Path of Exile 2 has a lot of work to do

I just uninstalled Path of Exile 2 (PoE2) after 70 hours played and don't think I am going back to it anytime soon. It isn't all bad news by any stretch but some of the design decisions they have made are baffling and discouraging. I am not going to do an in depth review here but I want to go over some of the things I really don't like about this game compared with Path of Exile (PoE1). Just as a point of reference I have around 6k hours in PoE1.

First though I do want to touch on what the game does well. The graphics, animations, and music are all top tier. The campaign is generally fun (outside of how big some of the zones are) and the bosses are fun to fight (provided you aren't super low on damage and have to try them 20-30 times). That might be the entire list of what is good.

So here is at least some of what I don't like:

• The length of the campaign
  
• The entire premise of the end game
• One portal per map
• Crafting is terrible
• Ascendancy trials
• Want to be like Dark Souls
  

The campaign is too long. I have run through acts 1-3 three times now. I started as mercenary into witch hunter, had terrible damage, and had to retry multiple bosses upwards of 30 times. Game is brand new and I had no idea what I was doing so whatever. I get through to act 1 cruel and it takes me forever to kill the first boss so I decide to reroll to witch and go infernalist. With infernalist and a few cheap uniques that cost around 4ex total I was able to do basically every boss either the first try or rarely two or three tries. I was rolling through the campaign and my knowledge from the previous run with the merc was letting me move much faster. I finally get to the end of act 3 cruel after defeating the final boss and my campaign completion time is 1 day 3 hours. I know I will get quicker over time but the idea of spending remotely that much time every time I want to level a character or at league start is discouraging. The campaign isn't bad but it is going to get old after running it 20+ times. 

The way the end game is laid out reminds me of Last Epoch (LE). I recently wrote about Last Epoch here and how I get bored with the end game and quit around level 80 every time I level a new character. This system isn't exactly the same but it shares a lot of the same drawbacks. Lack of control over the layouts of your maps is a big one. In PoE1 you can run the same map over and over if you like the layout. Here you just get whatever you are handed. Also, unlike LE/PoE1 you can't just rush to the objective/boss and finish the area. You have to kill all the rares and the boss on the map to complete it. I haven't written about Diablo 4 at all but one of my least favorite things about that game is having to do a bunch of make work before fighting the boss in nightmare dungeons. Yet here we are having to do make work to finish maps in PoE2.

Another issue is one portal per area. In maps probably not the end of the world but having to pay attention 110% constantly to not die to some cheap on death effect isn't fun or engaging. Also, hearing youtubers talk about how many hours it takes to get to a boss then only having one portal for it sounds awful. 

In addition, trying to craft gear feels bad. It's complete RNG and they have removed all the old forms of crafting. The crafting bench in PoE1 was a nice way to let you fix resists or other issues fairly easily without feeling overpowered. Meanwhile, the crafting in LE is probably best in class as far as I am concerned. This PoE2 system is really bad by comparison. Hitting maps with resistances not capped feels wrong. Resistances don't seem to matter as much in PoE2 but having no easy way to fix them seems like an oversight.

Having to do anything ascend seems outdated just give people the ascendancy at a given level. Running the labyrinth in PoE1 was annoying but I would take that back in an instant. We now have essentially sanctum and ultimatum to ascend. I actually liked sanctum in PoE1 but I think using this as an ascension method is foolish. It's not the same as PoE1 and not as hard (to me) but trying to it as any kind of close range character seems like it would really be frustrating. Ultimatum is more just fighting monsters so it is probably an improvement but would still just rather not have to deal with it. Also, not being able to respec your ascendancy like you could in PoE1 seems like a massive oversight.

The development team for PoE2 talks about wanting the game to be like Dark Souls (DS), a game I really enjoy by the way. The issue with this is there are no guaranteed drops and if you have to farm for hours and hours for a single shot at a boss that isn't like Dark Souls either. In DS you can reattempt a boss infinite times not once. You can also do crazy things like run your way to areas you shouldn't be in early to get overpowered items to start your run. The combat in DS is far more deliberate and you can counter things, control how fast you roll by using different equipment, and lock onto a given enemy to maneuver around them. None of this is in PoE2.

