In 2022, we would have a lot of H&S games. Will PoE survive it?

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Orbaal wrote:

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knorpl wrote:

... but in fact we have a game that is not and will not be finished, because every new league is more and more bugs and op builds, which with the next "league" are equated with zero. So there is no "vision" for me here.

You just descriped the vision tho.

Introducing new stuff and shifting the meta all the time to keep it fresh - as in it will never be a "finished" game.
Thats the whole point.

correct.



heres the thing, i dont even like that model, i would rather the game was far more stable and changed less, add a few items and mechanics but way less change and shift than we see.

but the reality is that this game has had unprecedented success, no arpg has ever held its player base, poe has not only held but its grown its player base year after year every year consistently. the 3 biggest league launches ever were this year, thats absurd for an arpg that released 9 years ago, that has never been done, its never even been dreamed of by any other game in this genre.

so i can say i dont like it, but its working. i cant pretend its not, if i tried to make a point that theres some kind of stats that show what theyre doing isnt working it would just be a lie to try and back up my opinion that i dont like it. gggs player data shows that we just had the most successful year ever, and that the 2nd most successful year was the one before, and then the one before that. how they run their game with this endless messy meta shift and half cooked yet massive league after league clearly works and has clearly put this game in a position of total dominance over the genre.






what will break that dominance is diablo 4, no one should be in any doubt that on name and marketing alone diablo 4 will be a behemoth that will probably sell over 10 million copies and will launch with probably 4x poes highest ever player count etc. the only question will be if blizzard finally work out how to hold its player base which they completely failed to do with d3.

who here thinks d4 will grow its player base like poe has, and that d4s biggest year for player peaks will be 9 years after launch? i wouldnt be putting money on it tbh.







heres the worry with d4. they invited streamers to blizzcon a few back and the lead dev of D4 talked about how he was a diablo fan, and said "I have a paragon 800 demon hunter im very proud of", when asked about poe he said they had people in the office that played it.

ok so for people who dont play diablo 3 a lot lets unpack that. i played the new D3 league, im current over paragon 1000 in the new D3 league. as an experienced d3 player i could hit paragon 800 on a character on day 1 of a new season start. so diablo 4s lead developer has got 1 days playtime experience in diablo 3 and hasnt played path of exile. and this is the man in charge of making blizzards flagship game that is going to dominate the arpg market and blow poe and d3 out of the water. a guy who literally doesnt play arpgs, has as good as no experience of being an arpg player.

this is what were fucking dealing with when it comes to blizzard. in an interview jay wilson, lead developer of doablo 3 talked about being given that job, how when he was given the job of lead dev on diablo 3 he had never played diablo 2 and how cool that was that he got to play d2 from a new players perspective for the first time while making notes on it to solve these issues in diablo 3.

...and thats why we ended up with the complete catastrophe that was diablo 3 on launch.

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Snorkle_uk wrote:

heres the thing, i dont even like that model, i would rather the game was far more stable and changed less, add a few items and mechanics but way less change and shift than we see.

but the reality is that this game has had unprecedented success, no arpg has ever held its player base, poe has not only held but its grown its player base year after year every year consistently. the 3 biggest league launches ever were this year, thats absurd for an arpg that released 9 years ago, that has never been done, its never even been dreamed of by any other game in this genre.

so i can say i dont like it, but its working. i cant pretend its not, if i tried to make a point that theres some kind of stats that show what theyre doing isnt working it would just be a lie to try and back up my opinion that i dont like it. gggs player data shows that we just had the most successful year ever, and that the 2nd most successful year was the one before, and then the one before that. how they run their game with this endless messy meta shift and half cooked yet massive league after league clearly works and has clearly put this game in a position of total dominance over the genre.

Very true. I also don't think there was ever any business like GGG, investing so much in their ARPG. It might not be only the genre. On the other side, they've delivered so much they kind of depend on it and it has had its cost on other factors (game state).

