Punishments in videogames.
Вставка
- Опубліковано 9 лют 2025
- Patreon: / joshstrifehayes
Twitch: / joshstrifehayes
Discord: / discord
Bluesky: bsky.app/profi...
Twitter: / joshstrifehayes
Reddit: / joshstrifehayes
Tiktok / joshstrifehayes
JoshStrifeHayes Main UA-cam Channel:
/ joshstrifehayes
JoshStrifePlays (2nd UA-cam)
/ @joshstrifeplays
JoshStrifeReplays (Full Twitch VODs)
/ @joshstrifereplays
Official Josh Strife Hayes Clip channel
Editing, Thumbnails and Management by Visa
#shorts #JoshStrifeHayes #twitch #clips
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 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?
(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.
Dark Souls mechanics are more intuitive and it's easier to get back to boss and try again :D
@@tyler6650 what exactly is bad about gemling? I read the nodes and they seem interesting and useful. Is there a hidden mechanic Im not aware of?
@@Cosmic_A.A. it's bad because he doesn't understand how to build it. Currently one of the best build in the game uses gemling ascendancy and stat stacking.
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 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.
they could nerf some damage and buff boss hp. but then people like you will get frustrated. what can GGG do
@@dennischen2642make it so you don't lose everything just for dying? Difficulty shouldn't mean frustrating and all of these needless punishments actively encourages you to cheese enemies and bosses that may give you a hard time.
Maybe make it so that you only half of your XP and only after losing to a boss 3 times. Now not only is the punishment nowhere near as bad but now you are encouraged to experiment and learn the boss their first 1-2 attempts and then get serious once you know you now have something to lose. This would encourage strategy and genuinely studying you opponent, looking for weaknesses and exploits, it would encourage you to treat this like a real fight.
@@dennischen2642 interestingly enough, thats something i did in another actiongame in which i found bosses frustrating because it culminated in "dont get hit and win the DPS race". i set bosses to have 75% their attack and 200% health. it drags the fight out a bit, but getting hit no longer set me up for failure and i was able to study the bosses patterns and mechanics at a much less stressful pace, to the point i actually engaged with it instead of trying to glass cannon through it like the meta suggested.
I did 1 run through of POE back in the day. I uninstalled shortly thereafter. Why? Grim Dawn doesn't punish you like this series does and it has a similar amount of depth without endless confusing build choices that don't actually mean anything. I still enjoy taking new characters through the campaign because of how much RNG there is. Knowing shrine and monster drop locations along side the knowledge of Totem and other farm locations along the way based on the build feedback keeps me coming back.
Poe just has never had that, sad to say. After 100 hours in Poe the "min-maxing" of late game is extremely stale. I don't care how much a build might or might not be effective if it mandates I already have the full build ready to slot in just to mash 1 or 2 keys for more shiny loot.
@@dennischen2642 reduce damage duplicate life.
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
The frustrating part about this is that I doesn't feel like you fault either. You've been dominating up to a certain point and the *BAM* dead, it's a horrible teacher, for instance if I die to something in Dark Souls I know why I died, I know how to fix that whether that's equipping more resistances/armor or simply playing better and avoiding certain attacks. In PoE 2 the death comes as shock, a surprise and I don't know why or how to fix it for the future - PoE 2 is simply a really shitty teacher.
@@esideras That's the key problem for me tbh. It feels so random. I don't feel like I'm succeeding because I'm skilled or tactful, I just feel glad that I didn't get one-shot by something offscreen this time. It's pure chance and I don't enjoy it at all.
I loved ritual in PoE1.
Ritual in PoE2 is basically guaranteed death. I don't understand how they downgraded it so badly. Have to save it until after finishing the map, then slowly run around and try to do them.. and usually die and lose all the rewards immediately.
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.
It's the consequence of so many gamers essentially telling game devs that a game can't be respected unless it's nail bitingly hard.
In this very case, a live service game incentivizes monetary investment to circumvent the harsh punishments which were deliberately put there.
Because some players are thinking it could make a fun game to have huge death penalties, and are loud about it.
@@professeurgideere5856 Or that it gives them prestige for surviving.
