Last Epoch is POE Killer now

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Hackusations wrote:

PoE was developed against a technically more polished competitor and launched in an objectively worst state than D3, D4, and LE. None of that matters. None of the comparisons to then and now matters. Content matters. PoE's success is built upon its content cadence and lateral expansion. The key to that success stems from the decision to go with bottom-up design via its mechanical tag system as opposed to the traditional top-down method used in most RPG games. It makes PoE modular in nature and giving it incredible agility to expand the game as well as the efficiency by not having to retread sub-system development.

Take this example. What does it take to add one skill that can be in a build for D4, LE, and PoE?
- In D4 it means integrating it and the sub talent into one of the classes' skill trees, designing new aspect powers, and adding to the affix pool of the itemization.
- In LE it means integrating it into one of the mastery classes, designing that skill's passive tree, and expanding the itemization where needed.
- In PoE the devs just add the skill. It automatically inherits the interaction with supports, items, and passives from the tags. Plus its usable by all the classes and ascendancies.


LE is a great game, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be able to match the pace and degree of PoE's development cadence.

Excellent points.

"

Hackusations wrote:

PoE was developed against a technically more polished competitor and launched in an objectively worst state than D3, D4, and LE. None of that matters. None of the comparisons to then and now matters. Content matters. PoE's success is built upon its content cadence and lateral expansion. The key to that success stems from the decision to go with bottom-up design via its mechanical tag system as opposed to the traditional top-down method used in most RPG games. It makes PoE modular in nature and giving it incredible agility to expand the game as well as the efficiency by not having to retread sub-system development.

Take this example. What does it take to add one skill that can be in a build for D4, LE, and PoE?
- In D4 it means integrating it and the sub talent into one of the classes' skill trees, designing new aspect powers, and adding to the affix pool of the itemization.
- In LE it means integrating it into one of the mastery classes, designing that skill's passive tree, and expanding the itemization where needed.
- In PoE the devs just add the skill. It automatically inherits the interaction with supports, items, and passives from the tags. Plus its usable by all the classes and ascendancies.


LE is a great game, but it is unrealistic to expect it to be able to match the pace and degree of PoE's development cadence.

One of the best posts I have seen on here in 12 years, and I have written tens of thousands so fuck knows how many that is.

Buuuuut there is something missing from its brilliant summation of PoE's endurance and flexibility. Sure, PoE has incredible modularity. And yes, that endows it with sustainability characteristic of Chris' visionary approach to the whole enterprise.

...the problem, the "successful despite this" factor, is no one at GGG and I'd say no one in gaming development overall had the nigh omniscient ability to deploy that modularity in a particularly rational way. This remains GGG's only game and it's clearly a full time job. Even with a curiously less ambitious sequel on the way (hard to be truly ambitious when you rule the roost and realise you can't fully explain how or why in terms layfolk could understand), PoE's modularity is a web chock full of shit. Not all of that shit is juicy flies. There's a lot of dead bugs and debris in there. Hence PoE 2, I imagine.

Sequels to bottled lightning are fucking scary. Well, to be less polite, a single title that lasts years is still a one-hit wonder. There is always an urge to try to do better next time. It rarely happens to the seeming flukes and inexplicable phenomena. PoE 2 won't be as modular because modularity in game design, hell in life in general, is incredibly demanding to maintain. PoE is a Frankenstein's Monster, a Prometheus Unbound, awesome and terrifying to its creators when they fail to shield themselves from how impossibly "alive" it is.

No one really wants to be Victor Frankenstein. All he is remembered for, all his name means to most, is the monster. The god-apeing animation of modular complexity comes at far too high a cost. So anyone developing an ARPG in the miraculous wake of PoE is much less focused on copying it and much more on figuring out how to do it less... Just less. EHG, officially GGG's most devoted fans, set out to offer not a truly new take on ARPGs but simply a soft fix for most of PoE's glaring problems. And from a development perspective, one of those problems is its unchecked modularity.

