Neither game is nearly fun enough to ignore all the feedback regarding unskippable campaigns.

I get that y'all like to ask streamers, who functionally get paid to play through the campaign ad infinitum, about it. They're wrong though.

Like I'm actually in awe of how they managed to functionally repackage the entire game and leave this unaddressed. It beggars belief. There was a short amount of time when GGG was saying they were going revise how people get ascendancies that looked like they were going to be making moves to address all the feedback about the unskippable campaign but then they took an abrupt left turn about all of that and here we are, another year without it being addressed.

You mean to tell me you come up with 40 unique challenges each league and can not come up with a way to unlock some way to streamline the leveling campaign? People literally funded and tested every feature in this upcoming game for you and you can't even bother to listen to them when they're telling you things?

They CAN come up with a way for you to be handed a free level 90 character with three hundred divines every league, sure.

They don't WANT to.

Grinding Gear has mentioned - repeatedly - that they don't like campaign skips. They've heard the community on this issue, and decided otherwise.

Do the work. And if it sucks, get to the point where you can blow through the campaign in forty minutes like all the Streamer Memers do.

I may be in the minority, but I like playing through the campaign.

I don't care about speed running them and I always play a character skill as soon as possible. I like the feeling of progression while using the skill you want to use end game. I almost always start a new character for a new skill.

I understand why others want to skip though. But GGG has made their plans very clear on this, they are not ignoring feedback, they are just saying they have no plans on doing it differently.

The argument is that doing the acts is boring and repetative

The players answer to that is to give them access to end game content in some way and let them do bite sized ultra repetitive content for even longer, do you not see the stupidity of the argument?

Look, they've done alternatives to the campaign previously (endless delve, endless ledge). The only thing they're lacking is a way to access those from the main campaign and some programming to make it go from one to the other.

They've tried to move more encounters into the campaign to make it more interesting and these have not met the design goal of making the campaign more interesting. Now, personally, I don't believe they can make the campaign dynamic enough to be worth playing through it more than once a year. They're welcome to prove me wrong.

The absolute dearth of resources going into this problem is unacceptable though.

Idk how this continues to confuse people. They are never going to allow this to happen.

Really hope they will introduce Heist or Nico for an alternative of the campaign.

They also can take older Atlas of POE1 endgame (shaper vs elder, Sirus, Maven) as a way to level up, and make the goal to kill some boss in the atlas to unlock some stuff like book of skill in the campaign and some craft recipe.

I like the campaign but I don't like replaying it 3-5 times a league so I rarely do. Not too big of a deal, just means I don't branch out very often. Might change my mind later.

What's bugged me about all kinds of games (MMO's especially) is they do a terrible job making you feel like you have the freedom to make a second character. GGG paints themselves into a corner by making a game that's fun to experiment with but you have to slog through a repetitive story mode to get there. I don't have college nights to waste away anymore so it feels less fun doing that than it used to. But 2024 was such a sorry year for gaming I might actually want to spend more time in PoE since I'll have few others to try out lmao

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Andromansis#4714 wrote:

...
They've tried to move more encounters into the campaign to make it more interesting and these have not met the design goal of making the campaign more interesting.
...

What counts as 'more interesting'?

Generally, people who push for campaign skips are there for endgame. They ONLY want endgame. Nothing CAN be interesting for them but endgame. The only thing they want to do is experiment with endgame builds; no matter what happens in the campaign, those players will not care because they one hundred percent believe "the actual game starts at endgame". Everything before level 90 is just pregame to them, a slog they have to pay in order to get to the 'real' fun.

The only thing Grinding Gear could possibly do for these people is just skip all the normal content entirely, hand them a level 90 character and a PoB-style item editor in the game a'la Diablo CheatEngine stuff, and let them go nuts because they care about no other portion of the experience at all aside from fiddling with endgame builds.

GGG cannot, will not, do that.

Ergo there is nothing to really argue for. If the only solution is "put me in red maps/Ubers with whatever gear I want", there is no solution. Not feasible. Can't do it.

So getting good at clearing the campaign fast it's gonna have to be.

"

Moridin79#6328 wrote:

Idk how this continues to confuse people. They are never going to allow this to happen.

Just like how they'd never allow trading automation or in game bulk markets and how path of exile 2 was just going to be a really big expansion for path of exile 1