Maps are too big/take too long to play

Short :
Imho the biggest mistake in PoE2 is how full clearing a map is just too big.

PoE 1 mapping is like a small bag of cracker Jack while you're sitting next to the distributor.
Sometimes there's even a quick cheap plastic toy or few to mess with a bit then move on from.
You finish one and go for "just one more" and next thing you know it's 2AM on a monday.

PoE 2 mapping is like a whole family sized cheesecake.
You finish it because you "paid for the entire thing" and it expires soon.
You feel a bit sick, growingly unsure if you ever want to get another one.

Thanks for coming to my ted talk, the rest is mostly praising/rambling.

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Context:
I beat PoE campaign, I come back every league to do it again with my bf and see how the game changes.
I join a group of friends who every time do a ruthless hardcore run as a group and see how far we can get, die, laugh and switch to a duo in non HC non ruthless league.
I never really play it solo.
Friends who know what they're doing spoonfeed me items and builds because I'm too lazy to figure it out myself.
I have 300h in the game.

I'm by PoE standard, a complete casual.

When PoE 2 was announced I was skeptical PoE 1 would still truly get supported.
Like how Nintendo announced the 3DS was not getting shot behind the shed to make room for the Switch and did it anyway.
I thought Kingsmarch was a great league anyway and down to see it as the last farewell. Mercs was fine but comparatively small.

Breach though really cements in my mind both games are here to stay and both games are meant to cater to different audiences.

I feel like PoE 2 is specifically made for me and other peeps who play PoE 1 as a social chill group thing first.
PoE 2 is fishing for Diablo 4 players, while PoE 1 is its own beast basically.

I like PoE2 more than my friends, but there's 1 thing I hate about it and prevents me from dragging them to try 2 in good faith.

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Mapping in PoE2 sucks:
Why are postgame maps so tedious to fullclear???

You know what new casual diablo players do? They full clear every map.
I don't mean just kill every mob.
I mean they pick up every. single. item. they find to sell it back and only then they're done and move on to the next campaign section.

PoE1 is unplayable without a filter and with that habit.
PoE2 feels like ruthless in terms of item drop qty and that's a good thing because of that habit.
I don't do it (anymore) either but I pick up every yellow that shows through the filter.

You know what my hardcore mapping PoE1 friends do? They kill every mob.
Because they paid for the map (the map itself, scarabs and probably other ways I have no clue exist)

In their own way both audiences have the habit and actively like full clearing maps.

To a casual:
The campaign maps in PoE2 are big.
It feels handcrafted and meaty and the bosses feel like they belong instead of being randomly placed uniques.
I love the boss design in PoE2 as they feel like playing a topdown action game where enemies have fair and clear attack pattern cues and dramatic phases.
A cinematic game.


To a hardcore player:
The maps in PoE1 feel great.
Just long enough you feel like it meant something without being tedious.
None of the clearing really matters then the boss is a somewhat more significant challenge.
But all of it is really an excuse to push your itemization and build even further.


Imho :
You play PoE 1 maps to map, to engage and farm map mechanics to perfect your obscene build even further.

You play PoE 2 maps and in general to fight really cool bosses.
You like the tension of getting obliterated by an attack that felt fair thanks to their animations, the drama that surrounds each in the campaign and the really sick phase transitions.

Mapping in PoE1 serves the best part of the game : Various ways that all feed back to itemization/farming.
Mapping in PoE 2 fails spectacularly at capturing the best part of the game that appeals most to its core audience: The bosses.

Mapping in PoE2 should strive to repackage their campaign snippets to deliver it as nostalgia pills for the first time you beat that guy.


In PoE1 the clearing gameplay is quick and mindless and the maps are small.

In PoE2 the clearing is more attentive AND the maps are so huge. But I don't give a flying fuck about micro optimization I can do by swapping a piece of equipment until I'm fully max level.
I'm here for the bosses.

From being so long the loot maps in 2 give is overwhelming despite being less frequent than in 1.
Despite the filter I end up having my inventory filled multiple times over of yellows I should sell while doing a single PoE2 map.

I want to get to the good part (the bosses), everything else including emptying my pockets multiple times over gets in the way.

