What sets this game apart

So looking at the footage of the game play, what sets PoE apart from torchlight,Diablo, and other hack and slashy dungeon crawlers.

The darker atmosphere the lack of gold, just from the footage the game looks less of a cookie cutter and more of some innovation and actually original ideas.

Well IMO this game will have a very long life due to the innovations it brought.

Gems for skilllzzzzzz

Passive forest.
Old man wearing rags with no shoes.
Only 2 classes (duelist and ranger) have pants.

"

SpudOfDoom wrote:

Passive forest.
Old man wearing rags with no shoes.
Only 2 classes (duelist and ranger) have pants.

^ This

skill gems, leagues, the wicked character customisation thanks to the passive skilltree

From what I've seen it looks like almost exactly the same as D2 with the biggest difference being the skill tree. Given the fact I loved d2 like no other game I completely approve of this, but it does make me wonder how similar you can make a game to another game without breaching copyright stuff.

+1

Differences from Diablo 2 and Torchlight:

- Online Only with no Singlepayer so its basically some kind of MMORPG HnS (like Mythos or new Hellgate Global)
- Flasks system (no normal potions, flasks are items with statistics)
- Skill system based on droppable gems and gear sockets heavily inspired be Final Fantasy 7 Materia System
- Passive Skill Web heavily inspired by Final Fantasy 10 Sphere Grid
- Total freedom with character build and skill choice. Even with predefined classes. In PoE you can meele Witch and caster Marauder if you want. No predefined skill trees etc...
- Dark, mature game atmosphere (difference from Torchlight and Diablo 3)
- you not saving the world in this game
- No gold in game. Game uses crafting materials as Currency in vendors trading and player-player trading. Barter trading only.
- Crafting system that allows you to xcustomize items (add/remove mods, upgrade rarity and quality, random rerolls, etc..) (mostly differrence from Torchlight - D2 has Horadric Cube)
- Leagues System that allows GGG to create temporary or permament leagues with differrent game rules (Normal, Hardcore, PvP On/Off) More here: http://www.pathofexile.com/leagues/
- Four difficutly levels (like in D3) with endgame later (after beating all 4). NOw in beta endgame its called "Mealstrom Of Chaos" and its heavy randomized (all stuff form game may be placed randomly)20 floor dungeon without waypoints and with very high difficulty.

This is the most important.

Its an evolutionary game, not revolutionary. The graphics are really nice for an Indie game though, Kudos to the art Guys.

"

Estebon wrote:

So looking at the footage of the game play, what sets PoE apart from torchlight,Diablo, and other hack and slashy dungeon crawlers.

The darker atmosphere the lack of gold, just from the footage the game looks less of a cookie cutter and more of some innovation and actually original ideas.

- Passive Skill Board instead of basic "stat allocation on levelup".
It is HUGE. And even though it may scare you the first time, it is guaranteed to be more interesting than "here are five stat points, bro, allocate them on a few stats".

- Skill Gems with no class restrictions that can level up and can be combined with support gems in many many ways

- No hard restrictions on what you can do with your class. Every weapon, skill and Skill-Board Path is open to every class.
Focusing on the stat that your class is designed around is being rewarded, and deviating from it is simply not being rewarded as much (instead of being punishing or outright impossible).
A lot of people like Hybrids (or even Tribrids) and they will be happy about this.

- Bartering system instead of a simple currency system (I'm curious to see how buying&selling from and to NPC's will actually be handled later on, and how the inventory management issue is going to be handled - the current inventory seems pretty tiny)

- Actual differences between Strength/Dexterity/Intelligence armor archetypes (Armor/Dodge/EnergyShield instead of Armor/LessArmor/LessArmor)

- Crafting.
Diablo 3 is going to have crafting, yes. That one sounds pretty interesting with you having personal crafting slaves that level up individually.
However, Torchlight does not have crafting to my knowledge and the Diablo 2 Cube crafting was limited and felt very weird.
So having a decent crafting system is definitely a plus, especially if you really can create fully custom equipment.

- Hardcore Mode's Death will only banish you back to Normal Mode instead of freaking deleting your character.
Thank god for this, now you can actually attempt hardcore and have a completely reasonable and acceptable punishment if you fail that doesn't feel like total bullcrap.

- No huge amount of disposable potions that you constantly have to manage and refill and so on.
A small amount of Flasks that you arrange similar to equipment and that will recharge during combat instead of just being gone.

- Persistent game. Not a "make finished product, then ship and ignore afterwards". Like for example League of Legends (new champs released faster than you can buy them, so you never run out of things to aim for), will probably be updated with new content regularily (maybe even faster than most people can chew through it) and thus last a lot longer. Reaching a point where you're "done" with the game will take longer as you need to catch up with the updates, and at some point an update will cause you to no longer be "done" and give you more things to do.


- And last but not least: Free.
Now I don't know how the actual F2P model for this will look like, so I can't tell whether or not this is positive or negative, but it is definitely something that sets it apart from the Torchlight and Diablo series.


This is really the make-or-break for this game, the deciding factor of how good of a game it will become or whether or not it even survives to pay off it's own production cost.

If it ends up being a badly designed F2P model (as in, real life money can grant a noticeable advantage of any sort in game), it will eventually drag down and ruin the game, everyone except the guys who bought tons of power will leave and all the developer's work will be for nothing.

If it ends up being a well designed F2P model (all the things buyable with real life money are convenience, aesthetics, fancy things, maybe even very minor, barely noticeable advantages) I can see this game becoming extremely successful.





To put it short:
Very many of the basic behind-the-scenes concepts (classes/stats/skills/money/items etc) of Hack'n'Slash games are changed up quite noticeably with this game while the core gameplay is exactly what you would expect.
I hope they pull off the F2P model right.