The game's great; here's the best parts
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I think the game is really quite amazing. It's basically the only video game I really played last year. I rarely put over 300 hours to any video game, yet alone 600 to a single one in a year as I did with PoE2.
To me it's been a marked improvement over PoE1, which is also a great game. Here's the things I feel are done particularly well and that I hope are something the game continues to lean on and improve on: Animations and the general flow of combat is really good. There were tradeoffs to associating most skills with specific weapons, but since it allowed to design the animations better, it was totally worth it. To me, it's just really fun to use the skills since it feels so good. Whether in Act 1, Act 4 or mapping. At the very end game this kind of tapers off, with the movement speed and attack/cast speed buffs making many skills feel fairly similar to each other, but even ten, many skills feel meaningfully different to play with. Aesthetics work great and the total really comes over the sum of its parts. The graphics look good, the 2D assets are great. The voicelines and sound cues work well and the game can be very atmospheric. The first time I played through Act that I haven't done before.1 was one of the best ARPG experiences I've ever had. It basically got very close to the original vibe of playing the first Act in Diablo 2. And that's a very high bar to reach. If any of the GGG staff reads this, please pass on my compliments to the art fellas (and the animators!). The difficulty and power curves feel good. I play only HC and played the campaign through the first time without guides, and I still don't check out bosses from guides or videos before trying them at least a couple of times (though only Arbiter and Xesth remain undone for me). The experience of playing through the campaign on HC the first time was really exciting, it felt great to know that you are often allowed only one mistake, and sometimes not even that much. But you also get a huge power boost from using the loot and currency from one run to set up the next character; this also feels nice, and it's a good feeling when you've died in maps and can gear up a new char to do the campaign much more easily with. RNG based crafting and other mechanics work really well in my opinion. PoE's biggest strokes of genius has been the use of RNG-based crafting currency as the de facto trade currency. I assume that in the future leagues more crafting mechanics are added and that balancing crafting is a constant area of work for the designers, but even now with significantly lower amount of crafting options than in PoE1, the crafting system requires knowledge and has at least some skill ceiling, and allows for some skill expression. To me this is a much, much better system than deterministic crafting, where the only RNG is when you get enough of the crafting ingredients to craft what you wanted. Trials of Sekhema are another good example of this; there's lots of RNG to it, but you can play the RNG to your favor, and there's a skill element to running the trials. There's def more things too, but those were the top four that were on my mind. Kudos on the great game - to me seems like it has a really bright and big future ahead of it! Last edited by tzaeru#0912 on Jan 13, 2026, 4:39:52 AM Last bumped on Jan 13, 2026, 11:19:22 AM
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Ah yes nothing speaks of skill expression louder than spamming 1k+ Chaos orbs in my hide out just to get that T1 mods, and then spamming 30divs omen each to get the others. Surely skill right there.
Exploit early exploit often bozos.
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Ugh, animations and flow. Hilarious how PoE 1 which is way older and uglier has straight up better and more fluid combat.
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Do you work for GGG?
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" If you want to craft like that, that's of course OK. But the crafting is a lot more nuanced than that really. Good use of essences, omens, orb of annulment, fractured orb, .. recognizing the good bases from the bad, knowing when to stop trying and get a new item and recognizing items that are good for some other build than the one you intended to craft for. Is it like a very high skill ceiling, no. But there's enough skill to it that there's meaningful differences in players' ability to do it. Which I think is a marked improvement over deterministic crafting systems. |
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" I feel it's the full opposite. Skills feel more similar to each other in PoE1 and the animations are not very fluid. The game might feel to many more fluid due to travel skills and higher movement speed though. |
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" No. But I wouldn't play 600 hours on a game I didn't think had a lot of very good things about it, and I think it's important to also offer positive feedback on these forums. Reading only negative feedback gets taxing, plus, if you want to see more of the things you enjoy, then it makes sense to tell what the things you enjoy are. |
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Dude the only skill ceiling in crafting this game ever had is how much currencies you have, show me any BiS items you ever crafted then maybe your opinions have any weight, otherwise this is nonsense
Exploit early exploit often bozos.
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" Why's a BiS item the thing to compare on? |
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