Second part Act 4 lore feels extremely rushed

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ancalagon3000 wrote:

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lazycalm2 wrote:

Good thing most ARPG fans don't care much about story then

I do, and a lot others do. You dont have the data to support that statement, that either a minority or a majority care.

The reason it feels rushed is because the content was rushed. But I'd rather get it now than wait till December. POE story was always kind of rubbish, you have to admit. It does not have the depth of the diablo series.

Well, D3 surely does not have much dept. It has in fact the worst story in any RPG. It looks like it was written by a 4yr old.

Also:

Storywise what i think i understand:

Shavronne,Maligaro,Deodre lived in the same time like Malachai and Kaom (not sure about Daresso) near the time when the Karui invaded Wraeclast.

Malachai's goal was to destroy the beast and restore the purity, like before the the time where the Vaal began all this gemling shit.

But in reality he want to become a god and used the rapture device to make it inside.
Shortly after he and his students(shavronne,Maligaro,Deodre) made their sacrifices to the beasts to become immortal they initiated the cataclysm which wiped out the Eternal Empire and started to bring the undead/undying plague over Wraeclast.

That happened about 300 Years before the current timeline and explains why Dialla remembers Malachai.

Shortly after Kaom was corrupted(300 yrs before,by a corruped Merveil?...lol). Daresso idk... also corrupted but decades before Kaom.

I also fully agree with OP. Compare end of act4 with end of act3, immersion-wise. In act3, you go through a beautiful, lush garden to reach base of a HUGE tower. The entrance itself makes you feel like a puny ant. Then as you ascend the tower, the level art conveys a great physical feeling of going higher and higher. Individual floors are getting smaller, later on parts of tower collapsed, exposing the interior to rain and wind. On the top of the tower, you really feel that you are so high and isolated from rest of the world below, feeling alone. Very nicely done.

End of act4, you just go through some generic flat corridors with generic bland organic walls, never really getting a feeling of how the areas are physically connected. or where you are progressing. If they swapped the level design around among the areas, people would barely notice.

Also, why is the inside of The Beast so generically organic? From outside, Beast seems crystalline, maybe silicon-based. I was hoping for some inspired, alien-looking insides, but when I entered the belly for the first time, there was a strong cognitive dissonance ("wtf? did I go through wrong door?") instead.

The three mine-themed areas are nice, though.

The lore problem is that we have a very rushed and undeveloped main storyline with two brilliant sidelines connected to it. It all together looks draft and unfinished.

The technical side suffers from very unoptimised dominus and malachai instances, weak comps just can't handle this load.

Balance is that malachai is uber op in a kitchen, I have no idea how to do him on equal levels except of buying BiS stuff (which is itself ridiculous on normal). His chain skill deals impossible damage and covers just half of the very tiny space given.

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Waervyn wrote:

I agree completely. I'm a bit dumbstruck by the fact that we had to fight so many 'famous' lore characters in one expansion. As far as I know PoE has planned for 10 acts. Now they've kind of gotten rid of most of their interesting characters, like Voll/Shavronne/Doedre/Kaom, which could easily have been made in to several expansions.

well, i think expansions can be about writing new history as well, not only about dealing with characters from ages long ago

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lazycalm2 wrote:

Well, D3 surely does not have much dept. It has in fact the worst story in any RPG. It looks like it was written by a 4yr old.

agreed
actually bad story was the one of key-reasons i abandoned d3 for

I agree that act 4 lore seems rushes. Apart from the initial explanation, there's nothing to inform the player about what the beast actually is, what Malachai has to do with it, and why we need the ingredients we need to make the hole in the stomach/bowels/whatever of the beast. And, yes, no reward for a boss fight is a real turn-off, actually for all the main boss fights in Path of Exile.

I also can't believe it that nobody in Sarn gives you a pat on the back for killing Dominus! You've just killed the most notorious tyrant in that part of the land and it seems that none of the NPC in Sarn actually give a shit.

To me, the area just before Malachai looks like the last 3-4 levels in Dialo 1. The all-red style, the small corridors and all those spikes everywhere. I did not play it with sound on but I could hear in my head those baby cries from Diablo. Looks like that but not so atmospheric :)

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Maciek14 wrote:

I agree that act 4 lore seems rushes. Apart from the initial explanation, there's nothing to inform the player about what the beast actually is, what Malachai has to do with it, and why we need the ingredients we need to make the hole in the stomach/bowels/whatever of the beast. And, yes, no reward for a boss fight is a real turn-off, actually for all the main boss fights in Path of Exile.

