Does POE feel less scary than Diablo?

I would guess that a lot of us played D1/D2 when we were young. Tough to compare 11 year old Timmy hearing the Butcher tell you he will make weapons from your bones for the first time at 10 pm with the lights off over summer vacation vs PoE as an adult.

What's scary about this game is that you'll randomly be one shot by bugs the developers will never acknowledge hence why we'll never have a combat log. If a combat log / death log existed we could see the bugs killing us and that just won't happen.

Says the incredibly salty player who just got one shot by the vaal oversoul at his 6. I'm not going to pretend that wasn't a bug.

Poe starts out with filthy cannibals, dead babies, and impaled corpses literally everywhere, and after a while it stops being creepy, or gross, or anything, really.

There's so much horror-clutter in PoE it totally desensitizes you so that by the time you get to the Submerged Passage, you don't even notice that Merveil wrote some shit on a sailor's poorly-tanned hide and stretched it for you to read on your way through the joint. By act 3 you've seen about 8 holocausts' worth of stacked corpses and are cracking up because it's so cringey edgy whatever. In fact, the belly in act 4 is actually quite subdued in comparison.

It's cliche fantasy horror all the way through, marinated in testosterone and served up half-baked.

So yeah a lot less scary :/

poe is a bit over the top , so much that all grit/darkness is lost.


once you travel from the scepter of god to the bowels of lucifer ; all bets are off. And what the hell are they implying here? ahahah


its so over the top thats it comes off as humor lol

*ps. a whore-thaumaturgist-timetraveller? thats funny not scary.


**it's tough going for dark/horror/scary without pushing too far and ending up in the comedy folder.

If you're scared by a video game you have bigger problems than deciding which is scarier.

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Izrakhan wrote:

What's scary about this game is that you'll randomly be one shot by bugs the developers will never acknowledge hence why we'll never have a combat log. If a combat log / death log existed we could see the bugs killing us and that just won't happen.

Says the incredibly salty player who just got one shot by the vaal oversoul at his 6. I'm not going to pretend that wasn't a bug.

Jokes on you China version does have death log.

Well, PoE has it's great and "scary" moments. Or perhaps I rather call them chilly.
Have you ever read the notes that woman left in the Crossroads? That's really some scary stuff.
Or in Act III on the market place, that piece of paper in which someone describes how he witnessed a friend transform into some monstrosity.
Just a few examples.

However, I think the first 3 acts and bits of the 4th have a darker atmosphere than the 5th.

Diablo I was dark throughout, and even in victory you failed.
Diablo II was, imo, not as good atmospherically.
Diablo III had its moments, but changed the theme from dark occultism too much (for my taste) to fantasy.

The only enemies in D3 I found you could describe as scary were the Thralls in Act I. Those guys are creepy.

I think the game would have fo be significantly slower and less screen-explodey to be even somewhat scary (outside of having your heart skip a beat when you take a big hit in HC).

But then it’d be a totally different game played by a different, and much smaller, audience.

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SummonerOfMinions wrote:

Is it just me or does POE feel less scary than Diablo?

The theme itself of POE seems creepier than the Diablo series, but the speedkilling of everything on screen and the less scarier looking character models make poe less scarier when actually playing the game. Even the Heist league has that slightly uplifting feeling of an Ocean's Eleven movie. I think Blizzard's diablo series had a higher budget for artwork and that had an impact on the feel of playing it.

What do you guys think?

My dream game would be POE game mechanics with Diablo 4 style artwork...

Less scary than D3? No, not even close. D3's heroic narrative, WoW-ripped aesthetics and ridiculously cartoony villains puts that game squarely in the ' disney PG-13' box. It's gory and violent but it doesn't have any true demonic/supernatural elements.

Diablo 2? I'd put them on par right now. Path of Exile when it first released was absolutely scarier than D2, given Hailrake could wreck your shit without moving, and Chatters was close to a 2 hit killer, and both seemed to come out of nowhere. D2 had superior light/dark usage at the time (yeah, even then) and some hairy moments thanks to its lingering connections to Diablo 1's dark-as-fuck ending, but overall early PoE made a hearty crack at bringing back Diablo 1's sense of dread and unseen threat. But since then, PoE has become...well, a little more popular, and has had to divest horrific things like the word 'hell' and overt depictions of pentagrams, etc. That as well as an endless barrage of league gimmicks pulled the game away from the horror genre and into...I dunno, just plain old fantasy really. That said, ZOOM IN ON THE POE SHRINES NOW AND THEN. They're still some of the most grotesque and poorly utilised works of visual horror I've seen in a game that wasn't called Agony.

Diablo 1? Fuck no. Diablo 1 was utterly fucking terrifying. The opening cinematic alone has more intensity, dread and terror than anything in any ARPG since. It was a masterpiece. And the game itself? Christ. You moved so slowly, so steadily, because the game forced you to, but also because you knew if you rushed through a doorway you'd probably get surrounded and die very quickly. Not to mention the fact that several monsters just outright moved faster than you and did so from off-screen. Anyone who's been charged by a Horned Demon out of fucking nowhere in the Caves and lost well over half their life will know what I'm talking about.

I should note that both Diablo 2 and 1 benefited from Matt Uelmen's genius. That man taught me to fear certain drumming rhythms and to take solace in a 12-string strum with the same game. Adgio's ambient PoE music tried to ape the former, but Kamil's work is clearly on a more cinematic/epic track, which suits the current PoE far more than its old minimal musical soundscape.

For the record, the scariest POE ever got for me was with the appropriately named Descent race, about which I have talked enough to repeat any of it here. Google it for yourself if you don't know what it is.

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Mikrotherion wrote:

Or in Act III on the market place, that piece of paper in which someone describes how he witnessed a friend transform into some monstrosity.

That note is, I think, the best voice-acting in the game. I may be misremembering (it's been a really long time), but isn't that note written by Victario at a cafe during the last days of Sarn? His breakdown is charted pretty comprehensively in the graphic novel, but hearing a moment of it, right near the end of Sarn's reign, is absolutely disturbing. But scary? That I don't think it is. Just disturbing. I do see a difference, if only because I know I can write disturbing -- I'm not sure I can write genuinely scary.

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Foreverhappychan wrote:

Diablo 1? Fuck no. Diablo 1 was utterly fucking terrifying. The opening cinematic alone has more intensity, dread and terror than anything in any ARPG since. It was a masterpiece.

Just compare the Diablos.
The original was a sinister Demon, the second one more like a dragon and the third one, while possibly a bit more sinister than the second, a babbling idiot. Oh how I will not miss him constantly bragging about being the worstest and badassest of all demonkind and that I can do nothing to stop him.