I also have spoken to people who have different thresholds for what feels like punishment for them.
It's almost like people disagree about this stuff
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.
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.
"If you want a child to enjoy Shakespear let them watch a good company produce it. If you want a child to hate Shakespear make them read it."
That is some Iroh level wisdom.
This is a problem I have with the latest "Deep Dungeon" in FFXIV. For reference, they are tiered-difficuilty (every 10 floors it gets harder) that can be tackled 10 floors at a time. The 10th one is a boss encounter and once defeated you are checkpointed and can go back in with the SAME party to continue at a later point. The different rooms of the floors have hidden traps, monster challenges and sometimes the whole floor has a modifyer on it. You can collect items to help your way and while you don't actually get levels in there you have an armor and weapon that gets stronger and provides a better chance to victory. If at whatever point your entire party goes down you are kicked out, you get no rewards for your (current) floor, you are graded with a score and this one attempt is locked out; game over.
In Endwalker they introduced a new Deep Dungeon where reaching the 100th floor is neccesary to get an item that when you have enough you can turn in for a fairly nice looking mount to ride around on. The basic rules are the same. However, pretty much every eight out of ten monsters in the place now have an attack or mechanic that will INSTANTLY reduce your hp to 0. No counter, no save, nothing but to make sure to 'just not get hit'. The other two have abilities that will make it easier for the first eight to hit you. This can be overcome when the attack is something like a small radius to get out of, don't stand in front or behind it, get away for a death-blow explosion or something that you can feasibly figure out and deal with.
But then at some point in the higher level floors. After working hard to get to 50, 60... 70... There are now enemy monsters that will start casting a spell, uninterruptable, that will kill everyone on the floor if cast. This is getting a bit iffy but at least they don't start casting it after a bit into engaging it so you could possibly defeat it.
And then comes the monster that will just, at some random point in its idle animation will start casting an attack that will kill everyone in its radius, the warning that you are in it will only flash for a second or so at the end of the castbar. It can start casting it even when you can't even see the monster and will hit you even if you line-of-sight it. And the radius is so big that if you only just notice it when it just starts casting... your best defense is to start running and hope you can make it out of the radius.
And the neverending string of hard to track, avoid or prevent instant-death attacks getting you kicked out after weeks long being able to get everyone in the locked party together for long enough to clear floors 10 at a time just because you all just rounded a corner and stepped into an aoe you could not have seen coming just as it finished casting... It's just sheer frustration.
I grew up with "Nintendo-hard" and I get it. There is a challenge and there is satisfaction in winning. Battling through hard stuff and smacking into the wall face-first over and over again is progression content in duties and trials. But it really... REALLY sucks after hours and so much effort you misread a queue or a new mob does something you haven't seen before and your KO causes the rest of the party to go down too and you just ended the entire run. No matter how often your buddies say 'It's ok, we'll try again' you're still going to feel bad for being the one to lose the attempt.
Ohh this, im in lower levels still and felt so bad,when something oneshot me because i stood in a bad spot. Thats not fun, and not a punishment. It just makes me feel really bad and stop my party to pick me up and maybe joke about my death.
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)
the real question is are you at level 95+ where losing exp actually matters
@@dennischen2642 As someone who enjoys these games but doesn't have the time to get really good at them or the time to play them a ton? Losing exp matters as early as level 80. Yeah I can overcome the XP losses, but it's absolutely a noticeable part of why I rarely reach level 90 in a league, much less level 95+
@@daredaemon8878 you're ignoring the fact that 10% from 70 - 80 is literally overcome in 5 packs. You barely reach level 90 because you keep dying. You have to change the way you play and improve your character defensively so you die less. Isn't that what people should be doing to overcome a game's challenge?
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.
@@Zectifin tbh I think the lags are problem on my side, not the servers, and I would not mind dying to them much, it is just that the punishment, it is too big
That issue is 100% your network, and sounds like you're playing on an unstable, or wireless, connection.
The game uses lockstep networking; if there's sync lost with the server, everything pauses then catches up again. All your input is also delayed until it's processed by the server. It can look like visual "lag" because of it freezing/stuttering (run a speedtest during it, it's bad).
