My thoughts on POE2 after 80 hours

I want to give a hats off to the dev team for making a great campaign. The acts are strong and as a stand alone are good. I'd like to focus on the replay ability of the game, and call out some positive and negative additions to the genre.

D2 is king. If I hadn't played it 1000 times I'd still be playing. With that said POE2 makes some great additions. The ability to raise your shield and block, support skills, combinations, and ascendancies are amazing. I like the endgame (POE1 was overdone, I like a simpler approach). More biomes, maps, and monster types will be great and I look forward to act 4 and visiting hell and its inhabitants. I'd like 20+ more biomes including hell and a lot more of the traditional fantasy creatures that D2 had.

I enjoyed the difficulty. I found myself wondering what happened to the D2 style lobbies? The game ends up feeling barren because it doesn't encourage you to group up with others. The game creation and battl.net lobby system in D2 is what made it great. If you wanted to play campaign you had to host a game and people were going to join in. Human connection was a by-product of this. It's funny how the people who defined and built these genres came up with these ideas but you get people these days who cry about it.

POE feels dead in comparison. Where has the fun in games gone? It should be about the wildest and coolest scenarios and skills you can come up with. Not worrying about 'balance'. Why can't you join lobbies and flag hostile any more? It's like games stopped being games at some point. You used to laugh or talk shit to someone giving you a hard time now games are so serious we need guard rails for everyone because they can't handle getting killed a couple times and remaking a lobby.

Why doesn't the act 3 boss drink the blood of his people for power? Why don't mobs engage in human sacrifice and become startled when you run up on them? Why doesn't he worship the devil for power? With the Aztec influence you could have made a great story out of them receiving visions and being tainted by demons (maybe that is to come). The act bosses are all a little too friendly and I shouldn't feel like people possessed by literal demons from hell are playing it safe. It's PG-rated.

An ARPG without a lobby system doesn't feel inhabited. It's a global chat and trade site linked to your single player experience. It's regressed substantially and a far cry from the roots of the genre which was a group of adventurers getting together - which grew out of D&D in the 80s and 90s.

Nowadays people have meetings about statistics and balance rather than bsing around and thinking of how to make a fun game.

Do you think the D2 devs worried about balance when they made Enigma or runewords? Or was it lets think of the coolest thing we can create in this universe.

D2's itemization was much simpler with a lower number of uniques but still somehow much more rewarding. POE and POE2 feels like you need a spreadsheet for everything and every unique that drops is trash or some weird niche. Shako wasn't BiS but it was a solid mid game item that set up your character while you looked for other pieces.

POE2 has potential but we've lost so much in the last 20 years, I'll have people with terrible taste arguing with me about how I'm an old man for liking D2 but it's a sign of how far we've fallen.

Dodge roll makes sense for my ranger, when I'm playing templar I'd like to be swinging a mace raising my shield and tanking everything using prayers/paladin magic. It makes no sense to be a giant knight in plated armor and be dodge rolling around like a cat.

I'm not being negative, I'm giving feedback because I like the game and it has potential. If I didn't like it and didn't want to play I wouldn't spend my time writing this. We can bring back a bit of the spirit that made the originals that defined these genres great.