I could easily complain about other things in the game but I feel like I have made my point. The game is in early access so it is not a finished product. A lot can and will change before this is a full release. I am *very* concerned that some of the things they have decided, like the layout of the endgame, can't easily be changed. In PoE1 Chris Wilson said (paraphrased), "Once a player gets to maps we have their soul." In PoE2 I don't think that is the case. What they can easily change is adding additional crafting options, adding additional portals per area, and modifying the length of zones. I think those will happen. I really want this to be a good game but it is not there yet.

My thoughts on Last Epoch 180 hours in

My favorite game of all time is Path of Exile (PoE). I have sunk countless hours (~6000) into it over multiple years. I am also a fan of ARPGs in general and have played a number of them over the years including all the Diablos, Titan Quest, all the Torchlights, Grim Dawn, and most recently Last Epoch. Last Epoch (LE) had it's 1.0 release in February earlier this year. Since then they have done a couple of what they call cycles (seasons, ladder resets, etc.) and I have sunk around 180 hours into the game over that time. I wanted to discuss what makes LE good and what keeps me from playing it more.

Starting off on a positive note LE does a lot well. To start with it has an excellent crafting system. I won't go into crazy detail but just to outline the basics items can have up to 4 (occasionally 5) affixes two prefixes and two suffixes. You can bring up the forge at any time to modify an item by adding, improving, rerolling, or removing an affix. There are 5 tiers of each affix but there are a 6th and 7th tier that are drop only. So finding a good base with a tier 6 or 7 affix that helps you feels really good. Then shaping that into the perfect item is very rewarding. There is also the concept of legendary potential (LP) on unique items which goes from 1-4 and allows you to smash a rare item into the unique to get 1-4 of those mods onto the unique. This requires running a dungeon to smash these together and also 4 LP items are very very rare so it is frequently a gamble to see what gets carried over to a unique. There are more nuances to this system but suffice to say it give you a lot of agency and reward for using it.

 

2LP item after combining

The next thing LE does well is the graphics. Performance is good and everything looks nice. The effects are neat and varied. The levels look good. The feeling of jumping into a bunch of monsters and wrecking them is satisfying.

Chthonic Fissure and level graphics

LE has five base classes and fifteen master classes which are gated by the base classes. The base classes have a number of common skills that are unlocked via putting points into a passive tree and then the master classes have a master skill and then additional skills to unlock via adding points that particular passive tree. You can also put points into the other two master class trees but you are locked out from the other two master skills and the top two skills of the other two master classes. This system leads to a good variety of classes with unique skills.

Warlock passive tree

Those skills are the next strong point for LE. You can specialize five skills and each skill has it's own skill tree with can radically change the skill. The can be as simple as just doing more damage or adding more projectiles or as complex as changing the damage type or triggering other skills. For example my Chthonic Fissure has a chance to cast Chaos Bolts which themselves have a chance to cast Rip Blood which is normally physical and restores life but now is necrotic damage and grants ward (thing kind of like energy shield from PoE). So when I use that skill it gives me ward in addition to doing damage.

Chthonic Fissure skill tree

LE has a trade economy, which I have not tried yet, but it also has a very strong solo self found experience. There is a faction you can join that gives you bonuses to drops and chances to duplicate drops. Plus this concept of prophecies that allow you to target farm certain types of items like helms or wands when you kill certain enemies or bosses. There are strong items that are gated behind the highest end bosses but you can get reasonable gear just completing prophecies and playing the game.

All of this sounds pretty good, and it is but I generally get to the end game which is going through these things called monoliths and get bored and quit around level 80 or so. Monoliths are this interconnected set of areas that you complete and they have certain rewards and after you have completed enough to build up the stability of the monolith you get the opportunity to fight the monolith boss. The bosses are generally well done and they drop certain types of loot and maybe even specific unique items. But the variety of the areas you clear is not great. It's basically go and kill this monster or monsters, kill these spires (immobile monsters), kill enough monsters to lure out an ambush, or go to this fountain and click it and kill everything that spawns. This kind of equates to mapping in PoE but it would be like running random maps every time and the maps aren't interesting. They look fine but it's like run this generic snow area then fire area then desert area and do these same things. I do appreciate some of the in area activities like the loot lizards and the harbingers and exiled mages you can challenge but the areas are not distinct enough and you have little control over which you are running.

