Path of Exile II Sets New Peak with Over 500,000 Concurrent Steam Players During Early Access
Path of Exile II Sets New Peak with Over 500,000 Concurrent Steam Players During Early Access
In a groundbreaking achievement for the action role-playing game genre, Path of Exile II has surged to an unprecedented peak of over 500,000 concurrent
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For anyone that's not familiar with the game, it's a slow top-down arpg with a souls like gameplay. The game is challenging but the progression can currently be tedious and unrewarding, the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn't ready yet; I recommend waiting for the full release if you want to give it a shot.
Soulslike gameplay? Have they changed the game so much from 1 to 2? It's more akin to a hack & slay like Diablo, isn't it?
As an avid PoE1 player who has 8h (act3) so far in the second game: gameplay feels more skill based (enemy/boss attack patterns, synergistic skills, more active defences/survivability) while in original you can faceroll most of the acts and endgame with enough knowledge (vendor recipes, "face tankable" content, automateable defences/damage, simple investable survivability). This might be why people are comparing it to soulslike.
Also the pacing is a lot slower which might add to the feeling of og Diablo/Diablo 2. Of course the progression will be faster after meta is found, but people still theorize that getting to endgame takes more time in PoE2.
This sounds more my taste. I played a fair amount of PoE1, but a lot of it ended up feeling like I was just running my stats around. I'd win or lose because of gear. Like, I could hand control over to someone who'd never played before and they'd do mostly fine.
Contrast with like Sekiro where handing someone the controller they'll probably just get stomped, since it has a bigger player skill factor.
A balance of those two extremes sounds nice.
Initial impression for me (4.5k hours in PoE1) was a hard no. Things is I'm pretty bad and I'm pretty lazy. It's def harder, more punishing and the pace is much slower if you just thought you could aoe spam your way to end game.
About 5 hours in on my third class I'm struggling but having fun. It's def a steep curve.
Thinking about it, a combination of "You need good gear to win" AND "You need good player skill to win" might not be my cup of tea.
I only have ~250 hours in Path of Exile 1, but I never got really deep into theory or build craft. I don't really love the spreadsheet and forums mode of the genre that much.
I guess we'll see!
I tried to get into PoE1 with my brother and it was nothing but a boring grind slog.
PoE2 feels like a fucking game. It's kinda great. The thin white ice things from that one boss (you'll recognize it) was like "Wake up, I'm not a harmless damage sponge!"
They slowed down the game tremendously and added dodge roll.
A dodge roll doesn't make it have soulslike gameplay in my books, but I've barely seen any gameplay, so what do I know.
D3 had a dodge roll added years after release but was kind of wonky and didn't give i-frames; D4 also has a dodge roll but it's actually functional. Is it good in PoE2?
Well that's how poe2 is usually described, i personally have never played any of the souls game so i can't attest to the similarity. Poe2 is a lot more boss centric.
The dodge roll has its niche: avoid boss mechanics. You can spam it so it doesn't provide any movement advantage, i think it gives iframes on targeted attacks, but you can still get hit by AOEs. However, because you can't attack while rolling you want to avoid doing it unless you really need to.
I always felt this game was unrewarding... There is a lot of bad loot and hardly ever any good loot. Talking about poe 1 now.
Sometimes the character felt powerful but very quickly it's back to dying in one or two hits. I guess it's hard to balance the game so it's always at a decent difficulty level considering all variations in gear and skill.
It also felt like they wanted players to craft gear by dice rolls, wasting a lot of time and effort on random number generator.
I would put this game into the category "play if you don't have a job and/or family".
Yeah, the insistence on trading as a key part of the game (despite the garbage trading system) absolutely murders your loot, which is just a huge drag in a loot game.
Global trading means drop rates and gear quality have to be kept down across the entire playerbase, so stinginess is built in deeply on top of GGG's inherent worship of time-wasting and RNG.
BTW, PoE2 separates skill gems from gear and removes color gem slot restrictions, so that at least frees you of the way PoE1 needed a drop to be good and to get good links and to get the colors you needed on those links. On the other hand, the simplified gem system is missing some life and fun. You don't even level gems by using them anymore. You just burn a higher level gem drop to level a gem you already have.
Yeah I'm playing poe 2 now. Too early to say something but it hasn't been too difficult for me yet. But I got a legendary coat from the first boss which is still good even at level 6. Probably why. :)
Everyone says souls like it but it feels more like a monster hunter. Got to dodge and position and find an opening to do your moves.
the EA is also missing a lot of content that isn’t ready yet
Sure, but there's also plenty to explore, especially for people who haven't played PoE1 and have to learn how things work from scratch. Given you don't pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.
But probably more important that early access characters and stuff aren't available out of early access, so you are explicitly playing temp characters. Fine if one treats their early/seasonal characters as temp characters anyway, but someone else might not want to play characters with no future after early access.
There's plenty to explore for sure, and the 3 acts will give most people a run for their money, but the game is incomplete, literally missing half the campaign. The missing weapons and skill gems means you actually don't have many options that aren't railroaded, there's also going to be a lot of balance fixes and probably item drop buffs; EA is never the best time to start a game.
Given you don't pay extra for EA and premium stuff like stash space you buy goes to both PoE1 and 2, you get quite a bit for your early access ticket.
Most new players buying into EA are not going to stick around. Also fuck premium currencies, this shit is manipulative as hell, not to mention it makes refunds needlessly complicated.
I understand where you're coming from, and not to sound like a shill, but GGG has made their mtx about as non-onerous as possible. Stash tabs are the closest it gets to p2w, and you get plenty for free, with plenty of free QOL features.
Also, the ratios of real money to the premium currency are more than fair without any of the 'oh no, you're a buck short, better spend $25 to get this thing. And now you have almost enough to buy this other thing, better spend another $25us!'
Premium currencies are just very anti-consumer, I'm sure you know most of the arguments against it so I won't reiterate them.
GGG are great developers, but their sales department is as predatory as every other game, FOMO sales, lootboxes, premium currencies, supporter packs... Not being p2w (the standard on pc btw) is really the only good thing you can say about their current monetization.