Good Morning Folks! On Friday Path of Exile II Early Access launched and at this point, I have played for 24 hours according to Steam spread over two full days and one heavy evening of gaming. This morning I am going to talk about some of the good bits and some of the bad bits from my perspective. I have deeply mixed opinions about this experience, and quite honestly above all else… I am very thankful that Path of Exile 1 is going to continue to receive updates. The thing is… Path of Exile II does not appear to be catering to the Path of Exile 1 audience, or at least not in its entirety. Time will tell if this audience is large enough one to support the type of brutal gameplay that they are going for. However before I put my thumb too far onto the scale, lets talk about some of the great things about the game.
The Good Parts
Feat of Cloud Engineering
While the game launched a few hours late, from the time the servers went up it was pretty much in a fully playable state the entire weekend long. Whatever they did to scale their systems for the massive demand worked. There were a few hiccups here and there, and a few times an instance server seemed to restart itself, but all in all it was a damned smooth experience. You have to understand part of why this is so amazing is that Path of Exile is a game that has never seen a peak concurrency over 500k, and with this launch they were prepping to have over a million players battering down their systems.
Amazing Communication
From the announcement for the Three Week Day, the concerns for launch, and all the way throughout the weekend with updates posted to Twitter (though I wish this were also mirrored on other platforms) the Grinding Gear Games team has been phenomenal with communicating what is going on and what we should expect as players. This really needs to be commended, because this level of honesty with the player base is refreshing. This is just not something we get in our current high-marketing-spin gaming environment and should be viewed as the new standard for game releases full stop. If you are not doing at least this well then you are failing your playerbase.
Better Performing Client
One of the more impressive things is just how well the game performs. It consumes fewer resources than the original Path of Exile client and looks a hell of a lot better. I am shocked at just how good this new client is, and it would be lovely if they could go back and rework the innards of the POE1 client to improve it in the same way.
Gorgeous Visuals
The game looks amazing. The environments look amazing. The lighting engine is phenomenal. There is this scene where you are roaming through a town on fire, and it just looks so damned good. Later there is a similar scene where you are roaming around a town with rain-slicked streets at night, and every so often you get this perfect glint of the moon off the puddles on the ground and it is phenomenal. I never really thought Path of Exile 1 looked dated… until I played Path of Exile II.
Better Onboarding
The game does so much better of a job onboarding the player and simplifying at least some of the early choices of what gems you should be using and what supports you should be putting with them. Some of this needs optimization, but it leads to a much more approachable experience. Similarly having mouse over text in the game for most of the game terms with pop-up definitions is a huge step forward. I often tend to discount this because I am a POE grognard at this point and have memorized a lot of these terms, but to a new player, this would be huge.
Pausing the Game is Huge
While there is a contingency of players who seem to be railing against this change, specifically when it comes to boss encounters… being able to pause your game is a massive improvement. There are a lot of times where I just need to get up and step away from the game and being able to hit escape and do just that is phenomenal. I just wish they would make it so that the game pauses any time you open any menu or even open your inventory. Make this a single-player-only feature, but it would be so nice to be able to fiddle with stuff without the fear of having to flip back out quickly to deal with a swarm of angry mobs.
Checkpointing is Solid
While I am going to complain about certain aspects of this later, the checkpointing tech in this game is pretty great. It feels awesome being able to restart something, without having to run all the way back to it. Similarly, it is great that the game saves your world state, and that you can legitimately just log out of the game and return right back to it without having to start in town again. This is legitimately next level for an ARPG.
Simplified Crafting
At least in theory, the crafting changes should make it far easier for a new player to pick up items off the ground and modify them for their uses. Similarly, the ability to Disenchant items for shards and Salvage items for quality and socketing currency is a big positive. Thankfully things like the Salvaging Bench stay unlocked for secondary characters on the account so that you never have to live without it.
Better Storytelling
Path of Exile had a great story, but it was told in a manner that was less than clear to most players. It was absolutely possible to get through the ten-act story without having a clue what was going on save for the fact that this Piety chick kept showing up regularly. Legitimately I highly suggest checking out KittenCatNoodle and her story deep dives because there is a lot of cool lore there and POE2 is a direct sequel to the story of the first game. However, the way in which the game is telling the story to the player is so much more effective in the second game. It would be very hard for you to exit this game without understanding at least the general broad strokes of the story.
