GGG is confused about what is rewarding difficulty and what is tedium

I have a bit of a love hate relationship with this game, thankfully the issues I see are probably easily solved with some balancing and minor tweaks. But one thing that repeatedly stands out is that even though GGG was inspired by dark souls to make this game, they may not actually play souls games to understand how they balance very high difficulty and a sense of achievement.

Right now several aspects of POE2 feel extremely punishing and unrewarding. Either this is done because of overzealous game design or more nefarious purpose of having you spend more time in game wasting your time (and maybe buying more tabs). Here are a few examples:

- Abundant 1 shot mechanics in maps and only 1 life. Not only do you lose the ability to finish the map, you lose 10% XP (which wasn't even acquired on said map), you lose the Waystone, and if you had any drops, you lose those too. You get no chances to go back and fix anything, you just get slapped in the face multiple times and told to move on. Technically the map node is still there, but any "juice" you had on it is gone.

- Trials of ascendancy have multiple floors, sometimes it can take many tens of minutes if not an hour to go through said floors. One mistake? Bye-bye mamma. You've now lost the ascendancy token, rewards, and the time invested, meaning you have to go all the way back to the beginning. Another hour slog just to get to the same boss mechanic that may have one shot you, just to get one shotted again. Not rewarding, not fun, no way to go back and "fix" things without wasting your time.

- The game emphasizes a strategic playstyle, positioning, dodge rolling, learning the boss mechanics and succeeding. Even if your build is not up to par you can overcome the challenge through skill. That's the spirit of the campaign. In endgame however, you have to farm 100s of maps and find one miserable citadel for 1 attempt at a boos. Die? OK time to farm 100s of maps again. No way to learn mechanics, to way to go back and "fix" without wasting another 10-20 hours to get to the same place. The worst Dark Souls will do is having you run for 20s to get to the boss door.

- Crafting and slamming. Towards the mid/late endgame, you most affixes on your 6 affix gear to be useful in some way, and hopefully have a high enough tier to make it usable. However, the entire "crafting" system is pure gambling. Once you multiply out all the probabilities of getting your affixes, you may realize that you're 50-100x worse off trying to craft than just spending 1 exalt in the trade site. Maybe by some insane luck you'll actually find something worth slamming on the ground, but this is not common. So if you're SSF-ing, chances are you will hit a point where you can no longer progress gear wise, and you're just getting 1-shot left and right in maps. So then in order to sustain the same level of fun as before, you will be forced into trade, which completely removes the reward of finding/crafting your own stuff and breaks any immersion. Personally I think the trade system is laughable and it doesn't actually add any "friction" (apparently the intent), 9/10 times the trade goes smoothly and is over within 30s. Items being "hard" to obtain in game in such a manner is not rewarding, it's not fun, it's just tedium and made to extend the game to make it seem longer, again waste your time.

That's all I got, I really hope this weekend chat highlights some of these as actual issues, otherwise I can't seem myself coming back to this game until the campaign is finished, then I'll just play that and call it a day. Or keep rolling new characters as that's actually quite fun (until you get to endgame, which is tedious, not well explained, punishing for the same of being "hard" without understanding what difficulty actually is, and has a messy interface with all the scattered nodes that you have to scroll across).

Rewarding. Difficulty. I think there's confusion for both terms.

I mean, 1-shot mechanics aren't "difficulty", even less so when they're buggy or poorly balanced (frequency, action speed, etc), like the Sky Seer's tornado attack (that happens so fast you will more often than not NOT have time to roll out of it and since travel skills aren't travel skills, rolls don't protect, blinks don't exist and movement speed modifiers on boots are a myth, nothing can save you, except the choice to not play melee).

Properly obscured ground effects aren't "difficulty" either, nor are the 100 puddles of corrupted blood. They're just boring and pace-breaking. Act 1 has the cultist archers spamming chaos damage everywhere when you don't have a snowball's chance in hell of rolling any chaos resist as a lvl 11 player. So all you do is backpedal to spread them out. Or, preferably, either 1-shot them before they can zerg or don't play melee.

As for the rewards? Oh, man! The game's trully rewarding! Defeat all bosses you can find on nightmare difficulty for 5 hours straight and get a few regals worth of rares with mostly T1 and T2 mods on them. Trully rewarding! You survived Lachlan? Great, here's your +12 hp, +9% lightning resistance gloves for a well deserved reward!

