Spring RTS Engine

I recommend it.
The game launched a few days ago and they now have pvp and guilds.
the game is free to play not pay to win and is much better and more satisfying than diablo.

XP loss on death. Fuck POE.

One of the genius of the game is you can disable that loss of XP when your busy creating your character at the start and what challenge level it is.

As someone who has played a large series of RPGS there is a huge combination of Diablo Elements, as well as Final Fantasy elements.

Previous topic: http://springrts.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=28139&

From what I have seen and played (I beat act 3 a while ago) it is quite a solid game in that I don't expect to discover that it is broken. Many annoyances from Diablo II have been fixed, for example you no longer have to continuously restock on potions. Absolutely everything you own is enchantable which makes your character quite customisable and this is supported by many consumables which to modify item characteristics. I really like the idea of linking spells together as it appears the create many options and the passive skill tree is a decent idea.

The game is (or at least was some months ago) quite difficult, even on normal mode. The customization comes at the cost of heavy farming. If you really want to link some spells together in a certain way and gain items which give out certain attributes you may end up farming for them. Alternately you could trade with other players as their economy system seems quite well developed. The economy is quite nice actually because it is underlined by objects which have actual value. There is no money in this economy, instead players trade item modification consumables.

I think that the farming, difficulty and trading make the game more for hardcore players. While you have a lot of options in customization you will have to follow a reasonable build otherwise you will get to a point where you will have to farm a lot to continue. There seems to be a reasonable amount of room in which to come up with your own builds so at least you can still make the choices yourself. At some point though you may discover that a build does not work and have to restart.

One of the genius of the game is you can disable that loss of XP when your busy creating your character at the start and what challenge level it is.

That wasn't present when I played some months ago so ignore a bit of what I said.

Noruas wrote:One of the genius of the game is you can disable that loss of XP when your busy creating your character at the start and what challenge level it is.

I call BuuuuuuuuuulllllllShiiit. I was told repeatedly on their forums that POE would never be fun to play for casuals such as myself.

The XP is not that big a deal..
yes, at end game on the hardest difficulty level you might start to feel it but on normal you got no xp loss and on cruel the xp loss is negligible.
you'd have to really fuck up your build to have a lot of difficulty before merciless.

The game is not hard on normal..It's super easy.
any hard point you encounter you pop a portal to town and start fighting, if you become low on hp or mana and feel you cant continue, you tele to town and back and all your flasks are restored allowing you to keep on fighting.
Unlike in Diablo bosses and rare monsters do not usually have life regen(it is a random property they can sometimes have) so you do not need to worry about taking your time.
In Diablo 3 for example you not only had to be able to face a boss or a rare monster but also DPS it down in one go while not being able to take a break because it would just start quickly regening back to full hp when you stop fighting it.
If you go through every level, including the side areas , and clear it completely you will be over-leveled and should have no problems especially on normal...You can die on normal as much as you want anyway.
I got a level 73 character and The game was not designed to force you to do every single level and instance throughout the campaign.
You just fight directly towards your objective and you will keep up in levels.
than on harder difficulties you can venture into other areas you have not been in.
Even on merciless i would enter instances and realize i have never been in them.

I think the difficulty level scales great personally. It slowly challenges you more and more making you think and explore your options regarding your equipment, passive picks and the skill gems you use.
The leveling and challenge felt pretty smooth to me with some hickups when i neglected to get better gear.

The game is not casual in the sense that you do need to do some thinking and reading while slowly making your build but it just makes you feel more satisfied when you make some nice calculated combinations.
For anyone playing Spring, figuring out path of exile should not be a problem.

the fun part is that they are adding more and more pvp content.
They added guilds and are planning on adding all sorts of interesting stuff like guild vs guild and capture the flag.

By the way there are also races.
In races or challenges you have a single goal and you need to breeze through a part of the core campaign or a new set of missions faster or more efficiently than others.
they have different limitations and goals but most have you play for an hour or a bit longer with a new character without your gear or stash.
i haven't personally tried one but they sound like the kind of thing that allows you to play the game without committing to it too much.

P.S I made my build alone without any guides with just the general guidelines about how and of what to think when making one.
If you follow a few core tips you should be fine.
If you dont care about planning and making your own build you can just follow one of the online posted ones.
GGG also does "build of the week" videos.
You can really just play a hands free character and go out and slay some monsters if that is what you want.

