PoE2 vs. Souls Games: A Comparison That Hurts More Than It Helps

It is irksome to see people who have never played a Dark Souls game imply that the Souls games commit the following sins:

* Wasting your time (i.e. hours and hours of lost xp and precious resources upon death)

* One-shots

* Being tedious (which is different than being hard)

Souls games don't do any of that. I agree with posters who complain about these things in POE2, but then they go and ruin it by saying those are elements of Souls games.

I think every POE gamer should check out a Souls game. They are fantastic. Multiple Game-of-the-Year winners to chose from. And best of all, you get to experience the most glorious melee combat every devised.

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voodoochile78#9787 wrote:

It is irksome to see people who have never played a Dark Souls game imply that the Souls games commit the following sins:

* Wasting your time (i.e. hours and hours of lost xp and precious resources upon death)

* One-shots

* Being tedious (which is different than being hard)

Souls games don't do any of that. I agree with posters who complain about these things in POE2, but then they go and ruin it by saying those are elements of Souls games.

I think every POE gamer should check out a Souls game. They are fantastic. Multiple Game-of-the-Year winners to chose from. And best of all, you get to experience the most glorious melee combat every devised.

Cannot agree more, I am a huge Miyazaki d-rider, those games are the best games I have ever played period. So much so, that I kind of ruined 90% of other (what I consider now to be slop) games which in the past I found good.

Great post.

If this was like an actual souls game you could just farm A1 boss till you get OP weapon then ez mode cruise through the rest of the game if you wanted.

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kabooms#3788 wrote:

If this was like an actual souls game you could just farm A1 boss till you get OP weapon then ez mode cruise through the rest of the game if you wanted.

This made me chuckle a bit, because, I am in A1 Cruel but I am still using A1 normal rings, because all the gear from drops and vendor are absolute dog shit.
there is not actual farming but more close to gamba RNG to get a decent drop of basically anything. I know there is trading, but WTF can you trade in campaign bruh???

Great post OP, especially your point about loot and RNG. That is something I always found especially egregious in games that try to "evolve the ARPG genre". Most try to increase difficulty (not challenge, but difficulty) combined with randomized loot. Two fundamentally incompatible things.

Souls games work so well because with game knowledge, you know exactly where to acquire the gear for your build. Some drops might have chances, but you know where loot is hidden or which mobs to farm. Your power curve is solely dependent on your own actions, allowing Souls games to keep a high challenge level.

RNG-based ARPGs inherently have high variance in gear and player power requiring the game to have progressive difficulty, backloading the most challenging encounters to the endgame, simply because player power is hard to determine accurately.

https://youtu.be/G54yUNj6ZHk?si=NhCFz1DCbMDm1fxl

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dreamstate42#3955 wrote:

Great post OP, especially your point about loot and RNG. That is something I always found especially egregious in games that try to "evolve the ARPG genre". Most try to increase difficulty (not challenge, but difficulty) combined with randomized loot. Two fundamentally incompatible things.

Souls games work so well because with game knowledge, you know exactly where to acquire the gear for your build. Some drops might have chances, but you know where loot is hidden or which mobs to farm. Your power curve is solely dependent on your own actions, allowing Souls games to keep a high challenge level.

RNG-based ARPGs inherently have high variance in gear and player power requiring the game to have progressive difficulty, backloading the most challenging encounters to the endgame, simply because player power is hard to determine accurately.

Basically what you said and if we add a touch of meme we get this:

Imagine in DaS1 you make a warrior, you get your starting sword, and the only gear you find are cloth armors, wands, spells, and a broken short short.
I mean yeah you could still play and etc. but that's not a challenge that you should be forced into.

I really hope GGG see this, because it is exact, on-point feedback with the core with POE2 at the moment, and articulated incredibly well. Well done.

I think one thing I'll add to the conversations is this:

I think at its core, for 'meaningful combat' to work for non-bosses as the game works now, enemy design has to change dramatically - density has to drop, movement speed has to drop, attack speed has to drop, you have to be able to both engage AND run away from enemies, and enemy power has to be designed around those changes... But, I'm just not convinced that GGG is willing to make that kind of change. I hope they will, like they did with bosses, but I just don't know.

I'm also not sure that an iso-ARPG like POE can truly have the type of 'meaning combat' that GGG aspires to without significantly rethinking how that gets adapted to the player. I think significant design and mechanics changes also need to happen to make 'meaningful combat' work in an iso-ARPG.

For example, Parry and Block. In a souls-like 3rd person ARPG, it makes total sense it's directional. In POE, it just doesn't. When you have a top down view, and enemies constantly come from 360 degrees, you cannot have key combat mechanics that are directional. Parry and Block should be 360° skills, with Parry having a generous radius of effect so when it's used, it's effective. That makes using these skills meaningful in the context of this game, it makes them fun, and you balance around that.

Another example, general balance and underperforming skills. Many skills in POE are just useless. GGG generally brings down the ceiling, rather than raising the floor, as evidence by patch 0.2. This should not be the case, and all skills should be viable for content like the campaign. If not, combat is not meaningful - people follow a handful of builds, people only use a handful of skills, and people gravitate to the 'easiest abilities.

Another example, top-end boss balance. It will be impossible to square balance at the low end (campaign) and high end (end-game/pinnacle) in a game with THOUSANDS of skill tree/skill gem/support gem/item combos. This is not a souls-like with finite skills/abilities and stats that you increase. If 0.2 has shown anything, it's that balancing a game around the top 1% of player boss encounters will inevitably ruin balance elsewhere. GGG has said time and time again they don't want people one-shotting bosses, so they nurf skills to avoid that. It will be IMPOSSIBLE to prevent OP builds that decimate bosses, and GGG have recognized this themselves. If they insist on trying to prevent it, address it mechanically, directly. Make player damage apply to bosses in raw numbers up to a point, then cap it and start applying it as a diminishing percentile. Tune it so the average build will defeat a boss in X minutes, and a high performing build will do it in XX seconds. Make it almost impossible to kill a boss in under a certain period of time among the highest performing players/builds, and turn bossing into a race to see how low that time can get without allowing it to be trivialized ... AND allowing builds that are obliterating end game bosses to be nerfed in this scenario without affecting the rest of the game and those builds' ability to play the game.

This game is poorly made, a disaster from the start. They've added things without rhyme or reason, insanely, pointlessly, and they think adding a lot of stuff makes the game better, when it just doesn't work at its core.