Path of Exile 2 feels off.
Path of Exile 2 undoubtedly had a successful Early Access launch at the end of 2024, passing its predecessor by expanding its audience far beyond the typical player-base of isometric ARPGs. The impressive player-count was largely driven by the prestige of Grinding Gear Games and an overall polish that is rare in a genre that is mostly occupied by smaller teams with smaller budgets. The game has since had a complicated relationship with player perception, with review scores swinging wildly between major patches as features are added, changed, and removed. Negativity was particularly loud after the 0.2.0 patch which was seen as leaning into, rather than moving away from, many of the complaints players had with the initial launch. I think the problems run deeper than any single patch, traceable to a single design decision made early in development that will be impossible for the game to escape.
A game that sells itself to such a broad audience cannot afford to approach design from the perspective of its most hardcore players.
The isometric ARPG is a “cult-classic” genre that attracts exceptionally dedicated players (I have been struck on more than one occasion by just how many lead game developers and directors cite an obsession with Diablo II as the starting point for their game making journeys). These games are often designed with those players in mind, which can be a challenge for developers who need to balance the wants of both advanced and casual players. This dedicated player base is both much less susceptible to being pushed away by temporary design issues, and is much smaller than the casual player base. Isometric ARPGs are built to appeal to the kinds of players that will take days off work to play the new league start; these players are unlikely to be bothered by things like the campaign feeling drawn out when not played optimally; they play well enough to not notice. This group of players, however, is not the majority of the millions who picked up the game on release and very few games of this scale hope to hold a concurrent player count in the hundreds or thousands instead of the hundreds of thousands. The game has already attracted a large player base, and many of those players are unhappy; a game that sells itself to such a broad audience cannot afford to approach design from the perspective of its most hardcore players.
The isometric ARPG is principally a genre about power; the isometric POV is ideal for showing many enemies on the screen at a time while the imprecision of that angle is overcome by AOE skills and auto-targeting. It is a very primal genre; it sits alongside survival crafters as a style of game whose reward systems sit close to the bone and tend to be quite visceral. These factors give the genre a distinct feeling that can grab and hold onto players for long, obsessive spurts. Like survival games, these games are usually very lean; their narratives are passable but rarely imposing, their narrative RPG mechanics are often close to nonexistent, and there is almost never anything to do but fight and upgrade gear. As such, the isometric ARPG is nearly inseparable from its reward and combat structure. Other games like No Rest For The Wicked may appear visually similar, but the feelings a player has are not at all the same.
The isometric ARPG is constructed such that each design element naturally follows from the previous with the root design choice being infinite buildcraft. If you want to make a game that people can play forever, incrementally increasing their power over time, then a natural way to do that is to implement granular buildcraft. Rather than give the player large and noticeable jumps in power, give them opportunities for small but consistent optimizations, the opportunities for which will far outlast their desire or time to play. It would be infeasible to design each of these optimizations manually, so attach them to gear that can roll a random array of stats and values. Players will need to go through a lot of items to have a chance at an improvement so you need to design the reward structure such that the player can be given lots of items very quickly. As this is a process that will take enormous amounts of time doing the same kind of content repeatedly, the gameplay loop needs to be exceedingly palatable. Each step here is natural, principled. All of these design elements link into one another, creating an unbroken design chain that has serviced the genre for decades.
Simple combat wasn’t a failure of imagination on the part of early designers; it was a necessity of the repetitive gameplay loop.