If the end-game's where we're supposed to be, to bask in the marvelous experience PoE2 has in store for us, we shouldn't struggle, level to level, map to map through the campaign. Which we are, if we want to dopamine hit of having obtained the gear we wear through playing, not through trading.

+1. Especially the part about the citadels needs to be addressed.

The tedium and punishments prevents them from making challenging content.

Meeting a new boss, you should expect to die three or four times just to see and learn how the mechanics work. The some more as you figure out how to overcome them. But finally, when you win, that feels rewarding.

Slodging through the weakest content you'll still progress your character through is not rewarding.

yeah love hate relationship is fitting. it needs HEAVY tweaks.

There is no doubt that one of the reasons why Dark Souls has been well received by a wide range of players is that even if you lose to a boss, you can revive from a nearby checkpoint without any restrictions.
If you look at the Steam review section for FromSoftware games, you'll notice that there are a lot of reviews that say, ``I'm not very good at games, but I tried my best and was able to clear the game. This is a really fun game!''

One of the first things I thought when playing this was "they tried to make a Soulslike but lack a basic understanding of what makes does game good".

GGG apparently thinks that just being difficult for the sake of being difficult is all there is to it. Elden Ring was hard, Shadow of the Erdtree was harder but never in a couple hundred hours I got the feeling that the game was out to punish me just for s*its and giggles. I threw myself at Malena, Fortisax and the DLC Bosses sometimes for days on end and at the end of it all it feels so very rewarding cause you learnt and you beat them with your skill(or sometimes just a lucky dodge).

PoE2 completely misses that part. There is no learning boss mechanics if you have to spend another hour to slog through 4 floors of Sekhema again hoping you dont get an unlucky afflication(-25% runspeed anyone?) that will brick your attempt.

GGG in a way is stuck in game design philosophies that stopped being relevant a decade ago.
If they want to continue down this path they will certainly have an audience but rest assured it will remain a niche game just like PoE1.
Or they can face the reality that Hard and Fun arent mutually exclusive.

I agree 100%.

I have reached the point where I am not having fun and the enjoyment is over. I can't even talk good about this game anymore because of the so many 1-shot mechanics, on death effects, periodic damage things most enemies have and don't even talk about the bad, so many bad drops you get or map sustain.

About map sustain, I know you can juice maps and get the +1 boss lvl and shit, but dude a reasonable killable boss turns into the Terminator and you have 1 fucking portal to kill him.

Yeah I feel like this post's title alone summarizes about 90% of the development issues GGG has ever had...

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ChoWanko#4074 wrote:

There is no doubt that one of the reasons why Dark Souls has been well received by a wide range of players is that even if you lose to a boss, you can revive from a nearby checkpoint without any restrictions.
If you look at the Steam review section for FromSoftware games, you'll notice that there are a lot of reviews that say, ``I'm not very good at games, but I tried my best and was able to clear the game. This is a really fun game!''

1000 this. This is how actually challenging content works. You need to build reaction, skill, and learn the fight inside and out to beat it. You get as many attempts as you need to do that because the difficulty is in mastering it, not in getting there.

Souls games aren't even the only ones that do this: the hardest fights in MMOs that groups compete for world firsts over are the same. They don't make you go spend 10 hours farming another key to attempt it again. You work on the fight until you get better at it. (And even other games follow this. Hell, Geometry Dash of all things has a scene for absurdly hard courses that take tens of thousands of attempts for even top players to beat. They don't make them go farm stars on easy courses per attempt.)

PoE2 does not understand this at all. It has the mindset that being time consuming = challenging and leans hard on that. That leads to problems all over the place like the awful design of the trials, endgame problems, multiplayer mapping being lousy (if someone dies they're just watching the other person instead of playing), and how so much of the game feels tedious rather than truly difficult.

This game doesn't want you to spend lots of attempts learning how to beat a fight. It wants you to spend most of your time doing a slog repeating easy content to get one try on the hard content, only for the trial to throw RNG nonsense modifiers at you or the boss you haven't gotten to learn one-shot you.

And it falsely equates that with challenging gameplay... but farming maps that are easy for you and selling keys because it's not worth bothering to use them is not what an actually challenging game looks like. It's what a timesink game looks like.