Reminder: Selectable Character Gender is a "Minimum Bar."

cats on crit was the best april fools event in poe in a long while. the fortnite event was interesting but after the initial hype died down i kinda ignored it entirely.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

We are pretty far off-topic here. Sorry, Numbers-sister.

Eh. The topic was lost years ago.

"

Foreverhappychan wrote:

How about if I bring up another of those 'minimum bars'? Non-story levelling method. If any game needs one of these, it's PoE 1. And if PoE 1 won't get it, you'd better hope and believe PoE 2 will. It could be the most amazingly well-written campaign in the history of, and people will still get over it after a few times through unless it has massive room for deviations a la BG3...and somehow I don't see that happening.

Boy sure would love to be wrong though. An ARPG with that level of narrative flex? Whoo nelly.

But more realistically, GGG would do well to copy pretty much every ARPG since D2 and have some sort of 'story free' means of levelling alts. Okay, Titan Quest didn't have it but Sacred 2 kinda did, WH40KIM totally does, D3 did and does, DIV does, Wolcen does...not sure about GD or LE, to be honest. Either way, I'd bet my left and right if GGG were to make PoE 1 today it'd have a non-campaign locked method of playing alts baked in standard. Left, right and maybe even middle.

Jonathan is on record in recent interviews (the last ~5 months, I believe) as "not loving" the idea of a non-campaign level skip. He knows it's a huge community ask, but he's stated he's strongly resistant to it. His preferred solve is, rather than allowing players to skip the campaign, trying to find ways to make the campaign fun to play every time, no matter how many times you've done it, so you don't feel a need to skip it.

I...don't know how reasonable/plausible that solve is, really. The Altmonsters who can crush the campaign in three hours and play forty alts a league are never gonna care about anything below red maps anyways, and frankly those aren't the people asking for a skip. It's the folks who take a week or two to grind through the campaign and who might only play two or three characters a league, if that, because their limited playtime and lack of Market Mastery means they can't commit to the new-character grind when they know that's twenty to sixty hours of basically throwing away all progress just to catch up to where they were. Those folks aren't really gonna care how cool the campaign is to play once they've done it thirty or forty times and all they want to do is try some of the new stuff in a league.

On the other hand I do get it, zooming through the campaign once only to press "SKIP SKIP SKIP" every subsequent character does feel like it cheapens the experience quite a bit. Heh, though it occurs to me as an ironic tie-in to the original long-failed topic that most of the people screeching for campaign skips and thus the elimination of any/all "story" from Path of Exile are also the ones generally trumpeting about how the different classes in the game are definitely their own unique and distinct characters with their own unique and distinct stories that cannot possibly be modified/swapped out for opposite-gender options.

Message seems to be that people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like. So, typical Internet. Ah well.

You start the thread by insulting people
Then you go on how you're the victim all along because people don't reply positively to you attacking them right away. I mean, why would they?
And then you again go how "people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like"

Honestly I find it weird that anyone even bothers replying to you.
Especially any positive messages.

You just shrug off any post with any criticism as trolls.

"

1453R wrote:

On the other hand I do get it, zooming through the campaign once only to press "SKIP SKIP SKIP" every subsequent character does feel like it cheapens the experience quite a bit.

I agree with this paragraph.

One of the things PoE nails more than other ARPGs, is the feeling of progression. You're so weak in the beginning and so strong in the endgame. The contrast is huge, unlike other games where you're character feels almost the same, just with different numbers. To take away 2/3 of that progression just feels wrong on so many levels.

I understand why people are asking for a campaign skip. I also understand why the developers are reluctant. But you do have to respect it on some levels, because this would arguably make the game more... Accessible and probably more popular. I like to see that some developers aren't just thinking about those factors (jab, jab).

I still think that alternatives are a better solution than a skip. Anyhow, regarding PoE 2, it should be a problem for at least a few years. If this is something people "demand" from the get-go, I clearly do not understand the world anymore.

"

imanubcake wrote:

You start the thread by insulting people
Then you go on how you're the victim all along because people don't reply positively to you attacking them right away. I mean, why would they?
And then you again go how "people only care about the game's story and artistic integrity when they can use those things to bludgeon people and ideas they don't like"

Honestly I find it weird that anyone even bothers replying to you.
Especially any positive messages.

You just shrug off any post with any criticism as trolls.

Weirdly, when they asked me "how can I fix this" and I answered honestly, I didn't get a response back.

This entire thread can be summarized with "The spirits that I called"

"

ArtCrusade wrote:

Weirdly, when they asked me "how can I fix this" and I answered honestly, I didn't get a response back.
This entire thread can be summarized with "The spirits that I called"

To be fair, I hit the same nails you did, just harder, so i assume the reply wasn't necessary(?). Also the dramatization narrative wouldn't work replying to you, i guess.

"

Phrazz wrote:

"

1453R wrote:

On the other hand I do get it, zooming through the campaign once only to press "SKIP SKIP SKIP" every subsequent character does feel like it cheapens the experience quite a bit.

I agree with this paragraph.

One of the things PoE nails more than other ARPGs, is the feeling of progression. You're so weak in the beginning and so strong in the endgame. The contrast is huge, unlike other games where you're character feels almost the same, just with different numbers. To take away 2/3 of that progression just feels wrong on so many levels.

I understand why people are asking for a campaign skip. I also understand why the developers are reluctant. But you do have to respect it on some levels, because this would arguably make the game more... Accessible and probably more popular. I like to see that some developers aren't just thinking about those factors (jab, jab).

I still think that alternatives are a better solution than a skip. Anyhow, regarding PoE 2, it should be a problem for at least a few years. If this is something people "demand" from the get-go, I clearly do not understand the world anymore.

