ZiggyD thinks the recent patches have helped things a lot, he put out a video.
Personally, I think they could do away with some of the older league mechanics that they’ve kept around. Also, they could probably remove half of some of the current zones. It frustrates me every time I play that I become over-leveled so quickly, and stop gaining XP efficiently. Being a completionist I’d prefer to have to almost clear each zone, instead of running past most trash mobs. That’s probably an unpopular view though, and I recognize that.
Well, they effectively did do away with over 50% of the older league mechanics in maps in this league. They’re out of the maps and queued up at the master NPCs to use only if and when you request them now. If you don’t like them, you’ll only see them a bit less than half as much now.
In Path of Exile 2 (nee 4.0, and it’s not due to Q4 next year at earliest), we will no longer socket gems into gear. But rather, gems into other gems (barrage is now a support for bow skills). You get “active skill slots” based on gear (what they showed off in the demo was 4 in a bow, 2 in armor, and 1 each in gloves/boots/helm). There are also “meta gems” which allow you to e.g. socket multiple auras into them (and they’re all commanded by a single hotkey).
Man it looks pretty great, already.
The announcement:
Huh. Well, I pretty much won’t need Diablo 4.
I mean, you’re funding the CPC either way so shrug.
It’s a PoE re-launch with a ton of new content, not a whole new game. Does look like a great update though.
Grinding Gear Games is an awesome developer. The amount of follow-on development they’ve done is astounding…
I do think they are re-writing significant swaths of the engine. But they also mentioned something to do with character models using a specific term. Uh. Shit. I can’t remember. But it sounded like “we took the basic model thingy and rebuild them for ehanced animations” (which you can clearly see on both players and monsters in the 2 footage that we’ve seen).
But it’s still the same game. Just with large parts radically changed. Poe 2 will feature both the current 10 act campaign and a new 7 act campaign (set 20 years in the future of Oriath). Characters “share the same endgame” but I don’t think we’ll be hopping between campaigns. Nor would one want to, I imagine.
That’s how you make a mmorpg “sequel.”
And the silly excuse that you need to make a new game from scratch if you want to upgrade a game engine.
Destiny, The Division, and everything else, will ever understand that it’s better to grow a platform than reset it every couple of years, ending up simply eroding what they have?
I was hoping to play a little more of this today, maybe reach and finish that first island with a new character. Unfortunately, it looks like there’s a patch.
This is the only game I have that I’ve spent more time updating than actually playing. I wonder why each patch takes hours?
I haven’t done any detailed research, but my guess is that they optimized for load time by doing a bunch of pre-processing during the update process. Compressed file is downloaded, extracted…and then you sit there for a while waiting while it does a bunch of optimizations on your installation. Means the game itself loads up faster each time, but the updates are slower. Having said that, if it’s really hours, then you’ve got some bigger issues. I usually end up waiting 10-20 minutes for most patches, maybe an hour for the big content patches that come with new leagues. If it’s consistently longer for you, might need to think about doing a clean re-install.
If you’re playing on Steam, it has the common problem all games that use monolithic archive files do - Steam makes a full backup of files that it is patching for rollback/safety purposes. So it should take ~ however long it takes to make two 25GB copies (backup + patching copy)
The standalone client doesn’t bother with that and will patch faster.
Faster is a relative term though. My non-Steam version feels like it takes a long time to patch. It looks to me like most of the time is spent reserving space. I don’t understand why it takes so long to do that. Regardless, the final product is worth the wait!
Outside of Steam, most patches apply in a minute or less for me on an SSD. Maybe it’s a HDD vs. SSD issue?
RPS tried the POE2 demo, and liked it.
This I do not like, because I am old and my twitch reflex sucks. But I’ll reserve judgement, we’ve got a long way to go before anything is released.
The nice thing about POE, at least so far, is there are many builds where you don’t have to be a reflex maniac. I’m sure Grinding Gear games understands that and I expect them to continue with that design aspect.
I’ve always been on the standalone client. If Steam takes longer than this, I can’t even …
I don’t know why I decided to play today. I guess because I’m listening to a historical podcast, and want something to do with my hands while I listen. It’s only been 10 minutes so far, but it already feels like forever. I wonder how long it will take.
There’s a Twitch Prime giveaway for some character effects.