PoE1 has an option to switch to predictive networking (something most other games use) for people in this situation. The reason lockstep was implemented was because of desync that predictive networking suffers from... and boy if you google about this and see old threads you'd find out how much of an issue it was, especially for melee. We all had macros for typing /oos in chat, which forced a resync with the server. PTSD times.
They did confirm on the recent stream they will be adding it to PoE2 at some point, it just had bugs that need fixing. Ideally lockstep would be used in every game, but, y'know, life isn't ideal (and distance to server matters VERY much for it, which most companies routinely ignore).
@@AceStrife yeah I am pretty sure the lags are on my side, I did not mean it to sound like a problem on server side, it is just that they inevitably happen sometimes, and that they can easily kill a melee player such as myself and for such thing the current punishment for dying is IMO quite frustrating.
I can not run a speedtest during the lag, cuz the lags are usually about 2-3 s long.
It might even be just pc lag as my pc is at the lower end of recomended specs.
Or mix of both problems.
Thank you for all the info hopefully it will get better soon :)
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.
@@IAmMrGreatdunno, my witches tree is 90% utility and defenses, I get all my damage from demon form.
@@IAmMrGreat Energy shield and dodge work well together.
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
you don't have to follow the meta. most people don't realize the difference between a non-meta build cooked by a noob vs a non-meta build cooked by someone who actually understands the game, and is VIABLE
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
@@Rex0142king KCD is one of my favorite games, but I would never play it without an unlimited save mod. Almost every game I play nowadays I end up modding in some way to remove time-wasting aspects of them. Inventory limitations and lack of quicksave are the biggest negatives for me in games solely do to unnecessary time waste.
@@Liriodelagua I haven't played Stalker 2 yet, but the thing you are supposed to do when facing multiple enemies in the first three games is to run away with your tail between your legs. It's not a _hard_ game, it's a game where you have to manage risks and don't run in guns blazing.
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.
Except on ultra nightmare I love Doom eternal I have like 2k hours but Ultra nightmare is just not fun to me due to its length I made it to mars core on un once died and was like "there goes 4 hours of progress guess I'm never trying that again"...
@@thefakebanette3483 yes exactly, thank goodness UN isn't the default. I'd say DOOM Eternal wouldn't have nearly as many copies sold if it was xD
@@Rex0142king that's another great way of going about it imo. Makes it even harder for me to understand why PoE2 does it the way it does 🤔
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.
>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 where 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.
Arcades were a very social gaming experience, if a game is ass or feels like it's cheap everyone just stays off it and it dies and the arcade owner probably won't buy any more cabs from them. Arcade games HAD to be appealing challenge wise in their main mode, fighting games get away with cheap CPUS because their focus is PvP.
When you started describing the truck analogy I thought back to my days at uni. I would come home after a night out, highly drunk, and white my essays. I would smash out anything from 500 to 1500 words before falling asleep. The next day I would go through what I had done and it was mostly nonsense, but there was also some really good stuff in there once it had been re-worked.
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.
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
the game punish people who thinks they're good enough to faceroll.
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.
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.
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.
I might agree about the soulslike games having you lose souls as a punishment being fitting except for three things: 1. It's often possible for you to die to bad physics/fall mechanics/dodgy controls that make you die just walking back, 2. Success sometimes depends on luck (if the enemy launches three unblockable and undodgeable attacks in a row or you get stunlocked by lots of small fry happening to stagger their attacks perfectly so that you can't run or fight, no amount of skill will save you), and 3. Enemies respawn from visiting bonfires or dying, so the game punishes you for being cautious (replenishing resources frequently undos your progress) and for trying to push forward when you're on a good streak (entering isolated corners of the game world that can't be reached consistently and require some amount of luck and not just patience are a deathtrap you may not foresee going into them the furst time), which tells the player that they shouldn't explore. So it's bad game design for an exploration game. I call it double-dipping when you get multiple punishments that make your next attempt more difficult than the previous- ideally the player should be given the opportunity to learn from their previous mistake and just repeat the section they failed without losing experience/souls/etc or the enemies stay dead but you have to go back to where you lost your stuff to get it back (and it never despawns or becomes otherwise permalost). My go-to for bad design like this is Zuma Deluxe: You gain lives in the early ~45 stages which give you more chances (~15 lives) to replay stages on failures in the late game as the difficulty curve becomes exponentially steeper, but when you run out of lives the game bumps you back like 15 stages to a checkpoint and doesn't give you back the lives you had when you reached this checkpoint in the game, it gives you the same number of lives you had at the start of the game, so you're way worse off continuing from the 75% completion checkpoint than you are starting over at stage 1-1 and playing the whole game over again.
