The good
Lots of "unique bosses" - we'll see about that.
I noticed the few bosses they showed were story bosses, the one boss with the log they showed while talking about 100 unique bosses was much much less intricate in design and effort.
Added a dodge psudeo-iframe space bar button.
Big graphics update.
Adding gold to the game

The bad
Closed beta June 7th 2024
Stash tab mtx p2w will remain
Bloat will remain and seems like it will get worse
More skill trees inside skill trees, doubling down on a convoluted system
They are cutting their resources in half and will continue making new poe1 content byside poe2
The new league mech is a shitty version of tft, I wish games would stop copying other fleshed out genres into their game, if I wanted to play tft then I'd play tft

All in all Poe2 is more of a big QoL patch than a new take on the ARPG genre (which is what I expected).
I don't know what's taking them so long to release it and I worry about the future of them working on both games at the same time.
I would have hoped they had plans to clean up all the bloat and convolutedness of the game but it seems like their vision has not changed
These are all great for hardcore Poe fans however I don't see many new players logging in and staying beyond the initial hype.

I look forward to trying out Poe2 next year for a week or 2 before moving on.
The new league in August for me is a hard pass.

ehhh pretty much same thinking here poe simply doesnt attract new players, if poe 2 is the same it wont help the slightest

actually it will only get worse. theres a thing that players experience thats very characteristic for poe called burnout, that didnt happen nearly as much before. it didnt happen because if someone played lets say d2, if he got bored he could just stop playing it. in poe theres a lot of systems that abuse our psychological loopholes (fomo, sunken cost fallacy etc), that subconsciously coerce someone to play even if he didnt want to. eventually this mechanism fails, and this is what makes the player eventually burn out so hard that he snaps and quits the entire game for a very long time now imagine these subconscious mechanisms being implemented for two games at once (even worse, two extremely similar games at once). burnouts will be much faster and so hard that people will quit the entire arpg genre

also release date lol fuck that shit

People are used to receiving half assed rushed trash from modern day Blizzard so they think a company taking their time before releasing a game is bad.

It sounds like you never played PoE at a high level.

Have u guys seen the new poe2 weapon swap mechanic?

It was more shit when they keep making paid stash tabs for new league currency. Good thing they listen to community how it was money grab so they stop doing it.

Wdym play PoE at a high level?
It's not some high-skill esports type of game, you make your build and grind until you can delete all bosses, that's all.
The only high level thing about it is hardcore racing but even that isn't that much about skill as it is about having no life and playing the game 24/7.

Poe2 was announced in 2019 so it's been 4 years already and now they say it's going to take an additional year for closed beta.
That's fine and all but this isn't a new game so much as it's an expansion so it really shouldn't take this long.
It feels like they are already in way over their heads and on top of that they announced they will be splitting their focus between Poe1 and Poe2 after Poe2 is released.

As someone who always prefers quality over quantity I don't like the direction this is going.

For reference Final Fantasy 14 went live on September 30, 2010.
The game was shit so the dev team decided they would split their team up and work on a new game along side continously updating the 1.0 version.
On November 11, 2012 they shutdown the 1.0 shitty version and went live with an alpha version of 2.0.
In August of 2013 the game was fully live.

So in 3 years, in an MMO, and more than a decade behind in technology they did wayyyyyy more than what GGG has/is trying to do with Poe2.
Keep that in mind.

This post was edited by Crossed on Jul 29 2023 09:29pm

High level as in endgame uber bosses. I said this because you said you have concerns about the bosses when in PoE 1 the endgame bosses are some of the best arpg bosses. Additionally, you're saying there's no new take while they show the ability to have 2 different builds on the same character at once.

This post was edited by Dmitriy on Jul 29 2023 09:55pm

Yeah the uber bosses are great.

The "100 unique bosses" aren't going to be anything like those is what I'm thinking.
The first boss they showed named SILVERBACK BLACKFAST did not look good.
The 2 story bosses they showed after looked far far far better.

The 2 builds on the same character thing they showed is not a new take and is actually directly lifted off of the Barbarian's Arsenal system in Diablo 4.

Ahh! I disagree my friend! While I can't speak for the gaming community as a whole, I believe that blizzard created a bit of an unusual phenomenon here.

You see as a d2 fan, d2r got me back into gaming after over a decade of not playing any games. I got hooked for a while(but then botters ruined it so I only play for 48hrs after season start) so with nothing to play my attention immediately went to d4.

But when I realized that blizz dropped the ball and d4 is still in a beta testing phase I became aware of the existence of poe!

I had never even heard of poe, but now I'm gona try n play the new season in August simply because I want to see if it lives up to the hype and how it compares to d2. Then I'm gona play poe2 just to see how it compares to d4.

I call this the snyft2 paradox. A game is so disappointing that you try out its main competitor out of spite!

LOL nice basically ur starting poe just because d4 was so horrible chad move i must admit