After enjoying this game for over 2000 hours across several years, I have to say that the most recent update and the development manifestos that outline future updates no longer inspire me to play the game.

Path of Exile is plagued with a number of design issues that horribly interfere with your average player's ability to make progress in this game. The game has suffered from content creep, to the point where the game is horribly bloated with various systems. The developers have acknowledged this content creep and the power creep of players that go along with it, and have been steadily increasing the difficulty of the game to offset this. However, this approach is not sustainable and they took the decision to nerf all player damage in the game quite harshly. This was not met with a change in enemy behaviour or stats, making the game so much grindier than it already was.

Due to the difficulty spikes these changes have brought, many skills are no longer viable as they do not have the damage or defensive qualities required to progress through higher levels of content. In a game where you are supposed to be encouraged to try out different builds and gear combinations, it takes so much investment and time to get a character off the ground following a build guide someone else has already figured out months prior, never mind experimenting yourself.

If you do not dedicate 12 hours a day to this game, with knowledge of how to farm for currency and gear, you will not progress. This is the simple truth to the game. Gear drops that are useful to you are practically non-existent and thus you are forced to use a trading system with other players which is incredibly archaic because the development team refuses to add any quality of life.

Most of the content in the game is locked behind RNG, meaning you will not see it the majority of the time. When you do get access to special boss encounters, it is almost always better to sell that access to other players and guarantee yourself some income to use in the trading system, as this guarantees incremental increases to your character, rather than gambling those encounters at the chance of getting a loot drop either good for you or valuable enough to be sold. Due to the infrequency of encountering these special events and bosses and due to the over-tuned difficulty in the game, you are likely to die and fail them with zero reward for your first few times, which further pushes you towards selling the content rather than experiencing it.

The game does not want you to play it. The developers themselves have insisted they want content that is inaccessible to average players and that they can always watch their favourite streamers who dedicate their entire lives to playing this game, just so we can witness these encounters.

I put this type of approach to development in a similar style as the developers of Wildstar, who tried to cater to a hardcore crowd with inaccessible, difficult content. That game died because average players had no content. Path of Exile is going the same way, with player numbers dropping hard.

If the developers can slow the game down immensely, allowing people to react to enemies' telegraphed attacks, plus tone the damage down on enemies so character defences matter so you are no longer dying in less than a second of engaging in combat, this review will likely change, but I can't recommend this game in its current state. People also need to be able to access content so they can practice it, it is fine to have bosses and special encounters extremely difficult, but when you only get to try them once or twice in your 3 month league window, it really puts you off trying them.