How POE1 felt after coming back from POE2

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feike#6684 wrote:

Its super common in ANY rpg, actually, scratch that, every MEDIA, to have minimal drive on the start

And about the "go home", that is a largely outdated approach, games have long started to insert the sidequests in more organic ways rather than make an obvious cue that its time to put the main story aside and look for side stuff.

And honestly, dont take offense, but you sound like a FF hater.

People like the FF stories because they are good, they tend to break stereotypes and tend to have good twists. Yes, some havent aged well

And to give my 2 cents on poe1 vs 2:
Poe 2 for me feels like its focused on bossing, witch im not found of, i find boss fights tend to lose the flavor fast
In general feels like a game tailored towards epic encounters on every turn, witch kinda, sorta, maybe goes in line with the idea back around 3 years ago when they forced AN down on our throats. Maybe its why it reminds me so much of dark souls with the rolling and stuff. But i didnt liked the DS-PoE mix, plain didnt worked for me, i hated the rolling, i dont think inv frames, even if just for non-aoe, have a place on this kind of game, i also dislike animation-canceling. Even on fighting games, i dislike when there is free cancels on big swings and option select, i prefer having to commit to my buttons and eat the consequences for a wrong input. Damn thing feels even more necessary than dark souls's roll

i agree with you on most of what you say about drive, and how stuff was added.

its not to say i m an FF hater. despite saying FF6 has low drive, it was one of my fav games growing up.

the reason why i bring up drive is because i want to highlight how modern gaming has changed what players expect.

back during FF6/Chrono trigger times, players were STARVED of games. people who loved jrpgs would flock to FF. not because of their story or anything but because it was a square game. it was Final Fantasy. all FF were celebrations. i still remember me and my friends being super hyped about FF whenever an FF title would be announced. so even tho you say the fandom agreed that ff14 sucked, back in the day FF always got a free pass.

because of such, it was common for games to start with low drive. i would say its not necessarily a bad thing but it is heavily dependent on the game type. also older games had hardware limitations so games were slower by default.

if you say i m an FF hater, i would say i love FF except 7 and everything after 9. i dont know if its accurate to say i had the fortune to skip 7 or not. i was really hyped for it but my parents didnt want to get me a PS so i was forced to skip it. by the time it got onto PC i had already experienced so many other games that i was coming in fresh without any of the "omg its FF" hype. i was no longer hyped coz of cloud with his huge ass sword. i was not giving FF7 any free passes. sometimes when we revisit older games that can happen. like what i mentioned about chrono trigger. unlike FF7, i liked CT. i finished the game many different times to get so many different endings. but when i replayed it over a decade later, i found myself lacking the drive at the beginning of the game.

this is not the fault of the game. it's simply that games "back then" took the time to flesh things out. similarly FF7 took time to flesh things out. but even then i would say CT did it better. CT has a slow start, but once the first time travel happens, you're sucked in. every part of the story you have a strong drive. why am i exploring this area? i am doing it because of this and that reasons. i am hyped. FF7, why am i bombing shinra? coz i m a paid merc so even tho i m not invested, thats my mission and i ll have to see it thru. after that, go back to town. discover cloud is so unlikable as a person. then as i mentioned. what happens next? just explore the town. i do know what happens. shit does happen later when you explore a certain part of the town. but before that you have literally zero reason to keep going except that the game needs you to. and as i mentioned about the world map. when you get there your drive is quite minimal too.

all this is a result of my exposure to modern gaming. you can explain terra is an amnesiac and the esper is the interesting thing. but before all that, a big question that older games always neglect to answer is "why should i care?".

newer games always answer this question. as mentioned in one of my previous posts about mass effect. mass effect makes me care a huge lot on saving people.

baldurgate 3 makes you care because theres a parasite in your brain and you just survived escaping a flayer ship.

anyway i dont see any offence in your response. we are seeing different it from different angles. you have not been rude to me i appreciate that.

as for poe2 its pretty reasonable to not like poe2. it really isnt for everyone

and many people dislike poe2 for many different reasons. and so far almost all reasons i've read are quite valid and boils down to preference.

like for your case is you would prefer it if bosses were more like poe1.

nothing wrong with having a preference/opinion

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exsea#1724 wrote:

[...]
who do you think are the type of people who go around looking for horadric cube/runeword/poe1 vendor recipes?

its more likely the small minority of players who do tons of USELESS actions.

who are you to say "poe is not that type of game"? some easter eggs took player bases literal YEARS before it got uncovered. dont forget we have a hidden fisherman in the game that i've never seen despite playing over a deceade. none of my friends have seen him either.

also do you even know GGG's intentions? do you realize somewhere in affliction league ggg added some "partial secrets" to poe1, which was also what we have in poe2. how do you know that ggg didn't actually have anything planned out for nessa/silk? it is a logical assumption to assume theres nothing. but its also logical that we cant say that with 100% certainty.
[...]

