First impressions on POE2 EA?

For casual players, it's a waste of time. Wait for release to hopefully be better/fixed by then. I have plenty of backlogs to go through than having to spend time with POE 2.

Visually fantastic. Music and sound is fantastic. Boss fights are interesting/fun.

The story I'm not following too well. Maybe that's just me, but I find it difficult to follow.

The severe lack of loot is horrendous (cmon man, its an ARPG)

The map slogs are horrendous . The reason the campaign is long is because the maps are huge, you move slow as shit, and you miss tiny little corners that end up being important CONSTANTLY.

The gems and skill and passives are all...weird, at best. The passive tree is way too big and complicated, and I say that because the majority of the stuff in it is uninteresting garbage.

The absolute worst thing though, hands down, is the trials. What the actual fuck is this shit?

It's awesome, I just got to maps yesterday and the atlas already is a really fun system. And the maps themselves look beautiful, and they're extremely varied too.

Crafting has been great so far too, I'm liking the changes.

Balance is all over the place but it's EA I'm not going to worry about it.

All I know is I'm trying to get off work early to farm more maps. It's been a blast so far.

Honestly? I quit today. I'm working on Atlas and after failing several due to after-death explosions or cheesy rare mobs with giga-affixes wrecking me, I gave up. This just isn't fun. I wouldn't even mind if I could simply try again, but bricking the node + XP loss is just too demotivating.

I love a challenge. Love Dark Souls games, grew up on Nintendo. But this doesn't even feel challenging. It feels cheap.

Between the awful visual clarity for threats, the insanely bad trials system, the constant need to roll dodge, and the cheeseball one-shot mechanics everywhere, I finally just realized that I was having 0 fun and decided to uninstall.

I might be back if they fix a LOT of things but right now it's just not an enjoyable experience.

A.I. post~

Just finished Act 2. Feels bad. So depressing. I seriously can't think of a single thing I feel positively about and every day I find myself less and less able to convince myself to finish the campaign. So I can get to the endgame everyone is complaining even more about.... Just feels terrible tbh.

My comment was removed because I stated that it might be AI generated. It left it in my cache though. So here's my comment : This is AI generated and the internet is fundamentally dead.

Overall I would give it a 7 out of 10.
But it has potential for a 9 with a few tweaks.

What I dislike about the game:

-Map Size, a lot of bloat without interesting locations

-Trials for Melee are horror, a cake walk for range chars. Needs balancing or being deleted entirely from the game. Whole community hates Ultimatum and Sanctum, yet they decided to use it for ascension. Must be a bad trolling attempt

-Skill Gem System and how underperforming most gems are. Some are overtuned on a three link already and some are barely playable.

-Tree is bloated with a lot of useless nodes. Needs to cook a little bit longer, maybe reduce the size, implement more defensive layers etc.

-Attribute requirements on gems and gear is still bonkers, needs tuning as well.

Why are people comparing this game to Dark Souls, which is meticulously crafted in terms of level design, itemization and enemy placement? Even the slow, measured success and reward dopamine drip is nowhere to be found in POE 2, which seems to revel in randomized difficulty spikes, sparse to useless loot (in a "loot" based genre) with no organic climb preceding said spikes.

They are not comparable, and this game in its current state is not good, nor will it appeal to any swath of a broader audience, which I thought was one of GGGs goals? All the streamer-glazing in the world won't fix the current state of affairs, and once the honeymoon period is over, assuming they continue down this path of making a game for a shrinking minority of vocal sweatlords, this will probably have a smaller playerbase than POE. Keep in mind POE was not actually hard, it was just complicated. Once you surrendered to plugging in an item filter and following a guide, the game was all about blasting entire screens in seconds. Almost no one likes both complicated AND hard. Choose one, or carefully balance the two to equilibrium.

Furthermore, the skill tree remains an instant repulsion to anyone not into spreadsheet-gaming and locking skills to weapons feels like a backwards design decision, too. Lastly, as a personal point of annoyance, gender locking in 2024 is something even Korean games no longer do and idc what GGGs excuse is: they certainly have the resources and passion to not do this, but here we are anyway. In fact, the absolute lack of any avatar customization aside from MTX is likewise inexcusable.

I like punishing but rewarding games, but this is a 4/10 for me for all the reasons listed above.

Oh, the graphics are quite good, aside from weird juddering when in towns.

I think the game is the best ARPG on the market, by far. And that in EA with many things missing and unfinished balance. Says something about the market i guess.

The problems i see are a mix of people expecting the wrong things and some design choices, but to a lesser extent. Here we go:

1. PoE 1 and 2 are not elite niche games, they never were (outside of SSF). PoE contains the Pay to Win mentality to the extreme. You buy equipment you don't play for it. Yes you dont pay money and yes you have to farm currency, but farming is nothing difficult. Best in Slot equipment can simply be bought. PoE is tedious and needs patience and time, thats all. Now dont massacre me on the spot, i personally have no problem with that, but when people tell themself all the time what a hardcore game they are playing and telling new player always to get gud and thats not a game for you filthy casual, its simply wrong and sets wrong expectations and that will show. (I personally can only have fun in SSF for that matter, but if people want to skip playing the game to have a "finished" character, let them.)

2. Everyone was talking how Poe 1 is just zoom zoom 1 shot everything and on the steam forums everyone is praising poe 2 and themselves for the great slow and methodical approach now. Well its gonna be a rude awakening for them when they realize poe 2 atm steers you exactly towards zoom zoom. Why? The focus on dodge roll and one shot mechanics with bosses means DEF, HP Rec, DEF skills etc. are even less important than in poe 1. And how do you win this bad visuality 1 button QTE? You kill the boss as fast as possible. Its Glascannons all they way, its simply the best solution. Look at all the streamers mapping and bossing, they dont fight 10 minutes and dodge roll like a boss and play a soulslike, they nuke bosses down as fast as possible, and they still die now and then.

3. Its EA. Yeah i know, but its EA. That means its missing so much and is not balanced. People hear it but simply often fail to grasp it. Such live games like poe or mmorpgs are balanced constantly even after release. All skill, class and what do i know issues should be reported but also be expected, its simply not done. There is not much to critizise about it.

4. The ruthless discussion. Many people think poe 2 is too ruthless. Well to a degree they are right. I was delighted when i heard they want poe 2 to be more craft your own things, struggle more with equipment and use all tools, and all that. But they did not design the game for that way to play. Its still a game based on trading and with way to many bosses at the start. Your equip must be up to date all the time basically and again its not challenging, its tedious. I mean farming for regal orbs with level 8 to overcome a boss or something? I am an Rpg Veteran with 30 years expierence and i used all my Regals all the time and was basically glad i had some good rolls in the beginning. Thats just too much. Again its not that its not doable it is, its just that challenge can become tedious and boring, and thats the case in some aspects here.

I think thats enough for now, what i want to say i guess is, the game is great, but it is way more "more of the same but better" than really a different game at all. Is that a good thing? Well i dont know, for me the lack of SSF support, or general the idea of rellay playing your character for yourself and the one shot boss galore dampen my spirits for endgame but we will see. For everybody else i guess you must ask yourself what you really want from an ARPG. Because nowadays that can mean many different things.