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

"

Libertine79#0911 wrote:

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.

If I had to review PoE2 in one word, the one I'd pick is "Archaic". And it's for this reason.

So much of it feels like its stuck in a time warp of "well Diablo 2 did it so we should too" even if there's a reason why games moved away from that.

This ranges from small things like needing to identify items (which serves no purpose now except wasting time and cluttering the screen with scrolls of wisdom I'm not going to bother picking up) all the way up to the false equivalency of "this takes a long time therefore its challenging."

There's actual good ideas and the core of a really good game in here, but it's bogged down by a lot of baggage that comes from a wildly outdated view of game design.

Its so fun playing Hardcore and discovering new 1 shot mechanics in the game

/s

often times tedious things is what make them hard.

I'm confused if this game is supposed to branch out to a broader arpg audience or if it's meant to divide their already niche game(s) into two different ones.

I just don't see any innovation or anything that makes me think this is a improvement in design choices.

Hopefully they give some insight tomorrow so people like me can decide if it's worth investing further

+1

The OP summarizes my feelings on a lot of this game's issues right now.

Campaign is a fairly fun experience, though you're really at the mercy of RNGesus when it comes to gear progression. Endgame takes away what few carrots the campaign had and introduces about 50 new sticks all at once.

"

Hotspurr#5494 wrote:

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).

I totally get the love-hate relationship you're describing. There are definitely a lot of great concepts here, but the current balancing feels off, especially when it comes to the difficulty and rewards in the endgame. 🙄

1. One-Shot Mechanics & Losing Progress:
The idea of losing your map progress, drops, and even XP from just one mistake is incredibly frustrating. When you're punished for something that feels out of your control (like a random one-shot), it can feel demotivating. It's the opposite of what Dark Souls does right, where there’s a strong sense of achievement even after repeated failures, but with minimal time loss between attempts. Maybe reducing the penalty for failure (or even offering a retry mechanic for certain high-risk scenarios) could alleviate this and make the gameplay feel more fair. ⏳

2. Trials of Ascendancy:
The long, drawn-out nature of the Trials is a major pain point. Spending upwards of an hour to get to a point and then losing everything because of a single mistake feels like a punishment more than a challenge. Dark Souls allows players to get right back into the action, even if the enemies or bosses are tough, but here, the time lost is just... brutal. A possible fix would be introducing a checkpoint system or at least making the retry less punishing. 🔄

3. Endgame Loop & Map Farming:
I completely agree with your take on the endgame grind. The lack of feedback or a way to learn from your mistakes in these long, repetitive farming sessions makes the endgame feel like a huge slog. It’s not about improving skills but about spending excessive time to grind and pray for a good outcome. There has to be a better way to learn and improve without having to restart from scratch each time. Maybe making the rewards feel more consistent, or allowing for more chances at success, would create a better flow. 🚶‍♂️

4. Crafting & SSF Frustrations:
Crafting should be fun and rewarding, not just a frustrating gamble. The randomness in crafting is not only discouraging but also forces players to depend on trading for progression, which breaks the immersion and rewards system. If you’re SSF, the grind can feel endless, and that’s when the game loses its spark. A balance between randomization and guaranteed progress would go a long way in making crafting more satisfying. Perhaps something like a "crafting safety net" or mechanics that offer more predictable rewards after X attempts could ease that pain. ⚒️

5. Trading System:
You're spot on with the trade system being counterproductive. It might be designed to add friction, but instead, it feels like an obstacle, especially when it feels like the only way to progress meaningfully is to rely on it. Maybe the trade system could be reworked so that SSF players have a more sustainable route for progression that doesn’t depend on an outside economy. The immersion and reward of finding or crafting your own gear should be the core experience, not being pushed out into a marketplace. 🛒

Overall:
You’ve made some really valid points about how the current system doesn’t reward the player’s time or effort in a satisfying way. GGG really needs to rethink these elements, especially as it relates to the balance of difficulty, progression, and rewards. I also hope this weekend chat sheds some light on these issues, as they need attention if the game is going to remain enjoyable long-term. 🗣️

Thanks for sharing your thoughts—hopefully, GGG takes the community’s feedback to heart and makes these necessary changes. 👏

"

Mashgesture#2912 wrote:

often times tedious things is what make them hard.

No its not. It makes them tedious. Something that is hard requires skill, and that generally requires practice to build up.

If the only barrier is tedium, then its not actually hard. The only thing stopping literally anyone from accomplishing something that is tedious is having something better to do with their time.

+1

This whole game is tedious and punishing. Nothing more.

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

Let's go down the list and see how many of these apply, shall we?

1. Bad technical aspects make it difficult. Making a difficult jump is real difficulty. Making that same difficult jump under an overly complicated control scheme, horrible jumping mechanics, and/or an abrupt mid-air change of camera angle—and therefore the orientation of your controls—is fake difficulty.