But it isn't useless, because D2/PoE1 ARE that kind of game, centered around items (among other things, none of which are characters/story beats) where it makes sense to do this.

Also like how these "partial secrets" added to PoE1 are about guaranteed league mechanics / item type drops.

Meanwhile FF7 and the like ARE the kind of games where you might be able to change the story (though still not in major ways in most RPGs - that would be too expensive in most video games).

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i am bothered by you claiming i m grasping at straws.

bro check yourself.

like really. since you don't believe me even tho i've already proved you wrong with ff7. go ahead and check wikis or try d2r and see if you can "avoid saving deckard".

go do that and tell me your experience. i ll wait lol.

Huh, indeed

But then it effectively changes nothing to the story, and is the opposite of «getting rewarded»...

(Also play D2LoD (and its MP mods !), not D2R, which is a travesty with its added DRM.)

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feike#6684 wrote:

[...]
Poe 2 for me feels like its focused on bossing, witch im not found of, i find boss fights tend to lose the flavor fast
In general feels like a game tailored towards epic encounters on every turn, witch kinda, sorta, maybe goes in line with the idea back around 3 years ago when they forced AN down on our throats.
[...]

AN being ArchNemesis ?
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Archnemesis_league

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In this league, players can build their own rare boss fights by applying new Archnemesis modifiers to petrified monsters, found throughout every area. These modifiers add dangerous behaviours to their targets but also imbue them with valuable rewards.

Sounds pretty cool, but I guess it didn't work out due to how PoE1 is built ?
Might have been a beta test for PoE2, after which GGG decided to do radical changes for PoE2 ??

For me its exaclty the opposite i cant see why anyone would like poe2 ... RNG is what makes game interesting. A bad situation is what makes a game good. There is no such state in poe2 oh no the item didnt get mana next 6 slam until it happens. The game is plain boring. No Fusing No consequences for fucking your skill tree. Its like a baby simulator where you cant fail.

Uh, people are complaining about PoE2 crafting being too much left to chance (rather than also having more fixed crafts like in PoE1).

And you still need to farm those orbs for crafting, as well as you need to farm gold to re-specialize (in PoE1 too, at least from 3.25/3.26 on...)

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BlueTemplar85#0647 wrote:

AN being ArchNemesis ?
https://www.poewiki.net/wiki/Archnemesis_league

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In this league, players can build their own rare boss fights by applying new Archnemesis modifiers to petrified monsters, found throughout every area. These modifiers add dangerous behaviours to their targets but also imbue them with valuable rewards.

Sounds pretty cool, but I guess it didn't work out due to how PoE1 is built ?
Might have been a beta test for PoE2, after which GGG decided to do radical changes for PoE2 ??

Yup, i indeed was talking about Archnemesis but i wasnt talking about AN league itself, witch i think people were fine with. Not a spectacular league, but not offensive

The issue was when they implemented the thing into core. Kalandra league by itself was unspectacular, but again, not offensive, but it became offensive because AN going core. The AN we currently have is result of a long string of nerfs and reworks because the vanilla core AN was a shitshow: loot goblin meta, extremely rippy or unkillable yellows and all. For the whole league the community was practically begging to remove the damn thing and they insisted hard in keeping it into the game and took a long while to finally get it into an okay state

But anyway, im not willing to dig into the announces and news videos to dig the quote, so im gonna drop a "trust me bro", but the whole point in making AN core with the mods as they were in the original league intact was to make memorable encounters. They mentioned that they felt yellows were too much just fancy trash and they wanted to make memorable encounters that were not just bosses, hence, the AN buff. And yeah, i think similar ideas went into the making of poe2

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exsea#1724 wrote:

...

I disagree that weak initial drive is something that we are moved past from

To give a few examples:
A classic with basically nill initial drive: Dark souls. Who tf are you? What are you even trying to accomplish? Why would you even care? I have to ring those bells, why? Because you are chosen... And? ...you are chosen... but what will happen when you do? Turns out, gonna have to do it to find out, by the time you meet a serpent and the game FINALLY gives something resembling an actual goal, how many hours worth of playtime you have?

