Yeah..I quit my gemling after the first map when I saw the writing on the wall. I was sold on the trailers..shit like this puts me to sleep. I can play vampire survivors for 50 hours and pick it up again occasionally, I cannot play thousands of hours of it.
The real issue is the compounding punishments. You die in a map you lose the exp, lose any rewards on the ground, lose the time and then lose more time as you have to repeat the map without rewards so you don't brick your atlas. Any one of those alone would be punishment enough, not all at once.
This is why my friend and I prefer to do maps together, even if difficulty goes up slightly and makes it a bit more likely to die. Because at least then the other can usually get the map complete and not waste our time more than the XP loss.
I like PoE2, but all this makes me not want to invest the time. I last got to around level 8 and all the cool builds seem to require high levels, but then this grind he talks about here seems so tedious.
Yeah, I think this is the thing. Having a punishment is good - if there's nothing, there's no incentive to do anything but go full DPS and brute-force through the endgame. But you only need one or two punishments for failure, and I think there are probably too many at once right now.
Punishment is fine, but the time investment loss is insane sometimes. I remember playing Maplestory back in the day... The amount of time it takes to get that 2% exp is basically all the playtime I had in a day, but then getting killed and losing 10% exp was just so demoralising... Losing a week's worth of playtime in a second just puts you off playing
The same goes for Tibia. Sometimes it took days to level up but then you die, maybe lag or maybe because of your own mistake, and you lose LEVELS. Not % XP but entire levels. Oh, and also, dropping your entire backpack, with all your stuff and a chance to drop pieces of your own equipment. Its just absurd. They later added a bless system that you could get some reduction to the XP penalty and protection from dropping things, but if you forget about it or doesnt have the money? You're fucked :D
Because "losing" time means you didn't play the game? Weird that you'd ignore the enjoyment you got out of your playtime because you need to play more. If you enjoy the game you aren't out anything. If you're playing for a reason beyond enjoyment then why are you wasting money and time on a thing you don't enjoy?
@@radaro.9682 you made no sense, a person can enjoy playing a game and not enjoy certain parts of the game. I enjoy fighting enemies and earning gear and exp from doing so, I dont like losing all the progress I did during my day because of how I played for 5 seconds
You'll be surprised to find out that hardcore exists for some games where ALL your progress is lost on death. So is the punishment too harsh or are you just bad at the game and not paying attention when you should be?
The paradox of PoEII is that has the best bosses of any ARPG and the biggest incentives to not engage with their mechanics. First run of the campaign is the most fun then it becomes a lawn-mowing simulator.
What I do not like about how punishing the endgame is: I can play a few maps without getting hit a single time (on my subpar frost monk build), but what usually kills me is getting oneshot because of lag, the one where the game freezes for a couple of seconds and then plays everything that happened during the lag sped up. But what is frustrating is not that I died, it is that I got robbed of my scarce good map, the chance to get good items from it and the exp. So it takes away my resources, my time, and it does not even give me something to learn from for the future.
this sounds like why I quit D4. I tried the shitty first season, but their servers were shit and it would occasionally drop me and I'd have to log back in and start the dungeon all over again. I had this happen enough that I quit and haven't played it again since. It was nice in previous Diablo games where I could actually play it single player, this one has to have the always online bullshit and their shitty servers ruined it for me.
10:59 I knew exactly where he was going with this, as soon as he started saying it, and it's *beyond* valid. Different people have different amounts of their lives they can dedicate to their "free" time, and mechanics that punish mistakes by taking that free time away *feel bad*, and encourage building as "safe" as possible... and playing that way tends to be less engaging. So you might quit because you get bored playing safely, or you might quit if you lose a ton of progress to a mistake (or an INTERNET HICCUP), but regardless you're still quitting and not engaging. It's not great design. It's something I've tried to get people to understand but the parapet from which I can speak is not as big as Josh's, so thank you for giving a voice to it Josh!
@@tsunamie1015 I definitely agree there's more to be done than simply removing the exp penalty, but there are _several_ systems that could benefit from a quality-of-life pass to make them feel--make the *whole game* feel more worthy of your free time, and taking away player punishment for "failure" or simply general misfortune is on that list.
@@tsunamie1015 I think it is actually the exact opposite. Leaving the XP penalty but fixing defensive stats would solve one issue but make nothing about dying any more deserving or fun. You will still lose hours of progress to being careless for 2 seconds or a lag spike. Defensives play a part in that, sure, but nothing about them has anything to do or changes anything about the fact that the XP penalty feels like it's wasting (and more importantly: not respecting) the player's time. It doesn't add anything fun or interesting to the game, it's just.. lame. Make the game difficult, not tedious, simple as that.
@@Sniperfuchs If (amongst other changes) defenses get buffed, and If the player has more tools and opportunities to avoid dying, then dying becomes less of an unavoidable "oopsie" and more a result of choices. Dying shouldn't be fun, or deserving (unless specific instances), it should be a sign for the player to investigate an issue. Aside from that, whether an xp penalty respects the players time or not is also a matter of balance and is something that could be drastically changed by altering the xp curve. Which makes sense given the early state of the endgame. Fundamentally speaking, if the xp penalty were flawed by design, then PoE players would have been rioting for years already. Like many other things, it just needs to be balanced.
@@tsunamie1015 "it should be a sign for the player to investigate an issue." It is, by using your time in that map that you just lost. It doesn't need an XP penalty. "Aside from that, whether an xp penalty respects the players time or not is also a matter of balance and is something that could be drastically changed by altering the xp curve." It could, but what exactly is the point of the XP penalty? Why can't we think of features that are actually engaging rather than wasting development time fine-tuning and testing a feature that is largely a waste of the players' time? Sure, there is a value of XP loss that is "acceptable" but why make something "acceptable" instead of just getting rid of it and focusing attention on parts of the game that actually are fun? "Fundamentally speaking, if the xp penalty were flawed by design, then PoE players would have been rioting for years already." I wholeheartedly disagree. There are many features that are flawed by design but are simply deemed legacy and thus don't get questioned or touched. In PoE 1 this is just as much a pointless design decision as it is here. Especially because this punishes newer players more than experienced, which is just doubly a bad design decision. If they die repeatedly, they'll know without an XP penalty that something went wrong. But XP actually offers power in the form of passives for just investing time to level. Doesn't require drop luck, knowledge of crafting or anything. And I think that is a GOOD design decision. Lessening the ability to gain that power is a mistake in my opinion (goes for both PoE 1 and 2).
The stupid thing about this is that this has been known for decades. Even back in the Ultima 7 days of the 90s Lord British was saying that the punishment for death should be inconvenience. So I don't understand why, decades later, that game designers keep making games that punish you for exploring the game mechanics.
Just came home after work, did one map self made build did 99% of the map coming to last rare before doing league mechanics, which are a more deadly, and died from shotgun of 3minions that have a firing squad's synchronisation closed the game and immediately found this video. Feel validated
Losing time it took to fight a boss then have to try again is punishment enough. Taking away EXP is just a slap in the face, makes people want to quit.
Losing time it took to fight a boss, then not being able to try again, losing EXP, and having to farm to get to that boss again, just to fail and repeat the cycle. Nah I'm good, I'm waiting for us to have our 6 portals back. Thanks.
You're already playing an IMMORTAL character with demi-god powers on the EASIEST setting in the game and you're complaining about losing experience?? This is what happens when "everyone gets a trophy" for simply showing up to play sports.
@@NTJediyes. Because it sucks. And is an old bad game mechanic. The real problem in my opinion is that the game rules aren't consistent. The whole campaign though the game teaches you that exp loss is not a thing. Also that you can try easily again if you fail. And revive your teammates. And in the endgame. (And for the last one just in the trails (shekma and chaos) ) It throws everything out of the window. Xp loss. No easy try again and no revives if a teammate dies you all fail. That's just plain bad game design and criticism in that regard is definitely earned. If it were that way from the start. It would be a different story. But it isn't.
I agree, there is a big difference between a game being challenging and a game being straight up annoying. If it's annoying, I don't want to play again. If it's challenging, I throw myself at it until I succeed.
+1 to this. Had both these experiences recently, where I got Stalker 2 and got killed by a (I assume a random spawn) bloodsucker and some bandits right at the beginning after getting knocked out. I uninstalled the game and got magicraft, where I also died plenty of times but never got frustrated. This is something to be asked to game developers in general: are you afraid of making an easy game, so you artificially bump up the difficulty? Or add grind, or whatever else that is obnoxious to most players. In Stalker 2's case, I understand that they were kinda busy dodging nukes, but it's like they're also ignoring years and years of experience from their previous games.
This has been my exact experience playing Kingdom Come Deliverance (in prep for the sequel). The limited save system and fucking awful combat is more annoying than it is challenging. Fighting more than one enemy at a time is certain death, and you can't manually save without spending an expensive item. The solutions fans defending that game give is "go level grind" or "go item grinding to buy the best gear". But you know what I'd rather do in this RPG? Play the GAME part of this role-playing GAME. Just like Josh says in the video, I've dropped the game for now and dread trying to finish it because playing for 3 hours, then losing those 3 hours of progress feels awful.
@@Rex0142king you just perfectly described why I dropped KCD after a couple of in-game weeks. It has its moments but interacting with the mechanics and many of the mechanics itself are constructed in what feels like the most cumbersome way the Devs could imagine
The more PoE streamers I watch, the more I think "Yeah, great game. I'm completely uninterested in endgame though because it sounds completely not fun... and not worth my time."
A good understanding of it, but poe1's endgame was actually stellar. I played poe1 since closed beta. I saw it turn from terrible to amazing. It will be amazing.
wait till its out of early access i would say. its rough around the edges right now, and GGG has plenty of room for improving things. plus, it will be free to play once its out of Early access so you have one less reason not to at least try it.
It's an early access game for a reason. If you don't enjoy the current state of endgame, it's understandable and perfectly fine. After all, it's not finished, let alone balanced.
@@tsunamie1015Early access isn't really a good excuse when it's intentional decisions made by the devs. Some bugs popping up and such is one thing, but they chose to make and send out the game with this design.
easy. dont lose xp, give us all the portals we see, but if you die enemies come back with an "already beaten" tag so you dont get xp or loot from mobs your previously killed. lets you learn to fight the mobs, and yes you will lose some time fighting your way back to the point where you get loot/xp again, but you didnt waste your currency and you can decide for yourself whether its worth finishing the map or you want to quit by wasting your remaining portals (or maybe even add a give up button)
Dark Souls and Elden Ring also take away your experience when you die: you drop your souls. But it's fair because it gives you the chance to recover them: they're waiting for you on the ground near where you died. They even move them to somewhere reasonably accessible when you die somewhere inaccessible, like falling off a cliff. I thought I won't like Soulslikes, but I love Elden Ring. It just feels fair. I don't feel bad if I die, because it's my fault. I don't feel bad when I lose the souls, because I had the chance to recover them, but I failed to do so. The important part: It was me who failed when given the opportunity. I had a choice, an opportunity, an input. It was a result of my decisions and skill, not just some inevitable decision imposed from on high without any regard for me and my situation.
I personally don't like the loss of souls in Elden Ring, but I could just go and mod it out by playing offline on PC. PoE2 currently only offers a brutal difficulty mode of play without any alternative, while at the same time trading is so overpowered that homebrewing your item loadout is strictly a waste of time. It sucks because I enjoy the core gameplay and FINALLY FOR ONCE WASD movement controls in an ARPG.
@@Lovyxia It's all about context. Souls are meant to be a currency that balances risk and reward. In Dark Souls, you are rewarded for exploring and killing monsters, with bonfires playing a significant role in that system. Losing your currency meant you didn’t calculate your risk well enough, and you shouldn’t hoard it. In Elden Ring, that context isn’t quite as strong as in Dark Souls, but at least it isn’t problematic. Losing souls isn’t a random decision to punish players; losing and gaining souls is part of how you handle challenges and decide to manage your risks in-game, while seeking your next bonfire. It simply just makes sense.
@@gsczo Same typebeat as PoE2 fanboys defending PoE2's end-game. Cognitive dissonance and nonsense excuses to defend something that doesn't really need to exist post 2010.
In both games you get to "lock" your maximum loss by spending souls. You also have items that are, effectively, souls in your inventory that you can't lose. The point is that there's intentional design around the loss on death mechanic they chose. And devs need to consider that the commonality of grinding in MMORPGs/ARPGs has a HUGE influence in loss on death mechanics.
You raised a point that was why I was feeling like i was struggling far far earlier, defense did feel worthless. And experimenting felt like it was dis-encouraged. And why i stopped playing and moved on to other things, despite liking the game.
I didn't play PoE 2 but it seems like Warframe but with difficulty. Which is just not fun. Fun is playing whatever stupid build you want still winning. Game that needs you to play "correctly" is fine if its something like League of Legeds or Counter Strike, where playing wrong makes you lose 30 minutes at most, and you can try again with no consequences
I like how DOOM Eternal did the arcade approach. Extra lives make sure you only get punished by making you conscious about having messed up, if you run out of extra lives you only lose the progress of that particular part of the level since the last checkpoint and all you achieved since then. It's still feels like a proper punishment but you still get to keep the previous level progress and "loot" as well as the knowledge of what enemies to expect when and where. Additionally with practically the entire Doom franchise I love that if you die, it's your very own fault or your own lack of skill like 90% of the time. The other 10% is usually just sucking at jump'n'run (in the versions/parts that have jumping) or getting stuck on odd level geometry or not knowing about some intrinsic mechanic (e.g.: how rockets work in the original Doom or where and how to get specific power-up secrets on harder difficulties). When I personally die for example, I take a deep breath and think stuff like "Hmpf, I was too slow", "Meh, my aim was horribly off", "I gotta mind that small obstacle, it has a bigger collider than model" or "I shouldn't take the medipack until XYZ happens in that battle" - the latter of which leads back to "too slow"/"bad aim"/etc. since in that moment I was simply not good enough to get to that point without the medipack. In the end I tend to instantly try again rather than closing the game. The last time I played DOOM Eternal was around 2 years ago on Brutal difficulty, yesterday I felt like playing it again but this time on Ultra-Brutal and while I vaguely remember specific rooms as really hard, they feel way easier and I literally just binged it for half a night and now I just got my super shotgun again and only closed the game when I was so tired that I couldn't be bothered to do the platforming that I need to do in order to smack that crucified demon to break the wall behind it. That seems like the polar opposite of being overly frustrating, it's tough but there's few of what you usually call "quit moments", even dying is just a minor cooldown just long enough to think and come up with a better strategy.
DMC5 adapted a similar approach, which is great. If you die, you can spend a gold orb (limited item) or red orbs (currency) to revive on the spot, or you can go back to a checkpoint. Returning to a checkpoint doesn't affect your style rank and points at the end of the mission, but using an item/money to revive does. So if you just want to play the game for the story and power through a difficult boss fight, you can. But you'll get less and less style rank at the end of the mission (which affects achievements). But if you want to repeat the combat from the beginning, learning to get better and have fun engaging with the awesome combat mechanics, you don't get any punishment for dying other than "jump back in and fight again". On bosses the checkpoint even skips the boss cutscene and puts you right back in the action.
@@PlusOne2Crit I will say he never got this deep into POE 1 from what I could tell. I also never saw him say anything about that in the endgame of POE 1. Although I haven't played POE 2 yet I put 500 hours into the POE 1 Kingsmarch season. In the endgame although it isn't as bad this is a thing for POE 1 which tells me he never got there. Maven and Uber Elder if you lose to them you need to grind out the invitations entirely again to have another chance at the bosses which is frustrating because I am incentivized to get really good gear and just beat them down with superior stats rather then try and engage with their mechanics and beat them with skill. Maven was my biggest quit moment in POE 1 because of how much currency I lost buying the invitations even if I enjoyed the difficulty on that boss the most. Maven should have been the highlight of my playthrough with how fun overcoming her was but it left a sour taste in my mouth how I lost all my currency attempting her even if I was successful in the end. The currency I lost on Maven set me back many hours of grinding which as Josh explained is punishing not fun. Genuinely if I had lost all my currency attempting Maven and had been unsuccessful I probably would have just quit the game then and there instead of continuing to play.
The fact that he needed to ask chat what the death penalty is for PoE 1, meant that he hadn't progressed far enough into the endgame to make a fair comparison
The one thing that kept running through my mind as I listened to the video: “Failure is always an option” -Mythbusters. But in POE2, it seems, failure is actually not an option.
Failure is always an option in science, because being wrong is still a valid result. Failure isn't an option in most games, because the only 'valid' result is completing the game.
