LET ME PLAY 0.1 AGAIN!

Totally man!!! I remember it so well. Everything in my body and senses were on high alert, I was creeping around the edge of the forrest trying not to aggro him. GOLD gaming moment. Forever etched in memory. Were you playing HC with monnkey boy?

0.1 jamanra was miserable. just an absolute sponge of a boss. geonor was and still is pretty great though.

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AbyssianOne#1625 wrote:

Accidentally walking too far into that ruin and seeing monkey with his club already raised was terrifying.

I feel sorry for all the new players starting at 1.0 release who will miss the experience when the game was at its peak in 0.1.

By reducing the overall size of the largest map layouts in the patch notes, they stripped away the feeling of the world. Sprawling areas used to give you a true sense of scale, the bigger the map, the more it stays engraved in your memory how you actually had to journey through a massive environment. Shrinking the layout sizes completely kills that immersion.

If you didn't rush the campaign, you never felt the annoyance of big maps or having to find your way. It all required fighting to get there, and that was never boring. Since it's a live-service game, they could have always just added interesting things for us to find instead of gutting the world scale.

the only thing i miss about 0.1 is grim feast

Yea, first playthrough are always somewhat special.

It's like my first playthrough with Elden Ring... everything is a challenge but you learn and get through it.

Then you never get that experience again... I'd love for them to wipe my memories of it, just to do it again for the first time.

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IonSugeRau1#1069 wrote:

Talking of.. I still remember that exilecon when they were talking for the first time in more detail about PoE2 and them mentioning how they want to cut down drastically on more multipliers on gems so that it doesn't become the same problem as in PoE1...

Great post and context.

It is perhaps relevant that Rory, a lead game designer who did a lot of work with player skills and pitched the Spirit mechanic, is no longer with GGG.

Hrishikesh, game designer on itemization and Ruthless in PoE1, left soon after Chris Wilson.

Although speculative, perhaps a lot of the thought leaders who preferred a more challenging, slow-paced game left with Chris.

Mark is great. But he is a zoomer and trade andy, no doubt.

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Mark is great. But he is a zoomer and trade andy, no doubt.

Mark can be a zoomer but he's also the main guy behind designing bosses and whole end-game stuff.
He talked many times about pride and feeling of accomplishment when designing bosses, their moves and how they should serve as challenge for players.
He said that theres no worse feeling than to see boss in which he (or other dev) put multiple hours of work to be obliterated within 2-4 seconds without chance to do his attacks.
So yeah, he can be a player who enjoys zooming gameplay, but first and foremost his job, which he truly loves is to design and balance the game.
I'm sure that in his mind this task comes first.

You consider this the best only because it was the first experience, i.e. the developers will not be able to return to what was in 0.1 unless they erase your memory.

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Becoul#8922 wrote:

You consider this the best only because it was the first experience, i.e. the developers will not be able to return to what was in 0.1 unless they erase your memory.

I've beta tested plenty of games and been very glad for updates. In most ways I prefer how this game played in .1, and that isn't normal. There was a reason to have all those skills designed to work together as combos. Beating most bosses was a rush. The game has lost so much of that in trying to please people who want a million paper enemies on screen at once and to kill all of them by just running forward.

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AbyssianOne#1625 wrote:

"

Becoul#8922 wrote:

You consider this the best only because it was the first experience, i.e. the developers will not be able to return to what was in 0.1 unless they erase your memory.

I've beta tested plenty of games and been very glad for updates. In most ways I prefer how this game played in .1, and that isn't normal. There was a reason to have all those skills designed to work together as combos. Beating most bosses was a rush. The game has lost so much of that in trying to please people who want a million paper enemies on screen at once and to kill all of them by just running forward.

You can always suffer from bosses even now in 0.4, if you erase your memory and play as a newbie without relying on builds, without knowing the mechanics of bosses, etc. Everything that is written about the difficulty is only because of the first experience, I am 100% sure that if you take a newbie who first played PoE 2 in 0.4 and then give him 0.1, he will say that 0.1 is terrible, and 0.4 was the best version.