Path of Exile is much more casual than World of Warcraft and Farmville

"

Silty wrote:

I've brought this up in a couple other threads, but decided to make a whole topic about it.

Path of Exile is more casual than World of Warcraft, because you can just pick it up and play through all the content by yourself, whenever you want.

In contrast, World of Warcraft requires putting together and organizing a group of 25 people for some of the high-end content. The difficulty involved in doing that obviously exceeds copying someone else's build for Maelstrom of Chaos. Plus, some dungeons take hours to complete, as opposed to the relatively small distance you need to reach between waypoints in Path of Exile in order to make progress.

Even Farmville is less casual than Path of Exile. The system is designed to lure you in and make you play at the oddest hours. I've heard horror stories about people being asked to harvest their friends' crops in the dead of night. Whenever a game has some kind of system where you have to wait a period of time whether or not you are logged in (daily quests and such), the game reduces its casualness by tying itself to your real life in an excessive way.

Personally, I enjoy the casualness of Path of Exile, and I fail to see why it's often thrown around as an insult. It's great to have a relaxing game without insane hardcore commitments like Farmville or World of Warcraft. It's a nice, casual game that you can relax with on a coffee break.

As an aside, the hardcore ladder is more casual than the default ladder, because it takes much less time to reach the top. It's not as hard as it seems if you think of it as driving - if you make a severe mistake while driving, you can crash and instantly die, but if you follow a few simple rules, it's not that hard to survive. Stay alert, be defensive, don't take risks, etc, and you will get there much faster than in default. In a way, playing hardcore is like enjoying a casual drive without the gas costs or risk to one's physical body.