Length and time

First of all: I'm having fun with PoE 2. They (GGG) have done a lot of things right and made something that can turn out to be fantastic.

But a lot of people saw this as their new "10 year game", which they will be playing for, well, the next ten years.

It's more or less impossible to get balance right in an EA, be that loot, class, gear, monster or whatever. This will have to be tuned all the way during EA and that is completely fine (and expected). But when it comes to campaign length and zone sizes, I have a few questions.

For casual players, story driven players and as a "first experience", the campaign is awesome. That said...

I'm against campaign skip mechanics. But just the idea of playing through this campaign several times each league is... A little bit demotivating. Not because I don't like the campaign, but because zones are HUGE and the campaign is LONG. Sure, it will probably get faster as we grow into the game, but it will never be a 4-10 hour campaign like PoE 1. I always had a "suck it up" attitude to people wanting alternative leveling methods or campaign skips in PoE 1, because of the limited campaign length. But in PoE 2? I'm having troubles seeing myself leveling several characters through the campaign every league.

Is it just me?

Not just you. It IS very long. So not sure how the leagues will pan out with the game as it is.

Very true. I had 1 day 10 hours played when I reached endgame. Altough fact is that I did Act 1 - 3 cruel in 1/3rd of the time that it took originally, and most of the time was spent searching for "stat bonus" encounters.

The tilesets need work such that placement of those POI is logical and somewhat satic, eg. entrance is in the same corner always, one exit is on the opposite corner, the other, side area is always generally to the third side, etc etc. I think you did amazing work with that in PoE 1, where if you know the acts well enough, you know which way to go.

I'm pretty sure I've had Jungle Ruins / Chimeral Wetlands rotated by 90° between instances, and the placement of the POI's also seemed random. Maybe it just threw me off because it was rotated, but the entrance for sure moved to the other corner from the point when I explored it first.

The zones being 10-20% smaller would also help.

I expect realistically it can be 20 hours or less, but it's still alot compared to PoE1, and we haven't seen act 4-6 what that will bring to the table.

Also would suggest normalizing to expected player power and speed for each act. I think Act 1 is very long, act 2 is somewhat OK, act 3 is probably even longer than Act 1 etc. That is just how I felt about it though.