Wednesday 30 October 2013

Path of Exile

I've been playing Path of Exile again.  I played it for a while in the beta and lost interest about halfway through the third difficulty.  I'm not really interested in losing experience when I die, especially not when lag was causing the game to report things to be in places they were not.

Anyway, it's gotten quite a bit better in that short time.  Not that it was bad before, I played plenty of it.  They added a class you can only play after winning normal difficulty that starts in the middle of the sphere grid passive skill tree.  More excitingly they added trigger materia skill gems so you can have skills automatically activate on certain events.  I haven't found these yet but it sounds really unfair.

And that's what I really like in games like this - being unfair.  Fair is boring.  If the game is totally unfair then you can play in so many different ways: look for the best build, refine your build, do broken things and make the game easy, use the worst skills and make the game near impossible.  It gives you a lot of fun ways to play.

With "balance" everything feels samey.  What the point in using the other skill if it is the same as the skill you were already using.  Sure, it may work a little differently, but ultimately the only way things are balanced is if they are almost the same, with only cosmetic difference.

This is a Diablo-like so it is actually a fair bit like Diablo and Torchlight and all those other games, but it is definitely a little more like Diablo 2 than Diablo 3.  That's a good thing here.

2 comments:

  1. are any of the games you talk of free?

    because i would go look at them and play them a little just to see what it is you're talking about.

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    1. Quite a few of them are free, including this one. It is huge and takes a long time to download, and has premium options. But even then, the premium options are purely cosmetic. I'm actually not sure how they plan to stay in business.

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