Take the skill trees. I loved them, even as far back as pre alpha LE. Less modular or flexible than support gems, but much less prone to accidental interactions and OP whoopsies. Plenty of flexibility from a player standpoint, plenty of control internally. LE's skill trees are reliable and solid. I never looked at them and thought, okay but what if they want to expand or modify them? Which of course they had, I am sure. And still went with a much more rigid design than the frankly insane skill gem system of PoE.

D4...well, its like any Blizzard game post Diablo 1: a polished, easy to consume offering drawing on much rougher but truly original games. No Dune 2, no "craft" games. No EQ, no Wow. I think where D4 really breaks the pattern is instead of presenting a Blizzard game smoothing out the rougher edges of PoE, it presents a Blizzard version responding to the criticisms of its own former work D3. That's why it has excellent world design, a superior story, non-corny dialogue and TWO well-acted Horadrim, neither of whom are killed off by butterflies. But that is it. It doesnt deign to draw on PoE's modular endgame systems or even D3's all-in item design madness. It plays it safe, which worked for the campaign but fails for any sort of ARPG loop. Trading is 100% unnecessary and item chase is down to a few bosses. The final final boss isn't for loot farming at all, a real Soulsian inclusion I admire and mock in equal measure.

But even with all that, D4 aint dead. It proved that while there seems to be no real niche in responding to PoE's modularity, there was room for an ARPG that completely ignored it.

Because as I have said multiple times now, modularity is a two edged sword. To anyone dealing with it. There is enough room in the gaming world, even in the claustrophobic ARPG subsubsub world, for games that are openly modular to players who want to be deeply involved and hands-on, and games that go out of their way to keep as much of that as possible in the backend, the messy reverse side of the tapestry.

LE flirts with both and as such will likely never leave PoE's shadow, even though it really does find an excellent medium between PoE's rampant modularity and Diablo's brainoffkillshit rapture more often than not.

But in and of itself, modularity is in a literal sense intoxicating. How do you maintain control in the face of seemingly infinite configurations? "Still sane, Exile?" remains the most obvious projection by a game developer I have ever seen, a cry for help overwhelmed by its Mad Hatter energy.

And much like the Hatter's fellow Wonderland denizen, PoE has many legs and many segments... And mostly sits on its mushroom vaping its way to alarming moments of lucidity. What next? Where to go from this?

Maybe PoE 2 will be a butterfly after all.

I think it's important to highlight how important the league cadence was to PoE, becaue of the F2P model. They were not even sure the 3 month cycle would work. I find it fascinating the entire model was basically created during a somewhat informal conversation with CW & Kripp, about his audience metrics.

It's far less important to D4 or LE for example, that retention occurs frequently because 100% of their players have been monetized already. That's the upside to the p2p model.

Sure D4 wants to keep "fish on the line" so to speak in-between their paid expansions, but its less important. What is important is these expansions be significant and appeal to their more casual playerbase.

LE is sort of in the middle. If I'm not mistaken there will be paid DLC coming in terms of expansions as well (free updates of course as well as part of live service), but becaue of the development team size I dont know when that will be. They might need MTX a bit more than D4 does, in terms of live service.

What I'm personally very interested in seeing is how PoE1 & 2 co-exist post launch, how resources will be allocated, how exactly PoE2 will be monetized due to PoE1, and finally how they are going to manage these two similar, but distinct, communities within the GGG universe. If you think Genshin and HSR communities have beef, wait til PoE1 is seen as the red-headed stepchild.

Popcorn ready.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

I think it's important to highlight how important the league cadence was to PoE, becaue of the F2P model. They were not even sure the 3 month cycle would work. I find it fascinating the entire model was basically created during a somewhat informal conversation with CW & Kripp, about his audience metrics.

It's far less important to D4 or LE for example, that retention occurs frequently because 100% of their players have been monetized already. That's the upside to the p2p model.

Sure D4 wants to keep "fish on the line" so to speak in-between their paid expansions, but its less important. What is important is these expansions be significant and appeal to their more casual playerbase.