Coming from PoE there are literally dozens of ways to farm different types of content to either use yourself or sell. While LE does have some targeted farming strategies I feel like they are very limited. It is down to go for nodes that have rewards you like, run monoliths that give you rewards you like, and complete prophecies that give you items you like. Each of the areas being samey is a drawback. In PoE you run certain maps for multiple reasons including divination card drops, layout, boss, and the way altars work on the map (for example Sepulcher and Jungle Valley don't have boss altars until you enter the boss area). Mesa has the boss in the middle and you can just rush to it if you are doing a boss rushing strat, Strand is long and linear so running it gets you to all the monsters then the boss pretty quickly, and if you want to run legion you run Dunes because it is big and wide open with plenty of room to spawn legions. Now PoE has been out for literally 11 years so comparing the amount of content isn't really fair to a game that has been out 8 months but the lack of identity of "maps" is kind of a fundamental thing. The only strategy here is the equivalent of running a bunch of random maps to get to Eater or Exarch in PoE then killing them and doing it again.

Another thing I am not terribly fond of in LE is the dungeons, there are three of them and they all have some kind of gimmick and are all not terribly interesting. The one let's you combine a rare with a unique that has LP so that is useful but running it isn't interesting it's just the outcome. One let's you gamble for items at the end and the other lets you spend gold to increase rewards in the final treasure room. The bosses also drop certain uniques so you will potentially have to run these. The one with the combining shrine thing you will have to run to min-max.

The last con is the trading system. Mind you I haven't interacted with it myself so this is all second hand but it sounds like the system is janky. You have to walk up to different vendors to look at different markets, the search functionality is limited, and you have to get to a fairly high faction level with the merchants to be able to sell everything. I won't really go into this much more but it doesn't sound good and I am not excited to try it which is why I stick with the SSF route.

So those are my impressions of LE after 180 hours. I would still recommend this game to anyone who wants a good ARPG, you will definitely get your $35 out of it and the developer is committed to adding more content down the line.

Why NHL 23 and 24 suck and what can be done to fix this series

I have been playing hockey games since the beginning of time. I started forever ago with things like NES Hockey, Wayne Gretzky hockey, 2k Hockey, and of course the ubiquitous NHL series from EA. The series has had it's ups and downs but has generally been good over the years. In 2009 they added perhaps the best feature to a hockey game ever with online team play. This mode let you and your friends play against groups of other people online. It has evolved over time to be called EASHL and added teams and playoffs and a lot of good features.

The series has had a few years where the game wasn't as good as normal. NHL 13 jumps to mind where the goalies were essentially unbeatable unless you scored off a rebound. But NHL 14 was great as was 15 and our faith was restored. My friends and I played a lot of EASHL since 2009 typically we would play each year until maybe a month before the new release. This has changed the past two years for NHL 23 and NHL 24 we have lasted until perhaps January before the game irritated us so much we quit. For those keeping score that is 8 months before the release of the next version, two years in a row. 

I will attempt to break down what is wrong with the game and what EA needs to do to earn back our trust when it comes to getting this hockey game back to a game we want to play until the next version is out.

The base game is suspect. A couple of years ago they made a change to the frostbite engine and since that change the game hasn't felt right. Obviously reworking a game for a new engine is going to cause problems but it seems like they haven't fixed the wonky physics caused by the change. The first year of the change you could understand things would be iffy and you could let a few things slide. That first year what killed the game for us was after a long and arduous process of figuring out how to score and defend our team had finally found our game then in the middle of the season they dropped a tuner patch that essentially wiped out all that progress and put us back to struggling to score and defend. Given how hard it was to get to that level having all of that taken from us in a single tuner was the final straw and we tapped out.

