Incline Path of Exile II - early access begins December 6th

[Yaar Podshipnik]

Movement speed reductions are the most annoying affixes on maps IMO. They just feel bad. On the other hand, being able to zoom through whole Strand in under 30s, while clearing most monsters, is ridiculous as well.

I really hope that PoE 2 will make considerate movement more meaningful (and not include crap like Flicker Strike).

 

[ArchAngel]

Eh then what's the point of making a new game? Zoom2 retards should stay in 1 and GGG should keep making seasons for it and another 10 convoluted way to craft bullshits so PoE 1 player can keep their game

The point is to earn even more money so Chris can buy himself a yacht

making 2.of the same game is anti thesis of that

if they make 2 the same.game as 1 they will just move between games, not making a new potential custom

That would then be true for any sequel. They know PoE1 players will come to play it and new players that would never play PoE1 will come to play it = more money.
Especially this pay to beta test system will earn them lots of money from PoE1 players getting Chris closer to that yacht.

 

[Lacrymas]

If PoE2 indeed turns out to be slower and more methodical, I'll definitely be playing it while hating PoE1, so they are onto something.

 

[Kjaska]

I still remember the times when people would complain about PoE(Pillars) that the devs promised a core audience a spiritual sequel to their favourite game only to take the backer money, turn around and make a game for "new audiences" instead. The developers were deemed people of low character for implementing such a strategy back then. I guess when you're the normies the devs are trying to win over it doesn't matter, huh.

PoE2 should have never existed. They should have implemented what they had into PoE1 after the first Exilecon, kept their initial promise and then started a new project under a completely different name to signify the major difference in playstyle. Start it out slow, with much less content and make all the support for that project it's own thing.

As it stands now, GGG has 0 experience in launching a fully feature complete game from scratch. They only ever launched small and iterated on that over time. Jonathan seems competent, but also inexperienced for his current position. And just the way they keep changing major features around erodes any confidence. At this point it might end up a complete shit show at launch, which will drive away any positive buzz never to return. And then they are stuck with a major project that needs 1-2 additional years of full attention while their core base is dwindling because they can't fully support PoE1 at the same time. Death spiral anyone?

I'm just wondering if the soulsbro or the normie is going to enjoy getting hard stuck in act 1. This isn't Elden Ring, where you pay up front. People will simply uninstall the f2p game again and play something else less challenging and more rewarding. GGG needs you to finish the campaign to acquire your soul and loyalty.

 

[frajaq]

I'm willing to give them a chance, anything to not play PoE 1 again

 

[Kjaska]

Everyone is going to give them a chance, that's not the problem.

The problem is going to be normies (including a lot of people in this thread hating on PoE1 "zoom" mechanics) getting absolutely destroyed by the difficulty, overwhelmed by the initial complexity ("no way I'm installing a separate program to theocraft my character build") all the while the PoE1 spergs adapt much quicker, overtake everybody and establish a dominant meta everybody then follows because the harder a game is the more people flock to strong meta builds instead of experimenting. They will hate it, uninstall and never pick it up again until something drastically changes and word of mouth starts spreading that the "game is good now" like it sometimes does for games like No Man's Sky.

Remember, GGG has never managed to make an actually good tutorial before or an effective on-boarding system. The idea was that the new campaign was going to fix that, but you barely ever hear that feature now, all they talk about is how great melee is.

Speaking of melee, it got me thinking how all the Soulsbros are only ever accustomed to pressing R1/light attack and dodging. Now I'm sure some of them will be able to get through the entire campaign on just their reflexes and auto-attack, but I doubt their brain will actually be able to handle the complexity of 22 active skills on a character that GGG expects them to use in order to deal actual damage. I'm still curious of how they are going to fit all that onto a gamepad. Prepare to suffer as a Keyboard and Mouse user for the sins of the consolefags.

 

[frajaq]

I honestly don't care if normietards find this game too hard for their small brains to figure out and experiment with builds, if the game goes bust (it won't, its sustained by those whales that buy expensive supporter packs and play for only 1 week) I will move on and play something else

 

[Lacrymas]

Not every game with a non-braindead difficulty and a dodge button is a soulslike.