LE is sort of in the middle. If I'm not mistaken there will be paid DLC coming in terms of expansions as well (free updates of course as well as part of live service), but becaue of the development team size I dont know when that will be. They might need MTX a bit more than D4 does, in terms of live service.

What I'm personally very interested in seeing is how PoE1 & 2 co-exist post launch, how resources will be allocated, how exactly PoE2 will be monetized due to PoE1, and finally how they are going to manage these two similar, but distinct, communities within the GGG universe. If you think Genshin and HSR communities have beef, wait til PoE1 is seen as the red-headed stepchild.

Popcorn ready.

Didnt know that Kripp tidbit but it tracks - - we were happily doing races for a while there but the top priority Chris gave to Twitch integration well before most other games made clear streamers would be both the fog beacons and the spelunking canaries.

I am so torn on that one. Not the streaming focus - - always hated that but it worked so eh whatevs. More on racing vs leagues. I felt races were much more accessible and had that rogue-lite feel to the fact that your character was nothing but a piece in a bigger game of collecting race points. But leagues have enabled a slew of excellent game additions, significant to the point of eventually being officially dubbed "expansions". But in making leagues the focus and by making each league chonk AF, the FOMO I felt with racing became a much more serious issue, one that I cannot acronymise: Fear Of Falling Behind. How many races of a sort I didn't enjoy could I skip and still get my target skins? Quite a few. How many leagues can I skip and not be utterly lost upon return? Far fewer. And that is a problem when some leagues just don't click.

Trite as it may be, life's too short for PoE as anything but one's One Game.

And to this Gen X gamer fart, the whole notion of a One Game will never sit well. To paraphrase that famous influencer Aquinas, beware the gamer of one game.

To add to this, I would also stress wariness regarding the devs of one game as well. Just because they've one basketed all their eggs doesn't mean you have to. Tribalism is by its very nature unsophisticated and myopic.

But I get it: what options do you have, as an Exile? No ARPG will ever... Ever do a tenth of what it does. What I think some Exiles miss is no other ARPG, not even Last Epoch, wants to. I suspect that baffles - - why not aspire to be as "good" as the best? Because good is subjective, something Aquinas also understood, but where he used God as his standard, I will stick with something a little more blasphemous: my own unique tastes, formed of my own relatively unique experience.

After all, who else here has played and deeply enjoyed every game in my signature in the past month or two? A few of them, sure. Thats how Venn diagrams work. But all? Not impossible, just unlikely and honestly disturbing if so.

Anyway never loved leagues and think a lot of the game's deepest issues come from overprioritising influencer... Influence. But again, a hundred million Chinese American dollars can't be wrong, to butcher another common idiom.

Nah, only thing that will kill POE is POE2. This league mechanics was super bad though.
Didn't played LE but by looking at streamers it looks boring and nothing special, especially if you compare it to POE2 which looks waaay superior.

ggg,

streamers,

scammerz

and meta was killed poe 1.

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TizeNO wrote:

Nah, only thing that will kill POE is POE2. This league mechanics was super bad though.
Didn't played LE but by looking at streamers it looks boring and nothing special, especially if you compare it to POE2 which looks waaay superior.

PoE 1 will kill PoE 2.

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Aynix wrote:

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TizeNO wrote:

Nah, only thing that will kill POE is POE2. This league mechanics was super bad though.
Didn't played LE but by looking at streamers it looks boring and nothing special, especially if you compare it to POE2 which looks waaay superior.

PoE 1 will kill PoE 2.

lol, agree there

If GGG continues like that, i can't imagine a game be able to kill poe.
Poe is just 10 time above all other games when we speak about quality.

A little further into LE now and it's just a ton easier so far. Very little resistance. Just running around with a coffee in one hand.

I tend to think that my first playthrough of a game should be rough. Really rough. Like bodies carpeting the ground.

Instead, this feels like I'm just mowing down everything. Maybe I accidentally picked something too strong? I don't know, I'm just blindly picking things and going.

This feels closer to D3. Fun to play for a short period, but won't hold my interest long.