Feedback from 13 years exp in poe 1 and Souls like player

up

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

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saashaa#5518 wrote:

There's a game called "no rest for the wicked" which is everything like poe 2 wanted to be.
A souls like with hack n slash elements

Wow what a great business model.
I wonder how that other one is doing..



Nobody likes these games.

These are small projects with low budget and little-to-no advertisement, not hyped AAA projects.

I haven't tried first game, but GD is just very old and created with 1/1000 budget of poe with lower quality visuals, voicing, story, no bosses and no content etc. and doesnt even have "seasons" and online. But it has great game pace/speed and pretty good gameplay.

If PoE1 won't receive any update and league refresh for 5 years i guess there will be 1k online as well.

As for OP i pretty much agree to everything.

Current game state is very confusing. It offers great combat and bosses in early campaign, epsecially good in SSF, where you can't get whatever-you-like item in trade for 1 ex isntead slamming it into item to have 1/20 chance to get something useful. SSF loot is interesting and makes you want better items always and its fun, while in trade everyone are just trying to "skip" the game asap to get to 95+ levels and farm for divines/hour.

Also, as mentioned, the game speed is increasing significantly after act 2 and especially in maps, quickly becoming poe1 zooming levels, which ruins 90% of core poe2 game mechanics and leave space only for one-button grind which is already done much better in poe1 since theres tons of content buildcrafting options and better balance and a lot of endgame challenges.

Patch 0.3 so far is worst in my opinion. Everything got trivilized a lot, mobs and bosses nerfed, player skill balance is absent. League mechanic is just awful ngl in PoE2 gameplay. Probably as a very endgame mechanic its ok, but still swarms you with a hundreds of random mobs with literally zero clarity.

I'm just hope the dev team really pick the PoE2 way and meaningful combat and the game speed will be locked somewhere on the act 2 level, and won't increase in maps, while overall difficulty and depth will.

I do not udnerstand how people expect these types of games to retain their slow pace through out the end game. You have to hugely limit stats and build variety to accomplish such a goal. Even Diablo 1 which had 1/10th of the build variety and loot. And was even more slow paced throughout its campaign than even POE2. Ended up fast paced once players stacked enough itimization. That's just the nature of loot based ARPGs. Players stack stats and mobilty and damage goes up and enemies die quicker... the game's speed ramps up.

Any other ARPG which is attempting to be a Souls-Like I guarantee does not have in-depth loot and build variety if it's retaining its slow paced combat. And once these game's do introduce in-depth itimization then the same thing happens. The game speed ramps up once enough stats are stacked .

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saashaa#5518 wrote:

The tree has too few specific nodes, and everything is too imposed.

We won't make a monk for AOE unless we go with the boring +5 stats on the "STR" side.
The tree should offer more character building options than the one completely imposed by the developers.
The STR side, on the other hand, doesn't even have nodes for HP - but they'll be located on INT under life-recoup, which should be on the STR side.
Somehow - we can have 80k energy shield and more HP than warriors, being a mage. And ES is incredibly easy to build, while STR, which should be the class's fantasy, is easier - needs to sit in math class and "calculate formulas."

Meta players screeching rn because you just called their builds easy and simplistic, while they think they've come up with the theory of relativity by copy pasting mobalitycs front page.

edit: just for good measure: It's A bUilD IssUe BrO. lAyEr dEfEnse BrO.

+1
They need to be more clear with their game direction, as it just feels its becoming POE1

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Nikuksis#6962 wrote:

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JODYHiGHR0LLER#6171 wrote:

"

saashaa#5518 wrote:

There's a game called "no rest for the wicked" which is everything like poe 2 wanted to be.
A souls like with hack n slash elements

Wow what a great business model.
I wonder how that other one is doing..



Nobody likes these games.

These are small projects with low budget and little-to-no advertisement, not hyped AAA projects.

I haven't tried first game, but GD is just very old and created with 1/1000 budget of poe with lower quality visuals, voicing, story, no bosses and no content etc. and doesnt even have "seasons" and online. But it has great game pace/speed and pretty good gameplay.

If PoE1 won't receive any update and league refresh for 5 years i guess there will be 1k online as well.

Huh, crazy.
It's almost like those types of games aren't able to sustain a company, even at a small scale.
Maybe most people just don't like them.

If you enjoy putting mustard and eggs on your pizza then good for you, wouldn't recommend opening a restaurant though.

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Icesinnox#6517 wrote:

I do not udnerstand how people expect these types of games to retain their slow pace through out the end game. You have to hugely limit stats and build variety to accomplish such a goal. Even Diablo 1 which had 1/10th of the build variety and loot. And was even more slow paced throughout its campaign than even POE2. Ended up fast paced once players stacked enough itimization. That's just the nature of loot based ARPGs. Players stack stats and mobilty and damage goes up and enemies die quicker... the game's speed ramps up.

