Good to great gameplay. Horrible over-the-top violence, no one to like or root for. People with no moral compass might like being led through a narrow story, but not me. Looking back, this is DEI. Meaning, that developers want to show a STRONG female protagonist, ambiguous morality, and tell the stories THEY want to tell without letting the players have input. Almost all developers are uber-liberal, however, the good ones still respect the player base who do not have the same worldview. Sure the story can end the way the writers want, but good writing can give you different moral paths to get there. BG3 is the pinnacle of this.
Path of Exile versus Diablo III Path of Exile has more in common with Diablo III than differences; i.e. game play, view, combat, weapons, leveling, etc... But as much as they are alike, they are also different. Diablo III is a more polished game in the realm of graphics, game play, storyline and ability to trade items and buy items…but you also pay a price. I liked Diablo and would give it an overall B+. The same can be said about Path of Exile, which I would give a B+; but for different reasons. I like or Love; It is free…no risk. Graphics and story-line for this game are very good, not great, but for a free to play I am pleased enough. Weapon and amour system is similar to everything else, but different enough you find yourself tweaking and tweaking. Cool and abundant character selection with mind blowing ways of leveling up and fighting and spell tweaks. Making your own amour & weapons is fun, easy and interesting, but not so easy that you will get awesome amour or weapons without effort. As I am sure most of you know, the skill tree is huge…but if you take a little time to really study it; I believe you will enjoy the system they developed and ways you can level up. Like the currency system of barter, but it can become frustrating; read below. Great and easy co-op if you want to play with a friend. I don’t like or hated. Small character inventory which has you running back and forth to town WAY TOO often to unload treasure. I hate having to pick up gobs and gobs of useless stuff, but in order to have plenty of identification and portal scrolls and build up an inventory of needed stones and orbs for later use; you are forced too. The bad part is all they would have to do is add a feature that allowed you to instantly scrap a normal or low level magic item for the required scroll scraps OR to go ahead and hall it back to town if you think it might bring in a better price. This way when your inventory fills up with items worth bartering, you could make the trip back to town; but if you want top dollar for everything, you can still hall everything if you want. Towards to end of Act II I began to tire just a little, but about that time the difficulty and abilities of amour and weapons changed a little and “support” stones began to make an appearance. This freshened up things a bit and shows they put thought into the long term evolution of your characters…kudos. Recommendations for a better game: Have 10 to 20 percent of the story line quests be some type of problem solving, riddles or Tomb Raider type puzzle; versus just finding the key or killing the next boss. Fix the inventory system and figure a way you can cut trips to town selling crap by 75%! If possible, an auction house similar to eBay’s “Buy it Now” would be awesome, but keep it simple. Each person (free account) can post 5 items for sale and can state what stones, gems etc. they will take for said item. Final thought. In some ways I feel like this game is a rip off of Diablo III, in some ways better and in some ways worse. But after playing it for 48 hrs, Path of Exile is just different enough and fun enough that I do feel like I am playing a unique game that is just similar to Diablo III and not a copy of it.