Game-Breaking Bug
A bug which renders the game unplayable from its current state (and sometimes, even future states). ✅

Pixel Hunt
When a plot-critical item is hidden so well in the scenery it's barely visible, and you might not even know it was there. ❌

Some Dexterity Required
Games with unintuitive, complex, and/or difficult control systems.
Uncomfortable jumping or other physics. Especially apparent when the system the game is on doesn't support smooth screen scrolling (like MSX). ❌

Ratchet Scrolling
Non-continuous scrolling that only allows you to go forward.
Badly implemented examples of Rubber-Band A.I. or Dynamic Difficulty
In which the player does so well that the AI outright cheats, so much so that it makes certain mission objectives impossible unless the player also cheats, or even spawns so many extra enemies that tracking all of them starts to overwhelm the hardware. ❌

Hitbox Dissonance
When the collision between the hitboxes and hurtboxes do not align with the player or enemy's actions as they are shown visually. Especially in cases where an attack hits the player character in a place that should logically be registered as a miss. ✅

Category total: 2/5

2. The outcome is not reasonably determined by the player's actions. Unlocking a door by solving a color puzzle is real difficulty. Unlocking it by pressing a button until you get the right number is not.

Checkpoint Starvation
Absence or severe lack of Check Points or Save Points. ✅ (in some areas.)

Escort Mission - Some of them.
The success of a mission depends on the performance of a non-player character you can't control. ✅/❌ (a few places, but only a problem due to bugs.)

Artificial Stupidity - on the part of your teammates.
As you progress in the game, and the difficulty rises, your teammates become more and more incompetent, forcing you to pull more weight. ❌

Interface Screw
An event where the player's display or control scheme are screwed around with. ❌

Luck-Based Mission
Skill matters not in this level! ✅ (rare mobs with build-destroying affixes, getting railroaded into trial rooms with build-breaking curses, etc.)

Random Drop
If the dropped item is necessary to continue the game or achieve certain endings. ❌ (technically exists with the relics in act 2 and the sacrificial heart in 3 but I've never seen them not drop.)

Damage-Sponge Boss or Marathon Boss
A boss whose difficulty is derived from the limits of the player's patience and endurance. They don't always qualify, but when they aren't difficult from a technical standpoint, aren't particularly evasive or hard to hit, and don't hit like a train, but are still hard because they take an unreasonable amount of time to kill or have excruciatingly long fights (especially with numerous unskippable cutscenes and/or quick-time events), it's probably Fake Difficulty. ✅

Time-Limit Boss
Another type of boss who is difficult as a result of a strict time limit that unleashes their powerful attack resulting in a Total Party Kill, or otherwise forces an instant loss. Combining this with the trope above will likely turn this boss into That One Boss. ✅ (treasure golem, possibly others.)

Video Game Delegation Penalty
By delegating a certain in-game task or mechanic to the AI or a NPC, you get a less desirable result than when you do it yourself. ❌

Forced Level-Grinding
When a boss or the encounters in an area reached in the normal order of progression are significantly more powerful and durable than what a player at the expected levels and equipment strength for that point in the game can reasonably deal with, forcing them to grind until they can handle the boss or encounters. ✅ (for some builds in some content.)

Category total: 5/10

3. Denial of information critical to progress. A reasonable game may require the player to use information, clues, or logic to proceed. Withholding relevant information such that the player cannot possibly win without a guide, walkthrough or trial and error is fake difficulty. Also includes hidden Unstable Equilibrium (e.g. a later level is much harder if you do badly at an early level, and you're not informed of this ahead of time). In a 2D game with no camera control, hiding important details behind foreground elements or Behind the Black counts as fake difficulty if your character should be able to see them.

All There in the Manual
If you don't know how to do a Shoryuken because you didn't read the manual, that's just you being lazy, not Fake Difficulty (or just a case of not having access to it or any reproduction of it for whatever reason). This is for games which refer to plot elements or instructions that are only in ANOTHER game's manual which you haven't purchased yet. ❌

Camera Screw
Problems with the camera in a 3D game. ❌

Copy Protection
Games with Copy Protection or Feelies that are not included with some nonetheless legal purchases of the game. E.g. Quest for Glory having only maps and pamphlets with certain versions of the game. ❌

Depth Perplexion
If objects that reside in the background or foreground layers can still obstruct and/or kill you by Collision Damage. In isometric views, it's hard to tell what's blocking you or what's safe to land on. Your bullets are blocked by walls, enemy bullets don't have that problem. ❌

Event-Obscuring Camera
The in-game camera prevents the player from seeing what's going on. ❌

Guide Dang It!
You'd never figure this one out without consulting some form of walkthrough. This can be invoked deliberately to hide really powerful weapons, substantial rewards, etc., that are optional. However, if the cryptic action is required to advance the game, it is fake difficulty. ❌

Hitbox Dissonance
Where the area around a character/enemy that registers hits doesn't match up with the actual appearance of the character/enemy – the game registers hits that don't visually connect, or fails to acknowledge hits that do. ✅