@@AGrumpyPanda Except as Josh mentions, games like Dark Souls punish you only with time spent on it, you are allowed to fail and from that you gain personal experience to allow you to overcome the fight. Failure is an option, and you are encouraged to try again. But if you were afraid to fail because you'd lose not just IRL time but in-game progress, then you aren't encouraged to try it. In essence, you are discouraged from failure.
@@Roccondil A case of me forgetting my internal monologue is internal. What I meant was, in science getting to the end of the process in failure is a valid result because proving a hypothesis wrong still gets you closer to the truth, by eliminating falsity. In gaming, ending on a fail state (for example, quitting the game because you lost so much progress that you don't want to play anymore) isn't a valid ending in the same way. In both you can have lots of failures before you get to a final valid ending, it's just ending a game on a failure isn't a valid ending in the same way it is in science.
It's funny how this endgame system is basically D4's back when they added ubers. There's little difference between "Do maps for X hours to find thing" and "Do all the timed events for X hours to find mats to summon thing." Both incredibly annoying and stupid. 'Look, guys, we made a cool thing, we're sure you'll love it, but you gotta pass the time investment inspection first!' Why do ARPG designers have such a boner for gating the content they make? Yeah the rewards are good, but they end up on trade all the same.
Difference is; D4 was viciously attacked for months over it and people still bash D4 over it, but people are already trying to deflect and minimize how bad it is with PoE2.
Poor Notivarg complaining about his IMMORTAL character with demi-god powers losing experience while playing *the easiest game setting known as SoftCore.*
FF7 Rebirth has a VERY similar problem with its Hard mode/Brutal & Legendary VR fights. The bosses have so much HP and are SO overturned with high AOE damage and DPS-gate OHK mechanics that no one engages with them "properly." Instead, channels like Optinoob's and others found optimal Insane Burst DPS strategies who focus on either burning down the boss in one hit, or stunlocking bosses as much as possible so they can't do their full mechanics. It's not easy, and takes time and practice to even pull that off, but its infinitely better than trying to "fight fair" where 95% of the time, you'll die after the transition to Phase 2, because you're about to be hit by an unblockable auto-tracking multi hit attack that will drain your HP before you can do anything, and your only hope is to have saved up enough ATB to cast a Max level fire spell and nuke the bosses' last 20% of health before it can finish its attack animation. I loved Platinuming FF7 Remake, but hated every moment of getting the Platinum for Rebirth and only managed it because I got COVID just before Christmas and got 2 whole weeks to devote to slamming my face against the challenge.
Problem in this type of games is scaling which causes any kind of tanky/defensive focused build to be pointless in endgame anyway since even those builds will get one-shoted, while before reaching endgame it works. You can have a "turtle" build with low dmg that has survivability high enough to survive everything (including "standing in stupid" - AOE). But as soon as you reach end-game, enemy mobs & boss scaling breaks the game and you are about to go through "rude awakening" when you have to re-build you character if this is your 1st one. It also makes mechanic & boss fight also broken cuz stuff that was previously a dmg over time is now a one-shot. So players build to avoid boss fight mechanics anyway since being tanky simply does not work. Same stuff happens in Last Epoch. All aRGPs have this design problem.
Nah you just don't understand defense layer defenses in poe there ways to just never die in poe and when you actually invest in you will feel scammed for not doing it before
They just need to make defense scale WITH enemies scaling then, seems like a rather simple solution. Instead of making defense completely useless by adding tons of one shot mechanics regardless of hp.
I mean you can literally get so tanky in PoE 1 that you can tank virtually every 1 shot mechanic in the game while doing millions of DPS and no you don't need mirror tier gear or investment to do that.
@@IAmMrGreat Outside of Arbiter's hard-coded one-shots (the falling orbs and the flame hallways), and River Hags (also a hard-coded kill on a white mob lol), I don't get one-shot by anything. The issue is possibly more on the end of defensive balancing. On a warrior, it was pretty stressful to tank stuff and you might die. On an Invoker that taps meditate up to overflow 16k ES, and has 15k Evasion (effectively also armour) between any boss hit? I've been hit by every single mechanic in Xesht 4, Olroth 4, King in the Mists 4, all Citadel bosses, and facetanked the non-oneshot (slam, beam, etc) mechanics in Arbiter, etc. If I'm going to die, it was a pile-up of mechanics from a map I overjuiced myself. Or a river hag that somehow dodged herald of ice. It's absolutely possible to build defenses to a point where you can avoid the vast majority of one-shots, but you kind of have to do it using specifically the most overtuned defenses in synergy with other layers. If you're using life? Nope, no good. Armour as a main layer instead of a bonus? Not good enough, and bosses often overwhelm some phys reduction. There's also a few overtuned examples that are way harder to tank (Sky Seer in Ultimatum? Tornado is infinitely more murdery than 99% of mechanics). In PoE1 you can build around tanking even Maven's Memory game, which would be like tanking the hard-coded arbiter one-shots. And in PoE1, you'll notice that most HC builds actually do have very strong and consistent layers. Currently, in PoE2, defenses are just somewhat undercooked, while damage is pretty unbalanced, so the best "balance" is to find one overtuned defensive layer (say, 15k+ ES with grim feast), as a safety net and then off-screen everything from there. We'll see how it unfolds over EA, though.
No one seems to have found a way of preventing all ARPG metas from devolving into clear speed. The quicker you kill stuff, the more loot you get. Damage is to be avoided, not tanked, so defences are irrelevant. And it just gets boring faster
PoE2 is an exceptionally horrid example of that - it features the awful dodge mechanic. The total flashy cluttered screen to a point the mouse cursor cannot be seen. Worst of all - the "maps" get negative effects, e.g. 30% more HP to all mobs, 30% more resistance, 40% more damage as chaos/lightning, whatever. The only sane way to play for many is killing everything offscreen. The physical defense is just bugged -- the armor is useful for trickle damage only. The spark sorc build in the video is another example how lightning damage is the best of them all. The game develpoers have a lot of work ahead, the game is totally not ready for prime time.
Meta will always be like that, this is ARPG, most people playing this genre want mobs exploding. But PoE 1 already "solved" this issue, there are plenty of good off meta builds that's focused more on survivability than damage, they do less damage, slower, but very tanky and sometimes even able to tank endgame bosses heavy hits. There's nothing like that in PoE 2 except maybe the most meta stacking ES mana with Archmage MoM, ED, CI, so you have both high regen, high HP (ES + mana), and high damage (Archmage from mana), and high survivability against chaos damage (CI).
@@PhakesL To put it inthe way Vash Cowaii does for Remnant 2 "You can either play a glass cannon, spend an hour dying to the boss because you're so weak you'll get one shot, or play this build and get it done in 1 10 minute fight." Tanky builds already had an upside.
It's even worse when you start doing arbiter, breach boss etc. Each death not only costs you experience but tons and tons of currency. Especially if you die to the arbiter (and you will the first few times). It is pretty unfair not to be able to train against him but each attempt is so costly
yep, die to Arbiter 'cause he used 1 shot mechanic where you need to get in that tiny circle off my screen 😂 quit after that, finding another 3 citadels is cancer to me.
@@oramisc90 yeah the game needs patches desperately. Their break has been way too long. Releasing a game and then immediately taking a 3 week break is ridiculous.
@@debrickashaw9387 i think the break has worked out quite well actually. the beginning of the EA was always going to be chaotic and leaving the community to figure shit out - ie, what works and what doesnt, bugs, broken builds, ect. means they can focus on the really bad stuff straight away when they come back rather than smaller less significant things weekly. also they did give us a fair few decent patches before they went on break as well, we cant discount that either.
@@debrickashaw9387 its in early access, so expect it to be a mess. they are trying things out to see what works, and not trying to simply make PoE1.5. if its too borked, i really would say come back when its out of Early access.
@@Sniperbear13 I know it is an early access which is why I am not as hard on them as I would have been if it was a full release. But the length of this break is hurting the growth of the game in my opinion. The patch cant come soon enough
yep. frustration is not fun. challenge doesn't mean make the game as frustrating as possible to the point its practically impossible. those frustration games like I wanna be the guy really tend to appeal to a very small percent of gamers.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me at all. GGG is pretty notorious for balancing the game around the top 0.1% of players in ways that punish non-meta players.
This is why I dropped PoE1 and why I'm probably never going to play PoE2. I found it ridiculous that I had this big whole skill tree in front of me with thousands of different build combinations to try - except I was expected to go over to path of builder, A THIRD PARTY APPLICATION, or watch a youtube guide for a build that would actually function at higher tiers instead of being able to tinker around and learn by myself in-game. At that point it feels like I'm playing in order to re-create someone else's game experience rather than actually play my own game.
@@vithefirst6173 Almost everything can function at higher tiers, tho. Unless by higher tiers you mean gigajuiced 300% quant T17s. You might not be efficient. You might not do Uber Pinnacle content easily. You might just need some more currency or introduce some mechanic interaction into the build. But saying there is no options at all is wrong AF. People cry about not having options, meanwhile there are streamers like mathil that do like 20 different off-meta builds EACH LEAGUE that are usually good enough to clear all of endgame. And if your goal was to "being able to tinker around and learn by yourself in-game" then how is any of the above a problem?
@@vithefirst6173 PoE 2 is much better in this regard. I went in completely blind with my first few characters (now I'm trying out theorycrafted builds) and I had no issues. You can play the game your own way and build your own character.
GGG is infatuated with the idea that their games are made for the hardcore gamers, that they are better than Blizzard. While I love POE 2 quite a bit, the endgame is at odds with giving players a satisfying experience, by making certain things just painful like one try mechanic and all of the OHKO. I will always champion hard games, but at a certain point, being hard just for the sake of it by going out of the way to make players miserable is not the way to go about it. That said, it's still EA and very early in the game's life so I have hope that GGG will make the necessary adjustment.
Which is kinda funny because Blizzard didn't make games to the the hardcore crowd. They might have hardcore elements, but Diablo and WoW were meant to be played by everyone, not just the neckbeards.
@@JDelwynn I think that's what OP was saying. Blizzard makes accessible games. GGG claims to be better because they are more elitist. Which is dumb, but it's how a lot of people think about things.
I mean they ARE better than Blizzard. Sure PoE 2 needs a ton of work to get where it needs to be, but PoE 1 is objectively in every single regard a better game than every single diablo game except on the point of lore.
@@YuYuYuna_ PoE will never have the kind of impact D1 and D2 had. GGG is better than Blizzard only because Blizzard sucks now. Being elitist about how hardcore their game is (which is what OP seems to be saying) isn't why they are better, though.
Either bring back the 6 portal defense or make it so that dying doesnt remove your map and instead slaps it with a stacking 15% reduced quantity of items or something along those lines.
10:30 - 10:40 . Died to a rare mob with haste + explode nearby corpses as a couple of its 4+ mods. It was on my screen for like 2 seconds and before i could blink , pun intended, it blew up all the trash mobs that i cleared in that area. Just decided to watch a film after.
6:00 No one wants to be _punished_ for failing, but people do like having _consequences_ for failing because it adds the element of risk. It's somewhat semantics, but the underlying idea is that players do want to feel like they might lose _something_ if they fail to succeed at something, but they don't want that loss to be crippling or painful.
The best punishment I've found is a lack of a reward. When success is rewarded but failure isn't punished but simply not rewarded (like dark souls, failure means you lose the unspent souls you had on you and no more than that, the levels you put into stats stay permanently).
They wanted more build diversity, and they did the exact opposite of what they should have done. They should have built the game so that the super casual builds made by the regular dudes working two jobs can complete all of the content without too much of a struggle, and then have been totally okay with the fact that the super meta builds will completely steamroll all of the content. They should have also removed punishments from dying at endgame. The fact you get punished for failing means that people will avoid being punished which means people will avoid playing things that aren't the meta
there is only half the classes in the game currently, also tons of weapons and skill gems are not even in the game yet, so we don't have access to full build diversity. in the future there can be a lot more variety and such. i think people are forgetting that fact. the builds we have now, could be completely outshined later.
Meta builds steamrolling content are also so absurd right now in the most obvious ways, like using the % max hp of enemies against themselves. How would anyone not see this coming and make the game hard and players weak through almost every other mechanic in the game? Build diversity isn't just about difficulty, but about balance. Lower difficulty leaves more room for balance but the balance right now is beyond broken as well.
@@Sniperbear13 that would only be true if the game didn't incentivize playing the best builds because failing is so punishing. People will naturally gravitate towards the best builds because players will avoid being punished.
@@BuckyDucky many will, but at the same time, people will still experiment and find fun builds that might not be the best but can still do the job. in fighting games, people do find fun in playing low tier characters, even if they will lose 7 outta 10 matches. playing the meta is not always the most fun.
@@Sniperbear13 the point here is not that nobody will play off meta builds. The point is that the game is incentivizing playing meta builds and that is a problem. The more you punish players the more they will avoid being punished, this is the absolute wrong philosophy to bring into a game where you want to incentivize build diversity
It is an interesting topic, and it relates to me as well. I am working on a space combat/exploration game, and the time a player goes "out" and "back" from his home base is what matters. Dying is not a big deal in itself, you just teleport back and your ship is there. So a player starts to go out, does things, acquires loot, and the amount of loot he carries increases. When a player's ship is destroyed, he loses all his cargo and cannot recover it. Meaning as he continues to acquire loot, his risk of losing it increases. I think that's a fair balance. If it were like EVE Online, you'd lose your ship, your cargo, your equipment and maybe even the equivalent to experience. The amount of time you lose is not only what you spent for that particular trip, but hours to weeks of money grinding for the ship and its equipment. Plus it is a hassle to buy all the parts for the ship, you may have to move around, which can take an hour. So what do you think, is it fair to "only" lose ~20-60 minutes of time, which are the things you acquired on a trip? It's not like Dark Souls where defeat is death, and it occurs a lot, and also easily out of nowhere. Escaping and avoiding combat is also well possible.
To compare: In Classic Wow you lose around 5 minutes. In Retail WoW you lose around 1-2 minutes. In Hardcore WoW you lose days, weeks even months of time. In Guild Wars it's around 1-5 minutes of walking back. In Minecraft it's up to 120 minutes if not recovered, ~5-10 minutes if recovered items. In Wildlands or Ghost Recon it's ~5-10 minutes. In Mario games (dropping to 0 life) it's possibly up to 120 minutes. In EVE Online it's hours to days. In single player games it's 1-15 minutes (forcing a loading).
to me it partially depends on how players can die, but if they can realistically only lose up to an hour of progress due to greed, this seems relatively fair, especially if that's kind of the point of the whole game. it's risk VS reward, you got a haul, is it worth it to risk getting a little more and losing it all, or will you go back now and ensure you're safe? but most importantly to me personally; was the cause of death realistically avoidable through experience or skill, or was it a matter of poor RNG and you just got ganked. if you can lose 60 minutes of time because of a random dice roll outside of your control, then i wont even look at your game, if there were tells that someone with experience could realistically tell, but failed to notice, then, while it may be frustrating in the moment, has at least a element of 'avoidable' to me.
Personally there's a couple of metrics to note. Losing active progress feels better than losing already attained progress. If you are 30 minutes into a run and then die, yes it feels bad to lose some or most of those 30 minutes, but anything that wasn't part of the run is yours forever. This is where a lot of the failure lies, in eating your progress further than the run went. There's also the perceived fairness of the loss. Could something realistically have been done about it? Was it a technical failure, did the game warn you enough that you're going in too deep? finally, there's also how natural the punishment feels. If you're out and about and you die and respawn on your ship, you won't have the stuff on you. That seems understandable. You might even have lost the experiences of what you were doing cause there's not a permanent memory repository. But why does it eat your permanent exp?
One point that your game has that PoE 2 doesn't is the voluntary nature of it. If I keep going after a good find, I know exactly what I am risking and exactly where I will reset to if it goes wrong. In PoE 2 as of now, I'm not sure exactly how much time I'll lose and what stuff I'll miss out on, only a vague 'A LOT.' is there. Moreover, the EVE example you listed is exactly why I couldn't stand to do what I'd originally intended to do. I spent months getting to the point I could use a Hulk (at that time basically the best mining ship out there) with the intention of doing Ice mining. I got a goddamn lone in game from my Corp for the skills, implants and the ship. After a few relatively safe runs? I paid off what I owed and outright quit EVE. As I told my friend who did the loan and got me into the corporation "Look, mining Ice is the worst combination of tedium and mind shattering tension. It's goddamn boring, except for the constant horrifying fear that if I look away for even a second, some pirate or hostile or rando jerk is going to decloak, tackle me, and I'll be out this enormous sum of ISK that I'll feel obligated to pay back. Even once I do? I'll be out all of my assets. If I wanted that feeling? I'd join the military." PoE 2, even in softcore, rapidly gets to the point of that same combo of 'boring/nerve-wracking' because of how much you lose on death once it's mapping time.