The Bad Parts
Confusing Difficulty Curve
ARPGs are supposed to make you feel powerful when it comes to killing trash mobs but then need to reason your way through the boss fights. This game has some of the weirdest difficulty spikes and almost all of them are surrounding white packs of random trash mobs. They feel awful and just sort of make exploring the world a bit of a slog. This really serves to make roaming around as melee miserable. Almost all of the random deaths that I have taken are to trash packs, which also have collision meaning that when you get surrounding you cannot dodge roll out of the way to get clear. I’ve had a lot of “oops I am swarmed and now fucked” moments and they feel bad. The game could easily have general mob damage lowered by at least half, as well as the hitpoints of trash packs.
Melee Feels Bad
Melee combat just feels bad. So many of the attacks have forced moments built into them, meaning that you have to plan for the dumbassed lunge that your character is going to do every time, meaning that it makes combat abilities feel awkward. I get that they wanted to show off all of these animations that they created, but I do not understand why it should feel so cumbersome to do anything. Leap slam for example just does not feel responsive and I have no clue why they needed to change the way this worked from the first game. All of the movement abilities feel bad, because they have awkward cooldowns, a bit of a windup, and target monsters unpredictably.
Targeting is Awful
There is something fundamentally off with the targeting mechanics in this game. There are so many times that one of my abilities decides to target some random mob other than firing at where my mouse cursor is pointing. This is especially prevalent with Boneshatter which I use as a “detonator” to cause shockwaves to fire off when I consume a Heavy Stun. This means that I need to target a mob that is primed for heavy stun, but too often my character turns in the opposite direction of my cursor and feebly swipes at something behind me rather than the target that is primed to create an explosion. Leap slam similarly often targets something in a completely different direction than my character is facing meaning that I go bounding off into oblivion.
Too Proud of Bosses
I get that you are super proud of just how many bosses you managed to cram into this game, but it is a bit much. Right now the best abilities in the game can one-shot these, and the majority of abilities mean you are just impotently banging away at a giant bag of hitpoints for 5 to 10 minutes so that the game becomes a battle of attrition to see if you run out of potions before you kill it. There is just far too much bossing in the campaign full stop. I never really liked bossing in Path of Exile and considered it the most annoying part of the game. It was something that I did to unlock the power that was gated behind it, but not something I would choose to engage with purposefully. The campaign should be a fairly chill experience as you get used to your character and work through building it up, and it is annoying to constantly have to keep going into a death spiral and restart at the checkpoint until you batter it down… only to have to do the same thing again a few rooms over.
Bosses are Bugged
At this point, I have played through several of the bosses multiple times, on different characters. The experiences are never the same, and this feels bad. I got into a death spiral last night on an alt where Geonor the boss of the first act was chain gunning mechanics so I had no time to actually do any DPS. As soon as one mechanic finished he would immediately start the next one, without giving you any time to do anything between. Other times I have completed the encounter, he has paused a significant time between mechanics. I am not sure which is the intended result, but clearly there are timing bugs happening and it is a bit maddening. As a result, I never quite know if the difficulty I am facing is intended, or if shit is just bugged out. Granted this is all part and parcel with a beta.
Starving for Resources
The supposed trade-off that we were getting for losing the power of the crafting bench, was that picking an item off the floor and crafting it up into something useable was supposed to be way more common. I am constantly starving for resources. I am around level 30 currently have have seen three raw Regal Orbs drop in total. They were correct that I saw around a half dozen Exalted Orbs drop during Act 1, but then they seemed to dry up completely, and have only seen one drop since. I am just starving for resources to be able to try and craft something reasonable for an upgrade.
Gear Drought
This is only magnified by the fact that the gear that is dropping is awful. Rares are exactly that… extremely rare, far more than they were in Path of Exile. It feels like we are playing on Ruthless mode, and news flash… that was not a popular game mode for a reason. What makes this even worse is the fact that the item tiering system does not appear to be working as intended. Jonathan talked about how as you went up in levels, there would be invisible forces gating the loot so that it would stop lower-level bases from dropping and lower-level attributes from rolling. The thing is I am still getting level 1 items with level 1 rolls in my 30s. The loot is horrendous and I feel even more like the only thing that is going to matter in this game is acquiring trade currency so I can buy my way out of gear holes.
Runes are Not Enough
Runes were in theory supposed to be our methodology for “fixing gear” but there are a bunch of problems with this. Firstly socketed gear is not dropping often enough to reliably generate a source of artificer orbs, so most of my gear does not have any sockets to put runes in. Even then the amount of adjustment that a single rune gives is just not good enough to keep up with your gear as you level. There really should be some methodology for spending additional runes on an item with a low chance of upgrading the stats to a higher tier or something like that. Right now I have large quantities of runes, but nothing to do with them.
