Path of Exile 2's disastrous new update reveals the core tension at the heart of its design: How do you make a game with meaningful combat when everyone just wants to blast monsters? : games

[–] [email protected] 31 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I've been thinking this from the start. The genres really just don't seem compatible.

Souls-likes are at their core about the fights themselves. Sure you can make builds, but unless you're going out of your way to cheese things, you're probably still fighting the enemies and dealing with the mechanics like anyone else. Outside of boss fights, you fight at most a handful of enemies, all of whom have been very deliberately placed in a level to create interesting encounters that are the right balance of difficulty. Also, your healing is very limited so that the game can punish you for mistakes without outright killing you because you will run out of resources at some point.

Diablo-likes are about the builds. The enemies are merely fodder for testing out whatever nonsense you've made. The norm is to optimize the shit out of your builds. The whole point is to eventually trivialize things. Enemies are randomly generated and placed. You don't get well crafted encounters outside of bosses so when you're presented with a mob of random enemies, your solution is to just kill them before they kill you. Also, a component of build crafting is often sustain and if you can build infinite sustain into your character, then the only things which can kill you will just be one shots.

There's no obvious way to resolve these contradictions. You kind of just need to pick a lane. If they really want a game that's fundamentally different from PoE 1... they need to make THAT game. But that's really far away from the game they've actually made and I don't think any reasonable amount of early access tweaking can get them there from here.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I disagree completely. I think you can have a game that is "about the builds" when engaging in meaningful combat. I think you're right to hint that people may play these two kinds of games for two different reasons, but I think there's a massive untapped market for the overlap.

I want the build creation and fantasy expression of typical ARPG's but I want to use them to do more than just idol click monsters into loot. I don't like the phone game playstyle of modern ARPGs. It's not compelling to me to trivialize the gameplay loop in order to get slightly more powerful gear to further trivialize another tier of difficulty.

I think if GGG took their boss combat design philosophy and extended it out to their monsters - mimicking genres like roguelikes or action games - they'd have a lot more success than the hybrid game they've produced. I think they're moving towards that but haven't quite yet committed publicly to reworking the monsters.

Imagine Hades or Dead Cells or Enter the Gungeon but in Raeclast. I don't think they're far off on the player side, a few more abilities per weapon type, especially interactive defensive options, and monsters re crafted to roles in an encounter and they could mimic the compelling gameplay of a rogue-like but give you far more expression than the four guns you have on you or the two weapons and two items or the boons you pick during a run.

I think the genres are wholly compatible. I don't think the idol vs engaging mindset are and that's where all the friction seems to be coming from.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I think the secret sauce there is that they're roguelikes. They have meaningful combat and they have the potential for wild builds that completely trivialize that combat. So why does this work for them? Because you can't guarentee a specific broken build every run. They're short and random, so the likelihood that you will put together all the pieces needed for a specific build before the end of a run is fairly low. By contrast, while ARPGs are "random", they're played over such a long term that it's expected that you will be able to acquire exactly the things you need for your build eventually. (Outside of chase items, but those usually aren't build defining for that exact reason.) PLus a lot of your build is defined by entirely deterministic mechanics. You get to choose your skills and passives. And with trading you can take nearly all the uncertainty out of whether or not you'll be able to put together the remaining pieces.

So because it's expected that you'll for sure be able to build what you want given enough effort, if you optimize your build to trivialize the game, you'll always be able to do that. When you get a a broken build in a roguelike, it's because you high rolled that run and you get to have fun experiencing the high point relative to the baseline. You know how tough the combat usually is, so the fact that you can now breeze through it without thinking about it is fun in and of itself. But if it was always like that, it would just be a boring game. Incidentally, this is why I tend to not like roguelites that allow you to define a lot about your build before you enter the run itself. They make it a lot more likely that you break the experience in a very predictable way.

In ARPGs the high point is the baseline. Either the game is able to be trivialized with a good build, in which case it always will unless you go out of your way to nerf yourself, or you can never really make the game easier no matter how good your build is, in which case the build making isn't super relevant. There's a reason people joke about Fashion Souls. The gear you can equip is often so pointless that you might as well just pick armor for how it looks.

