Jonathan Was Wrong, Challenge is NOT Required to Have Fun

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rhorains#6760 wrote:

I genuinely wonder, for those who insist that the only content worth doing is in the endgame, is there any open-mindedness regarding the potential to make an ARPG that is fun to play in the campaign?

I think I understand, but I want to keep an open-mind myself and see where I may be wrong, here is my understanding:

playing softcore trade (as most players do), there is a feeling that all time spent in the campaign is essentially a waste of time, because the loot there is meaningless. also, since there's no penalty for death, it's simply an obstacle and a "slog" (to quote the meta here).

on the other hand, for a HCSSF, every area and most drops have some meaning, you're desperate for any increase in power at every stage of the story, so it's much more meaningful to engage with the campaign and even grind during it.

so for SC Trade is there really just no way to make that "slog" enjoyable, since the game itself depends on having access to the best loot, most juiced areas, and clearing said areas as fast as possible?

obviously the vision here is to create a game that involves being engaged with the entire game, the entire way through it. so I am not finding an avenue where players of PoE will feel any purpose in this type of ARPG. am I on the mark at all?

The current campaign is too barebones and short for that. The campaign should be worth 40~hours of real gameplay like a proper rpg campaign.

Jonathan is so right,

Challenge its good but unrewarding and slow, not.

The game just need more drops (MUCH more) and balance all skills to be playable.


Adjust size of maps, improve the endgame and add more content will come later.

Path of Exile 2 doesn't know what it wants to be, that is why we got this abomination of mish-mash "action-combat" role playing game that neither have good action-combat, nor the success of itemization / customization / character building its predecessor have.

I get it its an early access, but that still not an excuse to determine the identity of the game. What is Path of Exile 2 wants to be ? Does it want to be a more focused action-combat game ? Then start scrapping away all of Path of Exile 1 contents that revolve around friction, trading, randomization and itemization.

FFS just look at Lost Ark. Despite the pay-to-win mechanic, it has insanely fluid, fun, and rewarding action-combat. Combos are rewarded, all abilities synergize with each other in a fluid and easy to execute manner, but still have rooms for high level gameplay. Start streamlining character progression, randomization, and itemization. Start focusing the game into the ACTION and the COMBAT. If that is what PoE 2 wants.

Or I dare to say look at how D3 did its gameplay, despite all the D3 bad yada yada, it got some things right with the combat. Its not one button to rule them all, greater rifts require resource management of build ups and payoff for damage, it requires player to actually CC mobs, it has insanely good visual clarity in combat. Why don't PoE 2 copy some of the action-combat design in those game, adopt it then innovate them to fit with PoE 2 own style?

If not, then it will just be a prettier PoE 1 with added dodge roll but worse itemization.

What happen to the "If people want to zoom and blast, you have PoE 1" , and if you want to have a "more meaningful and tactical combat, you have PoE 2". Where is the meaning and tactical in PoE 2 when the game is still designed like PoE 1 ? Everything boils down into 1 or 2 skills, clear-speed and movement speed, because that is how you compete in an competitive economic environment, in a game where efficiency in resource acquisition matters the most for your character development / power fantasy.

I would scrap the hole endgame thing and put everything into the campaign.

Both, the maps for the acts and the endgame map are not looking good and are taking a lot off the game.
That was my first impression.

The only balanced stuff was happening in the campaign anyway.
The moment you get out of there, it is just over.
You know about the grind to 100 and what it needs to grind the currency for T4 content also.
90% of people are leaving now. The next 5% after getting progress deleted over and over. Another 4% just do not have fun but do it for the sake of doing it or really as a job.
And I guess, 1% is really having fun all over the place.

Honestly I don't see anything wrong nor "challenging" about POE2's "difficulty". Even in this build, we're seeing YouTube videos of people one-shotting endgame bosses.

I just find the lack of loot unfun.

It's just a slog to get there, not a challenge, just a slog.

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rhorains#6760 wrote:

I genuinely wonder, for those who insist that the only content worth doing is in the endgame, is there any open-mindedness regarding the potential to make an ARPG that is fun to play in the campaign?

I think I understand, but I want to keep an open-mind myself and see where I may be wrong, here is my understanding:

playing softcore trade (as most players do), there is a feeling that all time spent in the campaign is essentially a waste of time, because the loot there is meaningless. also, since there's no penalty for death, it's simply an obstacle and a "slog" (to quote the meta here).

on the other hand, for a HCSSF, every area and most drops have some meaning, you're desperate for any increase in power at every stage of the story, so it's much more meaningful to engage with the campaign and even grind during it.

so for SC Trade is there really just no way to make that "slog" enjoyable, since the game itself depends on having access to the best loot, most juiced areas, and clearing said areas as fast as possible?

obviously the vision here is to create a game that involves being engaged with the entire game, the entire way through it. so I am not finding an avenue where players of PoE will feel any purpose in this type of ARPG. am I on the mark at all?

