To be honest I had forgotten that this game was even a thing until tonight, when my brother mentioned that our older cousin had expressed excitement for it. As it turns out, the early access release is a shade under 10 hours away as I write this (11am Pacific Time, December 6). The game will ultimately be F2P, but EA will cost you 30 bones. I did some looking into it, and the game does indeed look pretty neat, so I've decided to go ahead and take the plunge. I've always been a sucker for these isometric ARPG colored loot games anyway.

Here's the little I know about it that might help you decide if you're interested in playing it early:

• They've said EA will last at least six months.
• EA will start with six classes, but there will eventually be twelve. The other six will have a staggered release throughout EA.
• Each class will eventually have three "Ascendency class" options, which in effect are portions of that giant skill grid that are unique to them, and you can only pick one. But for now, each of the current six playable classes will only have two of the three ascendancy choices available.
• At the end of EA, your characters will apparently not be migrated to the standard realm (or whatever their terminology is), but will instead remain in a cordoned-off EA league. I can certainly understand why the devs would not want a bunch of max-level characters running around on day 1 of their 1.0 release sneering at the all the n00bs, so that part makes sense. The thing I'm not clear on is whether these EA characters will eventually be able to re-join the 1.0 release characters at a later time, perhaps after the completion of the first season. Though I suppose it doesn't really matter too much.
• As someone who played some PoE, but a long-ass time ago, one of my biggest questions was whether PoE2 would be more flexible and forgiving in their build mechanics. In the first game, your build choices had a high degree of permanence and were hard to reverse later on, to the point where it was often best to just start a new character if you realized you'd screwed up your build... and it was also basically impossible for a novice to spend their skill points wisely without resorting to build guides. I was not a big fan of these aspects. But, in my admittedly limited searching, it at least sounds like the devs know that this was a major problem with PoE1 that drove away the more casual crowd (myself included), and so they're now making some allowances to make it all a little more forgiving. Apparently respecs can now be done with basic gold, with an accelerating cost the more points you've put in... which sounds better than what PoE1 had, at least when I was playing it, with their Orbs of Regret and such.

So we'll just see. I'm looking forward to checking it out tomorrow, excellent timing for me since I just got a powerful new gaming PC literally this past Monday. I'll return and give some thoughts on the game here when I have them.

Anyway else planning on playing PoE2 early access? And do you know anything interesting about it that I don't? (I don't know much!)

I’m a little disappointed they didn’t go with the full campaign as initially planned. But like I get it I’m the weirdo who likes campaigns more than the end game so probably smarter to appeal to everyone else.

But yeah I’ll probably crack into it a bit. I liked PoE a lot even if I could never make it my eternal game the way some have.

Oh, right, I did see that they're supposed to be six "acts" of story and that currently there are only three, and that they'll ask you to repeat it on two different difficulty levels to pad it out for now. Definitely not ideal, and I'm not a fan of repeating campaigns myself, but I'll live.

Welp, I put about four hours into the game tonight. And so far... not loving it? I feel like I have a litany of mostly small complaints that have combined to leave me feeling a little sour on it.

The first thing that annoyed me happened before the game even began: when I tried to name my character, I got a message to the effect of "That character name already exists." Which apparently means that individual characters have to have a unique name across the entire playerbase. Which IMO sucks and is stupid. Of course players need to have unique names, but you should be able to name your characters whatever the hell you want without needing to add a string of random numbers at the end.

When it comes to the gameplay itself, by far my biggest complaint is the movement. Even when you're attacking from range, you character will not necessarily stop, they'll slowly move in a direction. And while there is a button that you can ostensibly hold to attack from your current position, if you'd already click to move someplace, all holding that button will do is make you slowly continue to move in the direction you've clicked while attacking. Since I could never properly stop my character when I wanted to, it felt like I was on ice skates the whole time.

Beyond that, there are a whole lot of little UI things that are annoying. Probably the biggest is that inventory tertris is back and as bad as ever. Whereas in Diablo 4 no items takes more than two spaces in your inventory, some of the items in POE2 take up 8 spaces... and you can't even rotate items to fit, nor does there seem to be (unless I missed it) an auto-sort inventory button. All this means I sure portal back to town a whole lot when I'd rather be moving forward to do a lot of fiddly selling and "disenchanting." Also, this game is still doing the "scroll of identify" thing, which... really? People still like that? Why?

