Another weekend comes to a close so let’s look back at all the PC gaming goodness in the latest “This week on IncGamers“.
- The Wolf Among Us – Episode 1 Review
- Hearthstone Preview
- IncGamers Podcast #136 This week: Watch and Wait Dogs, Steam controller action, Human Revolution’s director’s cut, The Wolf Among Us and Smugglers V.
- Magicka Wizard Wars Preview
- City of Titans Interview – With the Kickstarter goal reached, funding continues on City of Titans. We catch up with the team to discuss their plans for the game and the campaign.
- FIFA 14 PC Review
- The Dark Eye Demonicon Preview
This week coming up is a big week for the guys at Grinding Gear Games who will be launching Path of Exile on Wednesday. IncGamers.com will be running a special Path of Exile week where we will be talking to the development team, giving away Path of Exile special Divine, Regal and 200 Points packs, and also bringing you a few exclusives too. Keep an eye on IncGamers this week for all of that as well as the daily PC gaming news and features.
Path of Exile is what Diablo 3 should’ve been. Go play it if you haven’t already 😀
To be fair is not the ARPG of the year IMHO. Still waiting for the game that will carry the Diablo 2 torch.
Actually, it is.
Path of Exile. What a game! 🙂 It’s been so awesome to follow (and play) their development for the last couple of years.
I’ve got nothing but respect and admiration for those guys.
except the game’s combat sucks beyond belief. I’m gonna try it again tomorrow since its been a few months since I last tried. I just couldn’t get past the 3rd or 4th quest. So bloody boring and so hard to see the monsters as they don’t stand out very much.
if you’re going to try it you should wait 3 days instead of doing it tomorrow.
Three days and it comes out of beta: new skills, new monsters, some map level readjustment, new races, new items, a new class.
And stopping after the 3rd quest is like quitting D2 in the Cold Plains and claiming the combat is boring and slow because you’re always running out of mana and you can’t run more than once screen before running out of stamina.
That would actually make me quit just about every modern game.
But I actually enjoy Path of exile a lot, so no hate. I agree with Charons that the combat is the weakest part of the game, but it has huge customization and interesting character development. So i gladly play it whenever I get tired of Diablo 3 and LoL.
The combat is intentionally clunky in the beginning.
Why?
I mean, I played through the entire game that was available up until now a few months ago. It was okay, I guess, but I bounced off of it and went right back to D3. I don’t really know why you’d willingly reduce fun for a player as part of your design goal at any point.
I also don’t know if the combat gets much better. There’s not much incentive to use a variety of different attacks (2-3 at most from what I was able to glean). The elite monsters are basically indistinguishable (in terms of combat mechanics) from regular ones, and while the A2 end boss was a lot of fun, the A1 and A3 bosses were really, really boring kite-fests.
I really enjoy the starting slow aspect of POE
it really makes character progression more pronounced
you start off pretty slow and pretty weak, but you really feel your character’s growth in power as the game progresses
I like both A1 and A3 bosses
A1 requires you to have cold resistance,
the boss hits hard, and you have to run and position yourself to avoid the cold attacks if you’re low on resistance
and just as soon as you kill the first boss another one spawns and it has with minions
the A3 requires lightning resistance and cold resistance,
and I like how she pops into and out of portals, escaping your attacks and getting you from behind
and her ice attacks are vicious
I think she’s a great boss for multiplayer
It’s done to emphasize your growth and power from making correct passive choices throughout normal difficulty and does not last long. If by act 3 it was still clunky, I suggest you rethink your build.
The rest of your comment, as per usual, does not make sense since elite monsters have a slew of difficult affixes that can be deadly enough to one shot yourself.
Eh. Act 3 was more or less the same. Knight dudes? Shoot until they close, run away, shoot more. The statues? Same thing, except they move even slower? Archer statues? Just go somewhere where they don’t have LoS and pick them off as they move in to gain LoS. Ribbons? I honestly don’t remember, they always died before they got near me. I guess those insects mommies spawning insect babies at least necessitated something a bit different, which is nice.