Stopped playing more than a week ago after two consecutive deaths. After reaching the point where xp loss kicks in my gaming sessions would end in a rage quit after a death, the higher the level the more frustrating it became, to the point where dying 2 times in one minutes span at level 89, squeezed me out of all the morale to go and try regrinding the lost xp, cause I might die again and go even lower. For context I was playing self-made non-meta build, so this video really resonates.
Losing XP is like Demon's souls punishing you for using human form. There's no reason to engage with the mechanic since you only get punished by the game for using it if you die
I’d argue Demons Souls is one of two games I actually like the game punishing you with feel bad mechanics for dying. Those being the characters reliance on consumables and the tendency/humanity mechanics. As it helps the game communicate the main themes of the story and adds dynamic difficulty spikes almost guaranteeing some sort of roadblock if you’re not familiar with the genre. It also adds tension making each decision feel more meaningful and making the game feel scarier and more foreboding. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two more horror souls like games have your main source of healing come from consumables. The game clearly wants you to think about resource management a lot more than the later souls games. I understand that it makes the game more frustrating but imo it sorta payed off with the game feeling more engaging and immersive than it would otherwise. It also adds loads of replayability as it can change what parts of the game are more challenging on any given playthrough drastically and it makes certain interactions and build options available depending on how the playthrough goes. If you’re curious the other game I think makes very good use of feel bad/punishing mechanics is pathologic 2. That game does an even better job. Edit: I’d argue the game isn’t actually made much more difficult with worse tendency as the game significantly raises drop chances. What’s important as weapon upgrades are 95% from enemy drops. Not to mention soul form damage getting increased in lower tendency. What’s this ultimately results in is the game requiring you to grind more to come back stronger than was even possible before in order to defeat the boss that had become in your playthrough a hard boss. If you haven’t caught on the point of the punishing mechanics is to make the game seem more intimidating than it actually is in order to create an even stronger feeling of overcoming adversity. I would also explain the way these mechanics are important to the narrative but I’ve already gone on way too long in this comment. Thanks for reading all of this lol.
GGG has stated that "EXP loss" as a mechanic is intended to ensure that reaching level 100 is not something any player can achieve easily, making it a real accomplishment when you make it there. Even if you buy thousands of the omen to protect your EXP loss, it only blocks 75% so you still need to focus on staying alive to make progress. If we can come up with an alternative mechanic to fulfill that same objective, making the highest levels "prestigious" to attain, I think we could see the EXP loss mechanic removed at all levels. For example, we could use an ascension type system. Remove the EXP penalty and set the standard level cap to 90. To reach level 91 you must complete a challenging trial of some sort. To reach 92 after that you must complete an even harder trial, etc. This maintains the "prestige" of reaching those upper levels without needing the EXP penalty to be ever present for the general populous.
The punishment aspect gets amplified if you don't feel like you died due to a mistake you made or worse if you feel like you couldn't have done anything different. I recently played Brotato and due to the game kind of flooding the arena with enemies, it doesn't feel like you can actually avoid damage, so it comes down to whether or not you are lucky enough that the character dodges often enough or that whatever healing you have triggers enough for you to survive. Combine that with the luck aspect of building the character I always felt like I couldn't do something a lot different. It's why I eventually deleted the game out of frustration. I agree that the way souls likes handle punishment is probably among the best, certainly great for that type of game. While you can loose progress you always have the chance to restore it and it even adds an aspect of choice to the loss of that progress. The player can either go back to a boss and regain the lost souls, but will have to try the boss again or he can make the choice to go somewhere else, maybe find an easier boss for now, grind some levels or a try to get better equipment, whatever. At that point loosing that progress becomes less of a punishment, because the player chooses to give up that progress. The souls like Code Vein even adds the option to restore half of it's currency if you want to, mitigating the punishment aspect even further.
yeah that sometimes can be really bad, but i think brotato is still different. In Brotato you still can play glass cannon map clears, but you can also play defensive builds, pacifist builds, combos or anything you like, really. brotato just has the aspect that you kind of need to go with the flow of rng and if you dont know the game well enough that is really hard
@@justshinigami9364 Probably, that was just my personal experience. I persevered and finished a play through with several of the characters on the highest difficulty and while it's quite enjoyable when a build comes together, it's incredibly frustrating to loose. I rarely felt like there was anything else I could have done. Only rarely did I feel that I should have done something differently. As Josh mentioned, when you loose you should gain experience, get better at the game, get better at beating an enemy. I'm not saying that you don't learn anything, I just feel like you reach the point very quickly where you get only marginal improvements, if at all. I'm not saying I figured out the game entirely, maybe I was playing completely wrong. I just reached a point where I didn't feel like I could change a lot in my playstyle to improve my chances and I was playing it because the gameplay loop is quite addicting, not because I got anymore enjoyment out of it.
I mean for brotato that's just a build issue. All of these "vampire survive-style" games are just DPS checks. Can you clear the mobs on the screen before they attack you or surround you? Yes? Good! keep playing, No? You die. It's just how those games are and it's the fun of them.
>Loss in arcade terms means put more money in and try again That's only when you're learning the game, and is derisively referred to as "credit-feeding", when you're actually going for the clear, you're expected to do it in one go, and an arcade game is generally around forty minutes, so it's actually a pretty big loss when you game over! Incidentally, arcades have game difficulty literally down to a science, because they had to be hard enough to wear you'd get kicked off the machine or have to spend more by stage three unless you were really good, but not so ridiculous to where you felt you were just actively having your money stolen.
Your example with GTA was so funny to me, because PoE1 started extremely slow and punishing. It wasn´t growing until they changed, sped it up and allowed more things. Players were shaping the game into what it is today. PoE1 went in a direction many people of GGG didn´t want the game to be. Too fast, too rewarding. So they introduced Ruthless into PoE1 a game mode where you are slower, less loot, more tedium and the vast majority hated it. Now we have those Ruthless mechanics in PoE2 and people are against them again. I hope we can shape PoE2 also into a game worth playing in the endgame.
And some people preferred the old game and now want to have at least one to play. Do you really need two, exactly the same games? Do you really think that if something is more popular it is automatically better?
You fail to mention that retention has drastically gone down the more they sped the game up. We used to have nearly triple TRIPLE the retention that we have now in modern leagues. We do not need to go down the same road that PoE 1 went down. That just leads to frustration and people getting bored with the game. PoE 2 is it's own thing, it's biggest weakness right now is it leans too much into what PoE 1 was (especially in endgame). It needs to embrace the identity it had in the campaign.
Ruthless is the only way I play. All the sparkling and loot going everywhere makes me think of a mobile game. Specifically it makes me think GGG are trying to highjack my dopamine system like mobile games do. No I don't need loot fountains. No, I don't want lots of randomly generated colored names on the field. Feels bad when I stop caring about drops.
@@radaro.9682 I don't quite understand your point of view. Does this mean you're extremely happy to get a 1000th transmutation orb in poe2, but don't feel anything when you get a divine in poe1? Some things are meant to be rare just in the beginning. I think the huge problem with poe players is that they just get a loot filter that turns the game into the "randomly generated colored names on the field" or "dopamine hit" because of the loot filter sounds. And then they complain about it, oblivious to how they break it for themselves. I have almost 8k hours in poe1 and I don't feel indifferent to drops, even if they're meh, because it has it's use and purpose, I just went beyond it and need better stuff. Yet I still pick up smaller rare items because alteration orbs are important too. Also, people only playing meta and complaining about it is another problem. It's almost as if such players want to force others to play at their low speed.
*Sees recommended video* "Ah I like this mans' videos, excellent Rob Stark cosplay as per usual" *clicks on the video* "he often has quite poignant things to sa-why is he on a treadmill?"
In my experience playing Poe1 (roughly 700 hours), the point I would stop playing was usually when I'd hit a stonewall in exp progression, where my build couldn't survive lvl-appropriate content long enough so that 10% exp penalty would happen too often, making it next to impossible to lvl up unless I did low-lvl content with a huge exp penalty. Really not a fan of exp penalty for that reason. On the other hand, I do feel it's extremely important to for death to have stakes (love fromsoft games, roguelikes, played D4 almost exclusively hardcore, etc), so I'm not sure what the solution would be for me.
Consider the following: You lose some portion (say, 10%) of the map modifiers each time you die. The bonuses to loot, and the buffs to enemies/penalties to you. When you hit -60%, if you can't clear it, that is a reasonable sign you need to work on your build or bit off far more than you can chew.
Since you will inevitably die at least occasionally in basically any game that you play, anything that disincentivizes dying also disincentivizes playing. Punishment in games is -- at best -- redundant. Players are already trying to win, sometimes even without reward of any kind. If a game needs some artificial incentive to push players to avoid losing in addition to trying to win, the design is fundamentally broken.
This was a very interesting video, with a very interesting conversation. Really good points. Really good discussion. i feel like this topic is one of those topics that's not spoken of enough.
Completely agreed. Unlocked maps just recently, first one froze my game when I entered the portal and had to restart the whole pc (it didn't refund the map since it wasn't a dc/crash but a force-restart of my pc), and the second map was me just playing as if it were hardcore, which wasn't very fun since I pretty much just spammed storm wave on monk, otherwise I'd die way too fast. It's a huge disincentive that you not only lose the map and your time, but also the xp and potentially loot if you don't pick it up quick enough. Hope they change it, at this point I don't motivated to do more maps after those 2 runs
When Elden Ring received the enormous success that it did, it was obvious that a lot of studio's were going to learn all the wrong lessons from that success.
Another game I felt did the "punishment" system well (though very differently) was Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. Here you can find equipment in different tiers, and if the component its attached to gets destroyed (arm, shoulder, side torso, etc) then you lose the weapons and equipment in those slots. Then you have to replace them. If you have multiple copies of that item at the same tier then hitting "repair all" will automatically replace them. However higher tier equipment gets harder to find, giving you a choice: USE your high-tier equipment and make combat potentially easier, but risk losing components, or save them for when you get a healthy stockpile. You are also managing a mercenary company and there are upkeep costs and salaries to payout every few in-game months, also repair costs after missions. While a new player might struggle to make their profits exceed their expenses, you feel your skill as a Mechwarrior improving as the gap between your profits and expenses widen, because you have improved as a pilot. So, you might start out loosing hard-fought for weapons and components and making a marginal profit, but learn and improve and start making millions in C-bills profit over your expenses. I found this to be a very satisfying and addicting reward loop.
On Elden Ring. I remember my friend trying to fight a boss where the check point was this very long run through a cave to get back to it, and how frustrating it was for him compared to the rest of the game.
The only games where I've seen this kind of design make sense is in tactical/strategy games. If you want to encourage the player to think and prepare before doing anything, making them truly fear death is the best way of doing so.
I agree, but this needs to be done carefully. If the loss is severe and the mission is long, then it can quickly become tedious/boring to retry when you fail. I still haven't finished Fire Emblem Awakening for this reason. I admit that I made the initial mistake of playing on hard mode upon my friend's strong recommendation (he's naturally interested in and good at exploiting RPG systems). That's on me. But I made it to one of the last battles, and the length of it made repeated attempts boring pretty quickly. I'll come back and finish it eventually though. I always do.
@@MoonJellyGames Yup, I agree. Bad mission design that relies on previously unknown information (e.g. very strong enemy units showing up out of nowhere near the end) can also compound and make the issue even worse. Just like with everything else in game design, balancing is important.
And even there it's a bit knife edge. A lot of those games set you back further than square 1 on an unlucky encounter. XCom takes away your power but keeps the enemies' where it sometimes feels like you might as well reset the run.
Thank you in particular for pointing out that school is to teach how to think and learn, not for rote memorisation and facts that could be learned anywhere. Too focused on dealing with the tasks we're given, without questioning if those are the tasks we should have in the first place.
My take is: Games get played to have fun, and getting punished for something you had little to no control over it, since it was a pure one shot, on death effect you coudn't see, getting crit and such and get frustrated from your punishment, which is exp loss, missing out on loot, losing your map, your bonus objectives like map bosses, delirium and such... If you die in an elden ring fight you you get punished buy haveing to restart the fight. Which was most likely your fault. For not dodging a mostly good indicated attack.
"Most likely" "Mostly good" Why can't people just accept that a good large minority of bosses and enemies in Elden Ring suck and were horribly designed? Just admit it.
@@SenkaZver most likely because if it's your first time getting combo'ed by boss then it's not really your fault. you can beat *all* of bosses in elden ring without time investment loss (finding boss key/waypoints again), just your time learning the patterns.
Good large minority??? I think a few of the dlc bosses were meh but 99% of the base game's design is fine. Not agreeing is not the same as being unwilling to admit something.@@SenkaZver
@@oramisc90you can beat tons of badly designed and unfair games with extreme handicaps. The ability to do something doesn't invalidate whether it is well designed or bad.
This is why Kenshi is 95% positive on Steam. The "loss conditions" are fun. Say your band of adventurers is attacked by slavers. Two of your characters get captured, the rest flee but some lose limbs and others items. Your stuff really doesn't matter too much. You've still gained player combat skill. Your enslaved party members will not die, and can instead spend their time in slavery grinding work speed, stealth, lockpicking, thievery and assassination. On top of that, the game has given you an incentive to find robotic limbs, however you may do so, and get together a rescue mission. There are some frustrating mechanics here and there in Kenshi. But for the most part, losing is fun.
What you said about failure removing past successes is exactly the reason why the game's population has tumbled almost 200 thousand players on Steam. It effectively made the play time before it null, especially when it is to a mechanic you cannot avoid (server lag, straight up not being able to even see things, etc.) With more casual people playing the game for only a few hours a day, let alone a week, losing days or *weeks* of their free time for absolutely nothing is asinine.
Not only that, but honestly the timing was an issue, people were hailng the steam player numbers as if everyone playing has gotten to the problem areas, i consider myself non-casual is game time sense, and it took me around 50-60 hours too complete act 3 (mind you with some grinding here and there) no way a dad gamer is going to get the frustration parts of the game till at least a month in. And it shows. Not only that, but the diffirence i tone between the cruel campaign and maps i general compared too the campaign is an insane jump, thats where the quiting moment is going to be for most people.
11:52 I agree with Josh on most of this, though i'd argue yes in some cases, Roguelikes and to a lesser extend Roguelites literally are okay with you losing 3 hours of runs for the knowledge of what they gave you even if you don't win. Also theres fun in playing the game even if you don't win. I don't have long to play POE2 or other titles but I don't mind making little progress if I had fun or learnt something.
View it akin to something like Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). [This will teach me for rendering this comment before 20:00] The premise of the game, is speed & platforming. You make your way through a level, avoid dying, and try to take the 'best route' through the level (usually the top most path). At the end of every third level, you fight a boss that has your 'deal X hits' and the boss dies. The levels *tend* to get progressively harder as you go through. Importantly, you also tend to get better at these levels the more you go through the levels - where you remember how to take the optimum paths, getting you through them quicker. The final boss, almost always gives you no rings, so any hit, you die, as opposed to losing rings (and being able to potentially pick them back up). So the final boss / final level is always the most challenging because it removes your fail-safe and forces you to play optimally. By which point you've probably acquired a ton of extra lives, and maybe some continues. But if you lose all of your lives/continues, you go back to the start of the game. By modern standards, this would be considered an awful penalty (Think about it like 'deleting your save'). Until you look at how it's designed to get you replaying, in that you slowly master the 99% of the game. Once you conquer the last 1% of the game, that was it. There is no DLC, that's the game done. For the time, this was just akin to the arcade cabinets of the 10 years prior, just with less of the painful absorption of pocket cash. Every game *must* have a penalty. But it needs to be penalty that focuses the player on future improvement, without costing them too much of their already established investment.
No. There should be consequence. I just spent 4 hours levelling a key for a specific map up and surrounding towers for buffs. I died to death art due to a massive lag spike due to the way servers are currently unstable and regardless of settings, the screen gets overloaded. I can accept I died and lag happened. But losing the map, the exp and the time has put me off. I play ssf so the hit was insane. I really like poe2, the punishment is an issue. At level 88 ssf, this is a weeks set back. There has been a 200k player drop for many reasons but most come back to the punishment at end game. Those of us that do not play trade site lose harder. Kind of. Trade site players have their own issues lol. Consequence to choices should be promoted. Punishment is not acceptable.
Just wait until GGG adds seasons with TIMELIMITED FOMO MTX as challenge rewards like in PoE1 which completely nullifies the chance of you playing a character you WANT to play and forces you to play a meta build if you want a chance at getting said MTX before the league ends and those MTX can NEVER be acquired ever again.
