I tried the D4 Beta. I think PoE is going to be just fine.

The more I played D4, the more its flaws became apparent. But first, the pros:

Graphics are pretty.

The animations, sound effects and feel of combat are nice.

You can see what's going on during the fights.

The pace of combat makes it feel tactical.

No instant logout means you do or die, but the damage is less spikey, letting you react. And if you logout, it puts you back where you were when you log back in (with a couple exceptions of me finding myself in town, but i don't know why).

In fact, the less-spikey damage allowed for big CC effects that bring excitement/terror without instantly meaning death. Example, the big bad boss picked up my character and strangled it for like 3 whole seconds while monsters whaled on me. My health went down to about half (you can't drink potions while cc'd) and my heart was pounding. In PoE, if you get stunned/frozen for more than a half a second, you're basically dead.

Those are the pros. Now the cons:

One huge issue is that just like in D3, monsters scale with your level. It completely screws any sense of progression. Traveling through starting zones is just as deadly as far away dungeons, no matter my level. It also kills the joy of leveling up, because (without gear upgrades) you actually get weaker.

Dungeons all have the same formula: Kill something on the left side, kill something on the right side, now that gives you the key to open the path in the middle to fight the boss. Gets repetitive fast.

Lots of backtracking in the layouts. Last Epoch fixes this with monsters respawning after a short time so theres always stuff to kill. PoE fixes this (with a few exceptions, looking at you Museum map) with level design negating the need for backtracking.

The dialogue/narrative was fine at first, but it got lame and boring fast because it's the same formula over and over. I get it, demons are killing everyone and they're evil and must be stopped.

Lots of waiting around for NPCs to say their lines before the monsters spawn.

Shallow crafting/salvage system. Like d3, you just pick up EVERYTHING and break it down. I prefer Last Epoch's salvage system were you can break down only a limited amount of items (due to cost), and so you pick and choose which items are best to break down based on what affixes they have that you want. Meaningful. PoE too needs help in this department because loot just stays on the floor 99.9% of the time.

Shallow itemization. It's a step up from D3's "green = equip, red = salvage" complexity, but not by a lot. At least in the beta, the affixes on items are all meaningless. 2% fire resist? Who cares. Nothing is noticable except the DPS on weapons and armor on equipment. Maybe the endgame will change that?

Build choice (at least early on) is an illusion. I can make my tele-kick have a 3 second faster cooldown (normally 9 seconds) or i can give it a 1.5 second stun. Both don't make much of a difference, and those are the only two options. Compare that with the many support gems of path of exile, of which you can choose 5 (or more when you get into crafting insane endgame gear). Maybe this expands in the endgame, but the above is all I saw in beta.

You choose your difficulty. This removes the challenge and instead makes it a question of efficiency. Yeah, I could make the monsters twice as tanky and damaging for 20% more loot and XP, but bonus XP actually just makes monsters even harder. And since it takes longer to kill them, it makes more sense to choose the easier difficulty until you are so strong that you spend more time walking from pack to pack instead of fighting. I suspect it will turn into d3 with literally over 180 meaningless difficulty levels to choose from. PoE and Last Epoch have one difficulty for everything, as it should be.

Party-to-win. You get XP and Loot bonuses for playing alongside other players (mmo style), and the bonus doubles if you formally party with them. Not only does synergistic party power out-scale monster power making the game so much easier, the bonus XP and loot make playing solo feel punishing. And when you know the whole reason for the system is to turn players into salesmen for their friends, it feels predatory.


TLDR:

Good stuff = graphics, no instant logout, combat, readability, non-spikey damage

Bad stuff = Items, skill augments, narrative, waiting around, repetitive, monsters scaling with your level, crafting/salvaging, choosing your own difficulty

D4 is a nice game for people new to the genre or casual players, but I think PoE (despite it's flaws that will hopefully be fixed in PoE 2) has a monopoly on the people who want depth/challenge in their ARPG.

Key question is end game where PoE have nailed it since the beginning. Unfortunately we cannot learn about D4 end game during public beta testing.

I agree. Great graphics shallow game feel. It has the feeling of a free mmorpg.

I watched some streams yesterday, and my first thought was: UI looks like reskin of D3.

Outside of me feeling sad about the Diablo franchise dying for me at D2, it's a good thing D4 is following in the footsteps of D3 in terms of relatively easy itemization and character customization. The genre needs a game to step up into that market space to pull that player base.

When POE started getting D3 refugees, it was obvious in the tone and people pushing to make POE more like D3. This gives that group a place to go to enjoy the type of game they enjoy.

The game does look like it is moving a bit toward MMO rather than ARPG, but it still seems to maintain some ARPG elements -- at least enough to claim the ARPG genre flag. I hope it's closer to D3 than Diablo Immortal in the monetization department as well for that group that might head back.

the systems and the way the world works felt alot like diablo immortal in d4, now what remains to be seen is how the end game is going to look like.

D4 looks great, plays great as an arpg.
Poe is a crafting simulator that requires widescreen clear in a group to farm a mirror or two and takes a week to walk all over the game.

Yea, diablo4 rocks all over poe and upcoming poe2 the same game reskinned.

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skjutengris wrote:

D4 looks great, plays great as an arpg.
Poe is a crafting simulator that requires widescreen clear in a group to farm a mirror or two and takes a week to walk all over the game.

Yea, diablo4 rocks all over poe and upcoming poe2 the same game reskinned.

You say that based on act 1...
Tell me where in PoE you see widescreen clearing in a group in act1

I have an honest question: All of these MMO elements we see in Diablo 4: Is this something the majority of Diablo players want? Or is it a step in reaching more players - the MMO players? And lastly; can we in some way opt out of this? Can I play though MY adventures without seeing other people in the world? And am I missing out on something by not doing world events? Is there content gated behind having to "socialize"?

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Killhoven wrote:

Key question is end game where PoE have nailed it since the beginning. Unfortunately we cannot learn about D4 end game during public beta testing.

It won't have any (probably), its always the last thing to get finished and the first to get cut