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
Chat is just Josh's rubber ducky for sorting his thoughts
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.
just git gud and problem solved
@@dennischen2642 What a stupid tank. How do you think people get better lol
@@JasonWilliams89 by not making excuses like "this is frustrating, please remove from game"
@@dennischen2642 Wrong. People get better by practicing. You sound like you need to git gud at logic.
@@JasonWilliams89 you sure get alot of good practice by closing the game and giving up
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.
devils advocate here isnt that kind of the point with a giga boss tho?
to force players to theory craft some kind of wild ultra op build/strat that it becomes possible.
As long as it isnt hey go farm 40 hours of these low level mobs for these super rare single use things so its even possible to kill the boss im "kind of" for it.
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.
Never bring a knife to a gunfight.
I feel like the punishments feel worse because they are happening at endgame. The only thing you are doing once you get to endgame is really making the numbers bigger, and the punishment is making the numbers smaller. At least during the campaign your eyes are on getting further into the campaign - without that goal in mind you start to wonder why you're even playing when dying removes everything.
Stuff like The Walk of Shame is a punishment that I think goes underappreciated. It can take time to go through it, but good walks can have shortcuts. Hollow Knight's enemies giving mana for healing and spells and dream re-fight shortcuts demonstrate this. Learning how to navigate the walk to reach the boss faster and stronger is such a fun skill to learn. Despite that though, a friend keeps trying to skip enemies thinking it's slower otherwise despite telling them the value of hitting enemies. It makes sense in Nine Souls where health can be lost until you reach roots, but I didn't think it would have such a great pull on my friend.
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
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
level 79. not even into T15 maps is NOT deep at all lmao. but it's easy to fool all of you into thinking he knows exactly what he's talking about.
@@dennischen2642 He knows about his own experience though as he has experienced it. Just because he hasn't seen the entire game doesn't mean his critique isn't valid. Maybe the devs should take into account the fact why some people quit and change the game accordingly.
That's why fromsoft games are good at managing punishment.
You lose your unused souls but you have the option to either stock it up to not lose it ( at the cost of getting a bit less) or you can try to retrieve it, wich is not that hard.
So even failure gives you a second chance to lose nothing but the time you took to get to the boss. wich is fair enough as punishment
Also a very clear and consistent thing that's easy to keep track of. You know to spend all you can before a fight so even if you lose and cant retrieve them at all, you wont feel bad about losing them at all.
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.
so what happens when they remove the frustrating part of the game, make it difficult and then you found that frustrating.
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
It also probably bears mentioning that while Souls games do have a rune/soul loss mechanic, it is relatively compartmentalized compared to PoE's death penalty.
In PoE, the sheer amount of XP required to obtain later level ups (past lvl 90/95) combines with the possibility of that death penalty stacking up to 10 times (at 10% a pop, each possibly representing hours of lost progression per death).
When you look at souls games, the player levels (at least during the most relevant gameplay levels) are shorter, you can retrieve lost runes/souls if you can get back to the place you died without dying a second time, and if you die twice, the stackability of the penalty ends there - freeing you into "fun allowed" mode, much like the sensation of having just leveled in poe.
There's still a punishment mechanic: but it has an in-built salvageable function, and if you do hit the punishment aspect, it does it once, without continuing to negatively impact the continued play experience.
And that's the real kicker: the end gameplay feel and encouraged gameplay behavior becomes less fun. That isn't to say that some penalty shouldn't exist or that dying can't be disincentivized, it's to say that there are probably better ways to introduce a more elegant penalty that doesn't interfere with the fun aspect, or create negative play patterns.
