My thoughts on 2 so far

First off, let me say that I didn't read other threads or watch guides prior to playing PoE 2. That was deliberate, because I wanted to discover as I went. It's a new game, so exploring is part of the fun. Although fun seems to be a bit lacking so far. All this time and money for development, and we still can't choose male or female for any class? And you still can't have a space in your character's name?

Arriving on the beach all squishy and ready to hit things with a stick seemed very normal after PoE 1. Kill the angry blob to get into town. Great. Adding the keyboard movement option was an excellent improvement from the first game, as now you can kite effectively if you want to. No more stand-and-cast or stand-and-fire. Manually dodging felt weird after either building characters to tank damage in with high armor and max block in 1, or passive dodge with archers before they took that option away. Yes it was always layers of defense, but you didn't have to actively do anything for it besides take nodes on the tree and pay attention during boss fights.

But okay, dodge when you need to, which turned out to be necessary. Went around to the vendors in the first town, ignored the dialogue that I don't care about, accepted quests, all very normal. I didn't like that they take up so much space on the right side of your screen, but maybe there's a setting option to make it more compact that I haven't discovered yet. I sort of learned to see through them, like you do with the semi-translucent map overlay so you can see where you're going in these ridiculously large maps. But a melee character doesn't feel right with having to manually block with your shield. That's probably personal preference, but it feels clunky and I hate it. So I tried a caster instead, figuring a minion build would be safe and easy for a first play-though. Engraved a minion skill that I found out I couldn't use because I didn't have any Spirit, and didn't know what that was. Okay... I don't understand what was wrong with just having starter kill gems. You very quickly got access to any you could want without having to engrave anything in the first game, and they naturally leveled up on their own. That was a fine system on it's own, so why add all this other convoluted crap? Mana-reservation was fine. Spirit seems stupid. And for f*ck's sake, just call them buffs. People know what those are. Anyway, I thought I'd grab a zombie gem or a SRS and start powering though. But it was confusing at first and I gave up on that idea. I'll probably try it again at some point now that I've watched a few videos. Had to as I started playing to know where extra skill points were, because exploring everything to make sure nothing was missed became tedious very soon.

I ended up choosing a crossbow Merc as a main, although a Ranger with a bow seems the easiest to play currently. Reloading crossbows is equally annoying to manually blocking with a shield, but the speed does get better after some nodes on the tree. I am glad there's still a skill tree, but the nodes are a pale comparison to the first game's tree. My first question was: where is all the defense? I got the few major defense nodes near me, but to date I rely heavily on life/mana regen and basically overkill everything before I can die. It works so far, but doesn't feel like a good balance.

That being said, overall Act 1 seemed pretty decent and straightforward. Little things nag, like having to engrave gems (I have a full tab of unengraved ones and I don't know what to do with all the extras that I don't need) and why do flasks not simply refill when you enter town??? Later on I don't rely on them much, but at first I needed them. Crowd control was immediately a problem, which discovering grenades happily solved. I just don't want 5 different types to have to swap between. I'm a simple creature, so having a couple skills to spam and kill everything is much more enjoyable.

Act 2 was tedious, but not terrible. Ride in the slave caravan all over the place, fine. But just like calling buffs, buffs, can we just call the trials, Ascendancy trials? One of the streamers I had on in the background while I was playing referred to it as Trial of Suckmyass, which accurately describes how I feel about them in a nutshell. When I ascended, I thought I had some idea of what to expect, but the whole honor thing seems stupid. A friend said that was a mechanic from some league I didn't play in the first game, but it seems unnecessary. My character can survive easily without dying, but I 'lost' twice because I ran out of honor -yet had plenty of water that I didn't care about at all. Ascending was a lot more straightforward and enjoyable in the first game.

Act 3 is terrible. Seriously, scrap it and start over. The time-travel thing is dumb, the maps are way too long and mostly unrewarding, and the quest line is confusing. The idea of slogging through that crap again for two more difficulties just really unappealing. I do understand there will be later Acts rather than difficulties, and obviously I'll do it to see what endgame is like, but Act 3 has all the joy of a trip to the DMV.

As it stands now, PoE 2 is a worse version of the original. But I didn't start playing PoE 1 when it first came out, so perhaps it was equally primitive on startup, and over time they developed an amazing game. I had directly downloaded 1, but bought 2 on Steam so I could play with my friends, so I spent the 30 bucks. Even with the current issues, I still think it was worth the money considering how many hours I've already played. You sort of have to in the 2nd one to get anywhere. I had expected to log in the first time and happily smash my way through, but that's not the way 2 seems to work. In that regard, it's definitely a whole new game.

I have to correct an earlier assumption: For whatever reason I was thinking you had to play through the campaign 3 times, that there was a Hell difficulty like in D2. So.. I was delighted when I didn't have to slog through Acts 2 & 3 for a 3rd time. Act one is fine so I don't know why the others seem so tedious.

I like the world map. It reminds me of something from a Civ game with it's raised terrain, and supposedly it's endless? I don't have a lot of time to play so I've only done 4 maps so far, and haven't tried one of the towers that everyone complains about. But wow do drops suck. Seriously, why bother giving us multiple portals when there's so little to bring back? Maybe it gets better with things like breaches, or if you juice it enough. Right now it feels like the whole game is in Ruthless mode.

Despite that, so far endgame isn't as bad as I was fearing. After zooming though maps in 1 -which they probably never originally intended for players to do- 2 feels so slow. But it's not bad enough to give up on.