They add new features that no one wants and add no value to competitive play. They seem to add these each year in an attempt to make the game fresh and new. This year they added three things, a couple of returning items, and the full pressure system. The first two things were broken sticks and the hip check. Broken sticks are completely random but seem to screw us at the worst possible times. They do not add any value they just add more randomness which is not what a competitive game needs. Then there is the hip check. To begin this year it was completely broken. They have since balanced it somewhat but it is still overpowered. To me if you are going to put the hip check in the game it needs to function perfectly and work like an actual hip check. Until then just don't put it in. It is just a far too effective way for players playing small to be able to separate the puck from basically anyone.

The third addition is the full pressure system. Anyone playing with this for 5 minutes could have told you this system sucks. The idea is if you keep it in the offensive zone a pressure meter builds until you get to full pressure and the defenders get penalties to skating speed, other attributes, and do not regenerate energy. The goalie also loses energy and plays more erratic. There are so many things wrong with this system. One the other team can just pass it around the outside until the pressure bar fills up. They did tune this a bit to make teams have to get hits or shots in the offensive zone to fill it up quicker and lowered the penalty to speed for the defenders but when you are under full pressure it sucks and it rewards a lot of skating around the outside in the offensive zone not really doing anything which isn't great gameplay. You already had teams doing this in previous years trying to spin off of hits to break down defense to 2 on 1s constantly using LT spam but now it is just easier to get the team to full pressure and eventually you are going to score.

The game would be made immeasurably better if they just fully removed those three additions. I am pretty sure most players would be happier with improvements to the base game rather than these gimmick additions that just make the game more annoying and do nothing to address basic issues. If nothing else add these features to offline modes and focus on making online modes as smooth and bug free as possible.

This years game was also extremely buggy. Probably the most buggy version of it I can ever remember. Being in year two of the new engine this kind of surprised me because you would figure they would be working with a more familiar base this time around. My only conclusion is that they focused resources on the new features rather than making the main game stable and complete. An example of a bug was when we upgraded to our 2nd arena in EASHL we lost our custom jerseys and could do nothing to get them back. We had to reform our club to get custom jerseys back.

So let's move on to matchmaking, luck, and smurfing. This year or last they changed the match making to not be based on divisions but based on player ranking. There are still divisions but they seem to basically mean nothing other than for the playoffs if you are D5 and up you are in one playoff and if you are in D6 and below you are in the other. That's it. So basically nearly every game is a sweatfest. Before we would match up with some easier competition and some harder competition but now it is difficult games nearly every time. This is where luck comes in. Hockey is inherently around 1/3rd luck in real life. In this game I would say it is more like 2/3rds. Goalies make saves they shouldn't on a sniper with one tee on a 2 on 1 lasered towards the top corner. Goalies don't cover pucks they should cover or kick pucks back to opponents for easy goals. Goalies let in unscreened wristers from above the top of the circle, from bad angles, and from other non-dangerous areas of the ice. Also, there are far too many instances where you will get bumped and the puck will end up in your own net. It used to happen once in a while but it is far more frequent now. In addition, hitting is very inconsistent. You can line up a guy perfectly and one time you flatten them and other times they will slide off you like teflon. This is with or without truculence small or large players. It doesn't seem to matter. Also you can't cancel a hit animation so if you wind it up you have to skate to open ice to let it go if you don't actually want to hit someone if the situation changes. This looks and feels terrible and causes the game play to be very choppy swapping from defense to offense. So no matter how well we play it feels like if we win or not is based on mostly luck. In a competitive game this is a terrible feeling. We have played well and gone 1-5 on a night and played fairly meh and gone 5-1.

As for smurfing, we had to remake our club due to that jersey bug and we did it a few weeks before the playoffs started. We weren't able to get to D5 before the playoffs started so we were like oh at least we should have a pretty easy go of it. We ran into so many teams that were using 30k ranked ringers that were either just added to these low ranking teams or the teams were setup to add these players. It was a terrible experience and far worse than previous years. Not sure what EA was trying to fix with this system but it clearly didn't work. Aside from the fact that somehow we nearly always get people who are ranked near us but when we don't we get people who are 3-5k higher consistently. 