Another fun point about POE is that except the already substantial content the game has, the model is a free to play one and they are promising to release frequent updates with new areas, skills and equipment.

P.S
The weapon and armor crafting system is unlike any other and is extremely in depth.

Well I installed it when it was released on steam but I think this topic gave me the motivation to actually fire it up.

Another thing most people might not know is that when you finish the campaign on the hardest difficulty you can start doing "maps".
monsters can drop maps, which are themselves items.
They, like any other item, can be of common, magical, rare or legendary rarity.
There are many themes like a dunes map would be an instance of a desert, a dungeon map would be a dungeon and so forth.
they are randomized instances of course and like nay other item you can craft your maps...
You can change their properties, adding all sorts of buffs and debuffs to enemies and terrain which in return give you higher chances of finding more and rarer loot and currency(all currency types are orbs used for crafting gear in different ways).
You use a special location on the campaign map that has a portal to enter these maps.

CopyyyCattt wrote:The game launched a few days ago

What? But I've been playing it for like six months?

... oh right it was still open beta. At least officially, since there was no bugs and much polish already.

CopyyyCattt wrote:The XP is not that big a deal..
yes, at end game on the hardest difficulty level you might start to feel it but on normal you got no xp loss and on cruel the xp loss is negligible.

It is bad game design.

What you are saying is that there is no point in leveling past level 50, at which point dying causes massive xp loss and you lose hours of time spent grinding.

It's not just bad game design, it's fucking terrible game design.

It doesnt matter.
The thing is that if you fight in areas where you keep dying it means you dont have the gear/build to do them properly.
This means you dont actually want to level..
If you out-level an area you get less drops cause there is a penalty for loot in instances that are a lot above or below your level.
If you didnt lose xp it would be silly.
You would die and die and die until you'd slowly level up to get less loot that you need to actually stop dying..

When you finish merciless you can just farm those end game instances and get great drops already.
Yes not every shitty build that makes no sense can handle the god tier content..I mean,,what do you expect?
In general the game is designed for you to make several chars.
You will most likely fuck up your first one anyway cause you dont know enough about the game.
Leveling after you have leveled one char is easier cause you got some loot you saved up and you know better what to do and thus can go faster.

The design of it all is actually very nice and i had a similar opinion to yours before i actually played the game.
The point is not to get to level 100, the point i to carefully create a character that can get to 100.

i played 4 characters up to lvl 50 60sh

Mostly because the friend group i played with we were waiting for some members before we did a push to finish merciless.

My only problem with it is it takes a while getting used it, sometimes a loong while but you will enjoy it after, but the inicial barrier to entry is a harsh one. Also some transitions between maps are done a bit bad imo, the increase in dificulty sometimes is huge from one map to another.

Not to mention the level design of act1 is straigth foward and simple at best, but that act is made to be steamroled, however i did find the 2 bosses in that area interesting at cruel etc.. but the maps god it felt like pure grind. Of all the acts i love act3, i can play there all the time but act1 forcing me to repeat that shit all over again kills me a bit.

To me graphic wise its one of those games, that if your used to playing more cartoon and saturated games your eyes will hurt a bit, and dismiss it as a bad looking game. But its not it has its own style.

scifi wrote:To me graphic wise its one of those games, that if your used to playing more cartoon and saturated games your eyes will hurt a bit, and dismiss it as a bad looking game. But its not it has its own style.

do you have a few shots? because I am curious if it is realistic or over subdued. So far my impression is that everything is desaturated.

I found the caves in act 1 to be great looking, but yeah, The game would have benefited from a more impressive, hard hitting beginning.

do you have a few shots? because I am curious if it is realistic or over subdued. So far my impression is that everything is desaturated.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgg5dw1H0u8

By the way, no matter how many times you die you can never go back a level.
A level 60 character will never be level 59 again.
The xp loss is limited to your current level.

CopyyyCattt wrote:It doesnt matter.
The thing is that if you fight in areas where you keep dying it means you dont have the gear/build to do them properly.
This means you dont actually want to level..
If you out-level an area you get less drops cause there is a penalty for loot in instances that are a lot above or below your level.
If you didnt lose xp it would be silly.
You would die and die and die until you'd slowly level up to get less loot that you need to actually stop dying..

