever interacted with (it’s not as noticeable while you’re leveling up).

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I think d4 was really good last season. They have really messed up progression this season. it doesn’t flow well.

Poe2 has some of tbe clunkiest abilities i’ve ever seen in an arpg. The archetypes i thought were the worst ever in an arpg they somehow made worse in their second entry. Summoner and melee i think are very bad in poe2.

I think both are very good but some poe fans are delusional. especially the streamers. they both are very bad in certain areas.

They both force you into content that you probably will find unfun and i think poe2 is the worst offender there as well.

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I agree with everything except crafting part. There is no crafting in poe2, only gambling and trading.

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I would agree mapping feels highly disjointed with equal parts thrill and utter frustration. As a bare bones mess of a endgame though, i dig it. Or i should say, i dig what it can become as development continues. Love my D4 too, fully agreeing with all the criticisms of it.

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Yeah the completely random affix adding is the crafting and it’s probably going to stay the same way as that’s pretty much how I remember it being in the first game - that is to say, a garbage system worse than even D4’s or LE’s excuses for “crafting.”

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What items are locked in D4?
A: None

I got a Shako at lv 52 before even touching a boss this season.

I think you’ve confused “locked” with “better drop rate”.

PS - Diablo 2 had some items that were actually locked to certain enemies due to how the drop system worked with monster level.

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Minor grammatical point: did you dive into endgame yet? (I haven’t. But you seem to have a more confident opinion about how it feels to play… yet I saw no specific mention of you having dived into it yet.)

Assuming I don’t have that experience yet to compare “endgames”, a point about what you did like in both games, which was something about the meaningful/challenging combat encounters, as exemplified in P2’s campaign & D4 S0/1 (though I’m not sure I recognize what ppl mean when they refer to S0/1 & how the game was tuned back then)… combat loop is the core of what makes the genre ‘click’.

It’s what blew Brevik’s mind that afternoon when he’d recoded the combat to real-time & swung a sword at a skeleton: how does it feel to do the most repetitive action(s) throughout your character’s career? Is it satisfying? Is that satisfaction designed to last 20 hours (for most gamers)? 100? 300? That’s a design question devs are either engaging or not engaging with.

Its parts aren’t mysterious:

  1. the combat elements themselves, their variety & depth.
  2. how likely it is - and to what extent - for the player to alter those elements during a character’s career, thus multiplying the effect.
  3. how good do these feel?

You can design dozens of different systems around this mantra.

All that’s clear to me so far, is that in core combat mechanics & early progression (since these are all that can be reasonably compared, because these more fundamental parts are going to swing the least before release) it’s no contest which is the “better” core design given the above mantra. I can’t imagine what the rest of the game will really be like when it’s fully released, because a lot of its systems will have undergone dramatic change. Crafting & the economy, alone, will probably be very different on release.

I sense this without having dived into endgame (my gaming schedule is as boomer as Iggi’s)… just a single, deliberately undertuned, mid-60s pre-endgame build, with mediocre loot rolls & whatever skill gems I have access to… when/how often I’ve intervened to change how my char plays… and knowing a bit about what the skill/item progression potential looks like longterm (without even inspecting anyone!).

Increase player power through middle of normal Act 2, and make dodge roll have a smoother recovery animation, is all that core combat experience needs IMO… which would probably be 1 minor patch, and 1 major patch, respectively… and I’ll even keep treating early crafting as the afterthought that it is. That’s how big the quality difference in dev mindset seems to me, re: the most diablo-like aspect of the loop.

(Also, overlays & mods are a thing apparently, and inspect tool(s) are coming, for the non-ssf crowd… and the existence of ssf & overlays itself is worth noting. But as it is, you can get a sense of other players’ power with traditional, low effort ‘inspect’ methods.)
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They do go through phases of “locking” loot to a specific activity, but then subsequently increasing its drop rate outside that activity. It’s still a soft-lock if you don’t want to prolong your exposure to other boring/repetitive loops, because running the most efficient of these shortens the ordeal.

That’s the problem. The devs don’t actually play the game for prolonged periods to get a reading on the most important aspect of gaming across the board (ie for part-timers & for no-life blasters & everyone in between) which is: how fun is it to keep running this loop?

Rod isn’t interested in the answer IMO. He probably thinks as long as they sprinkle some seasonal candy every 3 months, the loop will feel “good enough”… because it’s “good enough” for him, and his is the permitted standard in the office (this is my reading).

If the game runner isn’t obsessed with the game itself (vs the ‘product’), it will show.

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it is call locked. You cannot fight it straight up. You got to grind the mats. And as many have pointed it up, this season with hundreds of boss run and no drop.

So you got an item that with 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001% drop from a mob. How many can say that.

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Competition hopefully breeds greater products and I’d hope that POE2 being as AMAZING as it is would light a fire under the D4 devs to produce the best work they can.

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I have spent 50+ exalted orbs on “crafting” (+ small orbs and regal, but I am not counting them) and I got 0 valuable items. It’s 100% gambling, not crafting. Got 2 chance orbs - both just removed the ring I have tried to make unique. It’s gambling. Vaal orbs - you know, it’s just gambling with high risk of punishment. The only crafting system elements are quality and maybe essences, but they are working once per item.

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I don’t understand how you say that and then immediately after you proceed to essentially invalidate it by pointing out how badly designed the game is compared to POE2.

What exactly makes D4 a solid game then? How efficient and dumbed down it is? :unamused:

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I hope about that too. My plan was to move to poe2 completely, but after 120h in game plan changed. I feel like they won’t change core mechanics of their “crafting” and it’s just too much rng gambling for me. Then I gave up and just farmed currencies to buy items through trade, but it’s not fun game loop, you have no fun from obtaining all items through trade. And I am locked in low-mid items range, because I have only exalted orbs and I can actually farm them, but for 120h of playing I got 1 divine orb and almost every higher quality item costs divine orbs, not exalted. Exchange rate for exalted:divine is 70:1 when I have checked. It sounds more like a real life job to get currency to buy items, not even grinding. And campaign was actually good, you got 1-3 bosses on each map, and it was a challenge, but in the endgame maps I have 1 boss in like 20 maps and usually it’s just seconds before it died. High end content is locked by maps tiers, so you can’t actually get good portion of t15 maps from runs until spent a lot of points in atlas tree. You have to be lucky to get ultimatums and another item to even get into trials, that are really good challenge, but reward is not compensating the potential punishment failure. And if failed - you loose your trial start item and you need to go farm it again to even try trial again.
I am leaving poe2 for now and go back to d2 until the new season of d4. At least in d4 I can get my month of happiness with multiple chars before I get bored.
And if compare performance of the game itself - poe2 in ea is just trash on ps5. But it’s ea so I expect they fixed that till release

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Well, that’s… great? I’ll be sticking with POE2 until… well POE3? Because D4 was a MASSIVE letdown and D2 just can’t compete with most of the current ARPGs. I would like to see D4 become a great game because one day I’d like to give it another try, but my hopes aren’t high due to the devs and atmosphere at blizzard.

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More depth does not mean a game is fun to play. Astrobot won game of year in 2024, it is an arcade game which is shallow compare to Dragon Dogma 2 and many other game released in 2024.

Likewise Elden Ring is lack of depth compare to Monster Hunter World, but the Souls like ARPG is far more popular and dominated game awards.

There is fine line between depth and tedious game play, not all game handle that very well. Not many players like to spend whole day reading information in the Internet before try a new build or fight a boss he never encountered before.

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