An interesting case study for a sort of in the middle experience that kind of illustrates some of this is Noita. For those unfamiliar it's a roguelike where you play as a mage/alchemist descending into the depths of the world in search of mysteries. Your builds consist of wands that you can put an assembly of spells and modifiers in to craft very different spell setups. You also get some perks occasionally that do the usual kinds of things you'd expect from a roguelike passive item system. The game is brutally difficult to a degree that's deliberately unfair to the player. Enemies are chaotic. The environment is volatile and filled with things that can kill you in an instant if you're not careful, or even if you are careful because some enemy triggers some flying thing on another screen that flies into you out of nowhere. Many spells in the game can hurt you too and even the ones that can't directly can sometimes have a firing pattern that will make it hard to avoid hitting explosives and stuff that will kill you. Healing is extremely limited. Early on the game is certainly very skill based in the sense that you aren't going to immediately break the game in the first level or so, so you need to be able to avoid things while you slowly kill them. If you really enjoy build crafting, the early game is fairly boring in that respect. But ultimately as you progress it's more knowledge based. Your will be hard pressed to outskill later enemies if you're still running a dinky no damage wand. So you kind of have to find ways to break the game if you want to succeed.

SPOILERS beyond this point:

That's the initial experience. Two things become true once you learn more about the game:

There are a handful of very powerful combos that are way better than most of what you can do in the game. Once you know about them, either through discovery or from reading about it online, you will kind of ruin the build potential of future runs. You can somewhat reliably find at least one of these most runs so long as you make it past a certain point. There's not nothing cool to discover after that, but they're all way less practical and only something you will be able to do once you've already reached a point where there's no challenge they're needed to overcome.
Upon freeing yourself from the initial core run to go see the rest of the world(s), you gain access to essentially unlimited perks. You can gain absurd amounts of health, damage reduction and healing, immunity to a lot of hazards, enough movespeed to avoid most things, and the ability to basically get anywhere you want on the map, etc. You basically become a god of death and destruction, untethered from mere mortal concerns.......... until you randomly get turned into a sheep and die instantly. So similar to a broken ARPG character, you reach a point in the game where the only things that the game can possibly do to threaten you is to strip you of everything that makes your build and just instantly kill you. And similar to an ARPG, this only really happens because you can play a run for many hours after the initial, more roguelike length run.

There's probably something to learn from all of that if you want to try to thread that needle, but I think it at least shows the challenges of reconciling the tension between mechanical skill and cool build making.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

I think you did a great job of talking about the various issues and I haven't played noita yet but I appreciate the example. I think there is a way to create a game with a baseline power level of 1x and give the player a range of 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their build and 0.8 - 1.6x power creep based on their mechanical skill. Capping the possible player power range from something like 0.6 (a game twice as difficult as it was designed) to 2.5 (a game that's a slightly more than twice as easy as it was designed) seems feasible to me - a none game dev. I believe this would allow me to have build expression from a power perspective and not reduce the game to a slot machine's level of engagement. I think the problem is the lower range is closer to 0.1 or worse in the end game maps and the upper end is 100x+ even on the hardest content in the game. That to me is the core issues.

I think part of the fun in ARPGs, something almost all of them do better than say Dark Souls or Hades, is that the individual abilities are way different per character or per class/weapon/etc. I can play a magma barbarian in PoE2 in a way I just couldn't in Elden Ring in a satisfactory way. I can play a lightning Amazon and a poison archer and a frost monk and the builds are visually (and in the best cases mechanically) diverse enough to make experience a new power fantasy that in itself is super cool. There are items and powers I can't or wouldn't experience on one play through that I could in another, and the best games in the genre provide me a ton of variation. That to me is more important to build expression than the power of my build, at least it's more important than the share it gets in normal conversation. A build for me becomes bland and identical the moment combat is trivialized, but ideally before it trivializes things it can feel expressive if the moment to moment gameplay is unique compared to other builds.

So personally I'm confident to the extent "the needle has to be threaded (lol)" it's not critically hard or critically important that it's gotten perfectly right. I think it just has to be choice from the developers on what the power range is and how much of that is mechanical vs itemization based.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I suppose part of the conversation is about a concept I call "difficulty pressure." (Maybe there's another term for it?) Essentially, how does the game's difficulty affect players' approach to optimizing builds in a game with them.