What are you on about? People complete the challenges in less than a week of league launch. Not being able to complete them after 3-4 months has nothing to do with not playing a meta build.
The issue of what is said at the end, that some ideas are good and some ideas are bad and it is now a matter of panning for the gold is, that alot of things that are bad in the design, where all people agree they are bad, are taken over from Poe1 and are declared as core game design. The one portal thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the bad things are bad on purpose.
You vastly overestimate the amount of people that think those things are bad. A very significant vocal percentage of the online community feels it is bad, that does not mean that ALL people agree they are bad.
@@silvermunkee The game design aspects we are talking about aren't a subjective matter. It's a objective measure. I cannot care less about what people with no idea about game design think about design elements.
@@silvermunkee Just one? Sure. The final boss has specific attack patterns you learn to deal with. At some point he abuses what you learned to kill you. There is _no_ way whatsoever to anticipate that the first go around. The game is literally playing with your psychology. And due the way how boss fights work he will do this several times, as you a) need to remember there was this attack b) you need to realize it wasn't a bad coincidence and c) need to actually manage the tight timing. That is on top of setting you back several hours of gameplay, being even more burdon on learning mechanics, due to the increased downtime between attempts.
@@Finsternis.. That is subjectively bad. By creating an intended gameplay of significant time investment of learning and re-learning you increase the value of the drops of the boss. Imagine if the balance was much tighter (no archmage, howa, etc). The first kill of the Arbiter would be extremely late after the launch, the exclusive gear he drops would be much more sparse. This would create truly aspirational content, which is the goal. Now subjectively that is bad for a lot of people, especially those with limited time, but its also subjectively good for those who can grind and dedicate their lives to it. It is in no way OBJECTIVELY bad.
Another way to put the feels bad mechanic is thus: you wagered your time and in game resources on the bet that you're skilled enough to beat the challenge. However, The game is also secretly wagering all your time and resources that you never specifically tried to wager. So it feels like the bet was unfair.
@@nurgle-j5n you are "fighting" something that is programmed to lose. so you will eventually win. you could argue: "why would i care if i am going to win anyways at some point?". thats why some people prever PvP over PvE, because there the enemy is not programmed to lose. in PvE though, the road is the destination. punishment is going back on the road. it is negative progress. not many people like that from my observations. Edit Addition: if "just dying" was an issue and needed more punishment, why do they have respawn points in front of every boss during the campaign? Why would it be possible to level up so that xp loss does not matter? Why no negative-leveling? if someone needs super high stakes and grueling punishment in order to "care" for a past time activity, i wonder if it wouldnt be better if they took this drive somewhere productive
@@grunerkaktus What is exactly programmed to lose? No game is ever programmed to lose, and that is a dumb statement. Games are designed to meet certain skill thresholds for their desired audience, whether that is PvE or PvP. There are easy PvP games and hard PvP games, as well as easy PvE games and hard PvE games. If anything, only PvP games are technically 'programmed to lose' with ranking systems. These systems place players in brackets that give them an equal chance to win, allowing even bad players to enjoy winning because they are matched with others of similar skill. A PvE game, on the other hand, will not show mercy. If you do not have the skill to beat it, you are out completely. As for competitiveness, a PvE game is as competitive as a PvP game because individual player performance matters. A weightlifter or a runner is not directly facing their opponents but is still competing to achieve higher results. And trust me, some competitive PvE players do stuff that PvP players don't even come close. In PoE, the experience loss is necessary. You must always consider the risk of dying and focus on your character's power, and most definitely playing better to avoid such outcomes. It is already easy as it is because character power is very high. If you never cared about dying, you would just die and keep killing monsters as if nothing happened. It would literally not matter. You could use the shittiest character and brute force any content simply by dying and retrying from where you left off. This makes no sense whatsoever. Games where dying does not prevent further progression often give you a limited number of attempts, or only one attempt with a reward for completion. In PoE, all loot is given the moment the monster dies. This is why you drop souls in Dark Souls, and this is why monsters respawn. It prevents brute forcing and ensures that death has a cost to consider. In PoE, you must be powerful to reach more difficult content. You cannot keep dying non-stop without a cost as if the death never happened in the first place. This is not a hard conclusion to reach, or else there'd be no point to even have a game where you character dies, you should just be unkillable.
You are mostly dying in situations you will probably learn nothing new from. Like you can suddenly be blocked by monsters, they are too fast and they keep hitting you despite you run around and you can't fight back properly, after death effects, etc. So losing to this will definitely not bring you knowledge to be better, just frustration and punishment.
TBH I don't mind this design if GGG could give players good defensive options to invest into and also balance the mobs, because I feel like the reason they made this choice is so that players won't be picking all damage nodes on the tree and one shot everything or get one shot
Agreed, the core design only works if the game is balanced properly. To have it this punishing while still working out all the balance issues is why people are getting so frustrated. I actually like the core idea assuming armor/es/evasion are all viable in different ways, assuming all the "one-shot" mechanics are clearly telegraphed dodgeable attacks, etc.
@@stanimir4197 There are larger and more vibrant cursor options that help a bit, but in general there is too much going on in the late game to see things easily, I agree.
@@silvermunkee "larger and more vibrant cursor options", if someone opts to do that, it pretty much tells you how much effort into the design has been spent.
@@stanimir4197 Typically those are for accessibility reasons, like those with reduced eye-sight. It just so happens to be useful in this case. It is very apparent a lot of effort has been put into PoE2, but most of it was centered around the campaign.
I love these videos where Josh explores a topic and chats but man do I wish your sfx volume was lower, its difficult to listen to you over all the noise.
I first noticed that difference between an educational loss and a frustrating loss around 8 years ago. I took a break from world of warcraft and had a look into eve online. Quite a jump :D So...you might thinking now: "Ohh, eve online isnt that the game where you loose all your stuff when you die throwing you back to zero?" No. It was quite the opposite. Let me explain: Yes, you loose your ship and your cargo. But you learn quickly that you onle should fly things which you are prepared to loose. You learn from every encounter. Whenever i died, i had a feeling of "i just got better. i learned something. Someday, i'll be the one farming!". Kinda like Elden Ring or Dark souls. World of Warcraft Arena was the frustrating part. Every time i lost a match, my arena rating went down. Sometimes due to situations which were completely outside of my control. Like path of exile. Am i supposed to read 8 different modifiers on a rare enemy within half a second? Am i supposed to know the skills of a pinnacle boss i see for the first time after farming the keys for over a week? THats frustrating!
They could use a altered version of the heist mechanic. Meaning you enter the instance, you travel to the boss and find items along the way. You cant get your items out of the map before the pinnacle boss dies. You loose your picked up items when you die. You can try the boss as many times as you want. Meaning if you take 20 attempts for the final boss, you will leave only with the bosses drops and all the other potential stuff is lost. That incentivises to do him on the first try but you can learn the mechanics and at least get the bossdrops when you finally beat him. You could also make it so that if you drop the mirror along the way and because of that dont want to do the boss, you can get out once but then you cant get back in.
No, punishment on repeating a level from the start is usually a bad mechanic to make games feel longer than they really are. I prefer checkpoints/level start right before a boss like Armored Core 6 because at least that game doesnt feel like a waste of time like other fromsoft titles.
@@Dragonfury3000 I agree with you for the most part. But I personally remember the long run back to bosses in Souls games very fondly. In my experience easy run backs make the boss experience somewhat forgettable but I'm fully aware that's just a me thing.
Elden Ring, I usually am more risky when I dont have many runes on me. But also it has a nice mechanic where if you die you can retrieve your lost exp. It encourages you to try the boss again as you can get your runes back if you win.
XP loss is such a dumb mechanic that makes no sense. You don't lose experience irl when you fail at something, because the whole point of experience is learning from both successes and failures.
If you get into a car accident, you don't lose just the time you spent driving. You may lose your car, medical expenses, insurance rate hikes, possibly have to go to court, and more depending on severity. Life is much worse than dying in poe2
I think it makes sense bc it's a way to make levels feel like an achievement instead of just a playtime metric. Like, if someone makes it to level 95, that means they played through level 94 with less than 1 death per 10% xp on some of the highest level maps (since those are the only ones that give a reasonable amount). There's also the leaderboard which is a measure of XP, and it would be much less fun to compete if all it took was playing 16 hours a day (granted, you do need to do that to be on the top, but you also need to be actually good). At high levels (where 10% xp actually means a decent chunk of playtime), leveling up doesn't even affect the power level of your character much. A single passive skill point at level 95 is negligible compared to just about any other upgrade you could get (a better piece of gear, jewel, level 20 skill gem, 5th support gem slot, etc). XP is a great punishment imo, when it goes too far is a death losing all your loot, bricking the node you're on, and deleting your waystone (or even your super expensive boss key, if you were fighting a pinnacle boss).
The experience loss is primarily designed to protect the value of being level 100. In both PoE games, characters that can reach over level 95 are viewed as being 'better' because they obviously last a lot longer between deaths. If experience loss is removed, level 100 will eventually mean nothing. I do agree that the current punishment is too harsh.
The same argument goes towards the absurd respec costs. It was so expensive in PoE1 and is even more expensive now. Just the fact that people always use an outside application to plan their builds because tinkering would be so expensive otherwise should've told them to skip respec costs. What would be the downside about having low or no cost for respeccing? That people play around more with their builds? The horror!
If I can respec freely I only need 1 warrior to play every warrior build. I would never need to level another, because I only do that if leveling another is "cheaper" (in time/general investment). Suppose their metrics show that player with low playtime investment (casual or not much free time) spend less money than strongly commited players. In this case it would make absolute sense to make respeccing not free, but be a inconvience. Of course, those two effects work against each other. But I have to imagine they got the numbers to make an informed decision about it.
Is the respec expensive in poe2? I find it very cheap, just some gold which can be obtained pretty fast imo by selling a bunch of stuff. Though my character is 74 so I don't know the cost of respec further in
@@Airahn It gets super expensive. Pohx showed an example - all the gold he had grinded to that point was enough to _barely_ respec a quarter of his skill tree.
What?, since the gold respec nerf, respec is REALLY affordable, even on lv 94, I can respect almost half my tree with 10 maps gold + the gold has close to no use after you get to maps, so you will have millions with after 1 week (low time per day)
It is not more expensive than in poe1. In poe1 it was almost impossible to respec for new players and it was super easy to change entire lvl 95 builds for players who played a lot. The idea is now that you can respec somewhat easily in the beginning and it gets a little harder lategame. Which is fine i think. Really i never had problems solving my build with the gold i had in poe2.
This concept is basically why I love VVVVVV's difficulty. It's a hard game for most to beat; the average player (me included) will die hundreds of times. But the respawns are so quick and so numerous (usually there's one in front of each difficult section, and said sections are short) that most players won't be frustrated. I was constantly going, "Whoops, that didn't work, let's try this instead," rather than having a gap in gameplay to go, "GAHHHHHHHHH now I have to try all over again!" It's extremely well balanced. Of course, if you WANT to have a ridiculously frustrating and punishing time, you can try to get the achievement for never dying in it, but having such challenges as optional content for people who want it is a far different story from playing and enjoying a game as it's normally built.
I honestly don’t think VVVVVV is a hard game. Sure you may die hundreds of times but the actual amount of skill needed to pass any given section is really quite low.
I actually really like the original Dark Souls Runback as it WAS a chunk of the challenge for me. It meant that getting to the boss was part of the process. I would love to see more like 'Hard Enviroment with an Easier Boss' as alternative things you can face beyond Elden Ring's 'You can instantly get into the boss with full resources, so every boss needs to be a thing that can threaten you will full resources'. Likewise: Not enough Elden Ring bosses had minions. I know people don't like Twin Bosses but fodder enemies would make AOE effects more fun against bosses beyond 'I have more leeway on any misses'.
This is the one thing that held me back ever leveling past level 90 in PoE, the constant one-shot mechanics and impossible to notice enemies AoE attacks (because of enemy density) sometimes just made it more than frustrating to bother. Torchlight Infinite has the same issue at higher levels, you gather experience for 30-40 minutes only to lose that progress in a few seconds and the only way to prevent said loss is with a (buyable?) revive token, opening the door for P2W-ish, P2 Save Time. (I haven't played Torchlight Infinite for 5 months so I'm not sure if anything changed since then). And in games like Flyff Universe you can actually lose a level if you die with 0 exp. It's such a waste of time.
This takes me back to when I'd play hardcore on D2 or PoE1. It's definitely a different leveling experience, prioritizing survivability. But when things like corpse explosions, pools, disco lasers, thorns, and network issues cause your death, I could only take so much. I eventually just stopped playing hardcore. It felt like an exercise in futility.
What I hate the most actually is the fact that you lose any modifier (a boss, a ritual, an expedition, corruption... any f those) of the map when you die. I'm fine with dying a few times until I get better gear, but what I definitely don't want is pass through 2-4 maps to then die to 3 random projectiles before even getting to the boss and now having to do another round of going to a boss map and hoping something worth it drops in between. Specially since the bosses are so good
(18:27) "Path of Exile 2 starts as Dark Souls and ends as Vampire Survivors."
Most true way to describe poe 2.
Yeah..I quit my gemling after the first map when I saw the writing on the wall. I was sold on the trailers..shit like this puts me to sleep. I can play vampire survivors for 50 hours and pick it up again occasionally, I cannot play thousands of hours of it.
The real issue is the compounding punishments. You die in a map you lose the exp, lose any rewards on the ground, lose the time and then lose more time as you have to repeat the map without rewards so you don't brick your atlas. Any one of those alone would be punishment enough, not all at once.
This is why my friend and I prefer to do maps together, even if difficulty goes up slightly and makes it a bit more likely to die. Because at least then the other can usually get the map complete and not waste our time more than the XP loss.
@@aoitamashii does that mean you can't revive you friend while in a map?
I like PoE2, but all this makes me not want to invest the time. I last got to around level 8 and all the cool builds seem to require high levels, but then this grind he talks about here seems so tedious.
Yeah, I think this is the thing. Having a punishment is good - if there's nothing, there's no incentive to do anything but go full DPS and brute-force through the endgame. But you only need one or two punishments for failure, and I think there are probably too many at once right now.
@@HumanPerson_final Level 8 like in character level 8? As in, just started the game half an hour ago level 8?
Punishment is fine, but the time investment loss is insane sometimes. I remember playing Maplestory back in the day... The amount of time it takes to get that 2% exp is basically all the playtime I had in a day, but then getting killed and losing 10% exp was just so demoralising... Losing a week's worth of playtime in a second just puts you off playing
The same goes for Tibia. Sometimes it took days to level up but then you die, maybe lag or maybe because of your own mistake, and you lose LEVELS. Not % XP but entire levels. Oh, and also, dropping your entire backpack, with all your stuff and a chance to drop pieces of your own equipment. Its just absurd. They later added a bless system that you could get some reduction to the XP penalty and protection from dropping things, but if you forget about it or doesnt have the money? You're fucked :D
Because "losing" time means you didn't play the game? Weird that you'd ignore the enjoyment you got out of your playtime because you need to play more. If you enjoy the game you aren't out anything. If you're playing for a reason beyond enjoyment then why are you wasting money and time on a thing you don't enjoy?
@@radaro.9682 you are an idiot
@@radaro.9682 you made no sense, a person can enjoy playing a game and not enjoy certain parts of the game. I enjoy fighting enemies and earning gear and exp from doing so, I dont like losing all the progress I did during my day because of how I played for 5 seconds
You'll be surprised to find out that hardcore exists for some games where ALL your progress is lost on death. So is the punishment too harsh or are you just bad at the game and not paying attention when you should be?
The paradox of PoEII is that has the best bosses of any ARPG and the biggest incentives to not engage with their mechanics. First run of the campaign is the most fun then it becomes a lawn-mowing simulator.
What I do not like about how punishing the endgame is:
I can play a few maps without getting hit a single time (on my subpar frost monk build), but what usually kills me is getting oneshot because of lag, the one where the game freezes for a couple of seconds and then plays everything that happened during the lag sped up. But what is frustrating is not that I died, it is that I got robbed of my scarce good map, the chance to get good items from it and the exp. So it takes away my resources, my time, and it does not even give me something to learn from for the future.
this sounds like why I quit D4. I tried the shitty first season, but their servers were shit and it would occasionally drop me and I'd have to log back in and start the dungeon all over again. I had this happen enough that I quit and haven't played it again since. It was nice in previous Diablo games where I could actually play it single player, this one has to have the always online bullshit and their shitty servers ruined it for me.