I think it's just that for a lot of people your build only really starts to actually take shape once you get pretty far in, for some builds you are just running like a starter build until you reach maps and then you completely transition over, this is especially prevalent in POE1 where it's like, yeah some builds can be played from the very beginning, but you probably want ascendancies and so on to make it really work, and it takes a while to get those.

The main thing that I think makes people 'bored' of the campaign at least from my perspective, is players doing the same build over and over. I've been doing very different builds every league in POE1 (even though I usually also do a flicker as well) and I've come to enjoy running through acts and optimizing my route and timing myself.

The problem with POE2 is not only is it way more stressful, it demands you treat it as if it's a real game, unlike POE1 which you can kinda faceroll through, but because it also demands so much more from you it actually I think makes it feel like even more of a chore and tedious, it doesn't make it more engaging inherently just because it demands more of your time, especially because... like it's not fun to replay, you're just so slow and the novelty of walking through the hallways of some weird middle eastern temple city is lost once you've seen it just one time.

If you have to redo parts of or all of it, too, it gets much more repetitive and thus more boring. And we also have 'cruel' in POE2, so that makes the direct repetition feel bad also since you see it twice before you even touch endgame one time.

And on top of all of this, the POE2 campaign is LONG. Me, I'll be honest I'm just into Act 3, and I've spent 23 hours on this one character. So with a little math that probably means, I will finish Cruel and enter endgame after about 64 hours of gameplay. I don't know about you but this feels kinda just absurd. I mean, for some players, if you play that long in POE1 usually that's enough to have reached yellow or early red maps! For some players that's like okay I'm done with the league now I played my slam build enough, I'm now done.

So that means people can get burnt out more easily, might not reach endgame, and then you have players dropping out of the league because they feel pressured to keep up and either can't just because they have a real life to worry about or just because they need to keep up with all the other players.

Another part of the problem is that they just don't have any meaningful or interesting quests with like, designed elements to them, except for 'and now you fight a boss'. Almost every quest in POE2, is just linked in with you fighting a boss, and now we have over 100 of them all with pretty similar or just the same mechanics over and over they don't feel special. At all.

Compare with Diablo 2 where, you only had like 6 or 3 quests per area, and one or two were probably just story related, but you at least had some variety. Even if it was just talking to NPCs to get the ashes of ku y'leh or whatever. There was way more story attached and they felt more meaningful, which POE2 lacks.

Even Path of Exile 1 had slightly more meaningful quests, like you can in act 2 activate the thaumetic seal that opens the gates to Lioneye's Watch so that the Exiles can venture inland for food and stuff. In POE2 it's like... go here, fight a boss. They may or may not have something to do with... nothing really. They just exist, so go fight them.

Diablo 2 had stuff like the quest with Anya where you go rescue some NPC and then go fight a traitor NPC and the stakes are really high and you understand them very clearly that SOMETHING bad will happen if you don't do something right away, and when you go visit his private sanctum it's like a nightmareworld of zombies and misery and suffering, and its' great.

In POE2 it's like... I still don't even know what the hell the Beast is this time around or why it matters, since whatever it is, we already killed the Beast once we can just do it again. It's not EXACTLY intimidating or concerning. Not only that, it was like the ages long elder Beast that Sin made aeons ago. And now we just have to kill a baby beast and some completely mortal lady. Wow! What a thrill!

You know what would have been a cool threat? If the Beyond demons and The Last to Die, that world, actually started to maybe begin to come true and this ends up being the one timeline where we manage to fight them back instead of being consumed. Maybe that would be cool because everyone can instantly intuit that demons are bad, demons are in fact so bad that they already destroyed the world in another timeline, and it'd be a chance to do some truly apocalyptic stuff without involving the gods yet again or even beings from the Atlas like Maven, Searing Exarch, The Elder, and so on.

... Anyway this is getting long, I guess at least me personally, 'fun' is about not having to worry too much or stress every single minute of every gameplay session. I don't mind being challenged and having to be stressed from time to time but the entire campaign shouldn't be like that. I liked that POE 1 has spikes of difficulty at specific intervals - like Act 4 Piety generally feels like a good yardstick for my builds, my first in Act 3, Kitava Act 5, etc etc. Those are fun to me because they're challenging but they don't make 'challenge' into a chore.