Path of Exile Ranking: D
When I first started this game, it impressed the hell out of me. It’s a Diablo clone with the Final Fantasy VII Materia system plus the Final Fantasy X Sphere Grid. Gameplay is pretty straightforward – the standard ARPG point-and-click fare, but the skill and level-up mechanics are quite deep. If you wanted to you could theorycraft this game for hours. The setting/lore/environment is incredibly well done and you really feel like you got exiled to a crapsack continent where everything sucks and then gets worse. And all this is free-to-play. These guys are actually really good at not harassing/pressuring players to pay money for anything.
Then I got further into it. Let’s start with the mechanics – in a nutshell, they took some things that worked really well from the Final Fantasy series and made them bad. The gems in this game give you your skills (the “Materia”) but they’re random drops just like every other item. Sometimes you get one from a quest, but if a skill you want isn’t one of the quest rewards, prepare to play the RNG game. The reason the “you need to find your skills to be able to use them” system worked in FFVII was precisely because Materia aren’t random – if I wanted a Fire spell I know exactly where to find that. The skill gems aren’t the only things that you need to rely on RNG to get, either. No joke, the entire endgame is based on running maps that you have to find random drops to access.
As for the passive skill tree (the “Sphere Grid”), here’s the thing about the Sphere Grid in FFX. If you wanted to, you could have a character fill the entire thing and become way the hell stronger than anything the game is going to throw at you. That’s completely unnecessary and few people will do it, but you can. That’s why the Sphere Grid is there – every character can do everything. In this game, you have something similar except skill points are limited, meaning you’re going to fill in like 10% of the tree and no more. What’s the point of having a gigantic skill tree if nobody’s ever going to use most of it? Why did they sink development time and resources into building it?
Now the above would bring this game down to a ~B-rank at most, but…then I entered the Labyrinth and the game went all the way down to a D. This feature of the game is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Basically you enter a randomized set of interconnected zones where there’s a boss at the end. You have to fight him in 3 stages and if you win you get Ascendancy Points, which are required to upgrade your class and advance in the more powerful class.
First, let’s make 1 thing abundantly clear: ascendancy classes are not optional. The game is balanced around the increase in power that comes from class change. If you want to progress in this game you need to do the Labyrinth. Now the Labyrinth is a mini-Hardcore mode since if you die in it, you need to start the entire thing over. If GGG’s servers implode and you disconnect, you have to start over. If your computer loses power or connection, you have to start over.
The Labyrinth is also filled with bullshit invulnerable traps, such as spikes coming up out of the ground, perpetually spinning sawblades moving around, and little dart guns in the walls. You know, the kind of thing you see in one of the old platformers like Mega Man. The third stage of the boss fight has traps around the room. So when you get there, you get to deal with the boss’s attacks, his unlimited army of adds, and the bullshit traps. If you lose to ANY of that, you get to do the entire Labyrinth again.
Making this (again, mandatory) segment mini-Hardcore is fucking stupid. You know what I’d do if I wanted to play Hardcore? I’d fucking play Hardcore. There’s a reason I’m in softcore and it’s that I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING PLAY FUCKING HARDCORE. Oh, and as of the latest patch, as if this weren’t rock-stupid enough, they added an “uber” version of the labyrinth that (1) to access, you need to complete 6 trials that randomly spawn in randomly found maps and THEN (2) you need to run these repeatedly since each time you want to do the dungeon, you need to use an item that you only get from completing these randomly spawned trials. Fuck these guys.
The boss of the Labyrinth isn’t alone in professing the game’s “1-shot LOL ur ded” design, either. The fights in the game basically just get worse from there. When a game makes me stare at the screen after dying in 1 hit and wonder what the hell I was supposed to do about that this frequently, there’s something broken-wrong with its design(ers). It boggles the mind that a game that professed to provide an alternative to Diablo III made the exact same mistakes Diablo III made at launch – an over heaping of RNG and bullshit 1-shot mechanics.
So let’s recap: the foundation of the game consists of butchered versions of other games’ mechanics and the gameplay is designed to be frustrating, time-wasting bullshit. The environment and lore are the only redeeming features of this game and even someone like me who prioritizes that sort of stuff can’t bring myself to give this game any sort of positive rating.
Here’s my character that I built up because I don’t like leaving things unfinished. Lots of rage went into building her. Take it from me: no ARPG has lived up to Diablo II yet, but you could do way the hell better than playing this game.
