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

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Gungniir#6674 wrote:

path of exile 1 is at least 10 years overdue a campaign skip, dont make the same mistake with poe 2. Maybe not on release sure, but never is just messed up. Can't describe how utterly sick of poe 1's campaign I am.

Edit: I ruined my 696 post count for this reply.

697 is just one better than 696.

My prediction is that POE2 campaign will run aground on the issue sooner than POE1 did. I'm basing that on their presentation today where they said they expect act 1-3 to take 25 hours.

I like the campaign. It feels integral to the genre.

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superbomb1967#5561 wrote:

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1453R#7804 wrote:

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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.

I mean, there's skipping the campaign, and then there's whatever you are going on about. No one is asking for whatever that is in your bit of hyperbole.

You will be, shortly after they add campaign skip. "I hate doing white maps every league. When will they add red skip?"

It's time to let go, you're not getting a campaign skip in PoE. Personally I don't mind, it's fun the first couple times and after that the fun comes from optimizing, getting faster, seeing your build slowly getting online at certain stages and so on.

Literally a non-issue.

My only problem with the campaign, is that once one has half a clue about how the gearing mechanics work, is too trivially easy and boring... which means it takes 4-10 hours to get to even a chance at anything where I have to turn my brain on.

The Last Epoch campaign system has been really refreshing, because it only takes 2.5-3 hours to campaign race to get to the point where you can do their endgame Monoliths (vaguely like POE2 atlas), at which time you can immediately start challenging yourself with hard content (doing level 55 endgame content at level ~30). Then, after grinding this a while, one can go back and "partial campaign skip" in a dungeon, then Speedrun an hour to pickup the remaining campaign bonuses. Which means your total time in the campaign is under 4 hours on a league/season start and less with hand-down gear.. and this is not pro-level speedrunning, this is something everyone can do after watching a single guide or understanding the concepts.

A simpler time in POE1 is 10 hours to the end of Act 10, perhaps as little as 7 once you are really good at it... which is more than 2x longer.

I really don't care if I'm doing the campaign or something else, I just want to spend less time with worthless gameplay to get to something challenging (which for me is where the fun is)...and no, ruthless and hardcore don't change this, they just make the gameplay slightly more tedious, not mechanically harder.

If POE2 is mechanically harder all the time, every time, then I'll be thrilled to re-run the campaign over and over. If it's trivially easy, then it'll be the same pointless time-waste of POE1.

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lagwin1980#2224 wrote:

The argument is that doing the acts is boring and repetative

The one thing that I really don't get about the "repetative" thing is HOW is it repetative to play the campaign every few month 1 or 2 times while it is no problem to run the same map over and over for a few 1000 times every league? Sure after all those years I'm not a huge fan of playing the campaign anymore but that's a natural thing I guess.

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KuroSF#6521 wrote:

If POE2 is mechanically harder all the time, every time, then I'll be thrilled to re-run the campaign over and over. If it's trivially easy, then it'll be the same pointless time-waste of POE1.

From what I've seen its mechanically similar in mechanical difficulty to the bosses in Hades 2 or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles : Splintered Fate.

I hate how much poe punishes players for making more than 1 character. It isn't just the campaign, but every grindy system to get a build running.

Their are larger issues, but I can see where players are combing from.

Nobody is saying its the only issue. Nobody is saying its the largest issue. But it is an issue and you'd have to be doing a lot of mental gymnastics to just ignore this issue. We have a long history of this specific gripe, at various levels of articulation, dating all the way back to the closed beta for path of exile 1.

We aren't in denial or undervaluing how fun the game is, we know how fun the game is, it isn't fun enough to completely ignore over a decade of feedback on the issue.

Indeed. Blindly following the narration that "we doing our best" has no value.