Game is too punishing for a Casual players.

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ExsiliumUltra#5541 wrote:

It does not need to be "Casualized". Souls games are very accessible to Casuals. This is not. This is an arpg trying to be a souls like and failing at both. If it was interesting to play the same zone or map over and over again to "Grind" there would probably be less complaints. They are not. If dodge roll worked as good as the dodge mechanics in an Actual Souls game it would be good. It is not. They have a crap ton of work to do before this is a good game. Meanwhile PoE1 will suffer and likely die on the vine.

don't think I disagree that much with what you're saying here, in some degree they are still trying to find the right balance points so its to be expected that some things aren't there yet.

I just know I am enjoying the game, some people wont. I don't want to play games that are trying to please everyone. As stated this is a large degree of what is wrong with D4. That said I am not saying the end game is right where it needs to be to be replayable and fun every X months. I don't think making the game more casual in the aspects talked about in this thread would make the game better. Nor do I agree with the sentiment that its required for survival or success.

I also don't think fears about POE1 are justified. They have openly stated that POE1's last 2 years only had approximately 7 developers working on it. And yet those are some great leagues and the POE1 gamestate by most accounts I've seen is now best its ever been. (all things considered I mostly agree because they finally mostly fixed melee in the last league)

It is strange that PoE, a game famous for letting the player customize the difficulty and rewards of content, is now presenting a baseline difficulty that's quite high.

At least in my opinion, the baseline difficulty should be relatively low, but with many more options to scale the difficulty and rewards.

The game is pretty easy. Random oneshots dont make it challenging, just frustrating.

I know im probably the minority when it comes to saying the game is easy but i am yet to meet a fight i think was hard.
Only thing i havent dont yet was these peak boss fights i have heard of.
I have killed bosses while mapping but since i dont actually look things up idk if those are "peak" boss fights, tho i doubt it.

I dont agree with this entire post but i also see a bunch of issues with the game, some of which are in here.

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Toforto#2372 wrote:

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diablofdb#3816 wrote:

maybe this game is not meant for casual players then?

That's a horrible idea if you want to make enough profits to sustain a live-service F2P game. Make it too "niche" and "hardcore" and you end up with a dead game. They need to hook casuals in and have systems and parts of the game that are fun for them, and just put a bunch of optional extra content in endgame for other people.

The point is, GGG wants this game to be more casual-friendly. All the videos on every skill gem explaining it, all the underlined words in text in the game that you can mouse over for explanations. Those are good attempts but atm this game is completely failing to be "more accessible to players" as it was advertised lol

Dark Soul beg to differ. Making a good game for a specific crowd was always a better choice than making a forgettable game for everyone

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Huh? That's not entirely true. Don't forget that, like in every Souls Game, you lose your souls when you die. And you have to get back to the point where you did die. That's not always in a boss room. Sometimes you get teleported way back and have to do alot to regain your souls. And if you die again, then they are lost. I guess every souls player felt the frustration of losing 6-digits. maybe even 7-digit souls at some point in the game. And very often, bosses are so hard, you had to give it 20-30 tries before beating him. Not having game knowledge is also punishing, because alot of good upgrades and weapons are hidden and not found while going through the main quest. And lets not forget brutaly placed enemies and traps that easily kill you, if you wasn't careful enough. And if not the enemies kill you, it's the environment. Ah, and then there are quests you sometimes fail without knowing why you failed them (to far ahead in story, killed a related npc, didn't do something in the right order). I think the Soul-Games are VERY punishing (and also challenging).

Soul-Games are supposed to be punishing. They punish you for not being focused all the time and you have to redo alot of stuff when dying. The same principle applies to PoE2 now. Didn't read the attack carefully? You may get one-shotted, or be lucky enough to have 10-20% of your life left. Didn't see the ranged or spellcaster enemies? Prepare for an incoming barrage of deadly stuff.

Not saying that PoE2 could use some QoL features and balancing here and there. But I think the complains are a little bit exaggerated.

