7/10

As of Jun 2024, I have 3000 hours in PoE, which I've played off and on for years. That clearly tells you that I recommend this game, but that also means that I've played long enough to be frustrated by the game's warts.

Path of Exile is easily the best ARPG out there, with a variety of class fantasies and play styles that no other game can conceive of, much less pull off. It has arguably more content than it can support, and Grinding Gear Games (GGG) does an incredible job of providing new updates on a (relatively) consistent schedule, providing new leagues with serious content several times a year, never opting for the sort of lame "leagues" that some other games have. The game's sound design and music are exceptional, and the game even has a fantastic story, if you stop to read it (or listen to KittenCatNoodle while you grind). GGG's monetization is also extremely fair - you can easily play through the main story without spending any money, but you will want to buy some stash tabs upon reaching endgame to hold all the loot you'll be picking up. Frankly, if you enjoy ARPG's, Path of Exile is the best game out there.

At the same time, the scale of complexity in PoE leads to a number of problems at the true Endgame. Garbage loot dropping in such volume that it crushes game performance. Artificially imposed friction in trading that leads to reliance on third-party tools that enable and empower in-game RMT cartels. One league each year that inexplicably kills the game's performance, with no acknowledgment or fix from GGG. An utterly bizarre refusal to stack currency items that drop to minimize the clicking that causes repetitive stress injuries to player's wrists. In some ways, GGG is a victim of their own success, as the game as grown and expanded so many times over time that trying to balance or manage the huge number of systems in the game becomes a near-impossible task. But in other ways, GGG's intransigent refusal to make Quality of Life changes for their playerbase or fix seriously broken systems that even they acknowledge aren't working the way they'd like is a massive stain on a game that is otherwise a shining standard bearer for the genre.

Altogether, Path of Exile is a really good game, and at 3,000 hours in, I definitely recommend it. But its faults become more glaring as you interact further with its endgame complexities, which are also the core feature of the game, and its frustrating that the intersectional complexity that is the game's most basic selling point that so many of us love is what creates the very inflection points that make the game harder to love. Plus, my wrist hurts - one click pickup and currency stacking, when, GGG?

3/10

Context: I'm a 3000+ hour veteran of PoE1 who follows the game's development, watches videos from PoE content creators, and has spent $350+ on the game over the years, but I'm also entirely too lazy to bother being a super-fast-and-efficient try hard. As of 0.1.0 in Jan '25, PoE2 is a bad game. Yes, it's early access and things will be patched and improved, but too many of the problems of PoE2 speak to poor leadership and outright intransigence on GGG's part. I'll happily edit this review when GGG makes this into a good game, but for now, it's not.

Path of Exile 2 was built with very few engineered solutions to the more fundamental problems of PoE1. Every interview along the way from announcement at Exilecon 1 to Early Access focused simply on how the game would be better because GGG would do a better job of designing with 10 years of experience in their pocket. Instead, GGG blithely ignored this experience and the player's concerns while speedrunning their way to many of the same intractable problems as the first game. There are a number of problems in PoE2 that were explicitly solved in PoE1, and you'd think they would've leveraged those 10 years of experience to avoid those problems in PoE2. Reimplementing these problems, oftentimes where changes were only made after vigorous and sustained feedback from the community, feels like GGG double crossing the players to try to force a "vision" of the game that the core player base has already rejected. There's a lot of speeches from Chris over the years about the importance of maintaining the player's trust, and frankly, Jonathan and the PoE2 team have lost a lot of my trust from the decisions that they've made through the start of early access.

Beyond these sorts of problems that are primarily visible only to the "bittervets" of the franchise, I think the PoE2's cardinal sin is that it is intensely disrespectful of the player's time. That's something that could fly 30 years ago, but it's not something that I tolerate from games anymore, and that's a popular sentiment. On many occasions, PoE2 replaces "difficulty" with tedium. Instead of vendoring all your loot like in PoE1, you take it to three different places in town to get the same rewards as before. Instead of getting your flasks filled automatically in town, go click on a well to do it the "cool" way. Instead of running maps and mechanics that you enjoy in the endgame, you have to grind out maps you don't want to do to help push mechanics onto a handful of maps that you DO want to do for a few hours, before having to grind to set it all back up again. GGG didn't slow down clear speed and combat, but just eliminated the movement skills that let you move quickly throughout the map.

PoE2 has so many of the same mechanics from PoE1, but everything is just _worse_. Perhaps the most obvious point is this - one of the things that nearly the entire community agrees on is that endgame zones are too large, too cumbersome to navigate, and character movement is too slow in them. Even GGG acknowledges this is true. And yet, a company with 10+ years of doing a good job making these sorts of endgame zones made the deliberate choice to make these zones worse across several vectors simultaneously, making them less fun and more tedious.

PoE2 is a bad game, and it deserves this review. My EA access is the first purchase from GGG that I regret, and I'm not optimistic about this game getting fixed to a decent state anytime in the next couple of years.