And you mentioned Baldur Gate 3, what about that game's elder sibling, Divinity OG Sin 2? Any initial drive that game gives is given on a wall of text on the character select screen and if you start with an original character, the drive is basically nill. Yeah, magisters are assholes, the people with power on the prison are assholes, the sympathetic souls are the ones on the receiving end of the abuse, why the fu should i care about anybody there? Really the "drive" you get on fort joy is to get out of there asap, less because any urgency, more to get away from those unpleasant individuals and the crappy place. And indeed, you just leave these sods to their fate(and likely will say good riddance). Seriously, the only reason to even get to the point you meet Gareth is because thats the path the game presents to advance forward

And talking about more obscure games: Lots of people play blazblue for the story. It really dont show it if you take the first few hours of calamity trigger. The game trows you in the skin of a VERY stereotypical edgelord that feels came straight out of a comic book from the 90's, he also is doing stuff that feels came straight out of a comic book from the 90's. In fact, on the surface, every character on the first game perfectly fits some stereotype. Its a very compelling series, if only because the cast is so surprisingly colorful and really makes you want to see what will happen to them(plot becoming increasingly impenetrable on each game notwithstanding)

And honestly, i think you are just not giving a fair chance to ff7, the gameplay aged very poorly, but the story still holds pretty nicely. Its kinda similar to dark souls in the sense that you need to make some effort to search the pieces, and the game does some things very well. I already said cloud codified the deconstruction of the edgelord, but outside that: theres a reason Sephiroth is so remembered, as the hype behind him was well build, aerith's death is something that even today, have very little equal(developed characters dying is common, but its very rarely done with: 1-A party member that is central to the plot 2-That is not replaced with another similar character 3-Isnt revived and the death dont happen in the last act) its a plot twist that forces the audience to deal with loss in a level not many pieces of media dares to. And more obscure... its one of the stories where the true bad guy gets away essentially scot-free, the audience being denied payback karma is something not terribly expected on media that is not marketed as mature

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BlueTemplar85#0647 wrote:

But then it effectively changes nothing to the story, and is the opposite of «getting rewarded»...

doesnt change the fact that my mentioning of deckard being unsavable was your entire premise of me grasping at straws and you're just huh-ing away after throwing such a statement at me.

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tycrus#4406 wrote:

For me its exaclty the opposite i cant see why anyone would like poe2 ... RNG is what makes game interesting. A bad situation is what makes a game good. There is no such state in poe2 oh no the item didnt get mana next 6 slam until it happens. The game is plain boring. No Fusing No consequences for fucking your skill tree. Its like a baby simulator where you cant fail.

i would agree partially about crafting. my take is its too difficult to get a "decent" craft in poe2. to get 2-3 decent mods with no alteration orbs is a little too harsh imo.

as for getting 6 mod items, i would say the game is balanced around players having 3 good mods and the rest are bonuses.

as for being a baby simulator, i would give the counterpoint that in poe1 theres so many player traps in the passive tree. i would add, that i find it bloody ironic that so many poe1 lovers would laud poe1's skill tree as a grand feature (which it is) but at the same time the best way to play the game for the vast majority is NOT engage with the tree but instead rely on build guides.

i would even argue saying that relying on a build guide is in fact playing like a baby. you're doing what you're told and not experimenting.

ggg realized this and designed poe2 so that players actually engage with the tree. you can go meta and follow builds but you're not required to. in fact my first character in poe2 was a mace ranger. i got to level 87 or so doing my own thing and completely off meta (mace+ poison in fact).

if you prefer poe1 thats fine, but just coz poe2 isnt something you like, doesnt mean its shit. so many people have enjoyed it. and if i m being honest a lot of my friends prefer 2 over 1.

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feike#6684 wrote:

I disagree that weak initial drive is something that we are moved past from

To give a few examples:
A classic with basically nill initial drive: Dark souls.

And you mentioned Baldur Gate 3, what about that game's elder sibling, Divinity OG Sin 2?

And talking about more obscure games: Lots of people play blazblue for the story.

And honestly, i think you are just not giving a fair chance to ff7, the gameplay aged very poorly, but the story still holds pretty nicely.

i actually agree with you on many of your points.

dark souls has bad drive. then again i didnt play dark souls.

as for divinity OG sin2, it also has bad drive.

ff7 also has bad drive.

but do they make them BAD games? nope i did not say that. my premise of talking about drive is because we were comparing campaign mode between poe1 and poe2. lore/story/drive are all crucial parts that go hand in hand.

like what you mention Divinity. i loved the fuck out of that game. finished it using just 1 (or was it 2?) person party soaking all the xp. theres a lot of customization. but i m not going to shy away by stating the fact is it has a bad drive.

similarly, you mentioned a lot of good points of FF7. i m pinpointing one particular point that it objectively is bad at. the drive. i cant argue with you on the other points because i agree with you. theres a lot going on with ff7 that are great. but it simply doesnt take away from the fact that it has a bad drive.

when we talk about campaign experience, to me story is something looming in the background. drive is what keeps us moving forward thru the campaign. a good story can be hampered if players are not motivated enough to continue down the story.

the way i see it. if you want to objectively determine if a games campaign/storymode is good is if you take away all the cool character designs, take away the game mechanics, take away any "it gets good later" notion, you take all that away and the player keeps pushing themselves forward.

