Digesting Path of Exile II

Good Morning Friends! This weekend was a bit packed with both Final Fantasy XIV Fanfest in Las Vegas and ExileCon happening in New Zealand. Throughout the weekend I consumed quite a bit of information related to both, but of the two events the one I had been looking forward to the most was getting some more information regarding Path of Exile II. I wrote a bit in June talking about my hopes for the game, especially in light of not really feeling Diablo IV. Quite honestly I had reached a fairly unhealthy level of hype for the game and had begun pinning my hopes on it coming in and being the one game to unite them all. This was at least influenced by me dealing with the emotional hit after waiting a decade for it… Diablo IV was really just not designed for my tastes. This weekend was a bit of a second volley though as I am realizing that Path of Exile II may also not be for me. Maybe we as gamers should learn not to pin our hopes and dreams on something we’ve yet to play… but the heart wants what the heart wants. Gamers in general would be a lot less toxic if we were better at handling disappointment.

A lot has changed since Exilecon 2019. At that point, it was announced that POE1 and POE2 would effectively be the same game, and essentially would just be an additional campaign that dumps out into the same endgame. In the four years since the last ExileCon, a lot has changed… not the least of which has been deciding that the two games had simply grown too far apart. Now the plan is to have two games that share a pool of microtransactions, but each has its own gameplay and content. We got to see a lot of gameplay, and I have to say… after seeing what seemed to be a much more slow-paced and almost soulslike style of combat… I am kinda glad that Path of Exile 1 will remain intact. Watching the above gameplay demo… gave me some of the same concerns that I had watching gameplay from Diablo IV, that maybe it just isn’t for me. I don’t get my joy from reveling in difficulty… I get my joy from blowing up entire screens of enemies and getting a massive loot explosion.

I have to admit I had some concerns in the back of my head. It seemed like Path of Exile was really pushing its Ruthless mode very hard. I spent some of the weekends playing Ruthless (shown above) just to get a feel for it, and it took me way longer than I want to admit just to get through the first act. I think Ruthless was essentially Grinding Gear Games’ way of testing the waters to see how players were going to feel about some of the design decisions that they were going to be making with Path of Exile II. In fact, at the start of the Crucible, they decided to make the league start race be in Hardcore Ruthless Solo-Self-Found… and had the lowest race participation in Path of Exile history. So it makes me wonder… if the decision to split the games was made rather recently taking into account how the core Path of Exile audience seems to be allergic to that game mode. During a given league, there tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six thousand players who participate in Ruthless as compared to the multiple hundreds of thousands that play the traditional trade league.

That isn’t to say that Path of Exile II does not interest me at all. In spite of not really feeling like an ARPG to me, I got quite a bit of enjoyment out of Diablo IV after all. The game seems to be leaning more heavily into class fantasy and creating some more clearly defined swimlanes for each class and ascendency. Essentially every attribute combination now will have two classes for a total of twelve with thirty-six ascendency classes in total. I’m really excited to see what the Druid and Monk for example play like, and I think even if it continues to double down on “super hardcore mode” vibes I got, since I won’t really be paying anything extra for it… it is likely going to be similar to the Retail vs Classic WoW dichotomy. If you have access to both you might as well dip your toes in occasionally.

There are a lot of really neat ideas that will be coming to the game. I like the concept of weapon swaps and being able to assign different skills to different weapons and have them change gear automagically. I also like the idea of being able to have conditional passive tree skills assigned based on which weapon set you are currently using. This is going to create a lot of really interesting build possibilities, but I am also concerned about some of the other things that appear to be happening. It seems as though movement abilities for example are just gone, as are some of the quirky spell types like brands, and it also feels like Auras will be significantly weaker than they currently are. Flasks are also designed to be more reactive than a defensive layer as they are today, which again… all of these things are probably better for new players but will serve to make POE2 feel wildly different than the original game.

I think the biggest concern I have is just how slow combat felt. In the demo embedded above, the characters seemed to spend more time rolling around on the ground than actually fighting things. This is what Dark Souls feels like to me… and that is not exactly the fantasy that I want to lean into with an ARPG. Like I said before I want to melt entire screens of monsters at once and pick through the remains looking for treasure. It feels like at some point they made a decision that Path of Exile would be the zoomy game and that Path of Exile II would be more slow and methodical. My hope is if this decision has officially been made, they maybe ease up a bit on the reigns of POE1 since many of the last few league’s worth of changes have seemingly been to slow things down a bit. Don’t get me wrong… the demos look really cool but I think it can be summarized best by what want of the devs said. To paraphrase they said that they wanted people to see the game and think it looks like a really good action game, not necessarily an ARPG.

It isn’t just a “me” thing… I’ve had side conversations on social media over the weekend about my weird feelings regarding the POE2 reveal. Additionally… I watched a lot of streamers playing the game and seemingly trying to hide some measure of disappointment. They were warned before sitting down to play that the game was a bit overturned, but all of the ones that I saw streamed… got wrecked and overwhelmed as they attempted to play POE2 like they would have approached POE1. The only person who really was successful as a whole was Kripparian, who admittedly is primarily a Ruthless mode player so likely approached the game from that standpoint rather than trying to gather up big packs and nuke them down quickly. Mathil seemed to have really mixed feelings about the game, and a number of folks who watched from home shared their concerns in live talking head reactions. So I at least feel like I am not alone in this.

Now this may be “copium”… but like I said I spent a lot of the weekend consuming POE2-related content and saw lots of different folks from GGG talking about the game and more specifically the demo that was available. It sounds as though they specifically wanted to slow down the gameplay so that it would record better and show off all of the work that they have done on the animation and skill design front. Players had no access to the skills screen and were effectively forced to play the builds that were presented to them. Based on some information like seeing how far off the gear that Kripp started with for example as compared to a few of the drops he got during his demo… it seems like they were trying to play mid-game content with starter gearing. So taking that into account… the game may be WAY faster when you actually get to play and gear your own character and design a relatively optimal build. If they are designing the game to be completed with bad gear and bad character templates… then maybe it will be good for brand-new players.

The other big disappointment of the weekend is that the “Closed Beta” begins June 7th of 2024. So we have almost a full year to wait until players can realistically get their hands on the game. I would assume they will have an “Open Beta” period as well, which means we are realistically looking at a Q4 2024 release for the game. A lot can change in ten months. I know I will play it when it comes out, but I am also going to try my best not to pin my hopes on it. I love Path of Exile 1, and my hope is that this means that they are actually going to devote more resources to it. I heard during the event that for the last year and a half, there has been an eight-person team supporting that game, with all resources being siphoned off by POE2 to speed up its development. I would wait an entire year more if it meant that we get better leagues as a result. With that in mind… the last several leagues have been rather impressive considering how tightly constrained resources were.

I am super pumped about the next league, but that is another post for another day. What were your thoughts about POE2? Do you also have concerns or were you pumped at what you saw? Feel free to drop me a line below.