We welcome First Impression posts! Please be nice to those posts.

My initial thoughts of the game were actually a bit negative. Now, before I continue, I just finished making a post in this subsection describing why I love this game. So, please take these few points as they were meant to be, my thoughts as a new player.

When I first started, the quest system was not very intuitive. It quickly caught on but it did slow things a bit. I wasn't sure what were considered important quest and what rewards I should take. These are common issues with many games, and honestly something I would expect.

The biggest issue I had starting out was really getting gear appropriate for my level. The lack of a large amount of currency in my stash meant I wanted to save as much as I could. The items were few and far between, with maybe a handful of rares by the time I finished normal mode. Now, I am not saying they were really "needed" but having more rares has two great effects. The first, people play ARPGs for the item hunt. More yellow items at lower levels means the more likely people are to stick with it.

The other fact is, a yellow and blue item really aren't that much different at those levels. The effects are not big enough to make or break a play through experience. However, I think it would solve some of the bottlenecks that new players run into. For example, I couldn't beat merveil for the life of me! I tried and tried to not avail. So, I thought for sure my character must be messed up. I restarted and rolled a ranger. Made it to merveil but by this point I had found a decent rare bow. I was ready and finished her with no problem. Later down the road I had found some decent witch gear and gave my witch a go again. Needless to say, I was able to accomplish it.

The point here is that lack of proper gear can make a new player feel as though they have messed up their passives in someway. With the new changes coming to the full rare suit turn in, I don't see how it would be a problem to increase the rare drop chance at the lower levels.

posted in wrong topic.

Hello,

I'll start with the things I liked:

+ It is extremely interesting that all characters can do a variety of builds (almost everyone can be an archer, DW-er, etc).
+ Really love the music and sound effects so far. They're spot on, not boring and not tiresome.
+ The story complements the action and does not impose itself on the player.
+ The game is fun!

And now for the things I didn't like:

+ Players statistics on the character screen feel like an Excel sheet. I think it would be nice to have it designed so that important stuff stands out immediately. For instance, resistances may hold a prominent position or be colour coded, and so forth.
+ Sometimes when a mob walks away from you, it seems certain skills do not connect even with Resolute Technique. This may be intended, however.
+ A lot of synchronization glitches, particularly when trying to kite a pack of enemies.
+ The ability to remap mouse keys is needed.
+ The loot system makes it really hard to even distinguish your loot, let alone take it. I'm not sure why such an archaic system (dates back to D2, possibly earlier?) was adopted.
+ The amount of white items dropping from unique mobs is just over the top.

Now excuse me, I have to get back to my Templar. Good game you've got so far, keep it up. :)

First post here, but have been lurking for a while. Wanted to give some feedback. I have completed the beta on normal, and have a bunch of alts in act 1 or 2 normal. Which is very typical of the way I approach any game of this genre.

Impressions

Act 3 has some of the best atmosphere I have ever seen in an ARPG ever. Lunaris temple is creepy beyond creeepy. The music in Solaris is amazing. The whole Act flowed together nicely. A bit of a difficulty bump at first, but then it evened out.

The music in Acts 1 and 2 by contrast was terrible. I felt like some of the music was so eerily similar to D2 that I thought you might have lifted the tracks. Anything you can do to distinguish the differences between D2 and POE is crucial. Its bad enough there are so many similarities in quests and environs.

The graphics were acceptable, and the gameplay was excellent. The game punishes you for making foolish mistakes or underestimating enemies. The first two uniques after Hillock, (the firestorm guy and Haildrake) quickly teach you its not easy mode. I learned quickly not to stand in fire!

The currency system is fine, and adds a different wrinkle to the game. Since many players are hoarders anyways, the 4 tab shared stash is very much appreciated. The gem system for actives is very fun, and the passive tree is great. Solid work there.

I have some ideas and questions, but I'll put them in the a different post. Great job!

/bump

I stumbled accross this game this weekend. As my laptop has an intel 7i processor but a non-existant video card, I was not expecting much from this game much less for it to even run.

To my surprise this game not only ran, but looks amazing.

Kudo's to the development team. I have already forward the game link to my friend base.

Hope to be playing with my old D2 group by the end of the week.

Thanks again,

Hello folks!

I've been playing the game for a few hours so far. I definitely like what I see.

