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Grinding Gear Games wants to wish Path of Exile players a Merry Christmas and a very Happy Holidays with a free Twilight Mystery Box, which will be available to all players on PC, PS4 and Xbox One until January 8th.
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You can see my sci-fi/WW2 book recommendations.
I'd say they surpassed what Diablo could achieve. We'll see what Diablo 4 can do but Diablo 3 left more to be desired than actuality.
Blizzard took D2 and dumbed it down to extremes, lowered it to only four players and didn't bother to test it's hardest difficulty.
Diablo 1 was supposed to be a turn-based dungeon crawler more akin to NetHack, but during development they decided to make it real-time. So Blizzard did not really take that much inspiration from anything else.
For me Diablo 2 was more playable and enjoyable than Diablo 1. Also I tried to like Path of Exile, but that game always felt boring and shallow to me compared to Diablo 2. The visuals of each Act in PoE looked boring and mediocre, the story.. I could not care any less about it, not having Gold also sucked, the way you transfer skills by embedding and extracting gems from weapons and gear is also stupid to me, potions that auto fill up is also a dumbed-down QoL feature aimed at a more feeble-minded playerbase. Diablo 2 did not have self-refilling potions and nobody had a problem with that. It's the same as the Hunter in WoW where they removed ammo in Cataclysm as well as feeding your pet on a regular basis and as a result dumbed down the game and with that what little RPG aspect it had.
This was a very clever design because it didn't depend on a static tree or some other locked in method to limit one. I found such clever ideas like putting pets on traps and using a chest piece with a gem to come up with a damage shield that can grow ...well until it was nerfed. Many of my builds died to nerfs They combined gear with abilities and gems to arrive at a solution that allows their player base to simply mix and match and combine them every season to give room for creativity to be the limiting factor. Their complex tree was another feat that again allowed players to run wild with ideas. Any ARPG is only as good as its customization.
Their potions are not just to heal or give mana but also as you go higher, something people who only played at lower levels would not have realised, gives you various options that aren't only about healing but about choosing the right flask for the right task or encounter. The fact that they fill up slowly isn't a quality of life aspect at all in fact it is a cleverly designed to make the fights more strategic which I have found to my utter dismay on the maps having run out and time being my enemy.
I think people often judge PoE without having actually played it to higher levels and on the maps. Not arguing that you can only appreciate it at higher levels but once you start theory mongering and dreaming up builds and finding out whether they can survive against some of the foes and combinations on the maps you begin to see the complexity and cleverness with these designs.
I think Path of Exile is in a class of its own and comparing it to other games do a disservice to those other games and PoE. I feel that PoE has sufficiently distinguished itself and earned a right to be considered an excellent alternative.
Ahh yes. Diablo pioneered the "ARPG with constant content updates for free" model.
HOTS was their big failure at that model though. And D3 failed to improve upon D2 except in terms of combat and of course graphics. They started failing once they insisted on trying to please everybody and accomodate console casuals who tend to bounce from game to game.
That is a debatable claim.
It's quite clear that WOW got rid of the biggest obstacles to attracting new players. There's a reason why no game really tried mimicking EQ.
You assume that that is the most important aspect of an MMO.
Vanilla WoW was my first MMO, despite I agree that EverQuest did many things better, but I never played it due to how old it is and how hard it is for me to get into it, I think Vanilla WoW's graphics still look amazing (to me) in 2020. Maybe it's nostalgia or something, now I'm trying to play EQ2 and to me the graphics of EQ2 in 2020 look worse than Vanilla WoW from 2004. As I said, maybe it's nostalgia.
Some things that WoW did better was instanced dungeons. The controls and combat were also very fluid compared to the much clunkier EQ1 and EQ2.
Where WoW dumbed the formula down is where the RPG elements from EeverQuest were gone and WoW (even in its Vanilla state) was just an MMO, not an MMORPG.
Things like in EverQuest 1 (which I read on the internet) if you're a Human and attempt to enter the Dark Elf city, they will kill you on sight, because they hate humans, but if you are a Human Necromancer, they will not kill you, because they revere Necromancy.
This is RPG stuff that more MMOs need, right now the most popular MMOs are just dumbed down grind.
Correct assumption. The "Massively Multiplayer" part is quite important.
Diablo wishes it was POE haha. You must be a serious noob. No game in the genre compares even slightly to POE in it's genre. The genre that Diablo created btw. Have fun living in the dark luls