There are alot of D3 players who always say that Path of Exile is sluggish and looks like crap but some of them actually try the game and tell its not that bad.
But go to a hardcore grim dawn stream (With usually 10-20 viewers, mostly the same circle) and ask them if they ll play 3.0 Fall of Oriath (PoE expansion)?
Nah man, they refused to even install the game again. They tested it sometime in 2013-2014 and thats it. The game is better now, looks better. And you will like something more when you get better at it.
My sample size is: 20-30 hardcore players (dikkie, dromihetes, twan, hanz gruber, ceno and so on).
I love hardcore arpgs, you recommend me a good one and Ill try it. Even Van Helsing Final Cut is decent.
The problem is that the core mechanics haven’t changed, and those core mechanics are a deal-breaker for a lot of players (myself included). The game is probably just as fun as it’s always been (which is a compliment), but the skill gem system, the economy system, and the lack of modding support are what turned me off after a while. In a similar vein, no matter how many classes and features GD adds, those who are turned off by central GD mechanics like the dual-class system will continue to not enjoy the game, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
I played diablo 3 2 months ago again after having played it for 6-7 months after its original release. I specifically bought the xpack for that and got sick of it within 3 days. No it has not gotten better. It has gotten more arcade-like. There are no challenges, there are no builds. People say builds are done by gear, but the gear is horrible. There is 1 dull run through a campaign and even on the hardest difficulty it is less challenging then the hardest difficulty back when it was released. Opponents have less attacks then they used to. So you get to those stupid boring repetitive rifts to rush to an endgame which isn’t there.
Despite its flaws i enjoyed D3 when it was released. I never liked the warehouse nor the lack of build options. Yet I leveled two characters of each class. But it still was fun to play through each difficulty with your character, see it grow, find loot while leveling since it was a smooth experience. Now you got nothing at all. It is shallow. It is a hollow sugar rush experience. It is a nice game for people who get into these games. People who are more experienced players, or those who simply seek challenge and depth… Stay away from Diablo 3. There are plenty of alternatives much better.
I’m someone who doesn’t stick too one game, although Grim Dawn has the most played hours then any other game in my playlist. I play and stream a huge variety of games. Diablo 3 is not one of them for a very long time.
Just like Path of Exile. Enjoyed it for about a month or two. As soon as I noticed the giant tree is just an illusion of depth my interest waned. Add to that end game which is similar like banging your head against a brick wall for months on it for minimal progress/reward it gets frustrating. In endgame only a few select meta builds work so you quickly find yourself with a “broken” build if you try to be creative and make something of your own. These are key elements that ruin PoE for me. Which is a shame since it has quite a lot of elements which are fun and interesting. When a game in this genre is unrewarding and punishes you for out of the box build thinking then…yeah…screw you.
I don’t see them fixing core issues with releasing a patch/expansion. Those can only be fixed by making a new game. So why bother getting it.
Grim Dawn isn’t perfect either, but it gets the closest of them all. Every build is viable, some require more specific gear then others so it might take longer. Some more “end game” might be the icing on the cake. Bit more smoothing in response here and there would be nice. And that’s the thing. All Grim Dawn needs is more polish while others are flawed in their fundamental core aspects.
I’m an avid GD HC player and I like D3 quite a bit. No, I haven’t played Fall of Oriath, whatever it is. I did played 2.6 earlier this summer. I haven’t played PoE, but mostly because of time limitations rather than just refusing to do so.
My friend played GD HC before, but left because farming felt tedious and he got bored. He also likes D3 and even bought a necro, plays from time to time, usually I reinstall when I see him playing just so we had stuff to talk about. He also tried PoE recently but haven’t stayed here for long.
Another friend got dragged into HC by me, we played both HC GD and HC D3 in multiplayer. He bought necro as well, and looks forward to playing GD once xpac hits.
OP your assumptions are based on die hard GD fans, who are more likely to stick strictly to GD, rather than to anything else.
Actually there are many players who switch between different games of the genre. Like, there are GD fans who will play the new PoE/D3 expansion for a while, same as PoE/D3 fans who come to GD when they got bored with their favorite. I know many of these.
aRPG fans aren’t unlimited in numbers, and it isn’t really the most popular and famous genre, to begin with. So there’s a fan base, which often plays many of the existing games of a kind, of course usually sticking mostly to a preferred favorite.
There are already too many quality titles on the market, and there’s a reason why developers try not to overlap the release dates of the expansions.