10:59 I knew exactly where he was going with this, as soon as he started saying it, and it's *beyond* valid. Different people have different amounts of their lives they can dedicate to their "free" time, and mechanics that punish mistakes by taking that free time away *feel bad*, and encourage building as "safe" as possible... and playing that way tends to be less engaging. So you might quit because you get bored playing safely, or you might quit if you lose a ton of progress to a mistake (or an INTERNET HICCUP), but regardless you're still quitting and not engaging. It's not great design. It's something I've tried to get people to understand but the parapet from which I can speak is not as big as Josh's, so thank you for giving a voice to it Josh!
But ultimately it's an issue with the balance of denfenses and stats. Removing the exp penalty is simply treating the symptoms, not the disease.
@@tsunamie1015 I definitely agree there's more to be done than simply removing the exp penalty, but there are _several_ systems that could benefit from a quality-of-life pass to make them feel--make the *whole game* feel more worthy of your free time, and taking away player punishment for "failure" or simply general misfortune is on that list.
@@tsunamie1015 I think it is actually the exact opposite. Leaving the XP penalty but fixing defensive stats would solve one issue but make nothing about dying any more deserving or fun. You will still lose hours of progress to being careless for 2 seconds or a lag spike. Defensives play a part in that, sure, but nothing about them has anything to do or changes anything about the fact that the XP penalty feels like it's wasting (and more importantly: not respecting) the player's time.
It doesn't add anything fun or interesting to the game, it's just.. lame. Make the game difficult, not tedious, simple as that.
@@Sniperfuchs If (amongst other changes) defenses get buffed, and If the player has more tools and opportunities to avoid dying, then dying becomes less of an unavoidable "oopsie" and more a result of choices. Dying shouldn't be fun, or deserving (unless specific instances), it should be a sign for the player to investigate an issue.
Aside from that, whether an xp penalty respects the players time or not is also a matter of balance and is something that could be drastically changed by altering the xp curve. Which makes sense given the early state of the endgame.
Fundamentally speaking, if the xp penalty were flawed by design, then PoE players would have been rioting for years already. Like many other things, it just needs to be balanced.
@@tsunamie1015
"it should be a sign for the player to investigate an issue."
It is, by using your time in that map that you just lost. It doesn't need an XP penalty.
"Aside from that, whether an xp penalty respects the players time or not is also a matter of balance and is something that could be drastically changed by altering the xp curve."
It could, but what exactly is the point of the XP penalty? Why can't we think of features that are actually engaging rather than wasting development time fine-tuning and testing a feature that is largely a waste of the players' time? Sure, there is a value of XP loss that is "acceptable" but why make something "acceptable" instead of just getting rid of it and focusing attention on parts of the game that actually are fun?
"Fundamentally speaking, if the xp penalty were flawed by design, then PoE players would have been rioting for years already."
I wholeheartedly disagree. There are many features that are flawed by design but are simply deemed legacy and thus don't get questioned or touched. In PoE 1 this is just as much a pointless design decision as it is here. Especially because this punishes newer players more than experienced, which is just doubly a bad design decision. If they die repeatedly, they'll know without an XP penalty that something went wrong. But XP actually offers power in the form of passives for just investing time to level. Doesn't require drop luck, knowledge of crafting or anything. And I think that is a GOOD design decision. Lessening the ability to gain that power is a mistake in my opinion (goes for both PoE 1 and 2).
The stupid thing about this is that this has been known for decades. Even back in the Ultima 7 days of the 90s Lord British was saying that the punishment for death should be inconvenience. So I don't understand why, decades later, that game designers keep making games that punish you for exploring the game mechanics.
Just came home after work, did one map self made build did 99% of the map coming to last rare before doing league mechanics, which are a more deadly, and died from shotgun of 3minions that have a firing squad's synchronisation closed the game and immediately found this video. Feel validated
Literally the worst aspect of the game rn
GGG should just straight up pay Josh their standard consulting rates for the time he played this. So spot on.
Losing time it took to fight a boss then have to try again is punishment enough. Taking away EXP is just a slap in the face, makes people want to quit.
Especially when u lose everything else too.
Losing time it took to fight a boss, then not being able to try again, losing EXP, and having to farm to get to that boss again, just to fail and repeat the cycle. Nah I'm good, I'm waiting for us to have our 6 portals back. Thanks.
You're already playing an IMMORTAL character with demi-god powers on the EASIEST setting in the game and you're complaining about losing experience??
This is what happens when "everyone gets a trophy" for simply showing up to play sports.
Someone hasn't played hardcore 😊
@@NTJediyes. Because it sucks. And is an old bad game mechanic.
The real problem in my opinion is that the game rules aren't consistent.
The whole campaign though the game teaches you that exp loss is not a thing. Also that you can try easily again if you fail. And revive your teammates.
And in the endgame. (And for the last one just in the trails (shekma and chaos) )
It throws everything out of the window. Xp loss. No easy try again and no revives if a teammate dies you all fail.
That's just plain bad game design and criticism in that regard is definitely earned.
If it were that way from the start. It would be a different story. But it isn't.
Difference between punishment and "actions have consequences" can be a hard line to avoid crossing.
@@Skenjin and the transition from reasonable to draconic punishment is blurry at best
I agree, there is a big difference between a game being challenging and a game being straight up annoying. If it's annoying, I don't want to play again. If it's challenging, I throw myself at it until I succeed.
+1 to this. Had both these experiences recently, where I got Stalker 2 and got killed by a (I assume a random spawn) bloodsucker and some bandits right at the beginning after getting knocked out. I uninstalled the game and got magicraft, where I also died plenty of times but never got frustrated. This is something to be asked to game developers in general: are you afraid of making an easy game, so you artificially bump up the difficulty? Or add grind, or whatever else that is obnoxious to most players. In Stalker 2's case, I understand that they were kinda busy dodging nukes, but it's like they're also ignoring years and years of experience from their previous games.
This has been my exact experience playing Kingdom Come Deliverance (in prep for the sequel). The limited save system and fucking awful combat is more annoying than it is challenging. Fighting more than one enemy at a time is certain death, and you can't manually save without spending an expensive item.
The solutions fans defending that game give is "go level grind" or "go item grinding to buy the best gear". But you know what I'd rather do in this RPG? Play the GAME part of this role-playing GAME.
Just like Josh says in the video, I've dropped the game for now and dread trying to finish it because playing for 3 hours, then losing those 3 hours of progress feels awful.
@@Rex0142king you just perfectly described why I dropped KCD after a couple of in-game weeks.
It has its moments but interacting with the mechanics and many of the mechanics itself are constructed in what feels like the most cumbersome way the Devs could imagine
The more PoE streamers I watch, the more I think "Yeah, great game. I'm completely uninterested in endgame though because it sounds completely not fun... and not worth my time."
I would guess most of the people who succeed at end game are those who have put in lots of time in POE1, its true for me.
A good understanding of it, but poe1's endgame was actually stellar. I played poe1 since closed beta. I saw it turn from terrible to amazing. It will be amazing.
wait till its out of early access i would say. its rough around the edges right now, and GGG has plenty of room for improving things. plus, it will be free to play once its out of Early access so you have one less reason not to at least try it.
It's an early access game for a reason. If you don't enjoy the current state of endgame, it's understandable and perfectly fine. After all, it's not finished, let alone balanced.
@@tsunamie1015Early access isn't really a good excuse when it's intentional decisions made by the devs. Some bugs popping up and such is one thing, but they chose to make and send out the game with this design.
easy. dont lose xp, give us all the portals we see, but if you die enemies come back with an "already beaten" tag so you dont get xp or loot from mobs your previously killed.
lets you learn to fight the mobs, and yes you will lose some time fighting your way back to the point where you get loot/xp again, but you didnt waste your currency and you can decide for yourself whether its worth finishing the map or you want to quit by wasting your remaining portals (or maybe even add a give up button)
Dark Souls and Elden Ring also take away your experience when you die: you drop your souls. But it's fair because it gives you the chance to recover them: they're waiting for you on the ground near where you died. They even move them to somewhere reasonably accessible when you die somewhere inaccessible, like falling off a cliff. I thought I won't like Soulslikes, but I love Elden Ring. It just feels fair. I don't feel bad if I die, because it's my fault. I don't feel bad when I lose the souls, because I had the chance to recover them, but I failed to do so.
The important part: It was me who failed when given the opportunity. I had a choice, an opportunity, an input. It was a result of my decisions and skill, not just some inevitable decision imposed from on high without any regard for me and my situation.
I personally don't like the loss of souls in Elden Ring, but I could just go and mod it out by playing offline on PC. PoE2 currently only offers a brutal difficulty mode of play without any alternative, while at the same time trading is so overpowered that homebrewing your item loadout is strictly a waste of time. It sucks because I enjoy the core gameplay and FINALLY FOR ONCE WASD movement controls in an ARPG.
Hell, even d2 let you click on your corpse to get 7.5%/10% of lost XP
@@Lovyxia It's all about context. Souls are meant to be a currency that balances risk and reward. In Dark Souls, you are rewarded for exploring and killing monsters, with bonfires playing a significant role in that system. Losing your currency meant you didn’t calculate your risk well enough, and you shouldn’t hoard it.
In Elden Ring, that context isn’t quite as strong as in Dark Souls, but at least it isn’t problematic. Losing souls isn’t a random decision to punish players; losing and gaining souls is part of how you handle challenges and decide to manage your risks in-game, while seeking your next bonfire. It simply just makes sense.
@@gsczo Same typebeat as PoE2 fanboys defending PoE2's end-game.
Cognitive dissonance and nonsense excuses to defend something that doesn't really need to exist post 2010.
In both games you get to "lock" your maximum loss by spending souls. You also have items that are, effectively, souls in your inventory that you can't lose. The point is that there's intentional design around the loss on death mechanic they chose. And devs need to consider that the commonality of grinding in MMORPGs/ARPGs has a HUGE influence in loss on death mechanics.
You raised a point that was why I was feeling like i was struggling far far earlier, defense did feel worthless.
And experimenting felt like it was dis-encouraged. And why i stopped playing and moved on to other things, despite liking the game.
Yeah, largest skill tree in the world yet you're railroaded onto only picking +dmg passives.
The way PoE does punishment just devolves the game into flavor of the month metaslop builds which just kills any enjoyment it had.
God yes. I am doing a fancy build I made but I know it wont matter
This sort of stuff is the reason I don't buy games on launch if I am not sure I know that I will like their gameplay.
PoE2 could remove dying entirely, as in you can never die, and people will still run meta builds.
I didn't play PoE 2 but it seems like Warframe but with difficulty. Which is just not fun. Fun is playing whatever stupid build you want still winning. Game that needs you to play "correctly" is fine if its something like League of Legeds or Counter Strike, where playing wrong makes you lose 30 minutes at most, and you can try again with no consequences
I like how DOOM Eternal did the arcade approach.
Extra lives make sure you only get punished by making you conscious about having messed up, if you run out of extra lives you only lose the progress of that particular part of the level since the last checkpoint and all you achieved since then. It's still feels like a proper punishment but you still get to keep the previous level progress and "loot" as well as the knowledge of what enemies to expect when and where.
Additionally with practically the entire Doom franchise I love that if you die, it's your very own fault or your own lack of skill like 90% of the time. The other 10% is usually just sucking at jump'n'run (in the versions/parts that have jumping) or getting stuck on odd level geometry or not knowing about some intrinsic mechanic (e.g.: how rockets work in the original Doom or where and how to get specific power-up secrets on harder difficulties).
When I personally die for example, I take a deep breath and think stuff like "Hmpf, I was too slow", "Meh, my aim was horribly off", "I gotta mind that small obstacle, it has a bigger collider than model" or "I shouldn't take the medipack until XYZ happens in that battle" - the latter of which leads back to "too slow"/"bad aim"/etc. since in that moment I was simply not good enough to get to that point without the medipack. In the end I tend to instantly try again rather than closing the game.
The last time I played DOOM Eternal was around 2 years ago on Brutal difficulty, yesterday I felt like playing it again but this time on Ultra-Brutal and while I vaguely remember specific rooms as really hard, they feel way easier and I literally just binged it for half a night and now I just got my super shotgun again and only closed the game when I was so tired that I couldn't be bothered to do the platforming that I need to do in order to smack that crucified demon to break the wall behind it. That seems like the polar opposite of being overly frustrating, it's tough but there's few of what you usually call "quit moments", even dying is just a minor cooldown just long enough to think and come up with a better strategy.
DMC5 adapted a similar approach, which is great. If you die, you can spend a gold orb (limited item) or red orbs (currency) to revive on the spot, or you can go back to a checkpoint. Returning to a checkpoint doesn't affect your style rank and points at the end of the mission, but using an item/money to revive does. So if you just want to play the game for the story and power through a difficult boss fight, you can. But you'll get less and less style rank at the end of the mission (which affects achievements).
But if you want to repeat the combat from the beginning, learning to get better and have fun engaging with the awesome combat mechanics, you don't get any punishment for dying other than "jump back in and fight again". On bosses the checkpoint even skips the boss cutscene and puts you right back in the action.
I gave you 28 minutes and I earned 28 years worth of wisdom.
Im so glad josh has gotten this deep into PoE to see its problems, he has a lot of constructive feedback from a genuenly newish player.
He's not a new player though. He played PoE1
@@PlusOne2Crit I will say he never got this deep into POE 1 from what I could tell. I also never saw him say anything about that in the endgame of POE 1. Although I haven't played POE 2 yet I put 500 hours into the POE 1 Kingsmarch season. In the endgame although it isn't as bad this is a thing for POE 1 which tells me he never got there. Maven and Uber Elder if you lose to them you need to grind out the invitations entirely again to have another chance at the bosses which is frustrating because I am incentivized to get really good gear and just beat them down with superior stats rather then try and engage with their mechanics and beat them with skill. Maven was my biggest quit moment in POE 1 because of how much currency I lost buying the invitations even if I enjoyed the difficulty on that boss the most. Maven should have been the highlight of my playthrough with how fun overcoming her was but it left a sour taste in my mouth how I lost all my currency attempting her even if I was successful in the end. The currency I lost on Maven set me back many hours of grinding which as Josh explained is punishing not fun. Genuinely if I had lost all my currency attempting Maven and had been unsuccessful I probably would have just quit the game then and there instead of continuing to play.
The fact that he needed to ask chat what the death penalty is for PoE 1, meant that he hadn't progressed far enough into the endgame to make a fair comparison
The one thing that kept running through my mind as I listened to the video: “Failure is always an option” -Mythbusters.
But in POE2, it seems, failure is actually not an option.
Failure is always an option in science, because being wrong is still a valid result. Failure isn't an option in most games, because the only 'valid' result is completing the game.
@@AGrumpyPanda Except as Josh mentions, games like Dark Souls punish you only with time spent on it, you are allowed to fail and from that you gain personal experience to allow you to overcome the fight. Failure is an option, and you are encouraged to try again.
But if you were afraid to fail because you'd lose not just IRL time but in-game progress, then you aren't encouraged to try it. In essence, you are discouraged from failure.
@@Roccondil A case of me forgetting my internal monologue is internal. What I meant was, in science getting to the end of the process in failure is a valid result because proving a hypothesis wrong still gets you closer to the truth, by eliminating falsity.
In gaming, ending on a fail state (for example, quitting the game because you lost so much progress that you don't want to play anymore) isn't a valid ending in the same way.
In both you can have lots of failures before you get to a final valid ending, it's just ending a game on a failure isn't a valid ending in the same way it is in science.
It's funny how this endgame system is basically D4's back when they added ubers. There's little difference between "Do maps for X hours to find thing" and "Do all the timed events for X hours to find mats to summon thing." Both incredibly annoying and stupid. 'Look, guys, we made a cool thing, we're sure you'll love it, but you gotta pass the time investment inspection first!' Why do ARPG designers have such a boner for gating the content they make? Yeah the rewards are good, but they end up on trade all the same.
Difference is; D4 was viciously attacked for months over it and people still bash D4 over it, but people are already trying to deflect and minimize how bad it is with PoE2.
Losing a boss fight and having to do it over is enough of a punishment in and of itself, as every loss is punishing your finite pool of patience.
If PoE2 had a mechanic that if you died in the game, you'd die in real life, PoE2 fanboys would still defend it with 'git gud' and 'skill issue'.
Just make a good build and stop dying it's not that hard really 💀
Poor Notivarg complaining about his IMMORTAL character with demi-god powers losing experience while playing *the easiest game setting known as SoftCore.*
"Dont wanna die irl?? Well go play D4 then scrub LOL since it is the only other ARPG to have ever existed ever"
they would be dead so none of them could say Git Gud.
