Path of Exile 2

Used to have hopes for this game. Thought it was going quite well.. now GGG are claiming it's going to be "fully released" ... ? 1.0? on dec 11th.. half the classes and skills, probably weapons and talents still missing. Embarrassing to say the least. Get back to me when this game is ACTUALLY out of early access. What an absolute shame.

I've played this game for roughly 600 hours and I still don't know if I recommend it. First: why is the entire playable cast white? An entirely white, race-locked cast in a major fantasy RPG in the 2020s is eyebrow-raising. I've reached endgame on two characters and have yet to find a speck of dialogue or lore explaining why they all have to be white. It gets considerably more icky when you look at what we actually do. We interfere in conflicts we have no business in, drag people into wars, ♥♥♥♥ with timelines, and slaughter native populations without much of a second thought. An uncomfortable number of NPCs of color who end up "on our side" are people we've previously killed, defeated, or subjugated. Then there are moments where the caricatures start to feel downright dehumanizing. One vendor comes across as a caricature of a Caribbean woman. We find her son brutally slaughtered, call her to his body, and she reacts with approximately the emotional weight of seeing roadkill for the hundredth time this week. White people wandering through civilizations clearly inspired by real-world cultures, slaughtering, pillaging, and destabilizing them. That's history. And a storyline. Failing to commit to any form of the bit makes it feel like it's toeing the line of being controversial for the sake of being exclusionary. Icky. Treat the player character like the god awful human beings they clearly are. I don't require this kind of plausible deniability. Committing to us being human sewage would be considerably less icky. I initially assumed the cast of player characters were innocent people being rounded up and executed to serve whatever purpose the Count had for their corpses. But having seen how the player character behaves once they're off the gallows, if their future behavior is any indication of their past, maybe there was a damn good reason they were standing up there. Good guy bad guy, it doesn't actually matter. Even if my character slaughters people because it brings them immense joy, that's valid too. Own it. Now, gameplay. I keep seeing people insist POE2 could become the greatest ARPG of all time, and I genuinely don't understand what they're comparing it to. I've played Dragon's Dogma, Skyrim, Nioh, No Rest for the Wicked, Diablo, and plenty of other RPGs and action games. Maybe I'm missing some very specific genre history that makes POE2 exceptional by comparison, because I'm thoroughly unimpressed. POE2 describes itself as a "living world." The town NPCs are glued into place like clutter. If they aren't a vendor or quest marker, you can't interact with them. The camp NPCs are literally items you place. The enemies, human and beast alike, don't interact with each other. The world waits for you to arrive, triggers an event, and then drags you along for the ride. There is no decision-making. That is not my definition of a living world. And with virtually no ability to decide who my character is or what they do, it's not my definition of a role-playing game either. It’s more like an action storyboard dungeon crawler. Don't hand me a click-to-advance conversation system wearing an RPG's clothes and pretend I'm participating. There are some glaring holes in things I would consider basic, and unfortunately what could have been my favorite archetype is essentially Swiss cheese. If you're specifically looking to play an occult-themed self-casting Occultist, I cannot recommend this game. Every other archetype is seemingly complete though. Remove minions from the occult spellbook and there's little variety. Remove curses and corpse-dependent spells and it's downright anemic. It is infinitely easier to cross the Witch with somebody else's archetype than it is to play a basic-♥♥♥♥♥ vanilla Witch who casts her own occult spells. I'm not dismissing any of my complaints as Early Access growing pains. POE2 has been publicly playable for nearly two years. This is NOT Grinding Gear Games' first game, and players have allegedly been complaining about the occult spellbook since Early Access began. I'm not saying it's unplayable. My basic-♥♥♥♥♥ vanilla Witch is over level 90. It's just limited and unnecessarily frustrating. Then there's endgame. The Atlas is enormous. Its size is also illusory. Within each biome there is so little meaningful variation that the maps might as well be the same dungeon. You run through a slightly rearranged environment, kill the same handful of enemies, reach one of what feels like ten bosses you've already fought, kill it again. A huge map does not equal a huge amount of variety. Personally, I'm done for now. Do I recommend Path of Exile 2 in general? I don't know. Despite its many flaws, POE2 is strangely addictive. It constantly feels like there's something I'm missing, some point where everything will finally click and make sense. After 600 hours, I'm done looking for it.