Yeah. Like, it's weird in that I find myself agreeing with both Jonathan and the playerbase on this one. Campaign skips suck, they disconnect the character from any sense of progression or attachment to the world. You just apparate into the Epilogue area as a Legendary Hero that didn't exist thirteen seconds ago, it's jarring and weird and kinna totally kills my buzz. A lot of Jonathan's answers on game design boil down to "people think they want this, and we've honestly tried it, but we've discovered it doesn't actually feel great in practice and tends to reduce immersion/investment/buy-in." A lot of things players find super annoying - manually opening doors, manual item pick-up, a lot of those stop-slowing-me-down bitsies - are there to facilitate a sense of being grounded in the game world.

A lot of the Boomer Zoomer Must-Go-Faster players that have long since lost all sense of that grounding in the world of Wraeclast forget that they're a vanishing minority of the playerbase - fewer than four percent of players on Steam have the achievements for defeating the Eater of Worlds, and same for the Searing Exarch. That sense of grounding is actually really important for retaining more typical players, even if it aggravates high-speed-low-drag optimancers looking to get to maps fifteen seconds faster.

And yet I cannot blame players at all for not wanting to grind the campaign for the three hundredth time and instead just getting to the part where they try their super cool idea they wanna play with, instead. Like, totes get it, especially with the PoE1 campaign. That sucker's showing its age hard, every time I get to Act II it just makes my boobs sag. Hardly Grinding Gears' fault, but it's also hardly the fault of people who've played as much of the PoE1 campaign as they ever wanted to play and a whole lotta "and then some" and would do just about anything to have something else to do. That is an absolutely valid ask, and it may have to end up being a point where Vision has to bend to demand.

I do get not wanting to offer a skip option in the new game the moment the new game drops though, heh. Like, PoE1? Absolutely, press for some sort of alternative, but PoE2 gets at least one league where ya gotta play the brand new campaign you've never seen before. Hueh.

I have read...a lot. Like, a lot. Highbrow shit. Pop shit. Everything in between.

And VERY few books are a joy to reread regularly regardless of quality. My tune simply won't change there.

And sure, playing a game isn't the same as reading a book -- it's a lot more interactive, a lot more potential for deviations playthrough to playthrough...But there is no way I can see an ARPG campaign being so compelling every time that it is a better approach to alts than a story-free mode.

This may well be Jonathan's hill to die on. Everyone has one.

And surely he's a lot more riding on it than any of us.

But it is for me a sine qua non. Period. Full stop. I can't but see his sentiment and feel a hell of a lot of hubris. And hubris not in unproven passion (as we saw with PoE 1) but hubris in the face of popular opinion and current trends based on what I believe to be a healthy evolution of the genre.

We'll see. I love being wrong about these things. But I had more confidence in BG3's claims regarding narrative ambition due to Larian's earlier works than I do GGG's claims to a 'compelling' campaign based on theirs.

Edit: and let's not call it a campaign 'skip'. That is the wrong language and I genuinely dislike that DIV and WH40KIM use it, even though that's what it is in DIV since the story-free mode is the result of events in the campaign. The word 'skip' implies something isn't worth experiencing. That is not what a story-free mode is about. It's about embracing the heart and soul of the replayability of ARPGs *after* we have experienced the story.

In a way, a good story-free mode is a bit like a sequel within the game, a 'what happens next' after you've resolved the main conflict of the campaign. No, not a sequel. A coda. A happily ever after full of slaughter and treasure hunting. Valhalla, in a way.

"

1453R wrote:

A lot of the Boomer Zoomer Must-Go-Faster players that have long since lost all sense of that grounding in the world of Wraeclast forget that they're a vanishing minority of the playerbase - fewer than four percent of players on Steam have the achievements for defeating the Eater of Worlds, and same for the Searing Exarch. That sense of grounding is actually really important for retaining more typical players, even if it aggravates high-speed-low-drag optimancers looking to get to maps fifteen seconds faster.

You can't really take steam achievements as a proper measurement tho.
Those 4% could be like 80 or who knows how many percent of the existing player base. The percentage is based on accounts with the game in their library and not the percentage of players who actually played the game lately.
A large portion of those players might not even play anymore and never experienced the boss fights to begin with as they simply did not exist years ago.
Some are probably players who've picked up this game but did not liked it much, not accounts which obviously don't encounter those fights anyways, and do on.

It's the same with those people who take the steam charts as active measurement of player numbers while it's also just inaccurate.

Some proper statistics after each league would be cool, but that's something only GGG can provide, so heavily unlikely to happen at all nowadays.

I like to play men, sexy men - sexy men I want to poke or rather, or as well, sexy men I would love to be - who are also gods in terms of their power.

Several other ARPGs that I could spend my time on, that are under active development now, give me the chance to be a dude in all classes.

I don't see why games both bigger and smaller, in terms of money if not also population/sales, can do this but GGG cannot.


Also - lol at anyone who calls this desire "woke" or other equally vacuous phrases.

Many cis, white, straight men prefer playing female toons when given the chance, some just want to be a dude. Some people don't care if their choice is made when they chose the class, some people very much do care.

There is nothing to lose by adding this is. Sure, everything is an opportunity cost, but so are plenty of things most of you won't like (no one is going to like literally everything about the sequel, of course) that perhaps you dont even know about yet.


If they are looking for more players, dying on the hill of gendered classes, and going with the typical "woman are magic and dex" stereotypes seems odd. LE also does the gendered thing but hey, woman can be warriors and men can be magic whores. Imagine that.