Do People Enjoy the Poe1 Campaign?
" im answering the question posed by the op with an honest answer. i didnt start this thread. " im 44 years old. i work 4 days a week, i have 3 days off. 8 hours is probably 2 evenings of my 3 evenings i have a week, it is not irrelevant to me. i used to work freelance, i could literally work hard for 2 weeks and then take 2 weeks off and just sit playing games none stop. that is not normal and it is not healthy. i enjoyed those days, i do not regret them, but i also do not have 10s of hours to waste playing a repulsively bad game for 2 evenings before it becomes a good game any more. " did i suggest they changed the game to become any of those things? " its 8 hours of absolute trash gameplay. its fetch quests and endless npc scrolling text dialogue in the middle of an action game, its like going to see a sci fi movie in a cinema and finding 5 minutes of action scenes followed by them pausing the film and handing out 2x A4 pages of text that describe the story line of the film for you to read before showing you the next action scene then pausing again... its absolute garbage. i played diablo 1 at launch, i played diablo 2 at launch, and 3, and poe, when D2 launched that was acceptable gameplay. by the time poe came out it was vaguely acceptable from an indie dev making a janky D2 clone. 13 years of putting up with that it is no longer something i am willing to suffer every 4 months. its just not, and im not going to sugar coat it, when asked im going to tell the devs the truth, its rubbish. love the devs, love the game, the campaign and the entire way it is designed is rubbish and not fit for purpose as a game that runs for 10+ years in this day and age. its gameplay that is made tedious by being part of a story, but you are expected to skip the entire story because its delivered in such an abhorrently awful fashion that even the devs openly say they expect you to skip it and play the game as if you are just grinding maps. just really shit repetitive maps with endlessly pit stops, leaver pulls and fetch quests to make it the most awful mapping experience the game has to offer in order to facilitate a story that you dont even experience because its so badly implemented the devs have designed it to be spamclicked past. so awful. no. no no no. no. terrible terrible game, i hate it, i cannot stand it. mercenaries was the first time i levelled a new character from start on a new league in years afaik (because a friend wanted to play) and itll probably be the last time for a year or 2 to come unless a friend begs me to play with them again and makes the awful campaign bearable by being a shared group social experience. i dont even play for tinks i play for fun gameplay and meaningful progress, no i do not feel any of that playing this awful campaign. all arpg campaigns i have ever played are absolute trash when taken as content designed to be repeated over and over and over. as a once through poe1 is decent, poe2 is great, diablo 3 is poor, diablo 4 is diabolically shit, grim dawn is alright, wolcen was actually fairly decent? diablo 2 felt great when it was first release. its almost unplayable garbage by my current standards and i could maybe enjoy it once ever few years out of nostalgia. i dont even have nostalgia for poe1s campaign i just hate it, i absolutely despise it. its not that you cant design a game like this with a campaig that is highly replayable, its just none of these games have done it, the minute you add a story and to experience the story you have to read scrolling texts from npcs in town you have failed and your game sucks. poe2s campaign is rapidly becoming the same because of all the same bad design. im not suggesting anything in particular. they can do whatever they like with that info. ive made a million suggestions in the feedback forums of this game over the years. this is not a suggestion post. this is a "since were asking the question this is how i feel as a long term vet of this game about this aspect of the game" and they can take that info and go do whatever they want with it. theyre the devs, thats what they do. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" lmao, ok that is one way to look at things ;P |
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i know i am DEFINITELY in the minority when i say this but yes I do.
its crazy to think how many years I've been playing and I am only NOW starting to dip into the ideas of speed running acts. Combined with seeing what cheap early level uniques i can use in path of building and making own builds and league start plans, it has once again breathed new life and enjoyment into starting new leagues/characters for me. And this is coming from someone account created in 2013. |
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" I'm somewhat confused, how do you think an action game should tell its story ? Because in PoE1 it's all skippable with a single click. We even have the nice touch of being able to continue playing in the area while the monologue plays in the background for the non-NPC ones. Meanwhile I've seen some people complain that PoE2 is a lot less 'skippable'. In fact it seems that it was much less of an issue in old games in general − those that you say you cannot stand any more − and it's the modern games, trying to make their story 'cinematic', that are the worst offenders for unskippable parts ! |
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" why have a story that you skip? if you design a campaign around a story, and then expect people to skip the story, then what you have designed is crap. it says something that we value the story in an arpg by how easy it is to completely skip interacting with it, but are willing to put up with bad gameplay in order to facilitate the story. i dont even know what the story of poe1 or poe2 is, ive never been able to suffer reading the silly text scrolls in town despite playing it dozens and dozens of times over 13 years and trying on occasion really hard to actually engage with it. you could tell the story in game as we play. in hiest the npcs talk to each other while we play the content, and theyre really charming and interesting, the dialogues are great. why not tell me the entire story and why im doing what im doing via dialogue like that while im actually playing? rather than expecting me to stop and stand still in town listening to this endless crap? why am i going to an area to get a medicine chest? is this part of this amazing story, they couldnt possibly tell this grand tale that rivals the greas of fantasy literature if they didnt send me on a fetch quest for a medicine chest? come on, its trash gameplay in order to tell a trash story. what happens when you repeat the story over and over, beyond it being a bad story told so badly that no one even knows the full story, is that it becomes what all objective content in this game turns into, a running past monsters simulator. hiest, do you enjoy killing the mobs, looting their stuff, that gameplay loop of an arpg? the gameplay of an arpg? no, you just run past all the monsters, kill only what gets in your way and just try to get to the end asap. delve, you run past the monsters just to get to the end. the campaign you just run past monsters to get to the end. i put breaches in my maps, i put abysses in my maps, i see a breach in campaign? skip