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what will break that dominance is diablo 4, no one should be in any doubt that on name and marketing alone diablo 4 will be a behemoth that will probably sell over 10 million copies and will launch with probably 4x poes highest ever player count etc. the only question will be if blizzard finally work out how to hold its player base which they completely failed to do with d3.

who here thinks d4 will grow its player base like poe has, and that d4s biggest year for player peaks will be 9 years after launch? i wouldnt be putting money on it tbh.

Blizzard has never gone that way. Even WoW which they expanded the most of their games was by pushing expansions that take players away from previous content. They never really evaluated the entire game (Cataclysm was a decent try, though, but alongside that entire revamp they once again made the 5 areas where players would go to - they should have pushed it back to Azeroth entirely but oh well).

GGG goes through entire atlas changes, more maps more skills more everything and keeps having to retune/change the entirety of the game.

So yea, D4 is gonna sell like cakes, have a bunch of issues (hell yea it will) and push about the same amount of people in a simplistic routine as with D3. That amount of people is also affected by PoE's volatility. I know quite some D3 players that like PoE but it's just too much out of control.

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heres the worry with d4. they invited streamers to blizzcon a few back and the lead dev of D4 talked about how he was a diablo fan, and said "I have a paragon 800 demon hunter im very proud of", when asked about poe he said they had people in the office that played it.

ok so for people who dont play diablo 3 a lot lets unpack that. i played the new D3 league, im current over paragon 1000 in the new D3 league. as an experienced d3 player i could hit paragon 800 on a character on day 1 of a new season start. so diablo 4s lead developer has got 1 days playtime experience in diablo 3 and hasnt played path of exile. and this is the man in charge of making blizzards flagship game that is going to dominate the arpg market and blow poe and d3 out of the water. a guy who literally doesnt play arpgs, has as good as no experience of being an arpg player.

this is what were fucking dealing with when it comes to blizzard. in an interview jay wilson, lead developer of doablo 3 talked about being given that job, how when he was given the job of lead dev on diablo 3 he had never played diablo 2 and how cool that was that he got to play d2 from a new players perspective for the first time while making notes on it to solve these issues in diablo 3.

...and thats why we ended up with the complete catastrophe that was diablo 3 on launch.

This one is going to hit even harder for D4. So many have left Blizzard and with the commotion I don't think they've even had their minds properly on gaming lately and won't in the near future.

Plus Lost Arc will have been out for a while, and I think that's a type of ARPG that can really chunk down Diablo.

Last Epoch will have quite evolved by then too and from what I see, it will fill up a niche between Diablo and PoE.

Diablo has strategic stability as an advantage over PoE and that is a strong determinant for long term retention next to content. But Lost Arc might beat Diablo here since it seems a bit more of an mmo and if better social options exist and there's proper working of guilds and such (I don't know - just saw some beta), well that's just the type of thing quite some players could call 'home'.

PoE will probably still be undefeatable on the gambling aspect, chaos and content. Brings me back to that earlier point - don't think there's been any game that received so much developer attention and such investment or this size of a business that relies on a single game altogether.

I don't think very much will change. PoE will double down on it's obtuseness, people will play for a few weeks each new league then go off and do other things.

As for other titles, I don't see the Asian games taking much of a share of the market outside of their respective homes. Last Epoch is good (the new patch adds some really nice features) but it still needs a lot more time. Diablo 4, who the fuck knows. Not due until at least 2023.

PoE will survive. I mentioned awhile back Undecember will shake up the genre.
It's polished and on unreal engine 4 and they claim you can build whatever you like so time will tell.

1) These are old failed games in an Asian market that are being re-released on a global level. I want you to do a history of how many reboots actually end up successful. (I've had at least 8 shut down in the beta, and some of them I loved).

2) It's good that GGG now has some competition for players in the same market outside the typical Diablo crowd. Why do you think they started developing PoE2, which has an entirely new battle style, new linkage system, new tree style, and has dynamic events? Also, D2R is a nostalgic game that has 0 content updates, but was praised by the haerdcore fans. You think this game doesn't have hardcore fans. This is an old game. Even if it starts to struggle because of a competitive market, it'll still thrive, because the story playstyle and cosmic imagination of it are just that badass.