Yeah, running back for runes/souls/etc never felt frustrating. It felt like a marked point. To me it was a sign I was getting better at the game, even just a little bit, if I could reach the place I failed before without dying and I was “rewarded” for that by getting all my potential xp back.
I am someone who can play a few hours a day after work. I have finished the main atlas tree (not the bossing). And I got to the point where I was dying every second map. It felt really bad considering all the consequences. So I quit. For me personally losing the map on every death is a big nono and I will be very reticent to return if this remains as it is.
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
XP loss on death is rarely done right. The best version of it has to be FFXI. Death is common place when solo, but rare with most of it's punishment removed when in a group. Revival spells reduce the XP loss penalty.
Common sense tells you to get a party. But also makes any time that you have to do anything solo intense as all hell. To the point that any solo content stops being solo because you are asking other players questions about it, getting buffs from them and over preparing. You're going in solo but not alone.
You can lvl down from XP loss in FFXI which makes it brutally punishing. But you are likely going to gain at least 3 lvls in a group. So unlike modern MMOs, you are mentally trained to attempt group content whenever you can. Being solo is like being in a warzone without the colors of either side, there is no solace.
There is a whole class, the beastmaster that is a solo class for people to level when they aren't feeling social.
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.
"The best way to play the game is to skip as much of it as possible."
Yep, I'm glad I never started this product.
Heavy punishment is ok if - and only if - the game has a robust learning toolchain.
So almost never.
I agree with a lot of your point about progression in time and in knowledge. If you lose to a boss you gain knowledge to get better next time. But if you lose to a lag or an off screen or an unfortunate attack while farming for level and progress another thing, it is just time wasted while you barely gain anything. Especially when you also lose the item to do the content.
The meta you said in the game seem to be 1 shot the boss so you don't have to deal with the mechanics. It is a bad design. In Dark Souls or Elden Ring, you can also 1 shot all of the boss and ignore all the mechanic if you want. However, the different is min-maxing to that point in Dark Souls requires you to have a ton of knowledge about the boss first, what attack to do, when to skip phase, which buff to use etc. You need to be good at the game and the boss to be able to do that. It is not "I farm 100 hours get good items and 1 click the boss die" but rather "I fought the boss for 100 hours and know how to 1 click the boss die". You can have max level all the equipment and still die to some mid game boss in Dark Souls if you just spam attack. One is a grind fest to trivialize the boss, the other is the progression of your ability to the point you can do so.
It's a quite complicated and interesting facet of game design. I don't think you can make general rules. Some games need to encourage you to repeat bosses to learn their patterns, in such a case you should (even if temporarily for that enemy) _reduce_ the punishment for death, FFXIV is an example where a punishment for death would be a terrible idea. This is a double-edged sword however, and if you've played FFXIV you will know how miserably unexciting the open world is because there is no such thing as danger, if a game like Elden ring had no punishment for death it would suffer greatly for it. Part of the fun of Elden ring is that constant state of anxiety it puts you in.
Re: defense feels bad
Speaking as a fighting game player, defense feels good when it creates punishment opportunities. Your opponent does something risky, you defend it, and now your opponent has his pants down for your next move. It's a "you have activated my trap card" moment. FG mechanics obviously won't translate to PoE, but that same feeling of "you have activated my trap card" needs to be created by defense if you want people to spend points on it. Defense needs to give the player an offensive benefit that makes up the opportunity cost (glass cannon build).
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.
How about this, the more you die the less xp you will get for a cap. Example, you die for the first time in this level, so your next bar will fill 50% slower or you will gain 50% less xp. Each death can increase the capacity or the % of penalty. It's like opposite of wow rested xp. I'm okay with getting penalties, but not okay with loosing what I worked for.
The issue with this is it immediately fails.
Cheese strats, guides, ect... there is no long term display of skill or understanding so it becomes meaningless to the core people who care and everyone just does it. You can't patch out the cheese otherwise it becomes people who exploited things are further rewarded by being "good"
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.