When a game is on the really difficult end of things, (and this goes for competitive multiplayer as well where the "difficulty" is that all other players are optimizing and you need to be better than them to win) the game pressures you to optimize your playstyle in order to just survive and overcome otherwise insurmountable odds. In this extreme environment, there sub-optimal builds get pushed out even if they seem fun because you will very likely fail with them. Thus limiting build diversity.

At the lower end of difficulty, the game might be so trivial that ANYTHING works, but it won't feel satisfying because nothing you do really matters. You probably don't even need a real build at that point, so that feeling of making something crazy that trivializes otherwise challenging content isn't there. There's just no reference point to appreciate how good your build is. If every enemy had 1 HP, without damage numbers, how would you even know how much damage you were doing? A build that did one damage would be the same as a build that did a trillion damage.

Like you said, ideally there's some good balance state where things are challenging enough to serve as a yard stick, but there are still a lot of builds that can reach that point. There's a boring way to achieve this easily: No builds. Or at least no difference between builds. Everything does the same thing but maybe the colors are swapped around. Obviously that's not really what we want out of an ARPG, otherwise we'd just play a pure action game. So builds have to be different enough to allow for very different experiences, but not so much so that some are essentially invalid. But that's a much more complicated problem. With so many pieces and combinations, it's virtually impossible to balance faster than the internet hive mind can optimize.

There's another boring way to achieve this: Not on the player side, but on the encounter side. Because a very wide variety of playstyles need to be able to complete the content in a roughly equivalent way, the challenges need to be relatively interchangeable because you don't know exactly what tools the player will have access to. So you flatten the content so there aren't sharp edges that will make some builds unable to beat it. Alternatively you can require the players to have a specific set of tools no matter the build so that they can deal with all these scenarios. For example, in Noita, you pretty much always need:

A primary damage dealing wand that can reliably kill things safely and which won't run out of limited charge spells.
A digging wand to access various pickups and other areas.
A mobility wand to be able to get around the more sprawling and dangerous levels as well as get up to places you otherwise couldn't.
Late game, a healing wand.
There are some enemies that are straight up just immune to some damage types.

You have 4 wand slots and you will usually need at least one empty wand slot to be able pick up new wands in a level unless you can meet some other specific conditions. So all the slots you can use to make your build are spoken for. This limits what you can build a lot. Late game you can combine some of these effects into a single wand, but until then you have that restriction.

If the game didn't have this variety of challenges, you'd be more free to choose what you want out of your build, but then the actual content would be way less interesting.

This is the core tension. Content asks things of you and your build is the answer to that. The more difficult or specific the challenge, the less freedom you have to make different builds. The more generic or easy the challenge, the less your build matters, meaning you have more freedom but it's less satisfying to act on that freedom.

EDIT: I forgot to discuss the action/skill axis: Some games, despite having builds and being mechanically difficulty, can be entirely overcome with skill. People do challenge runs of Dark Souls at SL1 with a broken straight sword and no armor because fundamentally, nothing in the game requires you to take damage or kill things at a certain speed. So you technically don't need a build. Skill is essentially all that matters. If you just avoid things forever it doesn't matter how little health you have or how long it takes you to kill something. Any build stuff you do on top of that is just for the fantasy and to make things go faster. (Although fantasy wise I think the souls games kind of do a terrible job. All the flashiest weapon skills and spells are way too slow and impractical to be useful. They're not just suboptimal, some of them will actively make the game harder than if you were using nothing at all.

I guess my point isn't that it's impossible to make a game that has elements of both. It's that they are inherently antagonistic, not synergistic concepts. The more builds matter, the less content does and visa versa.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I do not believe "everyone" wants to zoom. I like the engaging combat they're going for. I think the loudest people in the community like the idol game mechanics of most modern ARPGs but I think the genre is ripe for innovation.

Everyone praises their boss design and enjoy that aspect of the game, which to me reads "we like engaging combat with balanced rewards" but when that logic is theoretically applied to monsters we get people throwing online temper tantrums which tells me they don't know what they want except for the thing they've already been given.

