Until PoE2 comes, this game is toast (at least for me)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MP2uhLArUss&ab_channel=MattiasTheGamer

This video sums it up for me and after playing 3.21 and totally unplanned jump in into D4 beta I realized few things.

Div/h, most damage, most this, fastest that, best strat, optimizing, Exilence I can't even remember everything... I gave in into this mentality which is predominant in this community and it completely ruined PoE experience for me.
Most fun that I had was in 3.17 perfecting my own off meta build.

Other half of the coin is that PoE became very stress inducing game, giving me lots of frustration and less and less fun time actively playing along the way.

D4 beta which initially was repulsive, after another try reminded me so much of one thing. First year of my PoE career. Just pure fun, exploration, no being burdened by anything but exploring things for myself, absence of stress and frustration, just being in the moment.

Until PoE2 comes out I don't think I can reset myself for PoE1 to have that feeling again and I really hope PoE2 will be good and different from current state of the game.

cool

hoho toodles.

To quote a vendor from another ARPG wisely avoided by most: "Gems are addictive; you'll be back, soon enough."

I hope PoE 4.0 is everything Exiles want it to be, but realistically thst's just not possible. So on a more feasible level, I hope it capitalises on what GGG do best and isn't too heavily influenced by certain "imitative" demands from a parent company with an old ethos of basically "take it 'til you make it". I can definitely see investors pointing at an existing successful ARPG and politely suggesting the one they're technically bankrolling do something similar.

Otoh GGG continues to deliver chunky ROI so maybe that suffices. A flashier product never hurts though, and early impressions of The Next Generation of PoE were definitely pretty flashy.

So it'll be super interesting to see in July how different PoE 4.0 looks after 4 years, a pandemic, dwindling interest in isometric ARPGs, and a very high profile Diablo release eschewing isometric ARPG roots for a more MMO-lite experience: Diablo by way of Guild Wars 2. So far it seems the right move but after a few catastrophically bad wrong ones, course correction is the obvious choice.

What it lacks is clear staying power, which tbf should never be the core priority for a premium game. If the game is good to play, players will create their own ways of perpetuating their experience...not that occasional additions are unwelcome, only that they should be more than just more -- DIV might be pulling from the MMO well pretty hard but the worst thing it could do would be to mimic the genre's tendency for feature creep.

DIV's best days may be fairly early into its release, which seems to have brought this full circle since OP is drawn to how much it reminds him of PoE's early days.

It might be just a honeymoon phase. It might be just chasing waterfalls. If familiarity breeds contempt (and it does) then maybe the solution is to simply hop from one new thing to the next. Terribly immoral when you do it with real people but perfectly okay when it comes to abstract forms of entertainment.

Question is, will PoE 4.0 be enough of a new thing to fit into that pattern of serial honeymooning? Or just different enough to keep the marriage alive?

Well, even if it's only for a little while, maybe we will see you in Off Topic, Torstein. No shortage of Exiles deriding DIV there, and one brave one endlessly butting his head against their wall.

"

DarthSki44 wrote:

Spoiler

hoho that's 7 years bad luck.

Shiiittt more like 10 years+ lol, might as well double down. That's about as close to a mirror as I'm going to get anyways :P

More on topic, both D4 and PoE are going to be fine, at least for a while. D4 is too big to fail, but PoE isn't, at least not in its current form. July, as Mr. Chan said, should be pretty interesting. I think GGG has done PoE2 a huge disservice already. Hell many people don't even know it's not a new game. Some think a new engine is coming. Some think it will solve all PoE Vanilla's problems. Those folks are going to be very disappointed. Silence might be good for hype up to a point, but if it starts to drift into a messaging issue...well that's a big problem.

Setting expectations, and communicating intentions(and then executing them), has never really been GGG's strength. The word of mouth and organic growth early suited it well, along with the sorta "aww shucks" development relationship GGG had with early supporters. That shipped sailed A LONG time ago. Now it's about mass marketing, casting a wide net, and hoping that non-core PoE player types spend cash at some point. It might have been ok financially, but damn if the game & community haven't suffered. The data has been so fascinating. An ever growing player base numbers wise, and a direct decrease in satisfaction and retention percentage wise (on average with some variance by league).

PoE 4.0, will be a lot of things, to a lot of people. Not all of that will be good. Hopefully for them, whatever changes it does bring is received to a majority of the type of player they have been cultivating recently. The real challenge will be convincing these casuals that play PoE now, that D4 isn't for them. I think that's a big ask, and the player population numbers will likely reflect that.

Yeah I love the fact that some think poe2 is some brand new game. oh boy.

It will be the same game all dressed up in new duds, new moves, and a new neighborhood for dancing in the streets.

Poe2 will change nothing...keep copium...

You know the thing with reheated soup.