Yeah I disagree. You can still have a GGG game with some input from the average. Im not saying to redesign your entire game so that a blind person with no hands can play it. But at the same time, designing your game for the POE1 10 yr veterans and expecting a larger audience to come and play it is nuts. The average IS playing Diablo, not this, lol. Who wants to slog through 20+ hours of campaign, which isnt even done yet, there is more to come, to get to this "new end game" they patched in ranted and raved about for 3 weeks? Whats wrong with a Diablo 4 experience early on that molds into a POE experience by end game?
Im watching Gladd play this, for his second time, btw. And the dude is a gamer. Hes not even done with act 3 and hes up to 9 hours already. And he keeps saying how awesome the game is but what a slog fest the campaign is. Hes asking Why the fuck he has to play through the campaign over and over again once hes done it aleady?
I think you're arguing against a position I didn't actually take.
I've been one of the loudest critics of PoE 2's early game. I never said the campaign shouldn't be improved. In fact, I've been saying the opposite. Act 1 damage is overtuned, too many early skills and supports are garbage, and the early game could absolutely use some smoothing out. None of that means the solution is to make the game more like Diablo 4.
The reason Diablo 4's campaign feels faster isn't because Blizzard solved some great ARPG design problem. It's because the game is almost completely devoid of friction. Resource management barely matters, gearing barely matters, character progression is heavily streamlined, and most content falls over if you look at it funny. That's why so many people blast through it, say it was fun for a weekend, and then disappear.
You're presenting a false choice: either PoE 2 caters to 10-year PoE veterans (which it doesn't - they've simplified a LOT of shit in PoE2, even moreso with the .build files) or it becomes Diablo 4 and/or "Joe Average Gamer" accessible. There is a massive middle ground between those two extremes. As for "the average player plays Diablo," that's true. The average player also quits Diablo. That's not exactly the argument you think it is. And at the end of the day, what do I give a shit? If the average player wants to enjoy ARPG slop, that's up to them. I'd rather POE2 have as little in common with D4 as possible.
And if we're talking about "first-time players", I don't think the answer is shortening or trivializing the experience. The answer is making sure the experience is actually fun. Give players more viable early skills. Tone down some of the ridiculous damage spikes. Improve the pacing where needed. Those are fixes to the campaign. Turning the first 20 hours into a faster, easier version of the game isn't "fixing" shit. It's just making it shorter.
If GGG can improve early skill balance, and smooth out some of the rough spots, great. But the answer isn't turning the first X hours into a loot fest where every skill works, every monster dies instantly, and every player wins regardless of what they're doing, then suddenly turns into "POE" at end-game. That's exactly how you end up with a game people praise for three days and abandon until the next "expansion" Blizzard milks them on to do it all over again.