As someone who thoroughly enjoys FromSoft games, I feel like you're missing a number of points that make these entirely distinct experiences from one another and why GGG just ripping ideas without understanding additional things and how the mechanics have evolved over the years is a bad thing. You talk about losing souls and having to go back to grab them and potentially lose them forever, but that even in that simple concept is why it isn't as bad; you died, "lost" the souls, but you can go back and get it all back + what you've earned on the way. You've made it there before and you can do it again and totally negate the death, I won't say there's a positive but it gives you a goal you can achieve again. Here there is no achievement, the game just goes "all that stuff is gone, now do it again." Moreover, once you get even a little comfortable with the area it becomes super apparent how much of it you can simply just run past which is exactly what most people do.

Even if you're struggling with an area you naturally start overleveling it because after you lose all those souls once or twice you start hitting up the bonfires to spend them which is just straight character power that can't be taken away. And, over the years they've progressively done away with lengthy bonfire runs because at best they were tedious at worst everyone just skipped them because you're actually faster than 90% of the enemies.

In the Souls games you fight the same enemies, in the same locations, that do the same things every time you load in. Having a similar level of "difficulty" for ever changing swarms of mobs isn't a great feel.

Miyazaki heavily believes in things sorta gaining worth or value in doing through overcoming struggle, but the struggle has to be worth the outcome at the end and I don't think PoE 2 can do so in such a way as to keep a lot of its current foundation and have that happen. The environments in the souls games are all super controlled experiences.

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Dark Soul beg to differ. Making a good game for a specific crowd was always a better choice than making a forgettable game for everyone

Miyazaki made what he wanted to make and largely had a goal and reasoning for the design choices they were going to make and even then Demon Souls didn't do very well on release, it got positive reviews and a very small following and then they spent years and many iterations cutting the chaff and refining the ideas. Even DS1 wasn't popular on release, it took a while to catch on through word of mouth. I mean, they immediately got rid of the World level system that actively punished you for doing poorly. All the games after DS1 got teleportation almost immediately, more linear map designs ended up being common, more bonfires, shorter boss runs, all of them have had the ability to leave advice via soapstones(which the community trolls with tho), you can summon another player or npc if you're struggling on a boss, you have whole spirit ashes to be used not only in boss rooms but on other encounters, as well.

My problem is GGG's vision seems to be taking poorly thought through ideas from FromSoft but none of the underlying philosophy or mechanics to mitigate them or iterations that improved on them. They just said "people like the challenge in the souls series, let's do that" but never played any of the games themselves and didn't add any of the other mechanics that go around it. So it does neither genre well now.

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Kachechka_DDD#2310 wrote:

This might be fine for Path of Exile veterans who know exactly how to handle every challenge

You couldn't be more wrong about it :)

I think adding casual difficulty would totally solve this problem for players who don't want it to be punishing and challenging.

I basically want more resources to drop so I can play SSF and experiment with builds, recut gems, and respec at relative will. Currently, I want to change my build and want to try a new skill combination, but I'd have to grind for hours or trade my way out of it. The game is currently not for me and not for many people. If they want a Dark Souls like experience, I appreciate that difficulty VS diablo-like difficulty, but let me use my mind to get around the problem. If this is a casual mindset then so be it. Not going to spend two days after work grinding. That's for the endgame.

I'll just chill out here for 10 minutes every day or two and whine about it until I get my money's worth or they change it. They've got another patch or two to fix the issues before refund and quit until full release.

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Suchka_777#4336 wrote:

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Kachechka_DDD#2310 wrote:

This might be fine for Path of Exile veterans who know exactly how to handle every challenge

You couldn't be more wrong about it :)

I think adding casual difficulty would totally solve this problem for players who don't want it to be punishing and challenging.