Totally agree. The fact that defense is useless compared to dmg investments in builds makes one wonder why defense exists. That is what needs to be changed, defense needs to be useful.
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.
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.
*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?"
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
Hades is still the best example of making failure satisfying yet still clearly telling you you failed that run.
GGG should just straight up pay Josh their standard consulting rates for the time he played this. So spot on.
Walking on a treadmill while playing a grinding game is GENIUS
Price of failing is, failing to achieve the thing. It should not also cost my gear, xp, progress or anything else system-wise. I swear some devs think we are stuck with their games like we are in 90s
Well they don't want corpse walking to achieve wins. The real issue here is they have a system of delve that has forgotten why delve is fun. The approach of the personal and community best by pushing further with a tiny setback of sulphite. The maps are not like delve nodes where you get screwed on one biome and work your way round the rough bit hoping to find a boss or citidel with a divine in a chest or an explosion of maps. And when you hit your target you can go back and make things easy or travel side-ways.
Then you have the death stuff that is just the nail in the coffin for end-game. It's never one little thing that kills a system, it's multiple together. That just rub people the wrong way.
Player should not want to die but not fear trying
1. Wanted to make my own build
2. Did so and got fcked up by everything.
3. Uninstalled the game.
I just can't play games that don't respect the time I invest in them anymore.
i usually stop playing for the night if i die
One of the amazing parts of darksouls is that its not just making the walk back to the boss, but that you only lose your experience if you give up on the boss or if you die on the way there. This puts pressure on the player to play better, and encourages the player to keep attempting the boss until they know the boss like the back of their hand.
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.
The problems mentioned are literally the same problems people have with poe1. I don't see the point of poe2 if they're not gonna change anything from poe1 overall. PoE as a free to play game essentially does not and will not respect your time. You are meant to be kept in the game as long as possible while being frustrated as long as possible.
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.
Dont forget to give a bad review explaining why you're quitting, sometimes it gets better
Josh, listening to you speak I remembered my time playing Flyff, when it first release, I worked during the day, studied at night and when I got home I would play for about 2 hours. Sometimes I would die and lose days of XP, it was frustrating, especially playing alone. Thats we I stoped playing FlyFF, I really wanted to became a Psykeeper...
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
"Right now dying is more punishing than not dying". What a scholar :D
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.
Hot take. Keep one chance mechanics. Be rid of xp loss.
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.
Punishment should be in the games to tell you what you're doing isn't working. Not a punishment that takes away your resources, just an encouraging reminder that you can try going to other places first if it's currently too difficult to progress in the direction you're trying or that you might want to learn how to use X mechanic or stock up on Y item from the shop so you have enough of it when you need it.
you missed on the fact that most people making this claim wants to win without the challenge, framing it as "unfair punishment" or "unnecessary frustration" as cope to why they failed, while beliving they're good enough to not look for ways to overcome the challenge. straight up stubborn and delusional
@@dennischen2642 There are certainly players out there who want to feel like they've achieved a difficult feat without having to "earn" it, but I think there's also an inverse to this -- a type of player who feels like their achievements are of less value if the experience of earning them was smooth and enjoyable. As to the former, I don't think there's any cause for concern. There are still plenty of challenging games, and players who overestimate their abilities usually do not bother me.
The latter group concerns me more (and Josh too if I've understood his take) because, in order to meet their expectations, challenging games are full of harsh punishments that amount to "in order to try the hard part again, you have to spend a bunch of time on something else." I value challenges in games that are hard because they take great skill to beat, not ones where I only get one attempt at a dungeon per day or where I have to repeat a grind after each failure.
anyone that played og MMOs knows this in their veins, even the ones that never thought about it or considered it a problem.
i still remember being a kid playing tibia, farming rotworms all afternoon to buy a fire sword, finally getting it and going back to the rotworm farm cave and getting PK'd by a guy twice my lv who i cannot outrun, outdamage nor outlive regardless of player skill, and having the fire sword i just farmed dropping when i died.
that was one of the most frustrating moments of my childhood. i quit the official servers that day and went on to play private servers with death protections.
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.