When I finish a map I feel like I wanna fight another boss, but boy do I not wanna crawl through another map to do it.
PoE2 Maps are too much. I don't want less loot density I want >less map<. Even without going back to town it takes us like 4 times as long to clear a single PoE2 map, without all the numerous PoE1 side mechanic to stop and farm for.


PoE 1 mapping is like a small bag of cracker Jack while you're sitting next to the distributor.
Sometimes there's even a quick cheap plastic toy or few to mess with a bit then move on from.
You finish one and go for "just one more" and next thing you know it's 2AM on a monday.

PoE 2 mapping is like a whole family sized cheesecake.
You finish it because you "paid for the entire thing" and it expires soon.
You feel a bit sick, growingly unsure if you ever want to get another one.

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Praise:
I love every way PoE2 is different from PoE 1, think it succeeds at finding its own audience and agree both games are worth playing for different reasons :

PoE 1:
- The skilltree
Turbo intimidating (Literally quit the first time I installed it way back when trying it solo)
Tremendous depth
Obtuse and spread out by design
Requires a lot of player investment to crack open but boy when it gets cracked it really blooms and feels earned

- The postgame
I see people play exclusively one kind of map or submode like it's the entire game.
I tried the heist thing a bit but it'd constantly crash from how jampacked with crazy cosmetics it was (that's fixed thankfully lol).
My friend farmed blight maps like peeps in detective noir films chainsmoke packs.
Betrayal is a whole other thing I never wanna even bother engaging with because there's already so much game and I already found the stuff I like.

Mapping is fun as fuck.
Everyone describes the entire campaign as being the tutorial before the real thing.
I hope PoE 2 eventually gets there because I'd love to have a more modern ARPG to sink a lot of time into postgame but it has over a decade of catching up to slowly do.
The comparison isn't even fair.

PoE 2:
- The campaign
Sue me but PoE 1's campaign structure is dated, hard to follow, has little payoff for the first half of it and generally blows, feeling like disconnected loredumps to skip through more than a story.
PoE 2 on the other hand, wow.
See a pit down below where monsters work for some shadowy figure.
Actually go down there, fight a badass giant werewolf. It splits open, summons a blizzard and dashes through it across the screen from unseen places. That's just the first boss???
Join a caravan, that's your endlessly marching hub now, go in the past, rescue alva (by fighting a giant mecha), get betrayed by a comically foreseeable evil entity trapped and posing as someone else...

The story is *cinematic* in ways PoE just does not deliver and the pacing is so much better.

I'm excited for when PoE 1 updates to see what weird new mechanics they're testing out and hearing how the community breaks it now.
I'm excited for when PoE 2 updates to see what's the next chapter of the story and what new bosses there is.
I look up how people "solved" the new patch in PoE1.
I avoid spoilers for the new chapter in PoE2.

And yet when I try to get my hardcore PoE1 friends to try out PoE 2 it's an uphill battle.
Why?
Mainly because it's a different game.

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NonCriticism of PoE2:
- The skilltree
As much as the skilltree in PoE1 is deep and complex to pick apart, the skilltree in PoE2 is braindead easy.
Want spear skills? Literally go to the place where there's a spear shaped constellation and grab every node there, done.

Is there deeper builds you can do if you look deeper?
Maybe but I wouldn't know I'm a casual and my hardcore player friends hate how trivial routing the tree seems.

- The A then B skills
Same thing here.
The game spells out : You'll want to use Skill A before using Skill B
Charges are generated by enabler skills and consumed by payoff skills.

- Dodgeroll
By design PoE2 seem like it want to target a more casual audience that cares less about their builds and more about the enemy attacks being clearly telegraphed when they matter and dodgeable.
You have a dodgeroll and you're expected to use it because specific nonboss enemies with slow clearly telegraphed attacks can deal a shitton of damage if you're not paying attention.
Visual clarity has been improved a lot imho too.

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Anyway:
Friends hate it. It's not like PoE1. Deal with it and go play PoE1 it's still there and still very much getting sick new content.