Leap of Faith
A hole in a platform game which, despite appearances, is not bottomless and/or does have a safe place to land, just way off to the side. The only way to find out is to jump! This becomes fake difficulty when throwing yourself off a cliff and hoping you survive is required to advance the game. If the routes or rewards are completely optional, it is not fake difficulty. ❌

Metagame
When joining an online game, there are a lot of unwritten rules that fellow players expect you to know that the in-game tutorials do not explain. Worst-case, the single-player game is patched to be harder, with the expectations that players will use unwritten exploits. ✅

Now, Where Was I Going Again?
If you skip or forget information, you can't see it again. ❌

Screen Crunch
When you can't see your surroundings due to the screen resolution (or lack thereof). ❌

Trial-and-Error Gameplay
When you can only figure out the correct path by trying the incorrect ones and dying, until you get to the right one. ❌

Obstructive Foreground
You can't see yourself or the enemies because some object in the foreground is in the way. ✅ (in some areas, e.g. trees blocking the camera in forest.)

The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard and The Computer Is a Lying Bastard
Probably the worst cause of Guide Dang It!. This is when the game gives you information, but it's not simply inaccurate. The computer is outright lying to you (and not for plot-based reasons i.e. the player has no reason to expect a catch). ✅ (tooltips)

Category total 4/15

4. The outcome of the game is influenced by decisions that were uninformed at the time and cannot be undone. (Unless the game is heavily story-based and unforeseen consequences of actions undertaken with incomplete information are legitimate plot elements, or the game offers some way of mitigating or eliminating those consequences.) A game that offers a Joke Character and is clear about the character's weakness has real difficulty. A game that disguises a joke character as a real one has fake difficulty.

Character Select Forcing
Where the game designs levels or enemies to only be beatable by a particular character or set of characters and doesn't require or at least hint at which characters you need to pick at the outset. Some older D&D modules that require a certain character class's abilities in order to advance the plot (but doesn't force a member of the party to be one at the outset) are like this. This Looks Like a Job for Aquaman is a more downplayed example, and it can be legitimate difficulty, depending on how severe it is - a niche but not useless character shining in a notoriously difficult spot very well may not be Fake Difficulty, but a full-on Joke Character (intentional or not) who rips open an extremely hard section but is useless otherwise presents a far stronger case. ❌

Permanently Missable Content
A "missable" item which, if you didn't get it on your first chance, will be unobtainable afterwards. Doubly frustrating if it's a very powerful item that will aid the quest, and sure to cause a lot of frustration if it's a key item, primarily required for the best ending. Extremely likely to cause controller-tossing if it's a key item required to get any ending at all. If the Non-Standard Game Over screen/cinematic lets you know what you missed for your next go-around, then the Fake Difficulty of the situation is slightly lessened. It'd still be better if they told you about it before it was lost, though. ✅/❌ (Ascendancy and Venom quest reward can't be changed)

Violation of Common Sense
When a game expects you to do something stupid or downright suicidal and punishes people who take the more "common sense" option. Forgivable in more comedic games, but it is fake difficulty when you lose the chance to get the Golden Ending because you decided to make the entirely sensible decision not to sacrifice the lives of your squad to complete the mission of "get Phantom Zone Cabbages for Mr. Maginty's stew". ❌

Unwinnable
A gameplay state in which it is completely impossible for the player to finish the game. ❌

Category total: 0/4

5. The game requires the player to use skills or knowledge that are either incorrect or have nothing to do with the genre. A football game that requires you to name the eleven positions that make up a team has real difficulty. A football game that requires you to calculate the trajectory of a football in motion has fake difficulty, even if it is tangentially related.

Bladder of Steel
If the Pause button doesn't apply to cutscenes. Have to go to the bathroom or answer the phone? Hope you don't miss the NPC giving you the secret combination to defuse that ticking bomb... ❌

Conviction by Counterfactual Clue
A game's solution requires an answer that is blatantly incorrect in the real world, causing players with the logical answer to get stuck at the puzzle. ❌

Empty Levels
Where the stat gains from gaining levels aren't enough to beat the new, stronger wave of enemies that attack higher-level characters. This is only fake difficulty if it's possible to avoid gaining levels in the first place (and thereby enjoy the artificially lowered difficulty now or at a later date) otherwise it's just a game with a Parabolic Power Curve. ✅ (possible if you make bad choices with your passives.)

Unexpected Gameplay Change in more extreme cases
What the—why is this Visual Novel suddenly making me play a rhythm game? I only have one arm, man, that's why I picked up the slow-paced game instead of one of those! ❌

Category total: 1/4

Total fake difficulty indicators for all categories: 12/38.

If you missed 12 out of 38 questions on a test you'd get a D+ grade on it.

At this point I feel like they should've kept this as a PoE 1 update. I don't think they will be able to ''fix'' this without having to go back to the PoE 1 pace.
Just look at how the ''top players'' are playing the game. They are playing PoE 1 builds. In this game you either 1-shot or get 1-shotted. No middle ground here. And all of this to realize that the rewards behind such punishing content are so, so bad, that they are not worth even trading.

What a dissapointment, man. I really had good expectations with this game.