They're missing the mark with the monster design, getting closer than anyone else in the genre (besides maybe No Rest for the Wicked). They need to look at roguelikes such as Hades and make each monster have a "role" when building encounters. Give each monster abilities like the bosses in the game and don't make it about being auto-hit to death and they'll have a truly next-gen ARPG.

I'm positive the first team to crack the infinite loot/immense player expression of ARPGs and engaging combat loop of action games (or really all other genres besides idol click farmers) will make the next genre defining game akin to Diablo 2.

I think PoE2 is on the road to doing that but the immense pushback they're getting online seems to be wearing them thin. Which they asked for, for releasing an unfinished game and not having a clear line in the sand.

I'm still having fun. Pushing T4 maps today.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Not a big ARPG person, just an onlooker. I searched "idol game mechanics" and "idol game mechanics ARPG" and got nothing, what is that?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I mean to say "idol" as in... Oh fuck. Omg I've been misspelling idle in literally weeks worth of comments. Woooooow. Okay. Feeling a bit dumb.

I meant idle mechanics. Hopefully that makes a bit more sense but just in case - I'm making the argument that most modern ARPGs since Diablo 2 have not innovated on the gameplay directly but have innovated on the systems of the genre. This behavior has led to what I consider to be a stale endgame game to game that often or exclusively boils down to trivializing the content such that it's comparable to a slot machine, an idle game like Eggs Inc., or a "phone" game.

I think PoE2 is working hard to evolve the genre to what id consider to be a "next gen" ARPG, where most or all previous games fall into a large "Diablo 2 inspired" bucket. I think No Rest for the Wicked is similarly attempting to evolve the genre. A counter example for the genre is Titans Quest 2 which seems to be falling squarely in the "Diablo 2 inspired" bucket.

I'd like to see more "No Rest for the Wicked" level of swings regardless of if you consider that EA game a hit or miss in its current state.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Big fan of idles and incrementals, you have inadvertently advertised PoE2 to me haha. Thanks for your thoughts and explanation!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 days ago

That's totally cool by me, it's a fun game. PoE2 is probably the best ARPG on the market, it's just falling short of what they sold me (and the community at large) on. But for now, it's definitely an idle game during mapping with the right build (and the wrong build will see you roadblocked progression-wise).

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 days ago

I think that "slow" doesn't work for a live service game simply because it's a live service game.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Am I the only one that thinks PoE stands for Pillars of Eternity (and Power over Ethernet) and gets confused?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago

Just be happy PoE did not get dlc called "+"

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

I'm a filthy casual with one of each class, and aside from my precious "Big Hammer From Sky" needing heavy stuns to activate, I'm having fun with Huntress and understand its still early access... So 'devistating' seems a bit extreme and click-baity to me.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 days ago (5 children)

Genuine question for PoE1 veterans: What is it exactly, that people want from the sequel?

With my little experience in 1, I was excited about the new gem system, and the idea of not having to deal with stacks of 20 prefixes on high-end mobs, and it seems that at least with the latter nothing has changed

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

What is it exactly, that people want from the sequel?

Bigger skill tree, so you can make even more fun of D4.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Yes, because getting so lost in the skill tree that you can easily gimp your character by clicking on the wrong node is exactly the direction they need to push more towards.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I kind of find it fun to try new directions in the skill tree instead of just following someone else's guide. Yes, it means I might gimp my character and I have but it's not that big of a deal to fix and try something else.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 4 days ago

I was excited for...

the new gem system - there was this promise, that you don't have to roll fusings/chromatic/jeweller orbs anymore to make the sockets fit for your build on a certain item.
the graphical update - game looks phenomenal, let's be honest here.
Technical Upgrades on the engine - PoE1 has a shitton of technical debt and runs like ass. I was excited for them to be able to maybe start from scratch, or solve some longer lasting pains, that they never got around to with PoE2 (since the games ended up so different, that they drifted apart).
More smooth gameplay - I enjoyed the look of some of the older demos. It really seemed like travel skills felt more fluid and combat overall had more flow to it.

