Path of Exile is a bad game.
The fact is that most of the issues people have with D4 are worse in PoE. When anyone says PoE is the pinnacle of ARPG design, I can safely ignore their opinions.
First, stash space is a problem. In PoE, you start with 4 tabs with 144 slots each, totalling 576 storage slots. This is not enough for the minimum amount of gameplay. Why do I say this… math. PoE has OVER 50 currencies and 705 skill and support gems. If you were to save just one of each of those, that’s 755 slots required. You’re 179 slots short of saving the minimum of normal saved items from the start. This means you have to buy 2 tabs at a minimum since they’re only 144 slots each and you haven’t even tried to save a single piece of gear. You still have to save 1,337 uniques, unknown number of alt items, maps, cards, flasks, etc. That’s 10 more tabs just for uniques.
So even though PoE starts with more stash space, it’s designed for you to buy a minimum of 12 more stash tabs assuming you do no actual organization and save only gems, currency, and uniques. That’s $30 in tabs at a minimum level of play, $40 if you want the benefits of premium tabs. Realistically though, you’ll save a lot more stuff than those 3 things and you’ll organize things in seperate tabs so it’s not uncommon for players to spend $80 or more on just stash space. Gotta get those more costly specific designed tabs for things like currency, maps, delves, etc. You can pay $14 for a unique item stash designed so that’s a discount over buying 10 seperate tabs. Regardless, the cost to stash items is on par with the cost of a AAA game on launch.
Second, there’s over 50 currencies. The problem should be self evident. Mobile games that are designed the worst use less of currencies. To use basic systems in the game, you either have to play for hours and hours to get the currency from random drops or use MTX on 3rd party sites. To display the need of currencies, it is not unreasonable or uncommon to use over 1,000 of a single currency in crafting. If the drop rate is equivalent to 10 per hour, that’s still 100 hours of play for a single crafted item. So you end up hoping you get lucky enough to have a higher than normal drop rate or find something of value that you can trade with other players. Which of course ruins Solo Self Found play and subjects you to dealing with any kind of player whims.
Third, crafting is horrible. It’s mostly not actually crafting. PoE core crafting systems is using currency for a single random result. Think of D4 enchanting at the Occultist except you don’t get to pick from 2 choices. I’m not the only one that thinks PoE crafting is bad, the developers of PoE do too. They rebuilt crafting systems several times in the past 10 years in an effort to find a better system but still ended up relying on rng.
Because of the rng based crafting, it’s not unreasonable to spend hours and thousands of currency to create a single BiS item. There are a multitude of PoE crafting videos where players spend 3,000 currency or up to 9 hours of play refreshing the rng affixes. A quick google search will yield video after video reminding you they edited the video down because it takes a lot of time and no one would like to watch that much of something boring.
Fourth, the graphics are super dated. I know this is subjective, but allow me to explain my thoughts. PoE wanted to emulate the grittiness of D2 but they ended up creating grainy textures with limited color palettes. From a visual design standpoint it has a artificial highly detailed assets for the walls but the floors are mostly plain wide open spaces. This reduces the claustrophobic nature of D2 and ARPGs have in general. Even in map types that are underground tunnels with a space wide enough for just 2 character widths to fit, it’s still not visually consistent with the feel you should be getting. The art issues are especially sad to me as I follow a few of the artists for PoE and their art is amazing. The conceptual art they share looks phenomenal. There’s something done after they do the art that happens to ruin the look.
The character animations are clunky and untethered to the game world. There’s that uncanny valley where a the player character slides across the ground a little bit when they move. Like when you cast a spell, your legs are spread out to a shoulder width and your arm is thrust outward. In PoE, if you keep firing of spells while turning, your character stays with feet planted at shoulder width and pivots without moving their legs. This is only one example of animation issues but what is more impressive is that you can look at the PoE2 trailer 2 and the bad animation and bad assets are still there.
Fifth, the mess of a skill tree. The PoE skill tree is mostly useless. You can watch videos directing you to take node paths just to get to the key nodes that are actually useful. If you trim out the non-essential nodes and keep the Notable and Keystone Passive nodes, you end up with something like the D4 skill trees. The skill tree is artificially complex as it’s mostly useless and the complexity is trying to minimize the number of nodes you take on the way to useful nodes. Yes you’ve heard that right, currently the skill tree rewards you for not taking nodes.
That’s a problem because it’s unlikely anyone who isn’t copying a guide outright will have to respec. Therein lies the problem, you need to find random currency drops in order to respec. This is a relatively rare currency drop compared to other currencies in the game. You can get some from quests but if you complete every single activity and quest in the game you won’t even get enough of the currency to do 1 full respec.
Sixth, PoE has terrible itemization. There are 4,575 prefixes/suffixes in the game. Yes I’ve counted, at 9pt font it takes 130 pages to type. The bloat of unnecessary stats on gear that drops is beyond ridiculous. This is why you need a loot filter to play PoE. You will get so many loot drops that you won’t even be able to use. This is the definition of bloat.
On top of the absurd number of them, they’re frequently that kind of “damage on Tuesday” stat. Of course some of that is just how ARPGs work in general but the sheer volume of these types of stats is overwhelming. Yet again, you need a loot filter to play. There are 17 different “add damage as additional cold damage” listed on the company website. They separate bonus damage and damage type by each individual weapon type. There’s 17 different affixes to add chaos damage, 17 added fire damage to weapon affixes. Such massive bloat. All of this is pulled directly from the PoE company website. Path of Exile’s horrible itemization is the reason everyone thinks they need a loot filter.
In conclusion, I never understood why anyone is putting PoE up as the ideal that Diablo games should strive to meet. PoE has the same exact problems as Diablo 4, well, actually it has more problems but the ones people tend to compare most are the same in both games.
I think the artificial complexity of PoE tricks people into thinking it’s designed for hardcore players. The difficulty is… not there. Like I showed above, the skill system rewards you for not picking nodes. That’s not complex, it’s bad design. Yet people will laud it as the best design even though it’s functionally the same as D4 paragon boards, in both systems you gain power by using the least amount of nodes between the key nodes.
Is the game complex or deep because it requires farming 50 different currencies, or is it just a way to keep people playing a free to play game that lives off MTX? They built a “crafting system” where you use 1,000 currency for one item, that takes time to farm. It’s not a secret that the sunk cost fallacy is a key element in driving MTX purchases, as evidenced by every mobile game on the market that has MTX.
Does filling the gear system with over 4,000 affixes make the system complex or bloated? I don’t think that struggling to find an axe with “+damage with axes” on it because you get thousands of loot drops per Act is complex. It’s particularly not complex to let the loot filter block everything but that affix. At that point, you aren’t even engaging with the system. Don’t get me wrong, I understand why people wouldn’t want to engage with the system, it’s certainly not due to complexity.
The whole game is built on poorly designed systems. You can say PoE doesn’t have a crafting system under oath and you would not be lying. The worst part of all this… despite the developers of Path of Exile 2 pointing out they need to change the core systems, it sounds like most of the bad design will carry over to the sequel.