Any other ARPG which is attempting to be a Souls-Like I guarantee does not have in-depth loot and build variety if it's retaining its slow paced combat. And once these game's do introduce in-depth itimization then the same thing happens. The game speed ramps up once enough stats are stacked .

You recognize how lowering numbers causes problems, but also how raising them creates others—yet you can’t seem to imagine how the game could break that loop? Try to think beyond the slider. There are countless ways to design engagement that don’t rely on raw stat inflation or slot-machine psychology. It’s wild how fixated people get on “up or down” as if that’s the only dimension that exists.
It honestly feels like selective awareness at this point. There are obvious design solutions that don’t restrict player freedom or flatten the experience. But instead of engaging with that, people just repeat the same reasoning that caused the issue in the first place. It’s like saying, “I keep eating five pizzas a day, don’t know how to stop, but I have to eat.” Maybe—just maybe—look at what else is on the menu.

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These are small projects with low budget and little-to-no advertisement, not hyped AAA projects.

I haven't tried first game, but GD is just very old and created with 1/1000 budget of poe with lower quality visuals, voicing, story, no bosses and no content etc. and doesnt even have "seasons" and online. But it has great game pace/speed and pretty good gameplay.

If PoE1 won't receive any update and league refresh for 5 years i guess there will be 1k online as well.

Huh, crazy.
It's almost like those types of games aren't able to sustain a company, even at a small scale.
Maybe most people just don't like them.

If you enjoy putting mustard and eggs on your pizza then good for you, wouldn't recommend opening a restaurant though.

Your argument is not honest.
You won't find huge player counts for Secret of Mana or Zelda OOT as those are single player games, still considered some of the greatest games of their time. How numbers and player retention works may vary wildly depending on your project, beyond things such as quality - you can have great games with low player retention.

Did you forget that POE 1 is a game designed for spreadsheet sweatlords that tries to scare casuals out of the gate with its passive skill tree? It was a game designed for a very specific niche at the time.

As for sustain a company... Well, Grim Dawn 2 has been confirmed. If you look it up, there is some controversy on whether the company should continue supporting one or jump to the sequel. There is also a conversation between Chris Wilson and one of Grim Dawn devs, who worked on some interesting titles during the ARPG dark ages.
There is a lot of context and information you lose by just looking at "noomber beeg or noomber smol?". What you did wasn't the exercise in critical thinking you think you did. It's very, very easy to be misled and manipulated by statistics, which is why you need to look at other data, documents and effects.

Finally, i Think you tried to make an argument of "these games didn't work. Therefore: This shouldn't be tried". Even assuming your assessment were correct, the conclusion is a stretch. There are many reasons for things to not work and many solutions, which is why different games and different genres are born. Sometimes it's a piece of tech, sometimes it's a larger context, sometimes it's a matter of accessibility or even looks - Chris Wilson commented on how visuals and sfxs could push attacks to feel strong even when they remained numerically unchanged.

There is an ocean of difference between your response and the comment you quoted. And that difference is the fact the other person considered many factors and actually played some of the games mentioned. You didn't. You brought some raw data, didn't analyze context, how we get those numbers and made some fallacious assumptions. That's not how anyone who cares about data interprets it - do you have other metrics, other pieces of information that supports your claim? So far, the opposition seems to have a more solid argument.

As for what I think:

I do not think POE 2 should be slow.
It can be methodical. You can have fast and methodical games - these tend to actually be very volatile high risk-reward games, the flicker strike guys would be happy with fast and methodical games. Whatever POE 2 decides to be, it needs to push its gameplay beyond POE 1. There's a lot of potential for POE 2, but what i'm seeing is a bunch of scattered pieces with little context between them, something is not there. The game will be great if the devs figure out how to get 100% leverage out of what they put in the game's code that poe 1 doesn't have.
What i'm saying is that POE2 should focus more on action game and hack'n'slash gameplay elements as they've already shown they can figure out the "spreadsheet game" part with time. If the action gameplay is good, 10 buttons will feel like too little instead of too much. There can be a niche for "3 minutes long boss battles and engaged methodical gameplay" for racers and early leaguers, this doesn't need to be the rule for everyone in every case. The best lesson POE 2 can (and some say it did) take from POE 1 is how it doesn't force you into solutions - you can map, you can boss, you can farm one or multiple mechanics at the same time, you can focus on clear speed or try to squeeze as much out of a map as possible depending on what you need.

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saashaa#5518 wrote:

The methodical approach to combat is incredibly enjoyable, but that quickly fades away because the game has absolutely zero graphical clarity...

Stop reading after this sentence, as any other things you may have written could not have any kind of sense.

The methodical combat doesn't exist, it's in yours imagination and in Roger's marketing lies. Enemies swarm at you literally since the first area. You can literally skip every monster and finish the campaign just by killing bosses.

Visual clarity isn't a problem because it negates (an inexistent) methodical combat; it is a problem because a swarm of mindless, unmethodical enemies creates 2000 graphical effects while you are running at the speed of light doing 60000000 graphical effects, so you see no s**t, your CPU melts, and because of that, you insta-die.