GGG listens, the question is whether this is something they are okay with or not. But I think they are starting to realize that they have to compromise a bit if they want a growing playerbase.
@@esideras I do agree on that. I'm also confused about the "vision" of the game. The difference between acts and endgame is insane. It went from "dark souly" to "become god and zoom" real quick.
I know there will always be these insane god-builds but i wonder which one do they want to actually go for. :D I preferred the slower playstyle in acts as melee but maps are fun too.
(22:20) Failing in this regard essentially leads to a sunk cost fallacy. If you die, you lose 3 hours of progress, meaning you need to grind those 3 hours again. In doing so, you are essentially chasing a debt and losing double the time. Alternatively, you can quit now, but that would leave your 3 hours of effort wasted.
I literally do this, ill play a couple hours maybe, blast some maps or watever, then randomly die too a boss on a map or weird ground effect i didnt see. and i just log out of the game.
its not the ground effects that annoy me, i can learn those, 90% of the time i dont instantly jump on bosses now after i kill them, i look around, check my feet, wait for any animations to finish etc.
but dying to a hit from a boss in a map, or getting stunned/frozen from a random mob shot, then insta gibbed, loosing all the map, loot + xp....i jus log out and do something else.
My favourite hard game is super meat boy, because of this concept! In Super Meat Boy levels are like 30-60 seconds long. You never really get that feeling of "ARGH I just lost my progress!" because all you lost was like 15 seconds of platforming, that you now know how to do again.
PS Bosses should allow 6 portals, it just needs to reset the boss's health when you die like Dark Souls does. In PoE 1 you could cheese bosses because when you died the boss's health didn't reset. That's why 6 portal strats were OP. That's the whole problem.
Getting punished for trying and learning, just makes me demotivated to play.
You dont deal with the experience loss until endgame tbf
the problem is not losing 3 hours of progress for 3 hours worth of knowledge. but that it is losing 3+ hours of progress for 3 minutes worth of new knowledge if you even understand what killed you in the first place and how to avoid it. so worst case you just lose 3+ hours of grinding for no new information at all because you just got unlucky roll blocked enough on terrain or small enemies to get out of range fast enough.
that most bosses don't have a clear indication to where they will hit isn't helping at all. the long telegraphing before the target is locked in isn't helping either as it makes the telegraphing timing very unclear and random for most people.
the dodge roll also takes WAY too long. it feels like almost 2 seconds before you can do anything again and the boss will attack speed is sometimes even faster than that.
Punishment aside, I think you've also also the nail on the head with the observation that there's no point in having defences if the boss is just going to oneshot you anyway. Because it seems to be one of the big sins of ARPGs in general.
Just had the experience attempting the Echo of Lilith in Diablo 4 (only got the game because it had a free trial and then it was on special, and is often the case, I didn't experience the stuff that make me think maybe I was right not to invest at all (game crashes every two-three hours, at least one story boss has a permanent invulnerability bug that was reported over a year ago and still happens, and what I'm about to describe...) and pretty much the entire second half of the fight is about dodging oneshots. Some of which there wasn't enough of a tell to dodge, some I have no idea of what killed me at all. And this is playing at a difficulty level that the rest of the game mostly feels like a cakewalk at. Made about ten attempts or so and by the time I gave up, I'm honestly not sure right now if I'm just giving up on the attempt for now, giving up on the game for good, or somewhere in between. D4 doesn't have experience penalties and you CAN just keep trying, but the repair costs absolutely do hurt.
Sure, I could invest more into defence, but what would I really gain by doing so? If I could somehow double my durability it'd just make it a twoshot instead of a oneshot, while the reduced damage output would just mean that I have to survive that for longer.
And it's not just a D4 issue. D3 endgame also tends to lean into "if the difficulty is set high enough to be any challenge at all, it's because it just takes one mistake to be oneshot". It's evidently an issue with PoE2 as well. We saw in the video how unfair dying to a boss's ground explosion just when you're taking a breath after the boss has hit the ground can feel (it's human nature to relax for a moment once the threat has stopped moving, because we didn't exactly evolve in an environment where things exploding a few seconds after they died was a common experience).
did the same thing picked up d4 on sale over Christmas finally beat lilith what i didnt get was the blue missiles 1 shotting me in phase 2 if you are lucky and you need to be lucky imo avoid the blue missiles before anything else and once she has broken off the 3 sides of the platform and your still alive you have won
@@TheDeadgedd At least one of the attempts I was oneshot halfway through the final phase.