But honestly, I'm not really the right person to judge PoE2, I played roughly 10 hours in 0.1, almost finished Act 1 but then Life got a bit in the way and my playthrough fizzled out. From what I remember, monsters were too strong and too fast, playing melee kinda sucked (as is tradition).

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 days ago

The writing was on the wall for PoE2, so I'm not angry or disappointed, I'll see where things go.

I would have wanted:

less boss fights, not more, I find them bad and boring.
maybe an interesting take on the gem system, but essentially removing it is lame. They also removed / didn't reintroduce some gems that unlock certain interesting options, so I'm still waiting on what they game is like on actual full release.
maybe a revision and tighter integration of the more interesting league mechanics (incursion? ava's thing)
could have done without an idiot plot in terms of writing

the slow combat isn't bad, but the game is confused. You just can't have both fair fights with rare mobs with white gear and white mobs and rare gear. Either one is too easy or the other is too hard, or the items lack oomph. Impossible to resolve.

I agree on the modifier stacking on mobs.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

I was happy when it was going to just be an extension of the base game that made it prettier, smoother, and skyrocketing the already gratuitous content. I was truly looking forward to not having to admit through the same campaign each league for 8 hours. (Guess why I'm not playing Poe 2 0.20...)

Making it a different game was a clear signal that they wanted to follow The Vision that we'd already seen play out with ruthless mode.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

My expectation was combat would be more of a setup/payoff play style with situational skills and players suffering resource attrition over long fights and maps when compared to PoE's use one skill to clear the entire screen as fast as possible so you aren't one shot by a random rare that is harder than the map boss.

A lot of what they've said helped inform that understanding, but it's really hard to meaningfully combine skills when mobs are basically trying to shoot/rush you as soon as you can see them.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 days ago

The maps in act 2 and 3 already felt too long and repetitive, if normal mobs just take longer to clear that's a big turnoff to an already underwhelming experience.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Played this for a few weeks at launch and kinda just fizzled out with it. I feel like I hit a max level and just lost interest. Anything I should return to check out?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

It’s still early access. It’s v 0.2 now, just let the die hards and streamers playtest it and come back later when it’s more complete

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

No it's worse now in many ways. They think they're making a hard game but really it's just grindy and tedious.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I love my huntress

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

In my head cannon she worships Khorne, "Blood for the blood god!"

Also, isnt that accent Birmingham..? Ignorant yank here

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Seen some exiles complain about it in the Last Epoch forums, hoping their 1.2 patch is way better, but didn't think it was so bad I'ld see articles bashing the patch.

Gonna be an interesting patch launch next week....

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 days ago (4 children)

You can go blast monsters in PoE. Why would you want PoE2 to be just another PoE?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago

Because it's a hack-and-slash Diablo clone. The whole point is quantity of enemies.

If you want Dark Souls, go make another game and call it something else. You can't just make Starcraft, and then say that Starcraft 2 is going to be an FPS.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Problem is monsters in poe2 blasts you like in poe 1

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Sure, the monsters are currently to fast and aggressive compared to the player. But that is a different point than what the article is trying to make. The fix to that isn't taking PoE2 and making it into PoE again.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 days ago

Agreed

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago

you mean the game they promised they would continue to support and then failed immediately on that front? this company could barely handle developing one game. lots of passion but poor planning.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 days ago

I'm sorry to say but until they begin updating PoE1 you really cannot blast monsters there and phrecia doesn't count. And if you think that logging into a game without updates for a year is fun you really don't get how the game appeals on a seasonal manner.

For now, we only have poe2. When they finally deliver the next poe1 league I won't care as much.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Disastrous? This patch feels faster than the first one. If you're going too slow, get a better build.

Literal skill issue.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 4 days ago (3 children)

I'm enjoying this patch. Let the devs cook and stop trying to minmax the fun out of every game. Join us in g69 in game!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Doing my part to balance out you being ratio'd. Obviously everyone plays this with different expectations, but for some of the players, I think they arent trying to have fun but trying to be the first to find flaws.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 days ago

i know how the devs cook. i've been following this game since closed beta. tons of passion but many actions can really only be taking as loathing their playerbase.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

I just have this thing where when I see the devs burning it I have to say something.

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