Feedback on POE2 World Map and Exploration Experience

Hi,

The more I play Path of Exile 2, the more I realize that I’m not enjoying the World Map and how the endgame functions (not lack of mechanics).

My biggest issue is navigation — I constantly feel lost, like I’m wandering aimlessly with no real sense of direction. That really takes away from the experience for me.

Sure, the 3D World looks visually nice, but that’s where it ends. Unfortunately, adding more content won’t fix this problem. It just feels like I’m endlessly drifting through a big, randomized world with no structure. The bookmark system feels like a temporary band-aid.

Maybe the map shouldn’t be infinite. Having some defined borders — without fog of war — could really help. I understand that mechanics like Citadels would need to be reworked, but as it stands, exploring just feels like a chore. The fog of war only makes that worse.

I completely agree with this. The map is just a procedurally generated soup with no sense of direction, contour, or geography.

A simple way to begin to address this would be for all players to start the endgame with the same Atlas in a predefined layout which someone at GGG actually sits down and designs. That atlas could then have some kind of lore and identifiable structure and geography to it. Let’s imagine you built a starting map which included the number of corrupted nexus you need, and your first three citadels.

In response to this some will argue that if all have the same Atlas the layout will be available to look at on the net and optimised pathing strategies to follow will be devised in minutes. All that is true, but it would be up to the player as to whether they choose to look for that information or whether they choose to ignore it and explore that map for themselves.

At some point in the endgame experience it is probably inevitable that the Atlas cannot be entirely “bespoke” but will need some for of procedural generation. However even that could take place within a pre-defined framework which gives the Atlas some kind of structure. Starting with a map with some predefined elements could help to give subsequent randomisation some structure. For example, the initial predefined map may have the predominance of certain biomes at its edges - a mainly desert area on the eastern side, a mainly grass area on the western, for example. Subsequent generation of the landscape could keep to those themes which more of a certain biome in a certain direction. This would begin to give the map some vague sense of identity.

As it stands the Atlas is simply a big step back from the fixed layout in POE1, which allowed players to play the maps they wanted with the “juice” they wanted in the order they wanted. GGG needs to put a lot more work into the “explorable” Atlas to make it work. And that does not just mean dropping more “cool things to find” into the soup that that is there currently. The Atlas needs proper structure, identity, and character.