To be clear, I'm talking about the Echo of Lilith in Torment 1. Beating her in the story fight was a cakewalk, because when I reached her I was seriously overgeared for the highest difficulty level you can unlock before completing the main story. I was stripping away her health so fast it broke the phases.
But that's really just one example. I haven't re-attempted the Echo of Lilith, but I did have a few other things I wanted to finish in the season, and I've definitely been getting a feeling that the only ways the D4 devs know to introduce challenge at the higher levels are through DPS checks and oneshots. The last time I felt any threat from attrition was fighting Astaroth at around level 30-40 when I'd only unlocked five healing potions rather than ten. Everything else is pretty close to feeling no threat at all until and unless I get hit with a oneshot.
@@Draxynnic yep I mean the Echo of Lilith encounter I had no idea why i was being one shot killed on multiple attempts until i found a great video that explained what was happening because I just could not see what was happening her health was easy to remove but she would not die until the entire sequence was played out
Yep story end Lilith was a joke
Look out for a video called How To Easily Crush Uber Lilith In Diablo 4 by Raxxanterax this helped me alot
Punishment is ok if the deaths/failure feels fair. Dying to monsters exploding after you kill them losing a bossfight on q juiced map just feels lame and i ragequit for the night
i hope you ragequit because you realize how dumb it is to die to after-death effects
@Keindorfer mate its the only thing that kills you when u have gear in high tier maps you relax and out of nowhere oneshotted by a corpse exploding
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.
I'm glad to see the feedback is so completely consistent on this issue. Narrowly escaping death should feel good and make me want to push my luck on the next map. Nah, I'll just quit while I'm ahead. The endgame is simply not fun to play.
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.
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.
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.
Same mistake helldivers 2 devs kept making with their incessant nerfs being obsessed with trying to make the game a hardcore experience that no one liked more wanted
"Talking to you guys really helps me understand how these systems all work, btw"
We're watching rubber duck debugging live
I gave you 28 minutes and I earned 28 years worth of wisdom.
100% agree josh, it's what made me stop PoE and will likely make me stop playing PoE2 (not yet though) I was hoping that 10% xp loss mechanic would go.
Only if you're naughty.
Watching that Spark Mage gameplay is like watching paint dry except the paint fumes induce seizures...
If that's what the current "meta" has devolved into then oh boy am I ever glad I decided to wait for the full release before playing.
Played the first 2 weeks. Got to tier 10 maps. Went from having fun, to actively being stressed while playing. And always questioning if i should be doing an OP build instead and adding tons of MF. I quit. If i return, its when either MF is gone/reduced and the game stops actively trying to piss off players for playing.
You're right about how heavily incentivized NOT dying is. And because of that going through the end game maps feels like the true test is having the patience to go through the maps slowly, safely, and methodically enough.
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.
the monitor angle and treadmill suggests Josh is going for the shredded legs and hunchback build.
"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?"
That GTA anecdote about testers enjoying the punishment of cops chasing them . . . as a WoW player I imagine Blizzard would react by making the cops just nuke you as soon as you set them off. I still love WoW but those devs seem to have some unsung deep seeded hostility towards emergent gameplay.
Hence the "Fun detected" meme about WoW nerfs.
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.
The fact that you don't get your consumables back from a death in Dark Souls and games with a similar respawn system is by far my biggest complaint. It really made me not want to use them in a boss while figuring out the fight; it might just be wasted since I could die and begin again now down the item with no real result for using it. Call it a skill issue but that mechanic felt like I could not experiment with consumables much.
The experience loss is a holdover from PoE1 getting popular based on the back of experience races to level cap
For (partly) game specific discussions like this the date of the stream would be a great addition to the description so one could check if there were patches since then.