Resistances Almost Non-Existent
This is a problem that is multiplied by just how bad the loot is that is dropping, but my resistances are awful. There are fewer nodes on the passive tree that have resistances on them, and as a result, we have to rely entirely on gear… most of which are two-stat magic items. People who are actively doing maps right now, can’t even fix their resistances… it should not come as a shock that I am barely keeping mine out of the negatives while doing the campaign.
Passive Tree Choices Lack Power
It feels like most of the choices on the passive tree are not actually giving my character any more power. Across the board, it feels like the passive tree was watered down significantly from Path of Exile, and it does not feel great. There was a bit where I was trying to build into Block as a defensive layer and had my tree configured in order to take advantage of every single block node that I could get. This only managed to take me up to 36% block chance… which is nothing. Ideally in order to go block-based you really need to be able to hit that 75% block cap, and in Path of Exile this is honestly a fairly trivial matter once you have picked up a few node clusters. In POE2, I had three such node clusters and was not even vaguely close to being good enough to make a difference.
Sustain is a Problem
This might be a uniquely melee problem, but I cannot sustain my mana and every fight generally becomes a situation where I am just hoping that I don’t run out of mana flasks. I am running Clarity on my Herald of Ash, but it is nowhere near as powerful as the same ability would be in Path of Exile. In POE1 by the time I exit Act 1 I have generally “fixed” my mana and never have to worry about it again for the rest of the game. Not having the “juice” to be able to use your abilities feels miserable.
Regen is Almost Non-Existent
I’ve taken a ton of regen nodes on the tree and it does not really seem to be making much of a difference. My regeneration rates are so low as compared to what I am expecting from Path of Exile. It feels questionable how much of a defensive layer this really is. Having to sustain yourself from flasks feels bad. Flasks should be for “oh shit” moments, not the general play of your character. I expect to have enough regen to be able to recover from minor hits by just waiting… but that is just not really a thing in this game at least not yet. I have prioritized regen on a bunch of my gear slots and it still does not really make much of a difference.
Zone Pop on Death Feels Miserable
Because the trash mobs are soo poorly balanced currently, the whole thing about the entire zone respawning each time you die feels fucking miserable. There have been several times I have just given up playing for a bit because I knew I would have to clear my way back across a path full of mobs that felt miserable to fight… only to have to do it yet again if I happened to die. The old way of zones working in Path of Exile is far superior. You can still Ctl+Click a zone to respawn it fully, so I do not know why they went down this path of doing the dark souls bullshit of a zone popping. This was a bad idea and it needs to be thrown in the bin entirely.
Tanky is Not Really a Thing Yet
Building defenses feels like it is the wrong choice. I have two Warriors, one with and one without defenses and I had a much easier time getting through the first act ignoring all of my defenses entirely. Even on my character I have gone mace and shield and picked up defenses from the passive tree, I still do not feel tanky enough for it to have been worth the effort. My core player fantasy is to be able to shrug off attacks. I play tanks in MMORPGs, and as such I tend to build tanky characters in ARPGs. My two favorite characters are the Invoker/Thorns Crusader from Diablo III, and the Righteous Fire Juggernaut/Chieftain from Path of Exile and in both, I was playing into the fantasy of building super tanky and then coming up with an alternate feedback method for killing things. This just does not seem to be a thing yet in Path of Exile II.
Not Sure If It’s a Good Game
I am continuing to plug along, but there have been so many times that I have tried to decide if I just wanted to quit. I would like to finish the campaign, but I gotta be honest it is not something I am looking forward to completing it again on alts. Contrast that with the fact that I legitimately love doing the campaign in Path of Exile. I have a blast playing through the various acts and using them as a way of gauging just how powerful I am at any given point along the process. Admittedly we are comparing something I have now done once or twice, with something that I have legitimately done multiple dozens of times, so with familiarity comes fondness I guess.
I think there is a good base to build upon here, but I feel like they need to back away from catering to those players who obtain sexual gratification from difficulty and reign things in a bit. I’ve played this game before, and it was called Path of Exile on Ruthless difficulty. That was not a popular game mode for a reason. People who play ARPGs religiously do so in order to gain player power and crush the content, and I feel like this game is not really allowing me to do this. There are a bunch of reasons behind this like stingy currency system, bad loot drops, overturned mobs, and weak power gained through the passive tree… but all of it ends up adding up to an experience that is not terribly enjoyable for me personally.
Right now I think there are players who might love this game, but they are not the same players who love Path of Exile. Maybe that is okay. I am just annoyed that this is going to be the reason why we are late getting the next POE1 League because I am not sure it was worth it. Maybe I will start to love it over time. It took me from 2015 until 2019 to really begin to Grok the first game, maybe it is going to take a similar amount of beating my head against this wall before I learn to love the frustration.
