TLDR - The Absolute Best ARPG Ever Made
Pros: Unlimited build depth, incredibly rewarding. (10,000+ builds. 9,876 of which will fail in yellow maps.)
Cons: My wife left me, and I can still see the passive tree when I close my eyes.
Since I made a review about POE2, I feel obligated to review POE1.
I see a lot of players saying how good POE2 is (I still think it's pretty rough in its current state). But if you've played POE2, enjoyed it, and haven't played POE1, you're doing yourself a disservice—and honestly, the entire ARPG genre.
Allow me to explain what you're missing.
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##1. The Very Small Passive Skill Tree
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Most games give you a skill tree with a few meaningful choices. POE1 politely hands you a constellation containing 1,300+ passive nodes that resembles a neurosurgeon's MRI after twelve cans of Monster Energy.
Peak game design.
Do you want +10 Intelligence?
Or would you rather spend seventeen passive points hiking across the galaxy to reach a keystone that permanently sets your Life to 1?
Don't worry—you're immune to Chaos damage now, so clearly this was worth it.
People say the passive tree is intimidating.
Wrong.
It's actually very straightforward.
If you don't spend your first 40 hours staring at Path of Building while Zizaran calmly explains that your character is mathematically unsalvageable because you allocated "10% increased Maximum Life" instead of the nearby "+16 to Maximum Life," that's really on you.
It's not a game.
It's a religious pilgrimage.
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##2. A Flawless "Zero Third-Party Tools Required" Experience
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One of POE1's greatest strengths is how self-contained everything is.
To comfortably play the game, you only need a few lightweight companion apps:
*Path of Building (Community Fork)* - To simulate playing the game so you don't have to actually open the game.
*Awakened PoE Trade* - To price-check the 400 pieces of garbage you pick up every map.
*FilterBlade* - Because without a custom loot filter, your screen will be covered in so much text that your graphics card will melt.
*Craft of Exile* - To calculate the 0.0003% chance of crafting the item you'll definitely brick.
*PoE Ninja* - To discover that Divine Orbs are somehow worth even more than they were yesterday.
*PoE Regex* - Because naturally you'll be writing regular expressions just to identify map modifiers that instantly delete your character.
**A Twitch stream** - Preferably someone spending 14 Mirrors crafting an item you'll never afford while casually saying, "This is actually pretty budget - league starter."
Who doesn't love needing seventeen browser tabs, three overlays, a spreadsheet, two Discord servers, and a youtube tutorial just to decide whether a pair of boots is vendor trash?
The best part is that every veteran calls these "optional."
It's immersive.
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##3. The Most "Socially Enriching" Trade System Ever Created
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While lesser ARPGs lazily let you click Buy, POE1 believes commerce should build character.
To purchase that underpriced item for a single Alchemy Orb, you'll experience the following unforgettable journey:
* Copy-paste the same whisper to 47 players.
* Get ignored by 44.
* Discover two are permanently AFK.
* Finally receive an invite from xX_Shadow69Slayer_Xx.
* Enter a hideout decorated with highly questionable anime pixel art.
( . Y . )
* Stand perfectly still.
* Exchange exactly zero words.
* Type "ty".
* Leave immediately.
It is, without question, the deepest multiplayer interaction ever designed.
Forget Wall Street.
The POE economy is powered entirely by Chaos Orbs, sleep deprivation, and people who listed an item eight days ago.
Nothing teaches emotional resilience quite like spending 45 minutes buying one map before someone declines the trade because they sold it twenty minutes ago and forgot to delist it.
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##4. Visual Clarity? That's a Skill Issue.
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Other games make sure players can actually see what's happening.
POE1 considers that cheating.
By the endgame, your character moves at Mach 4 while simultaneously exploding three screens of monsters into a seizure-inducing light show consisting of approximately six million particle effects.
Then...
You instantly die.
What killed you?
* Corpse explosion?
* Reflect?
* Volatile?
* Ground effect?
* A white crab?
* A microscopic green pixel hidden beneath seventeen overlapping spell effects?
Nobody knows.
Not even the game.
You respawn in town and receive the valuable life lesson that awareness is temporary, but suffering is forever.
If you can consistently see your own character, your graphics settings are too low.
Or your build isn't dealing enough damage.
Probably both.
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##5 The Endgame
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Congratulations!
You beat the campaign.
Now you can finally start playing the game.
Welcome to the Atlas, where every mechanic GGG has ever invented over the last decade has been carefully preserved inside a single map because deleting content would hurt someone's feelings.
Would you like to:
- Delve?
- Heist?
- Expedition?
- Harvest?
- Blight?
- Legion?
- Breach?
- Ritual?
- Ultimatum?
- Betrayal?
- Sanctum?
- Delirium?
- Essence?
- Strongboxes?
- Shrines?
- Incursion?
- Bestiary?
- Harbinger?
- Abyss?
- Synthesis?
- Necropolis?
- Beyond?
- Torment?
- Conquerors?
- T17?
- Uber Elder?
- Uber Shaper?
- Uber Eater?
- Uber Searing?
- Uber Maven?
- Uber Sirus?
- Uber Cortex?
- Valdos? (You wanted to delete your character anyway...)
The correct answer is "yes."
Unfortunately, your Atlas Passive Tree says "no."
Don't worry though.
Once you've invested another 300 hours you'll discover you've been farming the wrong mechanic the entire league.
After 4,200 hours, I have finally finished the tutorial.
I can confidently say POE1 is one of the greatest ARPGs ever made.
It has absurd depth, nearly unlimited replayability, and enough content to consume your free time for the next decade.
I would never recommend it to anyone I care about.
My wife came back.
She saw the Atlas Passive Tree on my second monitor.
She left again.
The game is free.
The cost is everything else.
See you next league.
=)