I do plan to keep playing for at least a little while, and probably try a few different classes (only tried Sorceress thus far), but so far it hasn't done much to impress me. Some of the design sensibilities feel like they're stuck in the mid-2010s and have been carried forward out of sheer tradition and habit rather than thoughtfully reexamined and reconsidered with a critical eye for actual merit.

Yep, that all sounds like PoE. It's a game that needed a QoL for years and never really got it and I guess it's not a focus for a sequel either.

@efesell: I would actually say there's a ton of QoL improvements and if anything they've actually been very mindful of what wasn't working in PoE1. The general flow is much more new-player friendly in terms of how skills work, etc. It's going to be a lot more intuitive for newcomers and lot easier for experienced players to experiment with builds.

As far as some of the specific complaints go, still moving when attacking is a now either a strafe if ranged, or a means of changing the direction of your attack mid-swing. I don't know how that works on PC, but on controller I find it very intuitive as it basically works like a dual-stick shooter.

Other bits of it are personal taste. I genuinely prefer playing inventory tetris to the frankly stupid system Diablo uses nowadays. I'd rather have a limited inventory of stuff I can actually use to the Diablo 4 system of "here's a massive grid of crap to look through because the loot system is ass."

Keep in mind that this is also basically Day 1 of Early Access, so there's a good chance this stuff changes, maybe substantially, before the full release.

My main thing is having no button that actually stops all my movement. As far as I can tell it just doesn't exist. And sometimes that really matters. E.g., there are times when a boss will shoot out projectiles in fan pattern and you have to try to stand in one of the small gaps between them, so I need to be able to stop precisely, but I can't. It feels really bad. Again, it's like my character is wearing ice skates.

I honestly don't understand what you've even saying here. The only sensible way I can see to parse your statement is that you're not even actually talking about the tetris aspect at all, you're talking about the general quality of the D4 loot. Which is a completely separate thing and one I'm not talking about at all. I'm simply talking about the fact that every piece of equipment in D4 is the same size in your inventory. Whereas in POE2, you can end up picking up half a dozen 4x2 staves, say, and have to make a trip back to town inside 5 minutes. What about that is good? I'd rather be fighting monsters more and not have to go back to town every three seconds, I don't see the appeal.

But I'm not sure that anything epitomizes the lack of QoL changes more than the "Scroll of Wisdom" and the fact that you need to click on the well in town to refill your flasks. Equipment could simply drop identified already, and your flasks could just auto-refill in town. Instead they make you go through the extra step for no apparent reason. I don't understand what the gain is from either of these things, design-wise.

Well unless this one made some major changes PoE loot is not a more limited inventory of stuff you can actually use anyway.

Or, rather, it became one after you installed an item filter that purposefully ignored all of the useless shit that dropped that isn't even worth hauling back to town.

So I picked this up on console, because I insist on making this style of game work there for some reason, and I will say I am immediately more impressed by the controls than I was for Diablo 4s console release. This game has opted for Twin-Stick controls for a lot of the aiming and while I'm too early to say if skills stay consistently good and easy to direct it's a lot better than Diablo 4 hyper fixating on barrels and shit when I'm in the middle of combat.

@atheistpreacher: Looks like you can go into the skills menu and toggle each skill to force you to attack in place, which might solve your problem.

Requiring a unique name for every character is, uh... insane. This is supposed to be my character's name, but all the real names and all the fictional names and anything that sounds kind of like a name is already taken. At the very least, have some kind of name generator to make this a quick process.

Item tetris sucks, particularly on console. No auto-sort is nuts as well.

That said, I can't stop playing. Combat feels great on a controller. After picking up a few yellows, I've gotten a good sense of what is and isn't worth picking up, and I rarely have to portal back to town or shuffle my inventory around. Hoarders will have a bad time. They've seemingly put in a lot of effort into making things less intimidating for beginners. The decision to remove skill gem sockets from gear is a massive relief. There's gold. The passive tree is as monstrous as ever, but I'm hopeful I'll be able to build a playable character without using a guide. If not, we're gonna have a problem, but so far, I'm having a blast.

Hmm, I'll have to try that, thanks!