So I am not a game developer but I can tell you what I want to see in NHL 25. Focus on the base gameplay and physics. Make the game skill based not luck based to the extent to which you can do that. There will be variance but it can't be as bad as it is now. Remove unnecessary features and only add features that are 110% ready to go and not exploitable. This is a video game not a simulation do what is fun not what is 100% accurate. BTW, the glass breaking is mostly fun but also completely pointless and can kill a scoring play at the wrong time.

Finally I am begging literally any game company to create a competing product. I feel like the EA effective monopoly on NHL games has really caught up to them in terms of effort and focus with literally no one else pushing them to be better. Madden was far better when 2k was pushing them same with NHL. We desperately need that competition back. But baring that EA just needs to do better. All around.

NHL 15: Build of the Week -- Power Forward

Sorry, I have been out of the loop here for a while. My low level of enthusiasm for NHL 15 because of the lack of a next gen version has sapped my will to write about it. That is until now. So let's dive into the build.

Power Forward
Legend 2
6'2"
195 lbs
Regular flex
Second curve from the top
13" Skates

Deking: 88
Hand-Eye (+7): 90
Offensive Awareness (+7): 86
Passing: 70
Puck Control (+7): 89
Slap Shot Accuracy: 65
Slap Shot Power: 65
Wrist Shot Accuracy (+7): 88
Wrist Shot Power (+7): 80

Aggressiveness: 90
Body Checking: 68
Defensive Awareness: 86
Discipline: 85
Faceoffs: 65
Fighting Skill: 65
Shot Blocking: 65
Stick Checking (+7): 88

Acceleration (+12): 90
Agility (+7): 84
Balance: 67
Durability: 90
Endurance: 86
Speed (+12): 90
Strength (+7): 83

Built at http://pixelhockey.net/builder/p/jmpeLLFK

This type of build should be pretty familiar if you have seen my previous builds. Offensively it looks like accuracy over power is the way to go again for the shot. Passing gets fiddly if you put it up too high so minimal spending there. Max puck control, deking, and hand eye let you hang onto the puck. You can pick corners from the high slot with this build pretty easily.

Defensively the maxed stick check, defensive awareness, and aggression are highlights. To avoid unnecessary fights keep body checking low. If you play a more physical game you can feel free to increase that by taking away from say discipline or aggressiveness. The aggressiveness is to be able to corral loose pucks. It has a good stick check and isn't prone to tripping players like the playmaker.

In athletics it is all about the speed and acceleration and endurance. Agility is nearly max as well. Strength is solid. Balance is for left overs. Durability is maxed but injuries still happen with alarming frequency. It is an inexpensive stat so spending points there probably doesn't hurt the build. Injuries really need to go away (or be completely revamped) in EASHL. Getting hurt, especially if it is skating, ruins the rest of your game.

So why power forward? Playmaker trips everything in sight. Two way forward can't score well enough. Grinder ditto. Sniper is too squishy and doesn't shoot any better. Enforcer (pause while there is lots of laughter ... still pausing ... more laughing ... catches breath finally...) um ... no. Obviously you are not going to play this build at center. For center I would go two way forward. You won't score quite as much but max faceoffs and great defensive ability along with decent offense is a good balance. Maybe if I get ambitious I will put up my two way forward center build.

NHL 15 vs. NHL 14

After playing the pre-release version of NHL 15 we have decided we are going to play on the 360. Despite the exact same interface there have been some changes to gameplay which I will discuss below.

Here are differences I have noticed between NHL 15 vs. 14:

• No touch icing makes the game quicker and eliminates those times your CPU D decide to take a terrible line to the puck.
• Icing in general seems to be called more consistently. As opposed to last year where it was basically a coin flip as to when they were going to call it.
• Injuries seem to make much less of a difference. I don't know if this is a side effect of just not having many cards but I have barely noticed a difference when I get injured.
• The game misconduct is back in. This is really good because it should cut down on people running you from behind. The downside is I have seen a couple of five minute interference calls where they look no worse than incidental contact.
• The high flip dump super bounce is gone. So people can't cheese you with those.
• Off puck collisions between players on the same team could both help and hinder you depending on who it happens to.
• The physics just feel somewhat different overall. To this point I would call them improved.