Maybe it was me getting +life on every source I could, but I don’t really even remember my health swinging widely. The affixes themselves are also kind of off: a whole lot of auras are just passive scalar buffs to monsters. Minions can’t die is at least interesting, as is the one that drains your life over time due to proximity. But the rest don’t really necessitate different gameplay, which just makes the elites either guys that live longer or hit harder. There was also a reflect physical/elemental thing that I noticed, but it didn’t really make me play differently, which is, I guess, what I’m looking for.
Furthermore, I think some of the disconnect might be the word “clunky” – the animations just aren’t smooth, there’s a decent bit of desync, there’s never the feeling that I hit exactly the right buttons at the right time in the right order, or anything close.
PoE is the best game I’ve played since D2. Thank you Incgamers for the Closed Beta key. Being able to play PoE for almost 2 years now has been great. Really looking forward to the 1.0 launch, new passive tree, and new Scion class.
PoE is amazing, you must give it a try. It completely outclasses D3 in every way.
I found PoE okay and moderately fun for about 15 hours. But what I really hated was:
Combat was really boring. I don’t think I died even once on normal and A1 of the second difficulty, but I also basically didn’t do anything other than pew pew pew and sometimes move and pew pew pew some more. I don’t think I ever had to react quickly or change my strategy (except for the A2 end boss).
The items felt like a slog. I appreciate what they’re trying to do, and it’s probably awesome at endgame, but all the affixes and the item rerolling is really tedious without actually creating anything “cool.” Even the 2 legendaries I found weren’t game-changing, but just stat sticks. The wide variety of affixes and various not-really-interrelating ways of boosting the same thing made things feel overgrown and tangled. I could see how at the top end, you may care more about a specific elemental damage type, or something, but I found no real reason to care about specific item properties beyond my EHP or eDPS. I didn’t really see anything that made me want to specialize in cold damage, or anything like that.
Passive tree is neat, but too many yawn points. Skills/gems have cool ideas, but lack oomph. Explosive Arrow had some good oomph, but wasn’t a very good skill; meanwhile, Lightning Arrow was great but felt like I was shooting a nerf gun.
” I also basically didn’t do anything other than pew pew pew and sometimes move and pew pew pew some more”
really ?
the 2nd or 3rd quest – Mercy Mission / Medicine Chest features a unique monster that will freeze and two shot any character who isn’t ready for him
and if you do the quest “clear the cave” and kill the necromancer
its definitely a wake up call the first time a Rhoa charges and slams into you and you get stunned and lose 50% of your life in one hit
and I don’t see how anyone can think killing any of the bandits (especially Oak) is easy
and how in the world did you get through Chamber of Sins and the lightning and not react quickly ?
“I didn’t really see anything that made me want to specialize in cold damage, or anything like that.”
uh, because cold damage actually freezes enemies in their tracks ?
because lightning damage stuns monsters and causes them to take extra damage from all sources ?
because burning damage causes monsters to catch fire ?
and all of these effects can be increased by “increased duration” passives and by skill gems ?
so you can specialize in burning damage and increased duration, set entire mobs on fire and watch their health literally burn away
and if you really did kill all Act 1 uniques and bosses without having to react quickly there are ALWAYS races
it seems every 5 hours they’re starting a new one, and the races always have special restrictions – like skills cost hp instead of mana, or monsters move, cast and attack 60% faster than normal
Again, I see all the things you’re saying, but honestly, playing bow ranger:
The medicine chest guy died without getting more than half a screen close to me. Yawn. Clearing the cave was just a tedious slog; I was never in any danger of dying (easy to run away from slow-moving dudes) but it was tedious to draw him out to get potshots at him. Rhoas definitely didn’t do half my life in damage, maybe like an eighth or a tenth on charge. And that’s assuming they didn’t miss when charging, which they more or less did anyway.