it, run past, loot on the floor? skip it, its all shit its not endgame loot, its not endgame mobs, its all a waste of time, all content is trash its a waste of time all you are doing if you are even slightly good at the game is running past ignoring all content trying to get to the next zone so you can run past to get to the enxt zone. it loses all gameplay, all arpg game loop, its just garbage content all to serve a story that you dont even know or want to know. the story exists simply to justify the campaign and the campaign exists to justify the story, and theyre both bad. in poe2 theres a bit where you are on that big cart thing and you speak to a guy who then makes you go speak to a guy who then makes you go to a bench to click on a map to select a location to click on accept to zone to that location to leave the cart to get to a door to speak to a person who says "oh the door is closed btw lol" and then you get back on the cart and speak to a guy again... wtf is that? what am i doing with my time? is that gameplay? did this story thats so amazing it rivals name of the wind and lord of the rings and malazan rest so much on my going that door that even tho that was a colossal waste of time this fantastic tale couldnt possibly be told without it? i dont even know what the story is. poe1 and poe2 are full of doing really tedious crap to serve a story that they only invented cause they felt they needed a story so they just threw some junk together. you dont even have to have a story. the story can be really simple. the story can be shown and not told. the story can be told while we play. the story could be made to synergise with the fun aspects of the gameplay and not create bad gameplay. theres so many ways we could theorise not having these really bad campaigns. they just dont care enough about it to do them because they all skip the story when they play so they dont even consider it as an aspect of the game worth big consideration imo. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :)
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" I'm lost... Why would no story at all be better than a story you can skip? Isn't this just diversity? Appealing to more players? I mean, you will find PoE players that care about the story. You'll also find players that don't care about it. What's so bad about both types of players existing in the same environment? I find myself somewhere in between. While I don't really care about the story, I do somewhat care about the league lore. I would find it VERY demotivating chasing a Voidstone or fighting an epic monster without any lore or backstory. It would feel empty and stupid in my opinion. I find it very strange that you go straight for the word "sucks" just because a story can be skipped, especially when that goes for 98% of all games ever made in the RPG environment. Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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" because while you can skip the dialogue that explains what the story is, you still have to play through the actual story. you just dont know what you are doing, why you are doing it, you are send on an endless string of fetch quests and leaver pulling nonsense without any idea why you are doing it. you are in this environment and its about physically moving to the end of the zone. in a map you play the game, you kill monsters, play your build, thats what you are there for to get xp and items. you ignore most items in campaign, you ignore most monsters, you ignore all the cool content you happily engage with in maps. all you are doing is running to the next zone so you can run to the next zone to run to the next zone. you already have no story because the story is told so badly that even chris wilson who envisaged the entire game just said he skips the story in these games. but maps have gameplay with no story, the poe1 campaign has no gameplay and no story, its just running past the game to waste as few hours as you can doing this time tax. " i would argue the 10% of players who have ever listened to all that crap because they wanted the story would have a much better experience if the story wasnt bad and implemented in such a terrible way. it would be better to make the game worse for them by not having a story than make the game worse for the majority of players by making them run through zones endlessly for hours. " yes, i agree, and we are mostly denied that because the story is done so badly. i didnt say no lore, i said no story. i dont want no story, but id rather no story and a game designed to be fun without a story than what i have now which is a game with no story that plays like absolute crap because there actually is a story that the devs have intentionally designed for me to not engage with, but i still have to literally run through for hours and hours without any idea what is really going on. i dont think 98% of rpgs are designed with the idea that most players will skip the story. the vast majority of games that design the campaign around a story are expecting people to engage with the story. I love all you people on the forums, we can disagree but still be friends and respect each other :) Last edited by Snorkle_uk#0761 on Feb 23, 2026, 11:59:45 AM
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" GGG/PoE offers a story. You may take part in it, but you're also offered a choice to skip it - like most games. I would say that GGG "expecting" many players to skip it just shows that they know their audience (as I think the vast majority of ARPG players downplays the story)- in addition to knowing that "forcing" the story onto players in a live service, season-focused game would be suicide. Could they have made it more "opt in"? Sure. But I do think the game needs both lore and story for the overall structure and progression, even if the player takes part in it or not. Hell, a story-less ARPG? Has it ever been made? How would that even look like? Bring me some coffee and I'll bring you a smile.
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" Depends on the level of story-lessness we're talking about here (and what we understand for ARPG). If we're talking about no formal campaign with fetching quests then there's some. Deathtrap has lore and a backstory but you have no quests per se. It's just a Blight map after another. Exanima also doesn't have formal campaign with quests either. You can even ignore the main "campaign" as well and just fight arenas. The devs of Wolcen are going to release a new game (God, Death and Reapers) that, if I read correctly, it's basically an extraction-ARPG of sorts where you start right in your hideout and just do maps/missions. I like a lot of aspects of PoE1's story and lore (PoE2 not so much), but I would just like the possibility of leveling differently. Even if it was just one league. Just to try. |
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It's absolutely ridiculous that we have to plough this nonsense for the 400th time, and every single time we want to make another build every single league.
One per league is more than sufficient, what are GGG gaining here? Rentention? hours played? because I gaurantee theyre' losing more players with less time to play who just can't stomach another was of 10-20 hours for the average casual enjoyer,=. |
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