I feel like it's mostly the souls like community that has come into PoE2 that says things like that and refuses any criticism about the game
man, I lost a juiced to hell iron citadel yesterday with 11 breaches because I didn't see the fire explosion beneath me
Too bad u lost the exp how are u supposed to learn from your mistakes if u loose the xp... /s
i often die because i cant see the effects at my feet because the floor is so full of my sparks its making it hard to see anything on the ground.
@@Sniperbear13 playing LA Deadeye, got one shot through 6k es and 2k life. Couldn’t see shit
Visual clarity is terrible atm. It's like a bullet hell with invisible bullets half the time you do anything in the endgame.
they still cant kill players with enemies that are alive... i know why i quit poe after i was done with it
FF7 Rebirth has a VERY similar problem with its Hard mode/Brutal & Legendary VR fights. The bosses have so much HP and are SO overturned with high AOE damage and DPS-gate OHK mechanics that no one engages with them "properly." Instead, channels like Optinoob's and others found optimal Insane Burst DPS strategies who focus on either burning down the boss in one hit, or stunlocking bosses as much as possible so they can't do their full mechanics. It's not easy, and takes time and practice to even pull that off, but its infinitely better than trying to "fight fair" where 95% of the time, you'll die after the transition to Phase 2, because you're about to be hit by an unblockable auto-tracking multi hit attack that will drain your HP before you can do anything, and your only hope is to have saved up enough ATB to cast a Max level fire spell and nuke the bosses' last 20% of health before it can finish its attack animation.
I loved Platinuming FF7 Remake, but hated every moment of getting the Platinum for Rebirth and only managed it because I got COVID just before Christmas and got 2 whole weeks to devote to slamming my face against the challenge.
Problem in this type of games is scaling which causes any kind of tanky/defensive focused build to be pointless in endgame anyway since even those builds will get one-shoted, while before reaching endgame it works. You can have a "turtle" build with low dmg that has survivability high enough to survive everything (including "standing in stupid" - AOE). But as soon as you reach end-game, enemy mobs & boss scaling breaks the game and you are about to go through "rude awakening" when you have to re-build you character if this is your 1st one. It also makes mechanic & boss fight also broken cuz stuff that was previously a dmg over time is now a one-shot. So players build to avoid boss fight mechanics anyway since being tanky simply does not work. Same stuff happens in Last Epoch. All aRGPs have this design problem.
Nah you just don't understand defense layer defenses in poe there ways to just never die in poe and when you actually invest in you will feel scammed for not doing it before
They just need to make defense scale WITH enemies scaling then, seems like a rather simple solution. Instead of making defense completely useless by adding tons of one shot mechanics regardless of hp.
I mean you can literally get so tanky in PoE 1 that you can tank virtually every 1 shot mechanic in the game while doing millions of DPS and no you don't need mirror tier gear or investment to do that.
@@IAmMrGreat Outside of Arbiter's hard-coded one-shots (the falling orbs and the flame hallways), and River Hags (also a hard-coded kill on a white mob lol), I don't get one-shot by anything. The issue is possibly more on the end of defensive balancing. On a warrior, it was pretty stressful to tank stuff and you might die.
On an Invoker that taps meditate up to overflow 16k ES, and has 15k Evasion (effectively also armour) between any boss hit? I've been hit by every single mechanic in Xesht 4, Olroth 4, King in the Mists 4, all Citadel bosses, and facetanked the non-oneshot (slam, beam, etc) mechanics in Arbiter, etc. If I'm going to die, it was a pile-up of mechanics from a map I overjuiced myself. Or a river hag that somehow dodged herald of ice.
It's absolutely possible to build defenses to a point where you can avoid the vast majority of one-shots, but you kind of have to do it using specifically the most overtuned defenses in synergy with other layers. If you're using life? Nope, no good. Armour as a main layer instead of a bonus? Not good enough, and bosses often overwhelm some phys reduction. There's also a few overtuned examples that are way harder to tank (Sky Seer in Ultimatum? Tornado is infinitely more murdery than 99% of mechanics).
In PoE1 you can build around tanking even Maven's Memory game, which would be like tanking the hard-coded arbiter one-shots. And in PoE1, you'll notice that most HC builds actually do have very strong and consistent layers.
Currently, in PoE2, defenses are just somewhat undercooked, while damage is pretty unbalanced, so the best "balance" is to find one overtuned defensive layer (say, 15k+ ES with grim feast), as a safety net and then off-screen everything from there. We'll see how it unfolds over EA, though.
All of these reasons are exactly why playing POE2 makes me wanna go play Last Epoch instead.
You can always find negativity where you look. PoE2 is seriously good.
No one seems to have found a way of preventing all ARPG metas from devolving into clear speed. The quicker you kill stuff, the more loot you get. Damage is to be avoided, not tanked, so defences are irrelevant. And it just gets boring faster
PoE2 is an exceptionally horrid example of that - it features the awful dodge mechanic. The total flashy cluttered screen to a point the mouse cursor cannot be seen. Worst of all - the "maps" get negative effects, e.g. 30% more HP to all mobs, 30% more resistance, 40% more damage as chaos/lightning, whatever. The only sane way to play for many is killing everything offscreen.
The physical defense is just bugged -- the armor is useful for trickle damage only. The spark sorc build in the video is another example how lightning damage is the best of them all.
The game develpoers have a lot of work ahead, the game is totally not ready for prime time.
Meta will always be like that, this is ARPG, most people playing this genre want mobs exploding.
But PoE 1 already "solved" this issue, there are plenty of good off meta builds that's focused more on survivability than damage, they do less damage, slower, but very tanky and sometimes even able to tank endgame bosses heavy hits.
There's nothing like that in PoE 2 except maybe the most meta stacking ES mana with Archmage MoM, ED, CI, so you have both high regen, high HP (ES + mana), and high damage (Archmage from mana), and high survivability against chaos damage (CI).
Bro, this only happens in always-online ARPGs. Go play the other 80% of ARPGs that exist, that are single-player games.
@@PhakesL To put it inthe way Vash Cowaii does for Remnant 2 "You can either play a glass cannon, spend an hour dying to the boss because you're so weak you'll get one shot, or play this build and get it done in 1 10 minute fight." Tanky builds already had an upside.
It's even worse when you start doing arbiter, breach boss etc. Each death not only costs you experience but tons and tons of currency. Especially if you die to the arbiter (and you will the first few times). It is pretty unfair not to be able to train against him but each attempt is so costly
yep, die to Arbiter 'cause he used 1 shot mechanic where you need to get in that tiny circle off my screen 😂
quit after that, finding another 3 citadels is cancer to me.
@@oramisc90 yeah the game needs patches desperately. Their break has been way too long. Releasing a game and then immediately taking a 3 week break is ridiculous.
@@debrickashaw9387 i think the break has worked out quite well actually. the beginning of the EA was always going to be chaotic and leaving the community to figure shit out - ie, what works and what doesnt, bugs, broken builds, ect. means they can focus on the really bad stuff straight away when they come back rather than smaller less significant things weekly. also they did give us a fair few decent patches before they went on break as well, we cant discount that either.
@@debrickashaw9387 its in early access, so expect it to be a mess. they are trying things out to see what works, and not trying to simply make PoE1.5. if its too borked, i really would say come back when its out of Early access.
@@Sniperbear13 I know it is an early access which is why I am not as hard on them as I would have been if it was a full release. But the length of this break is hurting the growth of the game in my opinion. The patch cant come soon enough
I really do hope the peeps at GGG follow Josh. Very well put points.
we all know they won't
Didnt the CEO (or whatever is that Director guy's title is) show up in Josh's stream chat a couple times?
you might be shocked how often some game devs pay attention to people like josh.
Agreed. Challenging is good, frustrating is not. Challenging modes/difficulty does not need to be unnecessarily frustrating.
yep. frustration is not fun. challenge doesn't mean make the game as frustrating as possible to the point its practically impossible.
those frustration games like I wanna be the guy really tend to appeal to a very small percent of gamers.
Honestly, this doesn't surprise me at all. GGG is pretty notorious for balancing the game around the top 0.1% of players in ways that punish non-meta players.
This is why I dropped PoE1 and why I'm probably never going to play PoE2. I found it ridiculous that I had this big whole skill tree in front of me with thousands of different build combinations to try - except I was expected to go over to path of builder, A THIRD PARTY APPLICATION, or watch a youtube guide for a build that would actually function at higher tiers instead of being able to tinker around and learn by myself in-game. At that point it feels like I'm playing in order to re-create someone else's game experience rather than actually play my own game.
@@vithefirst6173 Almost everything can function at higher tiers, tho. Unless by higher tiers you mean gigajuiced 300% quant T17s.
You might not be efficient. You might not do Uber Pinnacle content easily. You might just need some more currency or introduce some mechanic interaction into the build. But saying there is no options at all is wrong AF.
People cry about not having options, meanwhile there are streamers like mathil that do like 20 different off-meta builds EACH LEAGUE that are usually good enough to clear all of endgame.
And if your goal was to "being able to tinker around and learn by yourself in-game" then how is any of the above a problem?
@@vithefirst6173but Poe2 has reduced that problem severely. It's not perfect, but it is a thousand times more flexible than it used to be
@@vithefirst6173 PoE 2 is much better in this regard. I went in completely blind with my first few characters (now I'm trying out theorycrafted builds) and I had no issues. You can play the game your own way and build your own character.
@@Oathiel Yea, good luck with a "functioning" build in in a trade league. Better to play LE than play a functioning build in PoE 2 endgame atm.
GGG is infatuated with the idea that their games are made for the hardcore gamers, that they are better than Blizzard. While I love POE 2 quite a bit, the endgame is at odds with giving players a satisfying experience, by making certain things just painful like one try mechanic and all of the OHKO.
I will always champion hard games, but at a certain point, being hard just for the sake of it by going out of the way to make players miserable is not the way to go about it. That said, it's still EA and very early in the game's life so I have hope that GGG will make the necessary adjustment.
Which is kinda funny because Blizzard didn't make games to the the hardcore crowd. They might have hardcore elements, but Diablo and WoW were meant to be played by everyone, not just the neckbeards.
@@JDelwynn I think that's what OP was saying. Blizzard makes accessible games. GGG claims to be better because they are more elitist. Which is dumb, but it's how a lot of people think about things.
I mean they ARE better than Blizzard. Sure PoE 2 needs a ton of work to get where it needs to be, but PoE 1 is objectively in every single regard a better game than every single diablo game except on the point of lore.
@@YuYuYuna_ PoE will never have the kind of impact D1 and D2 had. GGG is better than Blizzard only because Blizzard sucks now. Being elitist about how hardcore their game is (which is what OP seems to be saying) isn't why they are better, though.
Either bring back the 6 portal defense or make it so that dying doesnt remove your map and instead slaps it with a stacking 15% reduced quantity of items or something along those lines.
10:30 - 10:40 . Died to a rare mob with haste + explode nearby corpses as a couple of its 4+ mods. It was on my screen for like 2 seconds and before i could blink , pun intended, it blew up all the trash mobs that i cleared in that area. Just decided to watch a film after.
6:00 No one wants to be _punished_ for failing, but people do like having _consequences_ for failing because it adds the element of risk. It's somewhat semantics, but the underlying idea is that players do want to feel like they might lose _something_ if they fail to succeed at something, but they don't want that loss to be crippling or painful.
The best punishment I've found is a lack of a reward. When success is rewarded but failure isn't punished but simply not rewarded (like dark souls, failure means you lose the unspent souls you had on you and no more than that, the levels you put into stats stay permanently).
Chat is just Josh's rubber ducky for sorting his thoughts
They wanted more build diversity, and they did the exact opposite of what they should have done. They should have built the game so that the super casual builds made by the regular dudes working two jobs can complete all of the content without too much of a struggle, and then have been totally okay with the fact that the super meta builds will completely steamroll all of the content. They should have also removed punishments from dying at endgame. The fact you get punished for failing means that people will avoid being punished which means people will avoid playing things that aren't the meta
there is only half the classes in the game currently, also tons of weapons and skill gems are not even in the game yet, so we don't have access to full build diversity. in the future there can be a lot more variety and such. i think people are forgetting that fact. the builds we have now, could be completely outshined later.
Meta builds steamrolling content are also so absurd right now in the most obvious ways, like using the % max hp of enemies against themselves. How would anyone not see this coming and make the game hard and players weak through almost every other mechanic in the game? Build diversity isn't just about difficulty, but about balance. Lower difficulty leaves more room for balance but the balance right now is beyond broken as well.
@@Sniperbear13 that would only be true if the game didn't incentivize playing the best builds because failing is so punishing. People will naturally gravitate towards the best builds because players will avoid being punished.
@@BuckyDucky many will, but at the same time, people will still experiment and find fun builds that might not be the best but can still do the job.
in fighting games, people do find fun in playing low tier characters, even if they will lose 7 outta 10 matches. playing the meta is not always the most fun.
@@Sniperbear13 the point here is not that nobody will play off meta builds. The point is that the game is incentivizing playing meta builds and that is a problem. The more you punish players the more they will avoid being punished, this is the absolute wrong philosophy to bring into a game where you want to incentivize build diversity
It is an interesting topic, and it relates to me as well. I am working on a space combat/exploration game, and the time a player goes "out" and "back" from his home base is what matters. Dying is not a big deal in itself, you just teleport back and your ship is there. So a player starts to go out, does things, acquires loot, and the amount of loot he carries increases. When a player's ship is destroyed, he loses all his cargo and cannot recover it. Meaning as he continues to acquire loot, his risk of losing it increases.
I think that's a fair balance. If it were like EVE Online, you'd lose your ship, your cargo, your equipment and maybe even the equivalent to experience. The amount of time you lose is not only what you spent for that particular trip, but hours to weeks of money grinding for the ship and its equipment. Plus it is a hassle to buy all the parts for the ship, you may have to move around, which can take an hour.
So what do you think, is it fair to "only" lose ~20-60 minutes of time, which are the things you acquired on a trip? It's not like Dark Souls where defeat is death, and it occurs a lot, and also easily out of nowhere. Escaping and avoiding combat is also well possible.
To compare: In Classic Wow you lose around 5 minutes. In Retail WoW you lose around 1-2 minutes. In Hardcore WoW you lose days, weeks even months of time. In Guild Wars it's around 1-5 minutes of walking back. In Minecraft it's up to 120 minutes if not recovered, ~5-10 minutes if recovered items. In Wildlands or Ghost Recon it's ~5-10 minutes. In Mario games (dropping to 0 life) it's possibly up to 120 minutes. In EVE Online it's hours to days. In single player games it's 1-15 minutes (forcing a loading).
to me it partially depends on how players can die, but if they can realistically only lose up to an hour of progress due to greed, this seems relatively fair, especially if that's kind of the point of the whole game. it's risk VS reward, you got a haul, is it worth it to risk getting a little more and losing it all, or will you go back now and ensure you're safe?
but most importantly to me personally; was the cause of death realistically avoidable through experience or skill, or was it a matter of poor RNG and you just got ganked.
if you can lose 60 minutes of time because of a random dice roll outside of your control, then i wont even look at your game, if there were tells that someone with experience could realistically tell, but failed to notice, then, while it may be frustrating in the moment, has at least a element of 'avoidable' to me.
Personally there's a couple of metrics to note. Losing active progress feels better than losing already attained progress. If you are 30 minutes into a run and then die, yes it feels bad to lose some or most of those 30 minutes, but anything that wasn't part of the run is yours forever. This is where a lot of the failure lies, in eating your progress further than the run went.
There's also the perceived fairness of the loss. Could something realistically have been done about it? Was it a technical failure, did the game warn you enough that you're going in too deep?
finally, there's also how natural the punishment feels. If you're out and about and you die and respawn on your ship, you won't have the stuff on you. That seems understandable. You might even have lost the experiences of what you were doing cause there's not a permanent memory repository. But why does it eat your permanent exp?
One point that your game has that PoE 2 doesn't is the voluntary nature of it. If I keep going after a good find, I know exactly what I am risking and exactly where I will reset to if it goes wrong. In PoE 2 as of now, I'm not sure exactly how much time I'll lose and what stuff I'll miss out on, only a vague 'A LOT.' is there.
Moreover, the EVE example you listed is exactly why I couldn't stand to do what I'd originally intended to do. I spent months getting to the point I could use a Hulk (at that time basically the best mining ship out there) with the intention of doing Ice mining. I got a goddamn lone in game from my Corp for the skills, implants and the ship. After a few relatively safe runs? I paid off what I owed and outright quit EVE. As I told my friend who did the loan and got me into the corporation "Look, mining Ice is the worst combination of tedium and mind shattering tension. It's goddamn boring, except for the constant horrifying fear that if I look away for even a second, some pirate or hostile or rando jerk is going to decloak, tackle me, and I'll be out this enormous sum of ISK that I'll feel obligated to pay back. Even once I do? I'll be out all of my assets. If I wanted that feeling? I'd join the military."
