Nice Juke. Well Played.

After a 10 year hiatus, the anticipation and excitement to the Diablo 2 follow up could be felt throughout the greater gaming community. For any of you ancient enough to recall the origin of the series which began in 1996, the release of Diablo 3 was a looooong time coming, but the general consensus was that it would be well worth the wait. After all, the game had 10 years of design, development and polish.

Enter the game titled "Diablo 3". Fun gameplay mechanics... simplistic design, significant handholding, generic characters with no lasting build differentiation... Barney and friends inspired lighting / artistic influence... a 3 difficulty setting tutorial through the entire game prior to any difficulty curve... non-random maps (really?)... An end game that consists of grinding the same portion of the same instance hundreds of times... scratch that, an end game that, if you actually wanted to advance, consisted of more hours of auction house tycoon even than the monotonous act three grind I described above.... oh yeah... and how could I forget... pay to win.

In other words, a completely different game than diablo 2. With no connections to its predecessor with the exception of a poorly placed, poorly thought out cameo featuring the well known and loved (not to mention powerful) Horadric mage (Cain) needing your help to survive a group of mobs unworthy of an auto attacking level 5 sorceress sporting a pair of foam boxing gloves.

Needless to say, while I enjoyed the game for a month or two, us old timers expecting a continuation of the most widespread, nostalgia seeping dungeon crawl series in the gaming world, were disappointed.

Enter the game titled "Path of Exile". Fun gameplay mechanics, complex build paths filled with variety, (near) permanent build decisions differentiating play styles, dark monolithic settings... random maps... intentional lack of structured auction style economy (leading to an actual value based trading system), a gear grind that actually rewards you with gear you can use for something other than empowering your AHTycoon... oh yeah... and free to play with no purchasable stat sticks.

In no other terms, and with very little room for argument, a substantially, yet incrementally improved version of Diablo 2.

To all those who orchestrated this 10 year long epic juke, you really had me going.
Thank you for actually releasing Diablo 3 (AKA path of exile) after all this time.

Amen bro!

Take the design of PoE and add the polish that a mega-corp can pay for and you'll have an amazing game. I much prefer a good independent over a polished crap through.

Well stated, I agree.

Uncut Diamond (PoE) vs Polished Turd (D3)

POE > D3

Yes, oh yes.

GGG <3

Btw,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2evIg-aYw8

true story

nicely put together, was actualy quite fun to read and true by that.

D3 wasn`t just a "bad" (boring) game, no it was the "bad and boring" continuation of D2.
Tbh. ,putting all nostalgia by side, i do believe PoE has already surpassed D2, simply cause it offers more diffrent content (baal runs did get old eventualy).
The only problem is many people mistaking a hack`n slash with a MMO nowadays (WoW and co.) and expect things which do not actualy fit in this genre (or are not necessary).
Even on an objective level PoE IS the best hack`n slash currently on the market.

D3 was a sick Joke,which sadly enough got me pre ordering 2 limited edition boxes.
And we literaly stopped playing after 2 weeks, it was just so fucking bad.
D2`s amazing flair turned into an morning-cartoon-anime, no complexity, a just god aweful difficulty curve till you hit inferno, all the features which made D2 what it was stripped away, shity ingame cutscenes everwhere, no random levels, nothing, even my grandmother could`ve played this game..cause everything was so damn streamlined.

The only thing i liked about D3 was the introduction of "random events" and the Witch-Doc-art-direction.



Uncut Diamond (PoE) vs Polished Turd (D3) <-

With mostly positive response, here is my one shameless self bump so a few more people can read. Was fun to write and expresses my opinion. I hope it will be fun for you to read. :)