When you finish merciless you can just farm those end game instances and get great drops already.
Yes not every shitty build that makes no sense can handle the god tier content..I mean,,what do you expect?
In general the game is designed for you to make several chars.
You will most likely fuck up your first one anyway cause you dont know enough about the game.
Leveling after you have leveled one char is easier cause you got some loot you saved up and you know better what to do and thus can go faster.

The design of it all is actually very nice and i had a similar opinion to yours before i actually played the game.
The point is not to get to level 100, the point i to carefully create a character that can get to 100.

I played POE before you did.

Stop parroting that stuff.

ok...

It doesnt matter.
The thing is that if you fight in areas where you keep dying it means you dont have the gear/build to do them properly.
This means you dont actually want to level..

Lolwut?

First of all, the point of the game is to get more powerful by going into areas of shit that can kill you, so that you gain items and experience. It would be stupid to level up by killing endless mobs of low level monsters in order to be a higher or on an even level to the area you want to go, just so you can go massacre that area, then grind again for the next one. Not all of us play wow and find killing 784 wild boar over and over amusing.

How does tackling an area that _could_ kill me mean that I don't want to level? The fact that I'm there means that I want to advance.

Apparently you aren't aware of the fact that POE has a bad habit of spawning boss monsters that are immune to your entire build, and it won't stop at one monster, it will spawn 3 or 4 in the same area, all immune or highly resistant to everything you have.

But the difficulty is the fun of it. Unfortunately, removing hours of hard work just because I died or got unlucky in a zerg rush (this is a pretty common occurrence in POE) of monsters is not fun. Not in the slightest. Losing xp makes it so that you must farm areas where you can kill shit and not have a chance of dying, so you can level up to take on areas where you no longer are seriously threatened. It's shortsighted and terrible game design.

If you out-level an area you get less drops cause there is a penalty for loot in instances that are a lot above or below your level.

Making the XP loss on death even more of a penalty, because then you have to go farm areas where you are overpowered (because the moment your level matches the area, you are overpowered) in order to level up to the area you want to go. Rinse repeat.

If you didn't lose xp it would be silly.

As silly as losing hours of gameplay grinding? As silly as fighting tooth and nail to get to the end boss of an area that you can kill but will die several times in the process (due to the fact that he is resistant and immune to your entire build) so the only thing you can do is basically lose a level or give up on all your progress?

You would die and die and die until you'd slowly level up

So? Why is that a bad thing?

To get less loot that you need to actually stop dying..

But you just said I get less loot from lower level areas, so in order to get good loot I need to farm higher areas, but in order to farm the higher level areas, I need for farm the lower level areas to where I can then farm the higher level areas (which aren't so high anymore), etc, etc, etc.

Your logic is circular and nonsensical.

When you finish merciless you can just farm those end game instances and get great drops already.
Yes not every shitty build that makes no sense can handle the god tier content..I mean,,what do you expect?

Oh gee, I dunno, to have fun? Who gives a shit if I die a lot? Why do I need to be penalized for it? Dying is part of the fun. Just because I can die and not take a penalty for it doesn't mean I want to.

In general the game is designed for you to make several chars.

Oh, so that's what those other character slots are for... I just thought they were there to look pretty.

You will most likely fuck up your first one anyway cause you dont know enough about the game.

I know a lot about the game, but a newbie would most certainly screw it up, because for no reason at all, the game doesn't allow you to shift around attribute points. God forbid the player actually wants to have fun and try some new shit.

In POE, trying new shit means spending days remaking characters endlessly because you can't respec your points (other than a paltry few here and there). Clicked the wrong slot and out of respec points? Tough shit. Go redo all 50+ levels again.

Leveling after you have leveled one char is easier cause you got some loot you saved up and you know better what to do and thus can go faster.

/me summons Samuel Jackson to slap yo ass for making dumb statements

The design of it all is actually very nice

The level design, the graphics the skill system, etc etc is excellent.

Unfortuantely the game suffers horribly from the massive defects that are the lack of skill point respec and losing xp when you die.

Idiotic game design for $500 please, Alex.

The point is not to get to level 100, the point is to carefully create a character that can get to 100.

So the point is to get to level 100.

Alright, I believe you, you dont like Path of exile.