(Who likes 20 games built of the same basic concept of the devil coming to earth, possessing someone, and warring on heaven? PoE broke that concept and brought about the concept of humans playing God, broken by the fact that Gods were actually pulling the puppet strings, only to be broken by the fact that there are cosmic beings far more powerful than those gods, only to be broken by the fact there are beings greater still..... In Comparison, something like Diablo's micro-universe or Lost Arc's Demon invasion looks like a joke).

Lost Ark is just another Class based game that doesn't have the unique skill tree system, or Gems which makes builds interchangeable, but played differently by different classes as well, which imo is a negative, because there are over 80 popular games that have this system.

The look and feel of Lost Ark also really reminds me of some hybrid between Black Desert Online and Diablo IV. Both attracted massive players but one single deficiency in each game resulted in massive losses of players, regardless of how sexy the game was.

To me..... Lost Ark's mobs also seem slow, clumsy, and unreactive. They chase you very much like any softcore version of an RPG made 20 years ago. They don't seem to have creative AI.

It also gets to a point where characters all have 80-120k Health vs mods that hit 40, and all of them seemingly can face tank, and outside Bard/Sorceress/Scout, all the classes look the same and none of their skills look really flashy. It's also uncapped by the whole "limited number of skills" challenge. (Games which allow 15-20 skills generally don't teach skill/challenge, and get boring).

It's a pretty game. But it's just another pretty game. POE is Ugly, and Ugly is part of why it's survived this long.

P.S. Something else to mention: Outside of Square Enix, all these pretty games suffer HEAVILY from budgetary expenses which challenge them to keep the game going, even if the game is good, and popular, especially when they attempt to Free to Play. I've never seen a well rendered, crisp game that is constantly updated and needs high paid large shops to maintain and debug..... not die to those same costs. They become too expensive to operate, sell the game to another host, who sell the game to another host, who then pares back their selling strategy, isn't connected to their player base (who often lose things in the transition of owners), and generally drive people off.

finally got around to looking into Undecember and i must say, i really like the pacing that the gameplay shows.

this is where i think PoE severely went off course, mostly. the power creep and pacing of the game just went insane. if PoE was more like what the Undecember gameplays show, i'd still be playing.
i get it though. its fine to mindlessly and instantaneously wipe out everything in existence. however, that also introduces you being able to be mindlessly and instantaneously wiped out, regardless of defenses. that creates this necessity to instantaneously wipe everything out. then the game is completely devolved out of a mechanics driven thing, and is mostly about hunting for those mechanic exploits to gain the edge.

PoE would benefit a lot from slowing everything down. i just don't think they can or will without a complete overhaul at this point. which is exactly why i've expressed that i think PoE 2 should be a thing. not PoE 4.0, but an actual separate redesigned start from scratch PoE2 sequel.

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xMustard wrote:

PoE would benefit a lot from slowing everything down.

It could. It could also do the direct opposite. PoE's pace is one of the things that separates it apart from other games in the genre - and a lot of people are actually liking the pace.

Well one thing is certain, whenever the Devs get back into the office after the New Year Holiday, they should starting hyping 3.17 to the moon.

Fuck some insane media embargo. This is arguably the most important legaue in PoE's history. They need a victory, and need to sell the players on what makes PoE unique. I have ideas on this, but this isn't about me. I want to know what GGG has learned from this past two leagues and 6 months of meh at best.

Both Elden ring and Undecember look interesting. I will likely try both. GRRM was/is involved in the Elden Ring world creation. `

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Phrazz wrote:

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xMustard wrote:

PoE would benefit a lot from slowing everything down.

It could. It could also do the direct opposite. PoE's pace is one of the things that separates it apart from other games in the genre - and a lot of people are actually liking the pace.

i like the faster pace too, but it brings about all problems everyone hates about the game. screen cluster fuckery. zero visibility, zero understanding about what is happening. zero chance to react to anything. one shots, or rather instant death, all over the place.