4 ms·

it's simply the best action RPG available. It has limitless depth and tremendous player agency

str34m 4y ago
jiggawatts 4y ago
I have to be the voice of dissent. I played it for a few hundred hours (but nothing like the hours I sunk into Diablo I & II!), and for the first few days of play it was almost more fun finding bugs and little "polish issues" than the actual game itself. PoE is the diametric opposite of the quality you see in a typical Blizzard game. It's fun in its own way, and it is free, but calling the the "best RPG available" is a stretch. I had a list of all of the issues I found, but I lost the text file to a PC upgrade, so I won't type them all out here, but the most glaring one for me was that when you moved from one area to the next, the door orientation was inconsistent/random, so you'd often end up going click-click-click to move and then move back to the previous area by accident. With the slow loading times this was particularly frustrating. I've had debates with PoE fans, and they gaslight me by telling me that "there are no issue", "the game is perfect", etc... That's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon all by itself! People can get acclimatized to anything and learn through trial and error what to do to avoid issues. For example, I learned to avoid the door orientation thing by pausing the move clicks when entering new areas, so I stopped noticing the bug. But the bug is still there! It didn't go away. I changed, the game didn't. This is why players with 1K+ hours in PoE swear that it is awesome, polished, and bug-free. They don't even realise all the tiny habits they've picked up to avoid the bugs. It's like knowing to double-click desktop icons, but single-click web URLs. This isn't consistent. It isn't good. But people learn and get used to it, and stop thinking about it as a problem... until they watch Grandma use a PC. That's when you realise... oh... it's actually a terrible, unintuitive user interface. This is why Microsoft famously used to use random people off the street for UX testing. Internal testers learn to avoid the rough edges after years and years of clicking around the same GUI. PS: I just remembered another glaring bug. Setting the game resolution to 4K would set the monitor resolution to 4K, but the game would render in 1080p and upscale. This wasn't a feature, the game simply couldn't write the value 3840 to the config file because there was a "sanity check" in the config GUI (why!?). If you manually edited the config file, you could play it at actual 4K. Again, people would swear up and down that no-no-no, I was wrong, it's a flawless game and runs buttery smooth at 4K, etc... meanwhile they're playing a blurry game that they just assume is "the PoE look" and some sort of stylistic choice.
- http-teapot 4y ago
  Two or three years ago, I played PoE on PS4 and thought it ran great. I came up with a powerful but boring PvE build. I forgot how I did it but the character would spin like a tornado and blades would twirl around it. I kept on tweaking the build and I think too many effects would trigger at once and it crashed the game. I didn't know I could be interested in this aspect of a game and had a ton of fun pushing the limit. Breaking the game was rewarding in some sense. I didn't have in me to explore more of the game so I stopped. I recently picked it back up on Steam Deck; it runs great and I am getting 6 hours of battery life.
Lapsa 4y ago
try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge. 100% guaranteed your run will flop before you blink an eye. run #10 won't do much better. there's way too much weirdly named crap that gives no warning whatsoever. you just suddenly die. I mean - it's hardcore, all good, right? I'm whining about discoverability - lack of natural path to right information at right time and not just some postmortem googling // still better than diablo 3/immoral
- baby 4y ago
  > try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge Why would anyone do that? I can't imagine this being fun for any game that offers a hardcore mode. Actually I'd pay to watch someone do that with like, Elden Ring.

I have to be the voice of dissent. I played it for a few hundred hours (but nothing like the hours I sunk into Diablo I & II!), and for the first few days of play it was almost more fun finding bugs and little "polish issues" than the actual game itself. PoE is the diametric opposite of the quality you see in a typical Blizzard game. It's fun in its own way, and it is free, but calling the the "best RPG available" is a stretch. I had a list of all of the issues I found, but I lost the text file to a PC upgrade, so I won't type them all out here, but the most glaring one for me was that when you moved from one area to the next, the door orientation was inconsistent/random, so you'd often end up going click-click-click to move and then move back to the previous area by accident. With the slow loading times this was particularly frustrating. I've had debates with PoE fans, and they gaslight me by telling me that "there are no issue", "the game is perfect", etc... That's actually an interesting psychological phenomenon all by itself! People can get acclimatized to anything and learn through trial and error what to do to avoid issues. For example, I learned to avoid the door orientation thing by pausing the move clicks when entering new areas, so I stopped noticing the bug. But the bug is still there! It didn't go away. I changed, the game didn't. This is why players with 1K+ hours in PoE swear that it is awesome, polished, and bug-free. They don't even realise all the tiny habits they've picked up to avoid the bugs. It's like knowing to double-click desktop icons, but single-click web URLs. This isn't consistent. It isn't good. But people learn and get used to it, and stop thinking about it as a problem... until they watch Grandma use a PC. That's when you realise... oh... it's actually a terrible, unintuitive user interface. This is why Microsoft famously used to use random people off the street for UX testing. Internal testers learn to avoid the rough edges after years and years of clicking around the same GUI. PS: I just remembered another glaring bug. Setting the game resolution to 4K would set the monitor resolution to 4K, but the game would render in 1080p and upscale. This wasn't a feature, the game simply couldn't write the value 3840 to the config file because there was a "sanity check" in the config GUI (why!?). If you manually edited the config file, you could play it at actual 4K. Again, people would swear up and down that no-no-no, I was wrong, it's a flawless game and runs buttery smooth at 4K, etc... meanwhile they're playing a blurry game that they just assume is "the PoE look" and some sort of stylistic choice.

http-teapot 4y ago
Two or three years ago, I played PoE on PS4 and thought it ran great. I came up with a powerful but boring PvE build. I forgot how I did it but the character would spin like a tornado and blades would twirl around it. I kept on tweaking the build and I think too many effects would trigger at once and it crashed the game. I didn't know I could be interested in this aspect of a game and had a ton of fun pushing the limit. Breaking the game was rewarding in some sense. I didn't have in me to explore more of the game so I stopped. I recently picked it back up on Steam Deck; it runs great and I am getting 6 hours of battery life.

Lapsa 4y ago

try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge. 100% guaranteed your run will flop before you blink an eye. run #10 won't do much better. there's way too much weirdly named crap that gives no warning whatsoever. you just suddenly die. I mean - it's hardcore, all good, right? I'm whining about discoverability - lack of natural path to right information at right time and not just some postmortem googling // still better than diablo 3/immoral

baby 4y ago
> try playing PoE on hardcore with no prior knowledge Why would anyone do that? I can't imagine this being fun for any game that offers a hardcore mode. Actually I'd pay to watch someone do that with like, Elden Ring.