Diablo himself sticks his finger up your "path of exile" :O

I've only put perhaps a dozen hours into Path of Exile, so it's quite possible they're counting on you wanting to expand your stash if you really get into it, but 1) the stash space given is quite generous compared to most of the games in the genre 2) items are kinda worthless, so there's not much sense in hoarding them.

On the whole, it's not a bad entry in the genre, but I find the genre unplayably boring without company nowadays.

Would you like something Slytherin in your Hufflepuff?

What's with all the fingering in this thread?

I think I may have completely lost interest in hack-n-slash ARPGs. I used to love Diablo, Diablo 2, Darkstone, etc... Ten years after that my interest started to wane.

- Torchlight: Played through once; couldn't be bothered to play through again
- Torchlight 2: I've yet to get to the end of Act 2... after four tries with different characters
- Titan Quest: Yet to finish Act 1
- Sacred 2: Already bored a half hour in
- Din's Curse: See above
- Path of Exile: Minor lag issues aside it played so average I never made it past the initial beach area
- Replaying Diablo 2: What a slog!

The problem I find with these games for me now is that I see them for what they are: mindless grinds of mobs for slight incremental loot gain. It's just not particularly fun, and stat min-maxing with optimal skill paths does absolutely nothing for me. When I had access to way fewer games in my late teenage years I guess I didn't mind because it gave me more game time to combat boredom. Now in turn, these games have become boredom itself. *shrug*
Demons be kinky. ;)

Well it's already in the thread's topic... we've been warned...

I've played PoE. It's very well made, and is free while avoiding all the typical F2P horribleness of punishing you for not paying, but the latency really kills it for me. I'd consider it worth paying for if it could run on a local machine.

Oh, true dat: more DRM-free / offline would be ideal. At least we're not left completely in the dark.

Path of Exile would be better if the art direction didn't suck so badly.

Yea. I remember, back in the day, just trying out new skills and levelling them up in Diablo 2 was interesting. But later on you learn there are a handful of builds that make sense and that spending points on anything else is basically a waste. The experience does suffer for it. The other problem is that, while the action was initially exciting, it eventually becomes routine and starts to repeat itself. This is, of course, made worse by the fact that playing "sensibly" requires focusing on a specific build and ignoring all the other exciting skills. Instead of finding patterns and developing strategic use of a dozen skills, you keep just spamming the same tiny set of boosters and one or two damage dealers..

So when the action dies, what is left? Loot. Loot. Loot. That is my beef with the games of this genre -- they remember Diablo for the loot, not for the action. Instead of making action great, they give you mointains of loot (obviously mostly crap) to filter through. And that too gets boring when you just find way too much loot. Then it almost feels like silly inventory micromanagement from starbound, terraria, and the like.

I'm somewhat interested in developing an ARPG, but the approach I'd take would be a little different. Action first, ignore loot. Just a handful of weapons in a few weapon categories. Pick a weapon, make sure combat is fun enough with just that weapon. It needs some depth, and the enemies need variety; basic combat on its own should stand as fun. Combat needs to be more than just clicking an enemy.

Create some skills, and make sure they all stand on their own in combination with basic combat. Then focus on the enemies: make combat dynamic, full of changing patterns, and different types of enemies that call for different types of skills, different ways of moving through the battlefield to evade attacks or reach targets, or to break up the horde of enemies into more manageable chunks.

Make sure there are multiple sensible ways to combine skills for a variety of purposes -- maximum damage potential against single, heavy targets. Or large area of effect against mass-like hordes. Or fast attacks against quick-moving, hard-to-hit targets that come in rapidly. Skills to boost other skills as well as basic attacks, with different outcomes.. skills to move around and evade. In all that, there needs to be strategic depth. The repertoire of enemies must call for strategic depth, to keep the combat interesting and to give the skills a purpose.

At that point, the action should be engaging enough on its own to make the game worth playing. Otherwise do I really want a game that's just hacking and slashing enemies for hours? The basic, core gameplay must be lots and lots of fun.

Then the story, the loot, the atmosphere & immersion, the exploration, all that should be the icing on the cake. Not something to be neglected, for sure. But if the point of an action heavy game isn't the action but the loot, we really went wrong somewhere. And that's how you end up with a game that becomes a slog. Especially when the only thing you play it for (loot) gets boring too...

The microtransactions in PoE are mostly just cosmetic items, along with some account features (additional character slots, additional stash tabs, etc). None of the microtransactions are things that are needed to play the game. From my own experience, you'll probably run into the point where you want more stash tabs once you're around 80 hours in. After a couple years playing I haven't run into the initial limit on character slots yet. For cosmetic items, the only pressure to purchase those is how pretty you like your characters to look.

The action in PoE starts off pretty slow, then ramps up significantly as more skill gems and build-enabling items become available to you. If you look at some youtube videos of the various builds out there it's like you're watching a different game than what you'll experience when you've only just stepped onto the beach.

What, you don't enjoy our all-time favorite game of redownloading the 5+ GB Titan Quest installer every time they release an update? Come on, I'm sure you LOVE saturating your bandwidth and eating up your data cap!

I finally stopped. I'm going to give it a year and then download it again.