But for me, I'm down for that.
The A->B skills and the simplicy of the skill tree make me worry about moment to moment gameplay instead of tree routing
It's by design and This_hole_was_made_for_me.jpg

We need both games to be fundamentally different for it to remotely make sense to support both.
PoE2 is a game that targets more action casual gamers with its cinematic campaign and more moment to moment gameplay.
PoE1 a hardcore minmaxing obscene esoteric postgame-build-testing-machine.

But I have one major issue with the game I hope changes before 1.0 and I hope the maps shrink a significant amount because it's tedious if you're casual and it's tedious if you're hardcore.
The good part is the bosses, let me snort em like my friend does Blight in the alleyway behind the dumpster.


Good luck GGG I think you have 2 good games on your hands and I wish both of them well and that some day I can drag my hardcore friends kicking and screaming to the newest one.

I haven't read everything, just responding to the title: they've already simplified the endgame maps. I've even seen threads here complaining they are too simple and linear now. I tend to agree.

Act 3 Drowned City is too big IMO. Especially having a "whole other map" after you defeat the Viper boss.

Everything else seems fine.

PoE2 doesn't have a rhythm to combat or their map design so of course it feels empty.

Some of my favorite times in PoE1 were when Zana was around and would show up and take you on a trek to an entirely different map within the map. You'd go into an Abyssal Depth, do a Blight or something, kill the boss, return and find out what else is in store.

Most maps people run in PoE1 are the old ones where enemies were the main opposition. You couldn't just run into every fight or you'd risk getting too many mods and staggered to death. PoE1 now is little more than a glorified Boss Rush game, not an ARPG.

The most prominent problem with PoE2 maps is we kill everything instantly. The peaks of fighting and lulls of travel don't really exist because they're the same thing. I never had to stop my forward momentum at all with the 3 builds I made in 0.3 and one was even a quasi walking simulator with how Herald of Blood and Bleed/Incision interact.

The other problems are really just basic. There's nothing in the maps. No interaction with the environment you're in at all. It's just a strip of land and mobs.

Seriously, where are the doors in this game?

Edit : Haven't played after 0.3 I'll check it again next update maybe I'll like current simplified maps(?)

Agree and didn't consider that alternate option. Gimmick maps or more meaningfully engaging gated areas within a map to make it feel less like you're wasting your time walking around and finding the boss.

Having things to do in the maps like you do in campaign would be great.
Even if it's just a map whose gimmick is levers to open a path etc.

I don't mind everything dies instantly except bosses (and tbh didn't have that problem yet because my build is shit lol) but agree that's already what PoE 1 is so why make it so similar.

Think I'd like it a lot better if either:
- The maps were either empty *short* moderately easy or cakewalks to a meaty meaningful boss (Less tedium, more time spent fighting engaging bosses)
or
- The maps are still long but more interactive/almost narrative like the rest of the game that's done so well.

Personally I'd much prefer #1 in part because I really love the bosses and in part because I expect even higher quality more interactive maps would get repetitive in postgame anyway (And probably too expensive to make new content that match the campaign's depth constantly). I like the story but I wouldn't play it twice if it wasnt for new league mechanics and I'm glad you don't sit through dialog each time you fail a boss.
But at least either options would make it feel more significantly different than the prequel.

The maps were smallered from last league ffs.

It's a game, not achievement.

Takes 2 minutes to fully clear a map.

You are doing something wrong. It should not take you 15m to clear a map.

Talent into movement speed or something get AOE going.

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Kaeron#7125 a écrit :

Takes 2 minutes to fully clear a map.

You are doing something wrong. It should not take you 15m to clear a map.

Talent into movement speed or something get AOE going.

will disagree in here, i dont think MOST people get to the point wheren you just RAM trough everything with broken net builds, i would say 30% or so?(it is stull a HUGE number) im just pulling numbers out of my ass here, but i would love to know the real ones, what i do know is.. that a LOT of people get stuck on the act 1 boss and act 3 boss.
also lot of casual people that play like 2 hours each 2 or 3 days dont even get to t16, i have 3 friends that dont get there out of 5 and 2 of those 5 actually just netbuild

Why not just go kill the boss and be done if you don't want to play the whole map? There is no law that says you have to clear all of the map.