Again, for bandits, sure it was annoying to be enclosed, but nothing just kiting around couldn’t fix. I specifically had a Raise Zombie gem in case I was enclosed, so I just would raise a zombie, run around until the zombie was aggroed, take some shots, wait for the zombie to die, and repeat. I honestly don’t remember which one the chamber of sins is (is that where everything went dark?) but I don’t remember anything there that really bothered me.
As to my last point, I wasn’t referring to game effects but rather items. Every single item I found was a stat stick, rather than anything that made me want to do anything else. No item asked me to play the game a different way.
Stuff like races might be fun, but the combat feels so impactless and seems to be oriented around using 2-3 skills (and a bunch of auras/etc.) so it’s not really that fun (for me!) to just play day in day out.
I keep looking for evidence that PoE is fun. Every time I look up a gameplay video the combat looks excruciatingly dull. Just looked up yet another random video and it looks so boring I can’t imagine getting through any of it.
Every so often I see a post like this, and I wonder:
“Did they actually even play the game?”
Generally the answer is yes; they played act 1 for twenty minutes.
I’m glad y’all are enjoying the game, but if I have legitimate criticism after 15 hours, I don’t think it’s fair to lump me in with those that only played for 15 minutes.
The problem, Ivan, is that many of your criticisms don’t make a lot of sense as James L pointed out.
If you don’t like “move, move, pew, pew” gameplay, why are you building your guy that way? It’s not like you’re forced to use that playstyle. It’s completely customizable.
Again, this might be somewhat of a miscommunication. Ranged physical classes in RPGs generally follow the:
Damage from afar, relatively fragile and can’t survive hits
style of play. I gained no mobility skills, so the entirety of the game was pretty much shooting at things / moving to shoot more things. Melee classes seem to be “move towards a thing and whack it until it dies.” I really like the one fight that actually made me do something different (A2 boss) – no kiting since there wasn’t anything to kite. That made me think on my feet. But the rest of it generally feels pretty monotonous, because the game doesn’t appear to throw challenges at you that require on-the-fly decision making, quick reactions, or anything of that sort. That’s why everything feels like move/pew instead of anything particularly frantic or manually demanding.
I’ll happily concede the point if you show me that (in higher difficulties, new content, anything, etc.) the game turns into something more dynamic than what I saw through A1 second difficulty, but so far, only the A2 boss was really like that. The A3 boss lady was somewhat like that, but that fight just devolved to staying far away from her and shooting poison arrow until she died.
“…because the game doesn’t appear to throw challenges at you that require on-the-fly decision making…”
Rare affixes, brought to you by ggg, can spawn randomly everywhere:
-reflect physical damage
-reflect elemental damage
-enemies deal substantially more physical damage
-enemies deal some more physical damage
-enemies deal extra cold damage
-enemies move, attack, and cast faster
-enemies CANNOT BE CURSED
-blahblahblah
Exhibit 2:
Maps
Maps, Ivan, can have affixes that are randomized like items. Random, as in, they are random so unique. They can also be played Unidentified for a bonus. Here you will have to gauge what super powers your enemies have based on playing and REACT ACCORDINGLY.
Nemesis League:
Nemesis League, tomorrow, will have further affixes that are randomized and given to rare packs. These will be insanely powerful apparently.
Now if your ranger was “fragile,” I simply point to your either immature or poorly planned passive tree. Acrobatics could have made him dodge those attacks. Iron reflexes could have converted all that evasion you have as a ranger into Armor for a different approach if you don’t like Dodging. I’d also recommend getting Nullification and similar nodes for further evasion/armor.
My ranger has so much survivability, she uses a dagger and no bow at all.
Not to bash, but he sounds like a blizzkid or casual who didn’t beat d3 inferno hardcore and only played thru normal for the epic rated-g cutscenes + rmah. Credentials! I play a dual-wield witch btw.