Anyone playing (or trying to play) Path of Exile 2 yet? It just opened to Early Access today: Path of Exile 2 on Steam
Servers are overwhelmed, queued are sometimes working, databases are crashing, website is down… the usual. But in theory some are also able to get in the game.
Funny how despite this, it already has Very Positive reviews. MSFS2024 in the same situation got Very Negative just a few days ago.
I just started Metaphor Refantazio on my Steam Deck.
I love the Persona games(3-5) and am a JRPG fan in general; I have high hopes.
I played Path of Exile 1 a few months ago. Not bad, but I’m not the kind of person who gets into “end game content” in general; I like to play “story mode” from beginning to end and then try something else.
I assume I don’t have any machine capable of playing Path of Exile 2.
Ah. In that case Diablo IV has a story with a lot of cinematics. Not sure if the plot is any good, lol… I played it the same way I played Baldur’s Gate 3: skipping every line of dialog and killing everybody I possibly could. Violence > narrative 
PoE2 runs acceptably on my M2 Mac with Crossover on low settings, or perfectly with everything on max on Geforce Now (which is half off for a while).
Minor disagreement. Diablo IV has the first dozen chapters of the story with a lot of cinematics. The excessively blatant effort to sell the rest/next chapters of the story, as DLC priced at the cost of AN ENTIRE AAA game, was a blatant cash grab.
Marvel Rivals is out. It’s pretty much overwatch but with comic book characters. I don’t hate it so far.
Recently I’ve been playing Final Fantasy I and IV (Pixar Remaster version) and Stellaris. Last day+ though it’s been all Caves of Qud because it finally launched out of Early Access. I’ve played an awful lot of it for years but it’s nice for it to reach the finish line.
I’m pretty sure that’s been the official Blizzard motto of the last decade.
I’m not sure I disagree, but a lot of the grabbing had been more subtle such as the selling of cosmetics in WoW, although the “buy your way to max level” was damn blatant.
And I think everyone expected the same in D4, and trust me, the paid perk system with cosmetics was pretty damn bad, with, if not pay to win, at least pay to cut out MASSIVE grinding.
But the cost of the expansion, especially since the main story was so obviously half-finished at best at full price? Yeah. I know 3 people IRL (including myself) who bought D4 (which was already damn pricey at $70 compared to a vastly superior game, Baldur’s Gate). None of us were willing to get the DLC. And all of us are saying that after that treatment, we’re not even interested in it if it drops down to the $20-30 range which would have been more the norm.
YMMV of course.
I think that’s a totally fair take.
The expansion was expensive, and not a very good value compared to, say, buying Last Epoch or Grim Dawn, or visiting a classic on sale (Titan Quest, Torchlight 2, etc.)
That said, I’m a pretty different kind of gamer: ARPGs are my favorite genre (thousands of hours spent on them, sigh, lol) but I haven’t paid attention to any of their stories since Diablo II. It annoyed me that I had to finish the campaign first to be able to skip it. It’s the complex permutations of skill/equipment/build synergies that draw me in. And in that sense, Diablo IV got a LOT better after launch (i.e. they made the mid-end-game much more fun by adding more tactical options). The expansion added a new class, which was fun, but it was also extremely unbalanced – several times more powerful than all the other classes. In that sense it was also a money grab. People who bought the expansion could clear content probably 4-5x faster than people who didn’t.
But that doesn’t really bother me. The genre has been starved for good games for a while, and I was very, very happy to see D4, Last Epoch, and PoE2 finally arrive. These are games that I typically play for hundreds of hours each, so $40 for an expansion (or cosmetic) doesn’t really seem like that much per hour.
But if I were going for narrative and a good single-player campaign, I’d have a very different take on it too.
It still completely baffles me how people pay 9-10 dollars/pounds in perpetuity for WOW at all, never mind the millions who still do, when pretty much all other MMORPGs have long since gone free to play.
I personally turn up for 3 months after a new expansion and are gone.
Man, I wish more games still had subs like WoW. Free to play too often means pay to win.
For every rare game like Path of Exile or Once Human that are cosmetics-only, there are ten living and dead MMOs that make money by selling boosts and loot boxes that directly affect gameplay. I’d take an honest sub over those any day.
That makes sense, if we go into different games expecting different things, our experiences will be dramatically different. Yeah, I’ll wait for D4 series to be finished and go get the cut scenes off Youtube or something. It’ll be good enough to scratch my story-based itches.
FTR though, while I was irritated at D4’s initial cost, and paid promo tiers, and infuriated at the DLC costs it was (I played through the first 2 seasons) a very good Diablo game. The dark moments, the playstyle that was classic but with better graphics, the classes, etc.
Just extremely irritated by the way they obviously went with an incomplete story (far more so than earlier iterations) with such a pricey “Do you want more?” next step. Because if it had been the expected $29.99 or so… I’d have probably paid. Probably.
Well, I’d have dropped WoW due to sub costs years ago, but it’s something I do with in person friends who’ve moved out of state once a week. It’s a social thing. But, for the record, I don’t pay that sub. I’m very good at gold grinding and AH work, so I haven’t paid real world cash since … before Warlords of Draenor? Basically, I came back when WoW tokens became a thing, although to be fair, it would be cheaper to spend some of the hours I mindlessly kill time playing WoW and making gold to do OT, and pay for everything in real world terms.
But grinding gold and alts is very relaxing to me. So I’m back to having 8 million gold in wow, 10 tokens stored, $340 (near the cap) in Blizz cash, and 3 years of game time paid in advance.
I think I’ve played 50 hours of it in the last 48 hours. It’s fantastic. I can’t pick a class though.
Have you tried any of the melee ones yet? They seem to have ramped up the difficulty quite a bit vs the old game, and I was really struggling with the Monk.
Not really. I cleared most of act 1 with a monk, but most of that was in a party with two lightning rangers. The monk Tempest Bell + Lightning Arrow is pretty keen and fires off like 20 attacks per second flattening everything.
Most of the people I’ve played with are PoE 1 vets and that seems to be hurting them in some ways compared to my fresh take. Stuff like they refuse to spend their drops on upgrading items. After berating someone enough, they made a new rare with some item and it doubled their DPS. No wonder that boss seemed tanky. I’ll try the act 1 boss on monk later today. He seemed like one of the first real checks.
I played Limbo a couple years ago and then started Inside, but then got hooked on something else and never went back to it. I got back to it recently and all of a sudden I got that feeling that hooked me on Subnautica: Stomach dropping out when an unknown depth opens up below me. It was brief but I really appreciated how unexpected that was.
Thanks to a Steam sale a couple of weeks ago, I was able to score all three Hitman games for a pretty low price. I’ve had a few friends rave about this game for years, and now I can see why. It’s got a bit of a learning curve, but I’m really enjoying it so far.
Anyone else here have experience with the game?
Tons.
They are great games, assuming you are talking about the World of Assassination “trilogy,” which was really just three parts of the same game depending on who you ask but anyways, if you’ve never played a Hitman game before, know there hasn’t always been this amount of handholding, in the original games you pretty much had to figure it all out on your own. This iteration of the game encourages replay, but trying to do all of the challenges can start to feel like just checking things off a list. I prefer to still go old-school, turning off most of the assistance and just working something out. Haven’t played it in a while, but it was always a good time.
I did beat Hitman Go , the mobile version