This is where Path of Exile 2 stumbles. The goal of Path of Exile 2 seems to have been as follows: make an isometric ARPG with all of the systems that define the genre, but replace the simple and weightless combat with combat that is meaningful and challenging. Grinding Gear Games kept the infinite buildcraft, they kept the random stat rolling gear, they kept the hordes of enemies and repeatable content, but they changed the last link of the chain—palatable combat. Basic enemies in Path of Exile 2 can be incredibly time-consuming to kill. They do enough damage to be dangerous, especially as the player is expected to implement slow multiple-button press combos to be effective, and they are often faster in movement and attack speed than the player. This combat model is being used in a game with a reward system that asks the player to play for dozens or hundreds of hours per league. Huge hordes of weak enemies were not an aesthetic choice of early isometric ARPG designers; they were an integral part of how these games functioned. Simple combat wasn’t a failure of imagination on the part of early designers; it was a necessity of the repetitive gameplay loop.
Meaningful combat succeeds in short bursts of engaged play surrounded by large gaps of free play. Games like Elden Ring and Baldur’s Gate 3 use exploration as a pacing mechanism to split up combat sections that exhaust the player. Engaging combat is fatiguing. It needs to be placed in the gameplay loop deliberately and with the support of the reward systems, the narrative and the quest design. Path of Exile 2 treats meaningful combat as though it were a slider that could be set to the maximum without regard for the game’s other elements. This is how a game gets labeled as a slog: hours of constant, strenuous engagement from the player. In Path of Exile 2, this is combined with a loot system that is still tuned as though the combat were palatable and mindless. The critique is not that the game is too difficult, it’s that it is difficult in a way that does not align with the rest of the game structures. This is a problem that no patch can fully solve.
Patch 0.2.0 was not a massive step in the wrong direction but it was a small step, taken confidently. It slowed the game down further, it added a new weapon that was leveraged even more into long combos, and it didn’t attempt to solve any of the problems that players seemed to feel on release. While opinions of difficulty after the patch varied greatly based on player skill-level, whether a game is trivially easy or crushingly difficult for any given player is not relevant for this discussion—the game was difficult in the wrong way. The patch also made apparent another consequence of the incomplete design chain: the philosophy of boss fights. The combat structure forced the designers to fill boss encounters with one-shot mechanics as that was often the only way to kill a well-geared player with decent survivability, another example of taking part of a system without considering the importance of the surrounding parts. Most souls-likes give healing items a large opportunity cost; healing is a limited resource that is dangerous and time-consuming to use. Every hit you take can force you to step back to heal, giving the you the option to play riskier or safer, and creating tense moments when healing has run out. Healing in Path of Exile 2 doesn’t work like that because its combat system sits halfway between isometric ARPG and souls-like. Its slow, deliberate boss attacks cannot counteract the kinds of healing isometric ARPG players have in any way other than one-shots. The problem is that the system does not work, even when perfectly balanced. It is not a question of the combat being too hard; it is the combat being too demanding for too long.
As an example of how this kind of genre change can work, No Rest For The Wicked is a game that has solved many of the problems with which Path of Exile 2 struggles. The game has many of the elements, especially aesthetically, of isometric ARPGs, so it can be tempting to describe it as such. No Rest For The Wicked actually plays much closer to a game like Elden Ring. It has an isometric camera angle and a somewhat similar loot system to games like Path of Exile but it prioritizes player skill growth over incremental gear improvements. This frees the player from having to kill many enemies at a time, instead fighting enemies in small groups or alone and allowing there to be large gaps between combat encounters where the player is incentivized to explore and engage with the world. The game is not Path of Exile but with souls-like combat. It is a game whose pieces fit very cleanly together, and as such it is a far more cohesive work than Path of Exile 2. The problem then is not that Grinding Gear Games tried to do something different; creative and interesting genre changes are desirable in game development. The issue is that the changes made left Grinding Gear Games with an impossible design challenge.
Path of Exile 2 will find its footing; in many ways it already has. The game continues to see a large spike in players at the start of a new league and many of the complaints that arose out of the early patches have since been partially addressed. Most importantly, the game is fun. Despite it all, I keep it installed on my computer. Path of Exile 2 offers an experience that just doesn’t exist in other games and while I will continue to be frustrated by it every time I open the launcher, I’m still going to be checking out the next league start.