PoE 2, even in softcore, rapidly gets to the point of that same combo of 'boring/nerve-wracking' because of how much you lose on death once it's mapping time.
Stopped playing more than a week ago after two consecutive deaths. After reaching the point where xp loss kicks in my gaming sessions would end in a rage quit after a death, the higher the level the more frustrating it became, to the point where dying 2 times in one minutes span at level 89, squeezed me out of all the morale to go and try regrinding the lost xp, cause I might die again and go even lower. For context I was playing self-made non-meta build, so this video really resonates.
Losing XP is like Demon's souls punishing you for using human form. There's no reason to engage with the mechanic since you only get punished by the game for using it if you die
I’d argue Demons Souls is one of two games I actually like the game punishing you with feel bad mechanics for dying. Those being the characters reliance on consumables and the tendency/humanity mechanics. As it helps the game communicate the main themes of the story and adds dynamic difficulty spikes almost guaranteeing some sort of roadblock if you’re not familiar with the genre. It also adds tension making each decision feel more meaningful and making the game feel scarier and more foreboding. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the two more horror souls like games have your main source of healing come from consumables. The game clearly wants you to think about resource management a lot more than the later souls games.
I understand that it makes the game more frustrating but imo it sorta payed off with the game feeling more engaging and immersive than it would otherwise. It also adds loads of replayability as it can change what parts of the game are more challenging on any given playthrough drastically and it makes certain interactions and build options available depending on how the playthrough goes.
If you’re curious the other game I think makes very good use of feel bad/punishing mechanics is pathologic 2. That game does an even better job.
Edit: I’d argue the game isn’t actually made much more difficult with worse tendency as the game significantly raises drop chances. What’s important as weapon upgrades are 95% from enemy drops. Not to mention soul form damage getting increased in lower tendency. What’s this ultimately results in is the game requiring you to grind more to come back stronger than was even possible before in order to defeat the boss that had become in your playthrough a hard boss.
If you haven’t caught on the point of the punishing mechanics is to make the game seem more intimidating than it actually is in order to create an even stronger feeling of overcoming adversity. I would also explain the way these mechanics are important to the narrative but I’ve already gone on way too long in this comment. Thanks for reading all of this lol.
GGG has stated that "EXP loss" as a mechanic is intended to ensure that reaching level 100 is not something any player can achieve easily, making it a real accomplishment when you make it there. Even if you buy thousands of the omen to protect your EXP loss, it only blocks 75% so you still need to focus on staying alive to make progress.
If we can come up with an alternative mechanic to fulfill that same objective, making the highest levels "prestigious" to attain, I think we could see the EXP loss mechanic removed at all levels.
For example, we could use an ascension type system. Remove the EXP penalty and set the standard level cap to 90. To reach level 91 you must complete a challenging trial of some sort. To reach 92 after that you must complete an even harder trial, etc. This maintains the "prestige" of reaching those upper levels without needing the EXP penalty to be ever present for the general populous.
The punishment aspect gets amplified if you don't feel like you died due to a mistake you made or worse if you feel like you couldn't have done anything different.
I recently played Brotato and due to the game kind of flooding the arena with enemies, it doesn't feel like you can actually avoid damage, so it comes down to whether or not you are lucky enough that the character dodges often enough or that whatever healing you have triggers enough for you to survive. Combine that with the luck aspect of building the character I always felt like I couldn't do something a lot different. It's why I eventually deleted the game out of frustration.
I agree that the way souls likes handle punishment is probably among the best, certainly great for that type of game. While you can loose progress you always have the chance to restore it and it even adds an aspect of choice to the loss of that progress. The player can either go back to a boss and regain the lost souls, but will have to try the boss again or he can make the choice to go somewhere else, maybe find an easier boss for now, grind some levels or a try to get better equipment, whatever. At that point loosing that progress becomes less of a punishment, because the player chooses to give up that progress.
The souls like Code Vein even adds the option to restore half of it's currency if you want to, mitigating the punishment aspect even further.
yeah that sometimes can be really bad, but i think brotato is still different. In Brotato you still can play glass cannon map clears, but you can also play defensive builds, pacifist builds, combos or anything you like, really. brotato just has the aspect that you kind of need to go with the flow of rng and if you dont know the game well enough that is really hard
@@justshinigami9364 Probably, that was just my personal experience. I persevered and finished a play through with several of the characters on the highest difficulty and while it's quite enjoyable when a build comes together, it's incredibly frustrating to loose.
I rarely felt like there was anything else I could have done. Only rarely did I feel that I should have done something differently.
As Josh mentioned, when you loose you should gain experience, get better at the game, get better at beating an enemy. I'm not saying that you don't learn anything, I just feel like you reach the point very quickly where you get only marginal improvements, if at all.
I'm not saying I figured out the game entirely, maybe I was playing completely wrong. I just reached a point where I didn't feel like I could change a lot in my playstyle to improve my chances and I was playing it because the gameplay loop is quite addicting, not because I got anymore enjoyment out of it.
I mean for brotato that's just a build issue. All of these "vampire survive-style" games are just DPS checks. Can you clear the mobs on the screen before they attack you or surround you? Yes? Good! keep playing, No? You die. It's just how those games are and it's the fun of them.
>Loss in arcade terms means put more money in and try again
That's only when you're learning the game, and is derisively referred to as "credit-feeding", when you're actually going for the clear, you're expected to do it in one go, and an arcade game is generally around forty minutes, so it's actually a pretty big loss when you game over!
Incidentally, arcades have game difficulty literally down to a science, because they had to be hard enough to wear you'd get kicked off the machine or have to spend more by stage three unless you were really good, but not so ridiculous to where you felt you were just actively having your money stolen.
Heavy punishment is ok if - and only if - the game has a robust learning toolchain.
So almost never.
I love that Josh is talking about going away from the game whilst walking on the spot.
Your example with GTA was so funny to me, because PoE1 started extremely slow and punishing. It wasn´t growing until they changed, sped it up and allowed more things. Players were shaping the game into what it is today. PoE1 went in a direction many people of GGG didn´t want the game to be. Too fast, too rewarding. So they introduced Ruthless into PoE1 a game mode where you are slower, less loot, more tedium and the vast majority hated it. Now we have those Ruthless mechanics in PoE2 and people are against them again. I hope we can shape PoE2 also into a game worth playing in the endgame.
And some people preferred the old game and now want to have at least one to play. Do you really need two, exactly the same games? Do you really think that if something is more popular it is automatically better?
You fail to mention that retention has drastically gone down the more they sped the game up. We used to have nearly triple TRIPLE the retention that we have now in modern leagues. We do not need to go down the same road that PoE 1 went down. That just leads to frustration and people getting bored with the game. PoE 2 is it's own thing, it's biggest weakness right now is it leans too much into what PoE 1 was (especially in endgame). It needs to embrace the identity it had in the campaign.
@@Perqqq But you already have Ruthless, do you really need two, exactly the same games?
Ruthless is the only way I play. All the sparkling and loot going everywhere makes me think of a mobile game. Specifically it makes me think GGG are trying to highjack my dopamine system like mobile games do.
No I don't need loot fountains. No, I don't want lots of randomly generated colored names on the field. Feels bad when I stop caring about drops.
@@radaro.9682 I don't quite understand your point of view. Does this mean you're extremely happy to get a 1000th transmutation orb in poe2, but don't feel anything when you get a divine in poe1? Some things are meant to be rare just in the beginning.
I think the huge problem with poe players is that they just get a loot filter that turns the game into the "randomly generated colored names on the field" or "dopamine hit" because of the loot filter sounds. And then they complain about it, oblivious to how they break it for themselves.
I have almost 8k hours in poe1 and I don't feel indifferent to drops, even if they're meh, because it has it's use and purpose, I just went beyond it and need better stuff. Yet I still pick up smaller rare items because alteration orbs are important too.
Also, people only playing meta and complaining about it is another problem. It's almost as if such players want to force others to play at their low speed.
*Sees recommended video*
"Ah I like this mans' videos, excellent Rob Stark cosplay as per usual" *clicks on the video* "he often has quite poignant things to sa-why is he on a treadmill?"
In my experience playing Poe1 (roughly 700 hours), the point I would stop playing was usually when I'd hit a stonewall in exp progression, where my build couldn't survive lvl-appropriate content long enough so that 10% exp penalty would happen too often, making it next to impossible to lvl up unless I did low-lvl content with a huge exp penalty. Really not a fan of exp penalty for that reason. On the other hand, I do feel it's extremely important to for death to have stakes (love fromsoft games, roguelikes, played D4 almost exclusively hardcore, etc), so I'm not sure what the solution would be for me.
Consider the following: You lose some portion (say, 10%) of the map modifiers each time you die. The bonuses to loot, and the buffs to enemies/penalties to you. When you hit -60%, if you can't clear it, that is a reasonable sign you need to work on your build or bit off far more than you can chew.
Since you will inevitably die at least occasionally in basically any game that you play, anything that disincentivizes dying also disincentivizes playing.
Punishment in games is -- at best -- redundant. Players are already trying to win, sometimes even without reward of any kind. If a game needs some artificial incentive to push players to avoid losing in addition to trying to win, the design is fundamentally broken.
"You are gonna learn! [...] Welcome to the real world!"
- Justin Wong coaching
There is a rocket launcher somewhere in this quote.
"Is this what you ever do in your house?"
This was a very interesting video, with a very interesting conversation. Really good points. Really good discussion. i feel like this topic is one of those topics that's not spoken of enough.
I've has this same view ans my friends literally just reply "get good" and my brain literally just shuts down
And they're all probably playing meta cuck builds like spark archmage stormweaver
Completely agreed. Unlocked maps just recently, first one froze my game when I entered the portal and had to restart the whole pc (it didn't refund the map since it wasn't a dc/crash but a force-restart of my pc), and the second map was me just playing as if it were hardcore, which wasn't very fun since I pretty much just spammed storm wave on monk, otherwise I'd die way too fast. It's a huge disincentive that you not only lose the map and your time, but also the xp and potentially loot if you don't pick it up quick enough. Hope they change it, at this point I don't motivated to do more maps after those 2 runs
> restart the whole pc
When Elden Ring received the enormous success that it did, it was obvious that a lot of studio's were going to learn all the wrong lessons from that success.
That sounds like you think EXP loss is a new mechanic, which I can assure you is not the case
Elden Ring is a worse Dark Souls. Even FromSoft learned the wrong lessons from DS1-3, etc.
That was bloody amazing, hope the devs watch this :)
Getting punished for trying and learning, just makes me demotivated to play.
You dont deal with the experience loss until endgame tbf
Another game I felt did the "punishment" system well (though very differently) was Mechwarrior 5: Mercenaries. Here you can find equipment in different tiers, and if the component its attached to gets destroyed (arm, shoulder, side torso, etc) then you lose the weapons and equipment in those slots. Then you have to replace them. If you have multiple copies of that item at the same tier then hitting "repair all" will automatically replace them. However higher tier equipment gets harder to find, giving you a choice: USE your high-tier equipment and make combat potentially easier, but risk losing components, or save them for when you get a healthy stockpile. You are also managing a mercenary company and there are upkeep costs and salaries to payout every few in-game months, also repair costs after missions. While a new player might struggle to make their profits exceed their expenses, you feel your skill as a Mechwarrior improving as the gap between your profits and expenses widen, because you have improved as a pilot. So, you might start out loosing hard-fought for weapons and components and making a marginal profit, but learn and improve and start making millions in C-bills profit over your expenses. I found this to be a very satisfying and addicting reward loop.
Only if you're naughty.
On Elden Ring. I remember my friend trying to fight a boss where the check point was this very long run through a cave to get back to it, and how frustrating it was for him compared to the rest of the game.
The only games where I've seen this kind of design make sense is in tactical/strategy games. If you want to encourage the player to think and prepare before doing anything, making them truly fear death is the best way of doing so.
And a one player strategy game (or a 4x) is usually suuuuper slow, allowing you to just stare at a problem for a bit
I agree, but this needs to be done carefully. If the loss is severe and the mission is long, then it can quickly become tedious/boring to retry when you fail.
I still haven't finished Fire Emblem Awakening for this reason. I admit that I made the initial mistake of playing on hard mode upon my friend's strong recommendation (he's naturally interested in and good at exploiting RPG systems). That's on me. But I made it to one of the last battles, and the length of it made repeated attempts boring pretty quickly.
I'll come back and finish it eventually though. I always do.
@@MoonJellyGames Yup, I agree. Bad mission design that relies on previously unknown information (e.g. very strong enemy units showing up out of nowhere near the end) can also compound and make the issue even worse.
Just like with everything else in game design, balancing is important.
And even there it's a bit knife edge. A lot of those games set you back further than square 1 on an unlucky encounter. XCom takes away your power but keeps the enemies' where it sometimes feels like you might as well reset the run.
The treadmill in the office is peak productivity, new goal attained
The experience loss is a holdover from PoE1 getting popular based on the back of experience races to level cap
Thank you in particular for pointing out that school is to teach how to think and learn, not for rote memorisation and facts that could be learned anywhere. Too focused on dealing with the tasks we're given, without questioning if those are the tasks we should have in the first place.
My take is:
Games get played to have fun, and getting punished for something you had little to no control over it, since it was a pure one shot, on death effect you coudn't see, getting crit and such and get frustrated from your punishment, which is exp loss, missing out on loot, losing your map, your bonus objectives like map bosses, delirium and such...
If you die in an elden ring fight you you get punished buy haveing to restart the fight. Which was most likely your fault. For not dodging a mostly good indicated attack.
"Most likely"
"Mostly good"
Why can't people just accept that a good large minority of bosses and enemies in Elden Ring suck and were horribly designed? Just admit it.
@@SenkaZver most likely because if it's your first time getting combo'ed by boss then it's not really your fault.
you can beat *all* of bosses in elden ring without time investment loss (finding boss key/waypoints again), just your time learning the patterns.
Good large minority???
I think a few of the dlc bosses were meh but 99% of the base game's design is fine.
Not agreeing is not the same as being unwilling to admit something.@@SenkaZver
@@SenkaZver They are not.
@@oramisc90you can beat tons of badly designed and unfair games with extreme handicaps.
The ability to do something doesn't invalidate whether it is well designed or bad.
This is why Kenshi is 95% positive on Steam. The "loss conditions" are fun. Say your band of adventurers is attacked by slavers. Two of your characters get captured, the rest flee but some lose limbs and others items. Your stuff really doesn't matter too much. You've still gained player combat skill. Your enslaved party members will not die, and can instead spend their time in slavery grinding work speed, stealth, lockpicking, thievery and assassination. On top of that, the game has given you an incentive to find robotic limbs, however you may do so, and get together a rescue mission. There are some frustrating mechanics here and there in Kenshi. But for the most part, losing is fun.
What you said about failure removing past successes is exactly the reason why the game's population has tumbled almost 200 thousand players on Steam. It effectively made the play time before it null, especially when it is to a mechanic you cannot avoid (server lag, straight up not being able to even see things, etc.) With more casual people playing the game for only a few hours a day, let alone a week, losing days or *weeks* of their free time for absolutely nothing is asinine.
Not only that, but honestly the timing was an issue, people were hailng the steam player numbers as if everyone playing has gotten to the problem areas, i consider myself non-casual is game time sense, and it took me around 50-60 hours too complete act 3 (mind you with some grinding here and there) no way a dad gamer is going to get the frustration parts of the game till at least a month in. And it shows. Not only that, but the diffirence i tone between the cruel campaign and maps i general compared too the campaign is an insane jump, thats where the quiting moment is going to be for most people.
There are more people playing POE2 Early Access 1 month into EA than any peak day 1 POE1 season.
Get good
11:52 I agree with Josh on most of this, though i'd argue yes in some cases, Roguelikes and to a lesser extend Roguelites literally are okay with you losing 3 hours of runs for the knowledge of what they gave you even if you don't win. Also theres fun in playing the game even if you don't win. I don't have long to play POE2 or other titles but I don't mind making little progress if I had fun or learnt something.
View it akin to something like Sonic the Hedgehog (1991). [This will teach me for rendering this comment before 20:00]
The premise of the game, is speed & platforming. You make your way through a level, avoid dying, and try to take the 'best route' through the level (usually the top most path).
At the end of every third level, you fight a boss that has your 'deal X hits' and the boss dies. The levels *tend* to get progressively harder as you go through.
