Overall, I'd say its a decent game, and amazing for its price of 0.00$
At the same time it has a lot of pitfalls, many of which stem from the fact that it is available to play for 0.00$
Things I really like about the game:
-Lore- I really didn't expect to give any shits about the lore. Diablo 2 already killed off the majority of any care about the lore I had for that particular franchise. And reading NPC textboxes brought no one any joy. But I greatly enjoyed the immersion of PoE, and the super expansive and in depth world state that was cooked up. I realize I'm coming at this a lot later than it's inception, but the layers of back story upon which skill gems function was an awesome touch. The fact that the second playthrough has a purpose and isn't just "now do it all again but harder" was great and reimagined the game in a new way. It was actually interesting to see what happened to old NPCs from the first go round. It does get difficult to follow with the hundreds of similarly named characters spanning a millennia or so, especially on a single pass. But I found it interesting enough that I actually watched Youtube channels dedicated to explaining the in game lore. I guess that means I liked it.
-Character Progression- I think you're character starts off just strong enough to 'easily' kill stuff but feel threatened enough that you might die (if you are flask adverse). You get some fun things to do pretty quickly, and if built somewhat correctly can feel super powerful towards end game.
-Skill Diversity- You can build literally anything in this game. There are more permutations that one can ever come close to scratching the surface of, and importantly, they are meaningful. This isn't the Jay Wilson D3 rants of, each gem has 6 versions, so with 20 skills you have 20^6 builds, or whatever BS they were spewing. With the interactions of support gems, trap/mine/totem transforming gems, along with build changing passive skills and unique items there is really an infinite set of decisions.
-Loot- Although there is definitely too much loot in this game, the progression of gear through the core game feels good. You make meaningful upgrades as the game progresses without the ridiculous power creep of things like D2 pushing dps into the trillions. Also some of the early game drops you get might just stick with your character for a long time. This mixture feels good and rewarding.
Things that are not the best:
-Targeting- PoE does a piss poor job of defining enemies and making them targetable. Yes they have the 'gritty' graphics that a bunch of aRPG fanboys seem to want, but most of the time I either can't see or properly target enemies. This wasn't an issue in D1 or D2 and they had a similar graphical style. I wish GGG would do a little more work in matching up enemy palettes with environmental palettes.
-Flask Meta- At first I thought Flasks were great. They solved the potion problem that made D2 a game of 'dont get one shotted'. But as I started reading guides, I realized how much I wasn't properly using my flasks because they have access to loads of powerful buffs and critical defensive attributes. Then I realize I need to always have my flasks on. Then I realized I was just training myself to count to a certain time gap and press one of the 5 piano keys. Which I also had to do to keep a bunch of cast on X buffs going. Then I realized how much I hate skills that have an effect duration that can essentially be maintained for ever if you micromanage them and wanted to destroy everything.
-Too many things!- The fact that they have new leagues every 3-4 months is incredibly commendable and I understand this is what keeps them in business. But way too many of these things become legacy. It is SOOOOO f'ing confusing starting a character out on league and figuring out what the hell is going on if you weren't there for the previous league. This also leaves you with way too much shit in your stashes. I realize selling stash tabs is why the game is available for free, and keeping all these legacy modes as part of the core game is how they sell stash tabs, but it is way overboard. Further it is incredibly interruptive to gameplay when this new person just randomly pops up asking you to do this random thing while you might have been at the apex of an act close to taking on the boss you were building up to for the last few hours of gameplay.
-Too much to keep track of- Following along with the above, the too many things also means too much knowledge. There are soooo many intricacies as to how certain game mechanics work that I spend more of my gaming time looking up how to generate an item, or who is the vendor that has the recipe I need, or what oils do i need for my annointment, or what does a caster craft really mean, or where to I go to get this prophecy done. It's just too much shit. I shouldn't be referring to my web browser every 5 minutes when playing an aRPG.
-Character building is hard- I don't want to complain too much about this, but to make a good functional character, you almost have to follow a guide. Granted you can make a character that can finish the core game using some common sense and stacking what you logically need in the passive tree with skills that look like they belong together. But you aren't going to be able to figure what are the 5 best passives to link to your Vaal Arc, or which unique item should be in your glove slot and where to hunt it down. The difference between guide based characters and ones that are self made is generally pretty big because the guides are mostly made by people playing this game for a living on Twitch.
-Character completion comes pretty late- Taking my characters through the game, I really thought I'd be getting my 6-links and perhaps finding some of the key uniques before finishing of the story line (I don't trade), but this generally is just not gonna happen. I realize this is part of what makes the end game possible, but I personally didn't like the mapping experience. It was super redundant, and the item upgrades just came to a screeching halt at the rate that I play the game. I really feel like you have to be a lightning fast farmer to keep pushing through the end game, and that's just not something I enjoy.
Overall, I like the game enough. I chipped in $20 for a newb starter pack that gave me a free stash tab with the 200 points. Then used the 200 points to buy a currency tab and a unique tab. This still fills up fast, but I think I'll be good for the length of a league. I think in general I just don't like the end game of any aRPG, PoE included. PoE does offer heaps of 'options' for endgame activities, although you probably need to dabble in all of them since gear is specifically obtained from various sidequest type adventures (where? who the fuck knows, go fire up Google and start playing in an hour or two). However, one thing I plan to try is playing single pass full clears much like I used to do with D2. I saw a league called Gucci Hobo, which also reminded me of some of the things we did back in D2 and I'm planning to give that a go with some minor modifications.
Oh yeah, I forgot about the Labyrinth. Labs or terrible and should die in a fire
Having a clunky platformer embedded in an aRPG as a gate towards critical character progression that can range from trivially easy to stupidly difficult depending on your build is dumb and GGG should feel dumb for keeping it in so damn long. Also the last ascendancy can't be completed until mapping, so I guess the game really doesn't end at the termination of the main plot but is supposed to keep going into the maps even though I don't like them.