 

[Israfael]

soulsbro

I have nothing against Souls games or complex bosses, but did they actually, lets say, ___measure___ how does it feel to kill something like malenia for 100 times in a row to get something like sublime vision/ ashes/omni etc with a substantial chance of losing the portals / invitiation etc thus ruining hours of progression (in case of SSF) or lots of currency (in case of trade). By nature people will still gravitate to the highest dps zoom-zoom builds to lower the downtime and minimize chances of failure. After 100 hours of gameplay, no one will pay attention to the flashy new animashuns and graphix, while annoyance at all delays and mandatory invuln phases will swiftly increase. Things like killcam in nu-Xcom, for example, might look cool to the newbie or gaming journos, but it just ruins the gameflow (and you can't disable it, lel).

 

[Kjaska]

soulsbro

I have nothing against Souls games or complex bosses, but did they actually, lets say, ___measure___ how does it feel to kill something like malenia for 100 times in a row to get something like sublime vision/ ashes/omni etc with a substantial chance of losing the portals / invitiation etc thus ruining hours of progression (in case of SSF) or lots of currency (in case of trade). By nature people will still gravitate to the highest dps zoom-zoom builds to lower the downtime and minimize chances of failure. After 100 hours of gameplay, no one will pay attention to the flashy new animashuns and graphix, while annoyance at all delays and mandatory invuln phases will swiftly increase. Things like killcam in nu-Xcom, for example, might look cool to the newbie or gaming journos, but it just ruins the gameflow (and you can't disable it, lel).

My thinking exactly. All this great boss design and variety isn't going to do anything, if you have to farm some of these bosses 100+ times to get the only thing that's worth anything from it. They haven't been able to fix this problem in PoE1 and I don't see them doing anything for that in PoE2 either.

 

[Lacrymas]

Again, slow paced doesn't mean low reward. They might increase the drop chances if it takes substantially longer to kill a boss, so the time frames of getting the items would be the same in the end.

 

[tritosine2k]

Dodge doesn't make it soulslop in fact it's kinda OK in Wolcen. However I just don't believe their AoE focus AND gamepad would mix. I even saw ~16 y.o. girl streamer making valid criticism of their AoE stuff "WTF R these thresholds nothing IRL is like that"


Moral: It is not so easy to fool little girls nowadays as it used to be.

 

[Israfael]

Again, slow paced doesn't mean low reward

Low reward stems from the fact that PoE is trading-first game and you need scarcity to make the market work. Otherwise I'd have already farmed Mageblood, Original Sin, perfect Voices etc (and I've played probably for 5k hours in ssf or even more). This league I have all ubers apart from Sirus pretty much on farm and I've only managed to get Ashes (which I don't need) and Anathema (ditto, also not sure if anyone uses it), and I'd like to have frenzy-charge Sublime vision / Progenesis / Impossible escape (which was fairly easy to farm before GGG "buffed" uber system)

 

[itsme]

As far as I understand its not going to be free come November. They are going to sell early access packages.

 

[Lacrymas]

Low reward stems from the fact that PoE is trading-first game and you need scarcity to make the market work. Otherwise I'd have already farmed Mageblood, Original Sin, perfect Voices etc (and I've played probably for 5k hours in ssf or even more). This league I have all ubers apart from Sirus pretty much on farm and I've only managed to get Ashes (which I don't need) and Anathema (ditto, also not sure if anyone uses it), and I'd like to have frenzy-charge Sublime vision / Progenesis / Impossible escape (which was fairly easy to farm before GGG "buffed" uber system)

Higher difficulty would actually help the trading aspect because you'll need to trade to compensate for low skill.

 

[Kjaska]

Again, slow paced doesn't mean low reward. They might increase the drop chances if it takes substantially longer to kill a boss, so the time frames of getting the items would be the same in the end.

The problem isn't the time it takes to kill a boss, it's the fact that the boss drops are weighted with trade in mind. They haven't changed anything about how they are approaching access to bosses being fully tradable and the drops being fully tradable. This means that the market will just dissuade people from trying to self farm whatever good drop they want from a boss and just sell the invitations on the market until they can afford that specific drop.

 

[Lacrymas]

Someone will have to farm the items, so I'm not seeing how anyone choosing to buy them is a problem.

 

[frajaq]

Make it impossible for SSF characters to switch to trade, and make one boss drop table % based on trade league, and one for SSF enjoyers

 

[Gerrard]

Someone will have to farm the items, so I'm not seeing how anyone choosing to buy them is a problem.

Great idea if you want your whole game to be a repeat of the Legion league.