Importantly, you also tend to get better at these levels the more you go through the levels - where you remember how to take the optimum paths, getting you through them quicker.
The final boss, almost always gives you no rings, so any hit, you die, as opposed to losing rings (and being able to potentially pick them back up).
So the final boss / final level is always the most challenging because it removes your fail-safe and forces you to play optimally.
By which point you've probably acquired a ton of extra lives, and maybe some continues.
But if you lose all of your lives/continues, you go back to the start of the game.
By modern standards, this would be considered an awful penalty (Think about it like 'deleting your save').
Until you look at how it's designed to get you replaying, in that you slowly master the 99% of the game.
Once you conquer the last 1% of the game, that was it. There is no DLC, that's the game done.
For the time, this was just akin to the arcade cabinets of the 10 years prior, just with less of the painful absorption of pocket cash.
Every game *must* have a penalty.
But it needs to be penalty that focuses the player on future improvement, without costing them too much of their already established investment.
the monitor angle and treadmill suggests Josh is going for the shredded legs and hunchback build.
No. There should be consequence. I just spent 4 hours levelling a key for a specific map up and surrounding towers for buffs. I died to death art due to a massive lag spike due to the way servers are currently unstable and regardless of settings, the screen gets overloaded. I can accept I died and lag happened. But losing the map, the exp and the time has put me off. I play ssf so the hit was insane. I really like poe2, the punishment is an issue.
At level 88 ssf, this is a weeks set back. There has been a 200k player drop for many reasons but most come back to the punishment at end game. Those of us that do not play trade site lose harder. Kind of. Trade site players have their own issues lol.
Consequence to choices should be promoted. Punishment is not acceptable.
Been trying to tell the same to friend for weeks but he's on this mindset of a veteran PoE 1 player that 'Its not that bad, punishment is good'
Just wait until GGG adds seasons with TIMELIMITED FOMO MTX as challenge rewards like in PoE1 which completely nullifies the chance of you playing a character you WANT to play and forces you to play a meta build if you want a chance at getting said MTX before the league ends and those MTX can NEVER be acquired ever again.
What are you on about? People complete the challenges in less than a week of league launch. Not being able to complete them after 3-4 months has nothing to do with not playing a meta build.
I ABSOLUTELY love poe. I played 2 maps/waystones in poe2, havent played in almost 3 weeks.
The issue of what is said at the end, that some ideas are good and some ideas are bad and it is now a matter of panning for the gold is, that alot of things that are bad in the design, where all people agree they are bad, are taken over from Poe1 and are declared as core game design. The one portal thing is just the tip of the iceberg. Most of the bad things are bad on purpose.
You vastly overestimate the amount of people that think those things are bad. A very significant vocal percentage of the online community feels it is bad, that does not mean that ALL people agree they are bad.
@@silvermunkee The game design aspects we are talking about aren't a subjective matter. It's a objective measure. I cannot care less about what people with no idea about game design think about design elements.
@@Finsternis.. Name one mechanic that is objectively bad, not subjectively bad.
@@silvermunkee Just one? Sure. The final boss has specific attack patterns you learn to deal with. At some point he abuses what you learned to kill you. There is _no_ way whatsoever to anticipate that the first go around. The game is literally playing with your psychology. And due the way how boss fights work he will do this several times, as you a) need to remember there was this attack b) you need to realize it wasn't a bad coincidence and c) need to actually manage the tight timing. That is on top of setting you back several hours of gameplay, being even more burdon on learning mechanics, due to the increased downtime between attempts.
@@Finsternis.. That is subjectively bad. By creating an intended gameplay of significant time investment of learning and re-learning you increase the value of the drops of the boss. Imagine if the balance was much tighter (no archmage, howa, etc). The first kill of the Arbiter would be extremely late after the launch, the exclusive gear he drops would be much more sparse. This would create truly aspirational content, which is the goal. Now subjectively that is bad for a lot of people, especially those with limited time, but its also subjectively good for those who can grind and dedicate their lives to it. It is in no way OBJECTIVELY bad.
Another way to put the feels bad mechanic is thus: you wagered your time and in game resources on the bet that you're skilled enough to beat the challenge. However, The game is also secretly wagering all your time and resources that you never specifically tried to wager. So it feels like the bet was unfair.
Just as Asmongold said: "Punishment? Why? I lost. I died. That's the punishment."
but dying has to come with some sort of other consequence or else why would you even care if you died?
Just as Asmongold said: "Palestinians are an inferior culture"
Another dumb take from the dumb take lord
@@nurgle-j5n you are "fighting" something that is programmed to lose. so you will eventually win. you could argue: "why would i care if i am going to win anyways at some point?". thats why some people prever PvP over PvE, because there the enemy is not programmed to lose. in PvE though, the road is the destination. punishment is going back on the road. it is negative progress. not many people like that from my observations. Edit Addition: if "just dying" was an issue and needed more punishment, why do they have respawn points in front of every boss during the campaign? Why would it be possible to level up so that xp loss does not matter? Why no negative-leveling?
if someone needs super high stakes and grueling punishment in order to "care" for a past time activity, i wonder if it wouldnt be better if they took this drive somewhere productive
@@grunerkaktus What is exactly programmed to lose? No game is ever programmed to lose, and that is a dumb statement. Games are designed to meet certain skill thresholds for their desired audience, whether that is PvE or PvP. There are easy PvP games and hard PvP games, as well as easy PvE games and hard PvE games. If anything, only PvP games are technically 'programmed to lose' with ranking systems. These systems place players in brackets that give them an equal chance to win, allowing even bad players to enjoy winning because they are matched with others of similar skill. A PvE game, on the other hand, will not show mercy. If you do not have the skill to beat it, you are out completely.
As for competitiveness, a PvE game is as competitive as a PvP game because individual player performance matters. A weightlifter or a runner is not directly facing their opponents but is still competing to achieve higher results. And trust me, some competitive PvE players do stuff that PvP players don't even come close.
In PoE, the experience loss is necessary. You must always consider the risk of dying and focus on your character's power, and most definitely playing better to avoid such outcomes. It is already easy as it is because character power is very high. If you never cared about dying, you would just die and keep killing monsters as if nothing happened. It would literally not matter. You could use the shittiest character and brute force any content simply by dying and retrying from where you left off. This makes no sense whatsoever.
Games where dying does not prevent further progression often give you a limited number of attempts, or only one attempt with a reward for completion. In PoE, all loot is given the moment the monster dies. This is why you drop souls in Dark Souls, and this is why monsters respawn. It prevents brute forcing and ensures that death has a cost to consider. In PoE, you must be powerful to reach more difficult content. You cannot keep dying non-stop without a cost as if the death never happened in the first place. This is not a hard conclusion to reach, or else there'd be no point to even have a game where you character dies, you should just be unkillable.
You are mostly dying in situations you will probably learn nothing new from. Like you can suddenly be blocked by monsters, they are too fast and they keep hitting you despite you run around and you can't fight back properly, after death effects, etc. So losing to this will definitely not bring you knowledge to be better, just frustration and punishment.
TBH I don't mind this design if GGG could give players good defensive options to invest into and also balance the mobs, because I feel like the reason they made this choice is so that players won't be picking all damage nodes on the tree and one shot everything or get one shot
Agreed, the core design only works if the game is balanced properly. To have it this punishing while still working out all the balance issues is why people are getting so frustrated. I actually like the core idea assuming armor/es/evasion are all viable in different ways, assuming all the "one-shot" mechanics are clearly telegraphed dodgeable attacks, etc.
@@silvermunkee "clearly telegraphed", in PoE2 - there are times I can't distinguish the mouse cursor. The game is an absolute color/flashy vomit.
@@stanimir4197 There are larger and more vibrant cursor options that help a bit, but in general there is too much going on in the late game to see things easily, I agree.
@@silvermunkee "larger and more vibrant cursor options", if someone opts to do that, it pretty much tells you how much effort into the design has been spent.
@@stanimir4197 Typically those are for accessibility reasons, like those with reduced eye-sight. It just so happens to be useful in this case. It is very apparent a lot of effort has been put into PoE2, but most of it was centered around the campaign.
100% agree to your words about schools and learning (and Shakespeare)!
I love these videos where Josh explores a topic and chats but man do I wish your sfx volume was lower, its difficult to listen to you over all the noise.
I first noticed that difference between an educational loss and a frustrating loss around 8 years ago. I took a break from world of warcraft and had a look into eve online. Quite a jump :D
So...you might thinking now: "Ohh, eve online isnt that the game where you loose all your stuff when you die throwing you back to zero?" No. It was quite the opposite.
Let me explain: Yes, you loose your ship and your cargo. But you learn quickly that you onle should fly things which you are prepared to loose. You learn from every encounter. Whenever i died, i had a feeling of "i just got better. i learned something. Someday, i'll be the one farming!". Kinda like Elden Ring or Dark souls.
World of Warcraft Arena was the frustrating part. Every time i lost a match, my arena rating went down. Sometimes due to situations which were completely outside of my control. Like path of exile. Am i supposed to read 8 different modifiers on a rare enemy within half a second? Am i supposed to know the skills of a pinnacle boss i see for the first time after farming the keys for over a week? THats frustrating!
They could use a altered version of the heist mechanic. Meaning you enter the instance, you travel to the boss and find items along the way. You cant get your items out of the map before the pinnacle boss dies. You loose your picked up items when you die. You can try the boss as many times as you want. Meaning if you take 20 attempts for the final boss, you will leave only with the bosses drops and all the other potential stuff is lost. That incentivises to do him on the first try but you can learn the mechanics and at least get the bossdrops when you finally beat him. You could also make it so that if you drop the mirror along the way and because of that dont want to do the boss, you can get out once but then you cant get back in.
"Path of Exile 2 starts as Dark Souls and ends as Vampire Survivors" so true
Short answer, yes
Long answer, also yes
Edit: I'm mostly joking. Punishment is all fine and good, punishment for trying is bullshit.
No, punishment on repeating a level from the start is usually a bad mechanic to make games feel longer than they really are. I prefer checkpoints/level start right before a boss like Armored Core 6 because at least that game doesnt feel like a waste of time like other fromsoft titles.
@@Dragonfury3000 I agree with you for the most part. But I personally remember the long run back to bosses in Souls games very fondly. In my experience easy run backs make the boss experience somewhat forgettable but I'm fully aware that's just a me thing.
Elden Ring, I usually am more risky when I dont have many runes on me. But also it has a nice mechanic where if you die you can retrieve your lost exp. It encourages you to try the boss again as you can get your runes back if you win.
XP loss is such a dumb mechanic that makes no sense.
You don't lose experience irl when you fail at something, because the whole point of experience is learning from both successes and failures.
I'm pretty sure that you'd lose some experience irl if you died. Maybe all even. Seems like 10% is not that much, eh?
@@Perqqq Lmao if you want to play that card just play perma death and if you die your game gets removed from your library and you cant buy it again.
If you get into a car accident, you don't lose just the time you spent driving. You may lose your car, medical expenses, insurance rate hikes, possibly have to go to court, and more depending on severity.
Life is much worse than dying in poe2
@@xZeke97 I wasn't the one making the comparison
I think it makes sense bc it's a way to make levels feel like an achievement instead of just a playtime metric. Like, if someone makes it to level 95, that means they played through level 94 with less than 1 death per 10% xp on some of the highest level maps (since those are the only ones that give a reasonable amount).
There's also the leaderboard which is a measure of XP, and it would be much less fun to compete if all it took was playing 16 hours a day (granted, you do need to do that to be on the top, but you also need to be actually good). At high levels (where 10% xp actually means a decent chunk of playtime), leveling up doesn't even affect the power level of your character much. A single passive skill point at level 95 is negligible compared to just about any other upgrade you could get (a better piece of gear, jewel, level 20 skill gem, 5th support gem slot, etc).
XP is a great punishment imo, when it goes too far is a death losing all your loot, bricking the node you're on, and deleting your waystone (or even your super expensive boss key, if you were fighting a pinnacle boss).
The experience loss is primarily designed to protect the value of being level 100. In both PoE games, characters that can reach over level 95 are viewed as being 'better' because they obviously last a lot longer between deaths. If experience loss is removed, level 100 will eventually mean nothing. I do agree that the current punishment is too harsh.
The same argument goes towards the absurd respec costs. It was so expensive in PoE1 and is even more expensive now.
Just the fact that people always use an outside application to plan their builds because tinkering would be so expensive otherwise should've told them to skip respec costs.
What would be the downside about having low or no cost for respeccing? That people play around more with their builds? The horror!
If I can respec freely I only need 1 warrior to play every warrior build. I would never need to level another, because I only do that if leveling another is "cheaper" (in time/general investment).
Suppose their metrics show that player with low playtime investment (casual or not much free time) spend less money than strongly commited players. In this case it would make absolute sense to make respeccing not free, but be a inconvience.
Of course, those two effects work against each other. But I have to imagine they got the numbers to make an informed decision about it.
Is the respec expensive in poe2? I find it very cheap, just some gold which can be obtained pretty fast imo by selling a bunch of stuff.
Though my character is 74 so I don't know the cost of respec further in
@@Airahn It gets super expensive. Pohx showed an example - all the gold he had grinded to that point was enough to _barely_ respec a quarter of his skill tree.
What?, since the gold respec nerf, respec is REALLY affordable, even on lv 94, I can respect almost half my tree with 10 maps gold + the gold has close to no use after you get to maps, so you will have millions with after 1 week (low time per day)
It is not more expensive than in poe1. In poe1 it was almost impossible to respec for new players and it was super easy to change entire lvl 95 builds for players who played a lot. The idea is now that you can respec somewhat easily in the beginning and it gets a little harder lategame. Which is fine i think. Really i never had problems solving my build with the gold i had in poe2.
19:48 The Nintendo difficulty... there was no online help and patching games wasn't a thing.
I still love the original Rogue... "Backtrack? What do you mean? You're dead, fam"
This concept is basically why I love VVVVVV's difficulty. It's a hard game for most to beat; the average player (me included) will die hundreds of times. But the respawns are so quick and so numerous (usually there's one in front of each difficult section, and said sections are short) that most players won't be frustrated. I was constantly going, "Whoops, that didn't work, let's try this instead," rather than having a gap in gameplay to go, "GAHHHHHHHHH now I have to try all over again!" It's extremely well balanced.
Of course, if you WANT to have a ridiculously frustrating and punishing time, you can try to get the achievement for never dying in it, but having such challenges as optional content for people who want it is a far different story from playing and enjoying a game as it's normally built.
I honestly don’t think VVVVVV is a hard game. Sure you may die hundreds of times but the actual amount of skill needed to pass any given section is really quite low.
I actually really like the original Dark Souls Runback as it WAS a chunk of the challenge for me. It meant that getting to the boss was part of the process. I would love to see more like 'Hard Enviroment with an Easier Boss' as alternative things you can face beyond Elden Ring's 'You can instantly get into the boss with full resources, so every boss needs to be a thing that can threaten you will full resources'.
Likewise: Not enough Elden Ring bosses had minions. I know people don't like Twin Bosses but fodder enemies would make AOE effects more fun against bosses beyond 'I have more leeway on any misses'.
I have been listening on my phone with the screen on and only by the end realized - this is already one of the Josh Stride Hayes streams!
This is the one thing that held me back ever leveling past level 90 in PoE, the constant one-shot mechanics and impossible to notice enemies AoE attacks (because of enemy density) sometimes just made it more than frustrating to bother. Torchlight Infinite has the same issue at higher levels, you gather experience for 30-40 minutes only to lose that progress in a few seconds and the only way to prevent said loss is with a (buyable?) revive token, opening the door for P2W-ish, P2 Save Time. (I haven't played Torchlight Infinite for 5 months so I'm not sure if anything changed since then).
And in games like Flyff Universe you can actually lose a level if you die with 0 exp. It's such a waste of time.
"The first 3 acts are phenomenally good" damn it's almost like making your entire dev team pivot to endgame 2 months before launch is a bad idea
This takes me back to when I'd play hardcore on D2 or PoE1. It's definitely a different leveling experience, prioritizing survivability. But when things like corpse explosions, pools, disco lasers, thorns, and network issues cause your death, I could only take so much. I eventually just stopped playing hardcore. It felt like an exercise in futility.
What I hate the most actually is the fact that you lose any modifier (a boss, a ritual, an expedition, corruption... any f those) of the map when you die. I'm fine with dying a few times until I get better gear, but what I definitely don't want is pass through 2-4 maps to then die to 3 random projectiles before even getting to the boss and now having to do another round of going to a boss map and hoping something worth it drops in between. Specially since the bosses are so good