I won't leave a bad review (yet), but feel totally deceived

[jaykoblives]

This game looks like it was developed in 2012. The graphics quality are ancient. Now, I'm one who values gameplay over graphics, I'm a pretty OG ARPG player, going all the way back to Diablo 1, but it's hard to not notice how lackluster the animations and armor are in the very early game. Like, part of the ARPG power fantasy is looking awesome and not awesome by 2012 standards, but awesome by whatever standard is current and modern in gaming culture. This game looks...cheap...and the gameplay is not great enough (yet) to make me expect the gameplay alone is going to overcome how ass it looks.

Does the gameplay get better than in the first 1-2 hours. Is the itemization and build scaling just that good? Do the items look more exciting? I'm struggling to find a reason to play this after one hour.

[Ravenkid9266]

Originally posted by jaykoblives:

Does the gameplay get better than in the first 1-2 hours. Is the itemization and build scaling just that good? Do the items look more exciting? I'm struggling to find a reason to play this after one hour.

According to a developer "We don’t want to aim for gear to be as high of a portion of your total power of build customization as other games though."

The most up to date information is that with the 1.0 release there will still be entire categories of items missing their models.

[Behelit]

The game starts pretty slow. Everybody gets time to get used to the skills, game mechanics during the whole campaign. The game really starts in the endgame when unlocked all the idols and actually building up your character with each passiv points and exalted/unique gear. Visually the new Runemaster looks pretty nice in my option and the warlock (revealed today) looks mind-blowing with all the mechanics that are getting unlocked also just by the passive tree. We didn't see all the actual skills and it's already phenomenal.

As you might know from your very own experience 1-2 hours in any ARPG is nothing. Doesn't matter if its PoE, Diablo or even Torchlight. They all shine in the endgame. You keep learning during the first couple hundreds of hours and find something new still.

Last words to Last Epoch: the QoL is insane. Crafting on the run, doesn't matter where you are. Also very easy to understand while still being interesting and exciting. Build in Loot Filter that is easy to create and change as you progress. Stuff I missed after playing LE in other games making me coming back every time. Even the build in guide explains very clearly everything if you get lost or just want to look up something (like how do I scale up damage using bleed). It literally shows you what you need to do making it easy for beginners. With 1.0 at 21st Feb more QoL is coming.

[Troy Muni]

Originally posted by jaykoblives:

This game looks like it was developed in 2012. The graphics quality are ancient. Now, I'm one who values gameplay over graphics, I'm a pretty OG ARPG player, going all the way back to Diablo 1, but it's hard to not notice how lackluster the animations and armor are in the very early game. Like, part of the ARPG power fantasy is looking awesome and not awesome by 2012 standards, but awesome by whatever standard is current and modern in gaming culture. This game looks...cheap...and the gameplay is not great enough (yet) to make me expect the gameplay alone is going to overcome how ass it looks.

Does the gameplay get better than in the first 1-2 hours. Is the itemization and build scaling just that good? Do the items look more exciting? I'm struggling to find a reason to play this after one hour.

Omg, you read my mind. I came here to see if they anything to improve the presentation quality. The trailer looked like it might be better but I'm not investing my time into a glorified web browser looking ARPG when I could be playing POE instead. And saying this game looked like it was developed in 2012 is being kind. It 100% looks cheap by today's standards. I jacked up every single Nvidia control panel setting for it and am running on 4090 with an OLED display and it looked like i was playing with integrated graphics. Graphics aren't everything but they have ignored presentation qualities since day 1. And the game itself is a poor man's POE. So let's be real here. Plus it was so easy but was showing signs of becoming grind-heavy to extend it's shelf life.

[Great Brandini]

You can make it look a lot better using reshade, the game has this blue filter to it which imo looks bad, you can enable fakeHDR and a red tint that help bring it back to normal color levels, then some sharpening and contrast will make it look better also

[Troy Muni]

Originally posted by Scallywag'Sag:

You can make it look a lot better using reshade, the game has this blue filter to it which imo looks bad, you can enable fakeHDR and a red tint that help bring it back to normal color levels, then some sharpening and contrast will make it look better also

Yeah thanks, that's what I was thinking but there's only so much reshade can do if the game underneath hasn't updated any of it's textures or animations in nearly a decade.

[Dark Sun Gwyndolin]

Not sure what you're on about. I have a number of problems with the game, but graphics is definitely not one of them. I like that it's not as oppressively bleak as Diablo 4, and it definitely exceeds previous-gen ARPG's such as Grim Dawn and Diablo 3.

[The Gingerbread Man]

Deceived? Did somebody lie to you?

[Quillithe]

It's not AAA graphics or anything, but I think the style looks okay in general. Better than Grim Dawn, obviously not up to the fidelity of D4 though I kinda dislike the style of D4 - it feels like they overreacted to D3 being 'colorful'.

Itemization feels pretty nice to me - you can very reliably get items that add a lot to your power, there are ridiculous chase items but you don't really need them to be fine.

Ugh sure prefer it to PoE where they add new trash to sell stash tabs constantly and the entire itemization system is a trash fire. Every once in a while I consider playing it again and get as far as looking at an item before remembering why I don't.

But I'm also someone who preferred D1 and maybe D2 and think the whole 'endless item farming endgame with billions of modifiers' is the result of greed destroying the genre of ARPGs anyway so I know my take is unpopular.

[I Should Be Sleeping]

Originally posted by Quillithe:

It's not AAA graphics or anything, but I think the style looks okay in general. Better than Grim Dawn, obviously not up to the fidelity of D4 though I kinda dislike the style of D4 - it feels like they overreacted to D3 being 'colorful'.

Itemization feels pretty nice to me - you can very reliably get items that add a lot to your power, there are ridiculous chase items but you don't really need them to be fine.

Ugh sure prefer it to PoE where they add new trash to sell stash tabs constantly and the entire itemization system is a trash fire. Every once in a while I consider playing it again and get as far as looking at an item before remembering why I don't.

Was playing 3.23 of PoE and got bored of the slot machine RNG grind. Not spending X hours getting currency so I buy 100 essences and maybe get the mods I want.

[Quillithe]

Originally posted by Hentai Hero:

Originally posted by Quillithe:

It's not AAA graphics or anything, but I think the style looks okay in general. Better than Grim Dawn, obviously not up to the fidelity of D4 though I kinda dislike the style of D4 - it feels like they overreacted to D3 being 'colorful'.

Itemization feels pretty nice to me - you can very reliably get items that add a lot to your power, there are ridiculous chase items but you don't really need them to be fine.

Ugh sure prefer it to PoE where they add new trash to sell stash tabs constantly and the entire itemization system is a trash fire. Every once in a while I consider playing it again and get as far as looking at an item before remembering why I don't.

Was playing 3.23 of PoE and got bored of the slot machine RNG grind. Not spending X hours getting currency so I buy 100 essences and maybe get the mods I want.

Yeah I'm too casual to even want to get into trading.

Don't get me wrong, for hardcore ARPG players that want to play the same game every day for years or something PoE is hard to beat. I'm just more the kind of player that plays them with friends, has some fun, doesn't play 10k+ hours or anything.

From that perspective this isn't the greatest ARPG I've ever played or anything but it's been fun - and the easy itemization and respec means you can try out a lot of builds with a single mastery pretty fast which is really nice IMO.

[☁]

Yeah I find the skills to feel not fun or satisfying and the animations is like gliding on ice feel, its still the best arpg until poe2 or if diablo 4 fixes the game in season 4. hopefully 1.0 will improve these areas.

[Psykrom]

Is PoE still running gambling as their core gameplay and business mechanic?