Tag Archives: Path of Exile

Two ARPGs Enter, One Leaves

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I’ve been really craving a good Diablo clone lately, but there haven’t been any new releases that have really interested me. Therefore I decided to give some older ones another try. I reinstalled Titan Quest and Path of Exile and started new characters in both to see which, if any, would stick.

Some NPCs in Titan Quest.Titan Quest didn’t last long. I love the idea of Diablo Meets Mythology, but the game is just too dated. I kind of want to go back and give it a bit more time… but realistically I don’t think I will.

Right now I’m about about fifteen hours into my new run at Path of Exile, and it’s been scratching my ARPG itch, but I wouldn’t say I’ve been fully converted to a fan. I can only reiterate what I said in the past: Despite what its fans like to tell you, it’s actually a very easy game that mostly gets its “challenge” from poor UI design and a pathological aversion to basic quality of life features.

I started out playing a templar, but melee turns out to feel awful in that game (seriously, why is he swinging so slowly?!?), so I quickly went back to playing a witch like I did the first time around. Going for a basic necromancer build; I was in the mood for a minion swarm.

I decided to play on “Ruthless” mode. Given my main complaints about the game were a lack of difficulty and the pain of inventory management, a mode that increases difficulty by drastically decreasing loot drops seemed like the ticket, and it definitely has improved my experience significantly.

My new witch in Path of Exile.There are still some downsides. I like limiting gear drops as a way to add challenge to the game and make rewards feel more meaningful, but the incredible rarity of skill gem drops feels more like a nerf to fun.

On that note, I’m still not convinced that the game’s build system is really all that. The skill web looks overwhelming at first glance, but it’s not hard to figure out you just take the nodes that buff the stuff you’re using. I’d actually argue having so many nodes cuts down on meaningful choice because you never really run out of ways to buff your core stuff, leaving no space to take luxury nodes. I’d like that area of effect buff, but I still have about twenty more minion nodes I need to take to keep my zombies alive.

If I’m to try to be fair, I guess it comes down to what you want an RPG to be. If you see RPGs as a math problem to be solved, then yes, Path of Exile is as deep as they come. There’s never ending ways to tweak your numbers to min/max your performance.

But if you see RPGs as, y’know, role-playing games that are about living out cool character fantasies, then I’d say PoE’s customization options are middling at best. Builds mostly just seem to come down to picking a nuke, choosing the passives that buff it, and spamming one button until the cows come home. There’s not the variety of gameplay or aesthetic customization you see in games like Diablo III or Wolcen.

Fighting a mini-boss in Path of Exile.I also need to say that even Ruthless mode still isn’t that hard. A few of the boss fights have gotten a little hairy, but even then I mostly beat them without a single death, and even if I do die, they don’t heal to full health. Compared to how much Belial mauled me on my first run through Diablo III, this seems pretty forgiving.

To be fair, I do get the feeling running a minion witch build is playing on easy mode a bit, but even accounting for that, I don’t see how any honest assessment of this game could describe it as especially challenging.

Which is fine. I wasn’t necessarily looking for a nail-biting challenge. It just makes it hard to take the game seriously when its community has spent so many years heaping sneering scorn at how supposedly brainless Diablo III is, when in reality PoE even on Ruthless is at most maybe equal in challenge to vanilla D3 on normal mode.

I’ve never had a community negatively impact my opinion of a game as much as PoE’s does. Lost Ark comes close, as does First Descendant — for the love of the gods, guys, just watch some porn like normal people.

My new witch in Path of Exile.Anyway, I’m not really sure if I’m going to stick with PoE or not. It’s fun enough, and I do like the art, music, and ambiance, but the minimalistic story is starting to feel more unfinished than intriguing, and the gameplay is very repetitive, even by the standards of this genre.

Walking the Path of Exile

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A few months back, I wrote a post about how I would probably never play Path of Exile. From that point on you had to know it was inevitable that I would.

The character select screen in Path of ExileI did not, for the record, end up trying PoE because my view of it had changed. Instead, it was due to my job with Massively Overpowered. MJ provides most of our PoE coverage, but since ARPGs are one of the main genres covered by my column, I feel I should have at least some minimal experience with the big names in the genre, including PoE. And since it’s free to play, there’s not much to lose by trying.

Path of Exile is not entirely what I expected, though it is pretty close.

Given its popularity with the “uphill in the snow both ways” crowd, I was expecting this game to have some quality of life issues, but I was not prepared for just how bad it would be. What stands out for me about Path of Exile more than anything else is just what an absolute nightmare inventory management is in this game.

Maybe it gets better later on, but at least to start, inventory space is severely limited. Making matters worse is that there’s no gold in this game; it’s all barter. Yes, really. So your “currency” also takes up inventory space.

The barter rates aren’t exactly generous, either. Town portal scrolls, for example, are actually fairly pricey, at least from the perspective of a low level character. I quickly realized the optimal way to play was to just not pick up the large majority of loot. It doesn’t sell for enough to justify the cost of taking a portal back to town to sell it.

For a loot-grinder game, this feels downright bizarre.

My witch in Path of ExileOh, yeah, and unlike any other game made in the last twenty years, you can’t double click or right click to sell things, either. You have to click and drag each item over to the sell window — which is entirely separate from the buy window, because screw you, that’s why — which itself has limited space.

On the subject of items, I do want to note how irritating it is to have your skills tied to socketed gems. Nothing like not being able to equip an item that’s an upgrade because its sockets are the wrong colour.

I also quickly realized that there isn’t actually much depth to PoE’s massive and much-applauded skill web. The large majority of the passives are very simple, and it’s not hard at all to figure out a build. It doesn’t exactly take a rocket scientist to figure out that if I’m playing a class focused on magic and pets I should take the passives that buff magic and pets.

The only thing that makes it challenging is the fact that the damn thing is so huge and is not exactly laid out in the most logical fashion.

The really funny thing is that the actual gameplay — at least at low levels — is really easy. Right now I don’t even have to push buttons on most fights. My zombies can just mow down everything for me.

Near as I can tell Path of Exile’s vaunted challenge is based almost entirely on bad UI design. Clear up some of the QoL issues and you’re left with a relatively simple and pretty easy game.

Combat in Path of ExileNot that I’m really surprised. The kind of people who speak most loudly about games being too casual these days are generally not the upper tiers of players. They’re people who want gatekeeping so they can feel elite regardless of their actual skills.

All that said, there is one thing that impressed me about PoE: The world-building actually seems really good. The setting seems quite deep and fairly original, and I found a lot of interesting lore snippets out in the world. Each is narrated by some surprisingly strong voice acting, and as in Diablo III you can keep moving and fighting while you listen to the narration. It’s great.

Based on its reputation, I had not expected PoE to be a game that puts any effort into story at all, but instead the story seems to have had quite a lot of love poured into it.

This is a world I would like to spend more time in. I am more than a little tempted to keep playing based on the strength of the story alone. I’m just not sure it’s worth fighting with the gods-awful UI and inventory issues.