One thing that I would love to see is maybe make the higher end gear a bit more appealing?
I know some people out there loves to get cool looking gear, not just great stat gears.
I feel like it's missing some "oomph" when I see folks lvl 70 or above with their gears. It makes me kinda of sad that when I get to that point, my gear will look almost like what I currently have.

Just a thought.

Thank you guys! :)

extremely fun and addicting, personally I like fiddling with the builds and I have no problems with starting characters several times over to get a decent feel for them. the choices feel more final compared to the "respec button bash" most ARPG games have nowadays.

some drawbacks I did notice is that the game characters AI gives it the tendancy to shoot walls or terrain instead of the intended target. accidental clicks on the edge of the screen results in a 2 second freeze that might end up fatal (havn't found the button yet to get out of windowed mode) and the game defences seem to be extremely centered around HP, this gives the false feeling that one has to walk that path.

and chaos damage, while the passive tree is riddled with elemental resist nodes, it seems to be really difficult to get any meaningful amount of chaos resist. originally I though it would be a rare damage type. only to realize its used by mobs pretty early into the game and while its nowhere near as common as physical, it isn't exactly rare

Played this beta for some time and now it's going off the hard disk for some time. It's a good game, but nothing more than it, at least in current state.

I feel mechanics are totally broken still (chaos damage superior, but resistances hard to find through game, high armor means nothing vs stronger enemies, resistances aswell, evade etc.)

Loot is in horrible shape aswell, reaching end game leaves you with rolling high lvl rare items... but where are set items and better high lvl uniques, together maybe with some kind of gem combination like runewords in d2?

Race ladders I can't even bother comment because it's so pointless it's funny.

There are few builds for each class viable eventho there is huge passive feat tree available...

I like to play melee classes, but all of them have been struggling from lvl 25 - 50,60... it's either struggling to survive solo, or struggling to shrug off some hp in 6 man grp. Balance between melee and ranged is totally bad.


Like I said, it's going off hard disk for some time because all the negative stuff I pointed out are probably a subject for improvement till final lauch.

I feel like I've been playing for a while, but I haven't cleared Act 1 yet and I see people in this thread posting about Act 3 and higher levels, so I guess this still counts as "first impressions". :)

My first action-roguelike game was Torchlight, which I got from the Humble Bundle, and I found myself playing it more than pretty much any other game in that bundle... or any other bundle, probably. When it became clear that Torchlight 2 didn't work in Wine (on Linux) and wasn't going to any time soon, I looked around for another game to try... which was right about the time that PoE went into Open Beta.

Obviously, PoE is a very different game from Torchlight, but most of my first impressions come from my experiences with that game, so:

- PoE seems to give you more loot than Torchlight, the inventory-tetris system means more trips to town to vendor things, and portal scrolls aren't exactly common drops, at least at the beginning of Act 1. Then you have PoE's habit of re-rolling areas and closing your portal while you're still running errands and handing in quests in town, and then you have to go back and kill a bunch of stuff all over again, generating more loot to vendor. Eventually I found ZiggyD's "What Items Are Worth Picking Up?" video, and I think my inventory issues are more under control now, but now I'm running out of identify scrolls because I'm not vendoring so many white items. :/

- PoE's item-qualities apparently go white, blue (magic), gold (rare), orange (unique). Torchlight's (and, I think, Diablo's) go white, green (magic), blue (rare), gold (unique). I still find this a bit confusing, especially when PoE's rare items seem to have specific names.

- Torchlight's weapon types can be pretty much summarised by "primary character stat" and "1 or 2 handed", so every character gets to choose whether they'll go two-handed, one-handed plus a shield, or dual-wield. PoE's weapon types... seem to be much more arbitrary, and the only documentation on the official site is an enormous table of the stats of every white weapon item in the game. A nice list of "You are class X, you will probably be interestind in weapon classes Y and Z" would be appreciated.

- PoE seems to have much, much higher hardware requirements than Torchlight, or even Torchlight 2. Yes, this is partially my fault for trying to run a modern game on an integrated graphics chipset, yes it doesn't help that I'm trying to run it under Wine, and yes it's still beta and presumably there's going to be more polish and optimisation done over time. It's hard to tell how much of the lagginess and stuttering I'm seeing is from GPU inadequacy and how much is from network latency or server load.

- Let's end on a positive note: PoE seems to be vastly better balanced than Torchlight 1, although I guess that's not too high a bar. I've had a lot of fun, especially in the more open, sunny areas like the Terraces, the Ledge, and the bit after beating Brutus, where I can wander around and explore and make things blow up.