I also can't believe it that nobody in Sarn gives you a pat on the back for killing Dominus! You've just killed the most notorious tyrant in that part of the land and it seems that none of the NPC in Sarn actually give a shit.

Haven't finished Act 4 but I can tell you it does indeed tell us why we get those items from Kaom and Daresso. I believe most people just have an aversion to reading.

About the lore, I liked a lot of things but like people have already said, I think there is quite a bit of things that could be fixed.

I really liked the Kaom and Daresso storylines. When reading the weatered carvings in Kaom's dream for completing the karui storyline, I really felt pity for the king that brought shame and death to his peple when all he was looking for was glory. Daresso's dream is even more extreme, his great live and all he fighted for and all ends in just a fallacy.

About Voll, I actually liked how he was handled. I dont remember if there was an explanation as to why he ended in the dried lake, but I can think that the cataclism just got him there with his army after he went with Malachai to the mines. We knew quite a bit about Voll the brittle emperor thanks to the library and characters, but reading his perspective for the first (and only) time felt great. The regret, the ultimate suffering, his ideals crushed, yeah I like that stuff.


One of the things about PoE that I like is how the game handles the lore. There are bit and pieces that you can get from the perpestive of different characters or from the environment. The masters, for example, also give a clear opinion about certain figures, like Haku about Kaom.

But sometimes it goes to far with this aproach I think. For example, when we use the rapture device, as far as we know it was supposed to kill the beast. With the story about how Dialla rejected to be used as fuel, at least the idea was the it should kill it. I already knew the machine wasnt going to do the job, but I was left confused when it actually happened. There was no explanation directly given as to what happened. But then I read the missions map, and there it was: "The rapture has failed to kill the beast but opened a path". It would be nice to somehow get a hint there without being forced to check the mission map.


Then the belly of the beast and beyond. I really liked the zones, even if the sceptre of god gives a better feeling of being "alone in the world" (maybe this is piety's fault by being there).
The main problems I have is the new Piety's boss room and the harvest. That boss room and its placement lack quite abit of impact. I mean, it is almost as if she was just chilling in there. With the harvest bosses besides malachai I feel that there is not enough impact made by the boss rooms themselvels or the feeling you get when approaching them. The "how you get to them" can be improved a lot considering there is already a waypoint where piety is waiting.


As to the bosses themselves, they are quite lifeless. I didnt expect them to say much, but at least I wanted to see some conection to the lore we know about them and to know a bit more about their own intentions (besides being dedicated to Malachai). Maligaro, the chamber of sins, his artifact and raulo played a major role in an act and we never heard more of it.

Malachai dialogue wasnt bad, but it didnt leave me enough of an impact. Dominus got this forebonding dialogue and lines that make you shiver when you remember about them. Something so cliche as saying "this world is an illussion, exile" works pretty well and leaves an impression when the next thing you see is your seeminly human enemy turn into a giant bug-from-hell-thing. Even not having any dialogue can work quite well when you are the Vaal Oversoul and you have this awesome mechanism thing going while the whole world is dark.


Finally, there is not enough of a conclussive feeling when defeating Malachai. I hope this is being worked on, because that is a must when finishing a last boss that has such a fun and hard fight. Dominus got lady dialla speech (which was conclussive enough) and credits roll on. Somehow, there needs to be something, maybe make Malachai say something before dying but even then I dont think that would be enough.

Another thing I would like to point out, the Act 3 npcs dont react at all about you killing dominus. That was understandable before act 4, but right now it feels weird to get back to town like nothing happened.

I think the problem is that GGG doesn't have a storyline plan moving forward. I feel they planned act 1 and act 2 quite well as a coherent storyline....but then act 3...bam...hi guyz im dominus I sent you here but your just finding that out now, well put some posts with letters in lioneye to cover the gap.

act 3 was the worst because it shoe horns in a major player in the storyline out of no where, with almost no build up to him. At the same time the story undertones through act 3 are fantasic, with the monkey kind graffiti, the gemling storyline ect.

What they just need to do, from here on out...is start building a storyline that doesn't finish per act only to staple on another bad buy into the story every new act...and then pepper the world with some tidbits to try and build up to him.

Im seeing that peppering of storyline for act 4 already and I kinda sigh....

Truth be told, id more prefer a destiny style storyline where there isn't realy a told story but the land is littered with story to find, then just add in the bad guys per act. Attempting to tell a story as they've done here just doesn't work well, it doesn't flow right and stuff feels wedged in to try to make sense of whats going to happen later on.