I think the main reason why I can’t get into D3 or PoE much myself is because of the random level layouts - they completely kill the immersion for me, and I find it really hard to stay invested in games with such completely uninteresting and/or unbelievable environments, regardless of how good the gameplay is.
I managed to complete D3 and RoS once and that was about it - it was fun, but just…to quote Gibly, in a hollow sugar rush kind of way. With PoE I didn’t even get that far, I got to around Act 2 or 3 and then lost interest. I don’t think it necessarily plays any worse than D3, but the lore and story just bored me to tears - it felt like everybody was just constantly throwing made-up fantasy words at me and expecting them to stick. The fact that it’s really meant to be an online game put me off a bit too, even though it does let you play solo. Those things coupled with the randomly generated environments just made me never really care about going back, and Fall of Oriath does nothing to grab my attention either. That it’s going to include five new acts means nothing to me when they’re going to mostly be set in the same locations as the previous five acts anyway.
Van Helsing Final Cut…I actually quite liked. Granted, the balance was atrocious and the endgame was kind of a mess, but the combat, story and locations were nice enough, the dialogue was cute and the levelling experience fairly interesting. It was a fun one-time experience, at least.
GD on the other hand pretty much nails (or gets very close to nailing) everything that other games in the genre seem to always get wrong - at least for me. I’ve seen plenty of posts from people who dislike GD because of the lack of endgame or randomly generated content, so it makes sense that they’d gravitate more towards things like D3 and PoE. I just ain’t one of those people, I suppose.
I still play D3 a little because a couple of friends do, it’s fun for mindless mashing while chatting, but a chore.
I played PoE in 2.3 and 2.4, but two things irritated me too much: gear progression was painful solo and no physics just made combat feel flat. Compared to GD/D3, that’s very noticeable.
I also recently started using mods in GD and well, that’s a whole new ball of fun! (on that note I think Grimmer and Grimmest should almost be default mob densities, particularly for MP )
Ive played PoE since first day of closed beta =) Tilll Nemesis league everething was Okaysh, well, exept desinc and cancerous trade system. After Nemesis power creep pretty much killed the game =( . After 2.0 ive deleted PoE and i highly doubt i would ever touch it again >_>
I don’t play HC GD but the reason I left D3 and haven’t tried PoE is because they’re online only. I got so sick and tired of the latency and random disconnects in D3 and nearly all online gaming in general. There are plenty of other good ARPG’s to play that are offline, DRM free. I’m taking a short break from GD until the expac but there’s TL2 to play, TQ, Van Helsing, Victor Vran and others. That’s plenty for me. I’d rather play any ARPG with an interesting story or unique mechanics then another ‘rush to the highest level as fast as possible so you can start playing the game’ game. :eek:
For clarification, I assume you’re using “hardcore” in the sense of dedication and not with making hardcore characters. Because I don’t play hardcore even though I believe everyone else in your list does.
To some extent you are correct. I’m very stubborn in the sense that there are a few things that PoE does that I find inexcusable and so I will not soon return to the game. Chief among them is the always-online nature of the game and the fact that the drop system is balanced around trading with other players rather than playing solo-self-found.
If PoE had an offline experience with droprates balanced for singleplayer, frankly you wouldn’t see me on these forums much.
An offline experience would go a long way towards actually making me care more about it though. There are definitely some things I liked about PoE, and not having to be bothered by all the online stuff (never mind the focus on trading, even just having players there in the towns with me is bad enough) would certainly make me consider giving it another shot.
I’ll never play PoE seriously until they fix the core problems with character building:
[ul][li]Colored materia slots is garbage design. Can you imagine how shitty the materia system in FFVII would have been if your materia slots were color-restricted?[/li]
[li]The amount of materia required to build a mid to high-level character is ridiculous, considering the previous point.[/li]
[li]There are too many damn gems and the whole skill system has become overwhelming and oversaturated with support gems.[/li]
[li]PoE’s sphere grid passive skill tree is boring.[/li]
[/ul]
I love that GGG is removing difficulty levels (FUCKING FINALLY! An ARPG dev gets that some traditional design is bad and the standard needs changing!) but it doesn’t matter if the character building is shit.
Grim Dawn has its own share of design flaws, but GD’s character building is so much fun that I’m willing to trudge through the sluggish campaign in order to realize a fun character build.
this would get me back into PoE, if we could either solo offline or host locally with the drops based around actually playing the game rather than the online economy.
the desync issues, horrendous drops for solo players, are the only things that kill playing this game for me, fix those and i’d be inclined to toss some money GGG’s way