When I first started this game, it impressed the hell out of me. It’s a Diablo clone with the Final Fantasy VII Materia system plus the Final Fantasy X Sphere Grid. Gameplay is pretty straightforward – the standard ARPG point-and-click fare, but the skill and level-up mechanics are quite deep. If you wanted to you could theorycraft this game for hours. The setting/lore/environment is incredibly well done and you really feel like you got exiled to a crapsack continent where everything sucks and then gets worse. And all this is free-to-play. These guys are actually really good at not harassing/pressuring players to pay money for anything.
Then I got further into it. Let’s start with the mechanics – in a nutshell, they took some things that worked really well from the Final Fantasy series and made them bad. The gems in this game give you your skills (the “Materia”) but they’re random drops just like every other item. Sometimes you get one from a quest, but if a skill you want isn’t one of the quest rewards, prepare to play the RNG game. The reason the “you need to find your skills to be able to use them” system worked in FFVII was precisely because Materia aren’t random – if I wanted a Fire spell I know exactly where to find that. The skill gems aren’t the only things that you need to rely on RNG to get, either. No joke, the entire endgame is based on running maps that you have to find random drops to access.
As for the passive skill tree (the “Sphere Grid”), here’s the thing about the Sphere Grid in FFX. If you wanted to, you could have a character fill the entire thing and become way the hell stronger than anything the game is going to throw at you. That’s completely unnecessary and few people will do it, but you can. That’s why the Sphere Grid is there – every character can do everything. In this game, you have something similar except skill points are limited, meaning you’re going to fill in like 10% of the tree and no more. What’s the point of having a gigantic skill tree if nobody’s ever going to use most of it? Why did they sink development time and resources into building it?
Now the above would bring this game down to a ~B-rank at most, but…then I entered the Labyrinth and the game went all the way down to a D. This feature of the game is complete, unadulterated bullshit. Basically you enter a randomized set of interconnected zones where there’s a boss at the end. You have to fight him in 3 stages and if you win you get Ascendancy Points, which are required to upgrade your class and advance in the more powerful class.
First, let’s make 1 thing abundantly clear: ascendancy classes are not optional. The game is balanced around the increase in power that comes from class change. If you want to progress in this game you need to do the Labyrinth. Now the Labyrinth is a mini-Hardcore mode since if you die in it, you need to start the entire thing over. If GGG’s servers implode and you disconnect, you have to start over. If your computer loses power or connection, you have to start over.
The Labyrinth is also filled with bullshit invulnerable traps, such as spikes coming up out of the ground, perpetually spinning sawblades moving around, and little dart guns in the walls. You know, the kind of thing you see in one of the old platformers like Mega Man. The third stage of the boss fight has traps around the room. So when you get there, you get to deal with the boss’s attacks, his unlimited army of adds, and the bullshit traps. If you lose to ANY of that, you get to do the entire Labyrinth again.
Making this (again, mandatory) segment mini-Hardcore is fucking stupid. You know what I’d do if I wanted to play Hardcore? I’d fucking play Hardcore. There’s a reason I’m in softcore and it’s that I DON’T WANT TO FUCKING PLAY FUCKING HARDCORE. Oh, and as of the latest patch, as if this weren’t rock-stupid enough, they added an “uber” version of the labyrinth that (1) to access, you need to complete 6 trials that randomly spawn in randomly found maps and THEN (2) you need to run these repeatedly since each time you want to do the dungeon, you need to use an item that you only get from completing these randomly spawned trials. Fuck these guys.
The boss of the Labyrinth isn’t alone in professing the game’s “1-shot LOL ur ded” design, either. The fights in the game basically just get worse from there. When a game makes me stare at the screen after dying in 1 hit and wonder what the hell I was supposed to do about that this frequently, there’s something broken-wrong with its design(ers). It boggles the mind that a game that professed to provide an alternative to Diablo III made the exact same mistakes Diablo III made at launch – an over heaping of RNG and bullshit 1-shot mechanics.
So let’s recap: the foundation of the game consists of butchered versions of other games’ mechanics and the gameplay is designed to be frustrating, time-wasting bullshit. The environment and lore are the only redeeming features of this game and even someone like me who prioritizes that sort of stuff can’t bring myself to give this game any sort of positive rating.
Here’s my character that I built up because I don’t like leaving things unfinished. Lots of rage went into building her. Take it from me: no ARPG has lived up to Diablo II yet, but you could do way the hell better than playing this game.