Maybe I'll actually try it with a gamepad. But it always just seemed wrong to me to play one these isometric ARPGs that way. And I'm worried that makes navigating all the other menus more annoying.

BTW, what class or classes is everyone playing, and what do you think of them?

My first inclination in these types of games is to go for the rangy magic characters, though I don't always end up sticking with them; in PoE1 I ended up playing the ranger the most. Anyway, I started with a Sorceress this time, and am currently level 11. I've been focusing on ice skills and have been putting my passive points mostly into making my energy shield better for greater survivability (seems to make more difference than +damage?).

But I've also been stashing a few decent pieces of equipment here and there for other classes, might try switching soon and seeing if I vibe better with something else.

Even though most of the builds I used for her got shunted over to Sorceress I'm still mainly sticking with Witch. The minions don't feel quite as impactful in the early game but I might just be used to having the D4 necromancer army doing everything while I sit back and watch.

But I mainly like being the witch because the world in these games is awful and she's just thrilled to be in it.

A good tip for fellow controller users out there, you can bind a button for toggling between Dynamic and Focus targeting, where the former will try its best to target what you are facing with the right stick and generally does okay but Focus locks it to one thing at a time until you flick the stick to something else, great for bosses or elites.

I'm a lightning sorceress with a little touch of frost and zombie summoning.

This game is hard by the way.

@efesell said:

In playing a Sorceress freeze build, having minions has made a huge different just for drawing aggro and being meat shields. That's partly because a frost build seems to revolve around spells with a long travel time or else a long delay. If the minions are keeping enemies occupied then you can just cast on top of them and not worry too much that enemies will move away. The one bad thing, though, is that now I feel extremely locked in to using a sceptre that gives +100 spirit and minions, otherwise I can't afford them, Sorceress doesn't come with any spirit naturally. EDIT: Oh, apparently no one starts with spirit? I assumed Witch did since she's supposed to be the summoning character.

I've definitely seen people saying it's a lot harder than the first game. It's certainly not easy and I've had to fight a number of the bosses multiple times, but at this point I'm through the burned village place and am level 15, just picked up my first tier 3 attack spell, and things are actually feeling quite manageable. FWIW I do feel like the minions and the passive point focus on energy shield buffs have made the biggest difference.

I am getting a little more used to the mouse movement now. The slow strafe can certainly be an advantage because it's often still enough to dodge projectile. But I'm never going to stop wanting the "attack in place" button to immediately halt all movement.

@atheistpreacher: There is an option under the interface tab in settings that makes it so attack in place stops movement instantly. Having that said this issue is on my list of annoyances as well. It seems to mostly be an issue for mouse movement. The big problem however is that bosses seem designed around utilizing that movement for openings.

Also, in regards to identifying, you will unlock free "identify all" in town fairly quickly.

Other notes I've made during my first 10 hours so far:

Take it or leave it combat, feels like overcompensating.

Lack of meaningful skill choices. You either pick style 1, 2 or 3 and get "upgrades" every 10ish levels.

Character progression feels outclassed by Last Epoch.

Passive tree too many generic nodes.

Lack of utility skills makes the game feel outdated.

Poor telegraphing on bosses.

Skill gems not leveling removes a lot of the sense of progression.

Game looks great, and is fun enough to play but it seems very much stuck in the "we made a better Diablo 2" mindset. Maybe the end-game will be great, but so far there is a lot of stuff that just has been done better by other games since then. The whole skill gem system just seems utterly archaic at this point. Especially with the generically dropped gems and the limitations introduced in this game. In PoE 1 at least it was fun to randomly find a new gem and try it out.

Warrior feels bad.

Warrior feels like it's for a completely different game. Does not have the defenses to trade in melee, doesn't have the damage to be an all or nothing glass cannon. Easily interrupted by just about everyone. The first skill you get has so much start up time that I would never even think to use it in a boss fight.

I think there's an interesting style behind building up and cashing in the Stun bar mechanic but it is too frustrating to play at the start to even want to invest in its future.

Aha, fantastic! That's what I was looking for, glad it exists, though I'm confused that it's not the default, as the "attack in place" button seems pretty useless otherwise. Also, it should be in the "input" tab with everything else that has to do with input, I never even though to look in the "interface" tab for it... I'm sure there are many others with my same complaint who don't realize this exists.