 

[Damned Registrations]

Someone will have to farm the items, so I'm not seeing how anyone choosing to buy them is a problem.

Because this means the game is balanced around the people with the most money doing the farming. Which means the bosses aren't worth doing until they're not a challenge any more.

Alice and Bob both find a boss invite every hour. The boss drops 100 currency worth of loot.

Alice sells the invite to a rich meta player that farts on the boss and collects the loot in 3 minutes. He even gets bonus loot because of MF or modifying the map with more challenges or whatever, lets call it double. In exchange, Alice gets say 40% of that loot's value for the sale, in the form of currency to trade for exactly what she needs. Alice is making 80 currency per hour.

Bob fights the boss. Fighting the boss takes 20 minutes, several deaths that cost say 10 minutes worth of xp, and provides loot that can be traded for 100 currency... eventually. Trading all that loot takes another 10 minutes, and the whole reward is deferred by about a week on average as it takes time to find buyers. Bob is making 66 currency per hour. Supposing they each play 1 hour a day on average, after 1 week, Alice has 560 currency worth of new gear, while Bob has ~230 currency worth of new gear and ~230 currency worth of assorted crap waiting to be traded.

Alice is miserable because farming boss invites is boring and asks for power creep so she can fight the boss. The lvl 100 guy is miserable because farming the bosses is boring and asks for difficulty creep. Bob is miserable because his progression is painfully slow, AND he has to still farm the boss invites AND he has to spend time dealing with dickheads to trade stuff. He moans about it on RPGCodex and plays something else. The SSF guy is getting like 5 currency/hour worth of gear btw, because he can't use anything that drops since it's all hyper specialized.

GGG is happy because the rich traders/boss farmers that play the game 40 hours a week are free advertising for all their MTX every time someone has to deal with them. They add difficulty to the trash mobs that drop the invites and power creep to the top end gear. Now boss invites drop every 2 hours and the boss dies in 2 minutes, so the top end players seem even more prestigious.

 

[Israfael]

Someone will have to farm the items, so I'm not seeing how anyone choosing to buy them is a problem.

The problem is that if you don't do 'current edge' content you will be severely behind the curve and have no money if you don't want to invest time (as in ssf), so you'll complain that you are forced into zoom-zoom again

 

[Damned Registrations]

Make it impossible for SSF characters to switch to trade, and make one boss drop table % based on trade league, and one for SSF enjoyers

This is basically what Last Epoch did btw. It's more complex than that, but they functionally separated SSF enjoyers from the trade economy while giving them more loot to compensate.

 

[Israfael]

The SSF guy is getting like 5 currency/hour worth of gear btw, because he can't use anything that drops since it's all hyper specialized.

While I (surprisingly) agree with almost all of what you've wrote, currency gain is mostly irrelevant in SSF - currently I have 110+ divs and even more value in shards and some other stuff (pretty nice megalomaniac with feed the fury + repeater, for example), it's all worthless apart from esoteric metacrafting (actually spent like 15 divs on crafting half-decent claw that'd probably sell for a few chaos on the market), I had to farm like 20 mythic orbs to get a t2 unique (heatshiver), while you can probably buy it with half-decent gear in trade in 10 minutes of farming oils or expedition.

 

[Damned Registrations]

The SSF guy is getting like 5 currency/hour worth of gear btw, because he can't use anything that drops since it's all hyper specialized.

While I (surprisingly) agree with almost all of what you've wrote, currency gain is mostly irrelevant in SSF - currently I have 110+ divs and even more value in shards and some other stuff (pretty nice megalomaniac with feed the fury + repeater, for example), it's all worthless apart from esoteric metacrafting (actually spent like 15 divs on crafting half-decent claw that'd probably sell for a few chaos on the market), I had to farm like 20 mythic orbs to get a t2 unique (heatshiver), while you can probably buy it with half-decent gear in trade in 10 minutes of farming oils or expedition.

That's why I said 'worth of gear'. Honestly it's a far worse ratio if you want something specific, but part of the fun of SSF is warping your build to fit what loot drops into your lap. The point is that an SSF player will take 10-20 times longer to reach the same kind of combat potential as a trade enjoyer, all else being equal. Of course it varies a lot depending on how specialized the gear you can use is.

 

[Kjaska]

Currency hasn't been an issue in SSF for multiple leagues now. Except for Hinekora's Locks.