THAT is a good campaign/story mode.

when you mention blaze blue. i ll point out, that the drive comes from the players but not necessarily the game. the players want to know what happens to their fav characters. what they do is not too important. they fight whoever they're thrown at because they just want to know what happens next. not because the game is telling them a complex story.

neversoft does storytelling for fighting games on a whole different level. you WANT to know what happens to the story regardless of which character you prefer. injustice/mortal kombat. their story modes are damn solid. you fight enemies because of how you encounter them in the story with clear motivations.

but even then the drive is dependent on the game/story. some of their titles have stronger drives than others.

in ff7s case. the drive simply wasnt enough to get me to continue onwards. is it unfair? perhaps. but thats why i mentioned theres a lot of factors to consider. ff7 came out when we had gaming droughts. we didnt have too many options. we enjoyed gaming differently. if got mindwiped and was made to play chrono trigger, i MIGHT quit early too. walk around the fair? thats not enough drive. i say that despite CT being one of my fav games "back then".

and to that extent i would say poe1 suffers from that greatly. the only drive players actually had for the longest time is we needed an excuse to kill stuff.

without referring to wiki. can most players tell me WHY the exile wants to go thru the prison? why peity talks to the exile as tho he has been persistently been a pain in her butt? why the player wants to go back to oriath?

the "why go back to oriath" is actually a huge deal to me. coz different exiles have different motivations. it is not clear what each exile would do. in fact, lorewise for most of the characters theres no real reason for them to go back to oriath.

for example marauder. he's not even from oriath, if he went back to oriath it would be for revenge. karui are not always vengeful. we see in ToTA that there are many factions with different ideologies. the marauder could even prefer to live in wraeclast rather than return to oriath. i would argue the ranger would even just make wraeclast her home outright.

theres nothing "init" for the exiles to move on.

as for poe2 i would admit that the drive is NOT too strong. "survive", get to town, help people out. but it picks up real quick when you're nudged towards helping the local townsfolk, getting revenge on the count, discovering the beast. etc. it picks up. but the drive in poe2 is much more stronger compared to poe1.

in poe1 things keep happening with little interconnectivity. we fight malachai because we're told to fight him. malachai never did anything to us directly. perhaps dominus sentenced us, but we fucked him up already lol. after that things just keep happening that we have to deal with.

a lot of people are saying poe1 story is real good. to me, the LORE is good. but the story is shit. i m not giving GGG a free pass on this. POE1's story was never a priority. the priority was making a good game and selling their game. GGG cobbled up the story out of nowhere and we were stuck in act 3 for the longest time before ggg cobbled up a continuation of the story that made us revisit past areas. why? to save cost.

saying poe1 story is good is almost an insult to the large amount of effort ggg made to make poe2's story have more drive and interconnectivity. they even spent resources on making the absolute banger of an opening cutscene.

i might be digressing away from the our topic. i m just saying some games have better drive than others. ff7 was just an example i used of a game with a bad drive. it objectively has a bad drive.

After finishing PoE 2 campaign PoE 1 just felt phenomenal. The game felt even faster right from the act 1 both combat and movement wise - which is the exact thing I always loved about PoE. Also in a long time I finally enjoyed the campaign and even labyrinth. I think I will never complain about PoE 1 campaign after that 30 hours slog I experienced in PoE 2. Gems actually feel diverse, interesting and like a choice unlike PoE 2 where whole early game it felt like you are just stuck with very limited, underwhelming and unimpactful options. Proper ARPG. Still undisputed for me.

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esostaks#6761 wrote:

After finishing PoE 2 campaign PoE 1 just felt phenomenal. The game felt even faster right from the act 1 both combat and movement wise - which is the exact thing I always loved about PoE. Also in a long time I finally enjoyed the campaign and even labyrinth. I think I will never complain about PoE 1 campaign after that 30 hours slog I experienced in PoE 2. Gems actually feel diverse, interesting and like a choice unlike PoE 2 where whole early game it felt like you are just stuck with very limited, underwhelming and unimpactful options. Proper ARPG. Still undisputed for me.

this is how people should put poe1 up on a pedestal. mention what they like/prefer about it without the need to shit on poe2. as well as adding a "to me" at the back which makes it clear its an opinion.

i will agree with you about gems feeling diverse too. poe1 has way more many gems and a lot of interesting things you can do with them. one thing i love about poe1's gems is the weapon skill gems typically arent usually restricted to only 1 weapon class in most cases.