But I agree that even after I got the tip from @spunkyhepanda, I realized I didn't actually always want to stop the slidy movement because it can be hugely advantageous for boss fights in particular. Funny that they've made a game of this style where the mouse movement is so sub-optimal when for most other similar games the mouse is clearly the best way to play.

Yeah, I did reach that point, but it doesn't actually address my feeling that identification of items doesn't need to be a thing at all, whether it's free or not. The well to refill flasks is also free, and I don't like that either. It just feels like a legacy mechanic that has remained in the game just because, and serves no useful purpose. The appendix of isometric ARPGs.

I can see where you're coming from with this stuff, though so far I've mostly found the boss telegraphing to be OK. But I'm waiting until I play longer to decide how I ultimately feel about all of it.

Yep, here again is where I feel PoE2 has inherited a vestigial system from the previous game for no good reason when they should have just started from scratch. It's downright odd that skill gems are still treated as items yet simply drop as generic and then are slotted into a character skill interface so that they may as well not be items at all.

Similarly, and I complained about this already, the inventory tetris from PoE1 was a necessary design evil because gems slotted directly into equipment, which had different numbers of colored slots that might be linked or unlinked, etc., and so the size of the item icon actually mattered. In PoE2 it doesn't seem to (at least so far), so I'm not sure why the hell GGG didn't go the D4 route and just make all equipable items the same size so you can carry more before needing to make a town portal run.

It's a game that seems stuck in an archaic design mindset, in some cases very possibly out of sheer stubbornness, and I worry that a lot of this stuff is already so baked in that it's not going to be changed before 1.0, or ever.

I left this one for last because it's a whole different game and so kind of a different topic entirely. But after I played the D4 open beta, which I think was in March last year, I picked up Last Epoch to tide me over until it released. And while the skill progression was very cool, it felt like the tradeoff they made was that all of the loot was completely uninteresting, and sometimes downright meaningless. They had added all progression to the skills and seemed nervous to make the loot do anything powerful because it might multiply off the highly customizable skills in unpredictable ways. The end result was that I beat the game once and screwed around in the endgame grid thing a little bit, but ultimately stopped playing pretty quickly because the game had become about the loot hunt, and the loot seemed useless.

So, since you say this, I guess I'm just curious if this aspect has been fixed. Playing Last Epoch when I did, it was before 1.0 and I think I haven't touched it in 18 months. Does the loot aspect not suck now? Because I'm not sure I ever found a piece of loot in that game that was actually exciting.

Huh, well, that's good to know. If I was going to roll another character it would probably be an archer anyway, since I've picked up a lot of good archer equipment with my Sorc. I'm always more interested in the ranged characters in these games in the first instance. But I have to assume that if it's really that bad, the melee characters will get fairly quickly buffed, at least in the early game? Here's hoping.

@atheistpreacher: I don't think I've ever felt weaker starting one of these games than warrior. Like you think of a slow start as "wow these elites take a while to kill" but warrior start is like "damn those 3 wolves might kill me".

e: Of course the first legendary I find is for a Warrior and it fixes the early game problems immediately. Absurdly dependent on gear, absolutely not a class to start the game with until you have a stash full of hand me downs.

@atheistpreacher: I never really found the loot in Last Epoch to be a problem. There's a good deal of fun uniques and sets that do crazy stuff, although I guess I can see the normal stuff being a bit bland. A lot of it "unlocks" once you get into empowered monoliths though, so if you don't get to that point that could be an issue. The consistent complaint about Last Epoch is bland end-game content. It's for sure not a superior game overall, but the skill trees and passive trees are easily some of the best in the genre.

It's funny, I did decide to start a Ranger, and compared to Sorceress, it's been night-and-day in terms of how powerful I am, but I do think a lot of it comes down to hand-me-down gear. I'm easily dealing double the DPS with my Ranger and just burning bosses down. I do really enjoy collecting gear for other classes and then having them just roll through the early game, it's a fun way of feeling you're gaming the system a bit.

Side-note: I'd been crash-free during the first two nights of playing, but tonight I had something like four crashes to desktop. Not sure if that was just luck-of-the-draw or if the latest patch actually introduced some bugs.