Why would we know how to handle any challenge? PoE2 made a lot of the poe mechanics worse (nerf) like conversion etc, also half the stuff is different. Yeah I didn't struggle because I could put a good build together - playing mom archmage since day 1 - seemed strong, gear was also super cheap on trade before streamers decided making guides around it.

But its not as if I knew the boss mechanics (if they lived long enough to do them) - All I knew was, that I wanted fast paced screen wipes as a safety layer.

It's no surprise a lot of gamers have zero understanding of how business decisions are made so talking 'corpo lingo' isn't gonna work here, but just like in another popular thread there's a lot of defenders using Baldur's Gate 3 steam player charts as if poe2's sudden dropoff from 400-420k peak concurrent players to 300-320k when other top live service titles are staying steady or going up, there's people in this thread using Dark Souls/Elden Ring to justify certain decisions. Please stop comparing apples to oranges, different genres, different target audiences, different business models.

The AAA RPG titles are single player, single time one-and-done experiences, your average Joe casual gamer merrily spends a couple of months, maybe even using cheats, to finally beat the game once and that's it, the idea of NG+ or starting a new character sound weird to them, like why would I do that I already beat the game. Even 2.5 years after release, just look at the steam achievements on what percentage of players beat Malenia or Elden Beast. Your Souls or AAA action game crowd typically hardly touch ARPGs or live-service games, poe and Diablo are looked down upon as inferior, 'not skill based' games made for nerds who like looking at a skill tree all day doing maths.

PoE's live service model is revolved around the core concept of infinite replayability, not infinite boring unrewarding grind or infinite punishment. Right now the game is not the former, it's much closer to the latter. The game is NOT built around the campaign, even if the campaign is the best part of the game (also, with a bigger budget, can we stop imitating Diablo 2 in so many ways and have some originality for once? The acts and settings are still so close to D2's that if PoE2 campaign is a dissertation, it wouldn't pass the plagarism check).

GGG themselves stated that the campaign should take about 40h (still too long for the seasonal multi-char model most veterans of the genre are used to) and endgame about 200h. So please stop comparing Elden Ring, which is much better, much harder, and for 90%+ players has no endgame, to poe2. In this regard, the endgame right now is failing quite badly. Unless you're no lifer, most people who have already reached endgame won't be able to stomach grinding maps for 200h, not even close. Most casuals haven't even reached the endgame yet, and since most of them don't check these forums, they'll be in for a nasty surprise when they get there.

Which is why PoE2's peak player dropoff from 500-600k at launch which was fantastic btw, to 400-420k which was still good, suddenly this week to 300-320k when other top live-service games are stable or getting a holiday boost is not a good sign. The holidays are a major BOOST to entertainment activities, travelling only impacts businesses significantly on the 24th. Christmas -> New Year is the biggest window for film box office for decades and it's traditionally the same for MMOs. Last weekend PoE2 still had 400-420k, there's no reason it should be at 300-320k now. You don't lose 200-300k or close to half the launch players in the first 3 weeks of your endgame heavy (as in 80% heavy, according to GGG themselves) live-service game when most people haven't reached endgame yet. This is paid EA not f2p, customers who have spent money on this EA in theory are more motivated to stay put until at least they feel they've gotten their money's worth. It's not the launch of a new poe1 season, we have a lot of data on how that goes in a 3 month period.

Pre-release there was a lot of hype, lots of fans expected a masterpiece that is 'the true D2 succeesor' like BG3 was to BG2, and were fully prepared to invest a lot of entertainment time to play this game. I was one of them, but I didn't spend nearly as much time playing poe2 as I thought. The more you put deliberate time wasting and unfairly punishing mechanisms in a game, the more people reject the idea and play less, it's basic human psychology.

And I must stress here, instead of some users spending a lot of valuable time arguing with others pointless in the FEEDBACK forum, all of you should go check out the 2 major magic find threads. Increased item rarity/magic find is SEVERELY BROKEN right now and is destroying this beta's in game economy for everone, this is a much more urgent issue. If you're in maps, you need to know this.