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[John Sandoval]

holy shit path of exile is the most boring game

i literally cannot see how anyone could play this and be entertained

I've looked at some videos of it and read some stuff. It looks pretty nice to me, like a Diablo 2.5 or something. What did you find bad about it?

At the suggestion of Bobo and Crowe, I downloaded Path of Exile during the open beta weekend. Having been too young to even use a keyboard when the original Diablo came out, this was my introduction to the genre. But even though I was playing through the dungeons with Bobo and Crow on Skype, I got bored really quickly. I picked the archer lady, and combat consists of clicking on enemies till they explode (like a pinata, except instead of candy, there's shitty loot that all looks the same). No real strategy to it at all. Fighting one enemy is pretty much the same as fighting all the rest. The bigger ones just drop more gear. And as you get more gear, the cycle repeats itself in a more 'difficult' dungeon.

I found it a pretty mindless activity.

[Dacke]

Ah, okay, thank you! You hate the genre, not the game specifically. Which makes perfect sense; objectively it's a kind of a retarded genre. But I happen to like the mindlessness of it, so I think I'll like the game.

[PaleFox]

holy shit path of exile is the most boring game

i literally cannot see how anyone could play this and be entertained

I've looked at some videos of it and read some stuff. It looks pretty nice to me, like a Diablo 2.5 or something. What did you find bad about it?

At the suggestion of Bobo and Crowe, I downloaded Path of Exile during the open beta weekend. Having been too young to even use a keyboard when the original Diablo came out, this was my introduction to the genre. But even though I was playing through the dungeons with Bobo and Crow on Skype, I got bored really quickly. I picked the archer lady, and combat consists of clicking on enemies till they explode (like a pinata, except instead of candy, there's shitty loot that all looks the same). No real strategy to it at all. Fighting one enemy is pretty much the same as fighting all the rest. The bigger ones just drop more gear. And as you get more gear, the cycle repeats itself in a more 'difficult' dungeon.

I found it a pretty mindless activity.

I can see why you'd think that, yeah. It's not specifically path of exile, to be honest; thats pretty much how diablos are in general.

[Alevice]

It's supposed to look that way.

I still need to beat that game. I started raiding the office and shit and never bothered to move from there.

[Tanner]

crowe has made me really want to play K&L 2. Next Steam sale.

[charlestheoaf]

who cares about writing and plot in a game like dork messiah? i can't even remember what the story was about and who the characters were. what i do remember is the excellent first person melee system.

I brought it up because the game had a lot of negative reviews, but considering the awesomeness of the gameplay, the story/characters/etc were the only things that were actually "that bad". But even in the cheesy-badness, it's entertaining in the way that many cheesy B-movies are.

[SirNiko]

Played through MacGuffin's Curse, which was pretty rad. It's a Sokoban style box-pushing puzzler with the added twist that you have two forms, one human, one werewolf. Only the wolf can push boxes and break walls, while only the human can swim, flip switches, and fit through windows. It actually creates a pretty clever variety of puzzles.

The game has a bit of an adventure bent to it, since the world branches out into many directions and you can explore most of it in any order you like. There's a lot of dialogue, since every room has some 5-10 objects you can inspect and every one has a unique description. Mercifully, after a while you can skip the dialogue and just look for sparkles that indicate some hidden treasure.

The character animations are really detailed and make the game a treat to watch in action. Everything you do, from pushing boxes, to opening doors, to diving into whirlpools is accompanied by an different animation.

The part I like best is that most of the bonus unlockables are character bios and comic strips that fill in gaps in the backstory. The story is pretty simple, but it is fleshed out with fun characters who have interesting motivations beyond just getting Lucas's amulet.

The puzzles tend a little to the easy side, though towards the end of the game I did encounter one really tough puzzle that took almost half an hour to solve. Hints are available for every puzzle, so you never need to consult a walkthrough if you happen to get stuck.

The sidequests in the advertising are actually mostly disappointing fetch quests that literally just have you warp from one node to another to pick up a macguffin and give it to another NPC. There is one NPC who gives you riddles that lead to hidden rooms, which is the most amusing sidequest of all. I wish that more effort would have been put into making the sidequests more fun and varied.

You have an overworld map with a quick warp option, but you don't have a more detailed map to help you. This gets a little annoying late in the game when you're hunting down locked doors you missed because you didn't get the key earlier on.

There are a few puzzles that can be solved by smashing boxes with lasers or dropping them in water, which is never introduced as a legitimate puzzle mechanic and feels like it isn't the intended solution.

I had a lot of fun with this one, and it would be great if you're looking for a casual game with a lot of poking around and reading descriptions when you need a distraction from the puzzles.

[John Sandoval]

Ah, okay, thank you! You hate the genre, not the game specifically. Which makes perfect sense; objectively it's a kind of a retarded genre. But I happen to like the mindlessness of it, so I think I'll like the game.

I think I would have been more into it if the loot was more visually interesting. Or if they had cool names. All the item drops seemed very samey and very brown. There might have been 5+ variations of beige leggings. However, note that I only played the game for around 2 hours, so there might be some cool looking/sounding items in the lategame. Still, I don't want to play 30+ hours or whatever in an ugly tin can helmet to get to that point.

[John Sandoval]

or if you could make your character an anime

[C.A. Sinner]

or if you could make your character an anime

or a girl with short hair

[John Sandoval]

i like the sound of that

c-can i name her amelie


other issues i had with path of exile:

-you fought the same 3 zombie character models for the first 20 minutes
-camera felt really stagnant (though this is probably just me coming from dota/league)
-no indication that you're about to die aside from the health bar (i would zone out and not realize that i was low on health fast enough to pop a potion, though according to crowe and bobo this is just a glitch on my side)
-potions were too easy to get, there is no reason to be careful; even as an archer i could tank damage for a while
-spells didn't feel very varied (i had a fire arrow, and a lighting arrow... and a poison arrow... and it seemed like the only difference was the particle effect)
-didn't like the art direction (felt it was generic)

the best part of the game was when i got the 'move really fast' spell, and for a few blissful seconds i could pretend to be windrunner

why isnt windrunner in every gam

[Dacke]

Still sounds like a good game to me! Many of the problems you describe seem to be related to you either not liking the genre or not playing long enough (I'm pretty sure it gets very hard later on).

Half the enjoyment comes from building up a powerful character over time. If you got more than mediocre stuff at the start, there would be nothing to look forward to. Now you have to collect power-gems, booster-gems, good-socketed-armor and combine them with your own passive abilities. Which I find quite meditative, in a strange kind of way.

But seeing how it will be an ethical free-to-play game (no buying of ingame benefits), I'll have nothing to loose by trying it!

[crzikrn]

Fallout! With the hype of wasteland and all in kickstarter. It was hard not to resist the sale on GOG.com/ I missed the free version i.i

It's taking way too much of my time. I can't get away from it once I start playing.
But it's really fun when the character's intelligence fall below 4.

[Blademasterbobo]

re: poe: biggest problem for me with that game was that the small fov meant that playing with more people made it exponentially harder to see wtf was going on. the spells are huge and flashy and make it hard to see shit.

[PaleFox]

Elizardbeth, classy mage extraordinaire