There are other observations I think are too clouded by lack of attributes to be able to come to any solid conclusions. These include the poke check being poor and scoring being difficult. I suspect these are going to clear up over time just like in 14.

So there you have it. Are these changes enough to justify buying NHL 15 on last gen? That is a call you will have to make.

NHL 15: EASHL Fail

The game I was most looking forward to this year was NHL 15 on Xbox One. The though of a better engine and crisper graphics combined with the ability to stream to Twitch or just grab highlights on the go seemed like the breath of fresh air the series needed. As it turns out this was not to be. EA decided to leave EASHL (and other modes) out of next gen in favor of overhauling the presentation, crowds, and arenas.

In my professional life I do custom application development. This decision from EA is like getting a complaint from a client that their application is running slowly and responding by prettying up the UI. If we did something like that we would be fired. It is difficult to fire EA because there are zero alternatives for NHL games. What I did though was I got EA Access refunded and am not buying NHL 15 on next gen. I would encourage you to do the same.

However, the story doesn't end there. EA happily informed us we could still play EASHL on last gen. Reluctantly, my teammates and I resolved ourselves to the disappointment and decided to suffer another year in the 360 ghetto to play the only must have feature of the NHL series. At this point I think things are about as bad as they are going to get.

I was wrong. As you can see by watching that video they have basically taken NHL 14 and changed the logo to NHL 15 and forced you to look a Bergeron all the time in the menus. I am grabbing the pre-release as I write this to confirm myself but at this point I am not inclined to keep my NHL 15 pre-order for 360. If the gameplay is still exactly the same as 14 then why play it or more importantly *pay* for it.

I will be commenting on Twitter as I try out 15 on the 360 this weekend. I may follow up a with a blog post but it is looking like this may be a lost year for the NHL series. I can see my team just staying with 14 and then maybe upgrading to next gen if they follow through with their promise of implementing OTP in a future patch. But I could just see waiting for NHL 16 as well.

NHL 14: Build of the Week -- Sniper Winger

This week (month/year) I am featuring a build I just started playing recently. The sniper.

Sniper
Legend 3
6'2"
195lb
Regular flex
Second curve from the bottom
13" Skates

Deking: 80
Hand-Eye: 85
Offensive Awareness: 80
Passing: 77
Puck Control (+12): 90
Slap Shot Accuracy: 66
Slap Shot Power: 65
Wrist Shot Accuracy (+7): 90
Wrist Shot Power (+7): 84

Aggressiveness: 84
Body Checking: 66
Defensive Awareness: 86
Discipline: 75
Faceoffs: 65
Fighting Skill: 65
Shot Blocking: 65
Stick Checking (+7): 86

Acceleration (+7): 90
Agility (+12): 88
Balance (+7): 75
Durability: 75
Endurance: 87
Speed (+12): 90
Strength (+7): 83

The offense is going to look somewhat weak compared with a playmaker outside of the shot and puck control. You aren't going to feather great passes across the ice to people for one timers unless they are completely open. What you will do though is score goals in bunches. This build puts pucks in the net like no other. The shot is nicely balanced and will pick corners with ease. The puck control lets you hang onto pucks in high traffic areas so you can get your shot away.

Defensively it looks somewhat weaker than a playmaker as well but it has a surprisingly good pokecheck given the rating. The solid aggression and defensive awareness make this build respectable at picking up loose pucks as well. While the body checking is low it is notable how often this build knocks people down. That may have something to do with the athletics.

One of the things I never liked about sniper before was how it felt skating. It was awkward and didn't turn well and seemed like it was a step down from most other choices. This setup though feels very quick and responsive with the maxed acceleration, agility, and speed along with the 13" skates. Balance and durability are just enough to get by. Strength is maxed here as well and while it is not a very high rating it seems to factor in to how well the build hits.

How to play this build?  Pretty much get open in good scoring position and fire away when your teammates set you up. Or pick up the puck with speed in the neutral zone and beat the goalie off the rush. You are the trigger man with this build. This is not a support build. If you aren't going to shoot a lot then I suggest picking another build.