New player feedback on campaign

PoE2 is my first foray into a Diablo-style ARPG (I come from a console gaming background - FF, Zelda, Mana series etc), and I had a lot of fun - thanks for building the game and releasing into Early Access!

Here are some of my thoughts after completing most(*) of the 0.3 campaign on SSF Abyssal:
(*) Everything except Azmadi, see below.

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General gameplay

+ Boss encounters were very enjoyable, both for overall variety throughout the game and for mechanic growth during each encounter. The sound/music design is a plus - the act 2 boss in particular was a favorite.

+ Nice variety of map design as well, so it doesn't turn into the same pattern of hacking-and-slashing across the map every time. Some of the layouts are pretty diabolical, but that just makes it a good challenge!

+ Playing as Huntress with spear, I thought the skill set was reasonably complete and well-balanced. Cast time on some of the skills felt pretty long in the beginning, but with enough support gems and passives combat goes much more smoothly, so as a growth mechanic I think it's fine.

• I wouldn't have minded an airborne option or two, but I suppose my view on spears is somewhat influenced by Final Fantasy's Dragoons...

+ The passive tree! I loved FF10's sphere grid, and I could spend (and have spent, at that) hours just panning across this one and pondering the huge variety of options. I particularly appreciate that (like FF10) the entire grid is connected and classes aren't locked into their own individual trees.

+ Item modifier variety makes gearing much more fun than simply "swap to each higher level as it drops". I lucked into a unique hat with +30% to all resistances in act 1 and kept it straight into act 3, but then I started feeling the low evasion and had to start planning resistance upgrades on other gear pieces so I could get better base headgear - I very much enjoy those sorts of complex interactions.

+ I'm glad that dropped items stay around for the life of the instance (at least as far as I can tell), which is a refreshing change from certain modern console games that really ought to do better.

− I ended up slightly overleveled, gaining about 1 level per act relative to the campaign map levels without spending any time specifically grinding (though I do habitually clear maps to try and find all the secrets). I don't know if this is the intended balance, but early act 3 up to late act 4 felt, if not trivial, then at least straightforward outside of boss encounters.

− While I understand the various limitations imposed by the random nature of the game, I found the instance timeout to be a source of stress: if I went back to town for gear changes or to respec or similar, I had to keep an eye on the clock and make sure I jumped back into the instance before it was reset, and especially as map sizes increased in the later acts, I'd have to ask myself if I have enough time to get through the entire map before meal/bed/etc. It would be nice if, at least while progressing the campaign, the most recently visited map instance was saved indefinitely (perhaps frozen so as not to take up compute resources).

− A more common reason for returning to town is item disposal, but item disposal mechanics feel unnecessarily convoluted. I imagine there are historical reasons behind them, but given that PoE2 is a new game, perhaps some of this could be streamlined?

• The only time I might hesitate to identify items is early in Act 1 when the Hooded One hasn't been freed and the 25 gold for a scroll is a non-trivial cost. After that, it just becomes a mandatory speed-bump on returning to town to go to the Hooded One and press A, X, B. Is there really still a need for the "unidentified" mechanic? Could the Hooded One maybe grant something that auto-identifies items when you save him, so the concept of "unidentified" remains in early Act 1 as a callout to older games but the gameplay of PoE2 itself is smoother?
• Much like all vendors will buy all types of items, all vendors should be able to salvage or disenchant. I can understand from a lore perspective why magic-item sellers like Una are the only ones who can disenchant, or why a salvage bench is needed to salvage gear (and I'd be fine with keeping that quest as an unlock for salvaging), but in a gameplay sense, it's just another speed-bump to have to interact with 3 different NPCs/objects to clean out my inventory.

− Auto-targeting on controller is very finicky. At the least, an option to always target in the direction the player is facing and/or moving would help - I can't count how many times I've turned toward an approaching enemy, tried to attack it, and the attack would go toward some other enemy on the opposite side of the screen.

− Direct Minions doesn't seem to do anything on controller, at least for a Huntress's companion. I think this needs to be split into multiple actions for controller, perhaps along the lines of:

• "Direct Minions: Free" (revert to default behavior)
• "Direct Minions: Attack" (focus attacks on player's current target)
• "Direct Minions: Follow" (prioritize staying close to player over attacking)
• "Direct Minions: Stay" (make minions stay in their current location)
• "Direct Minions: Move" (make minions move to a specified location - this would probably need some sort of ground-target cursor)

− I've found the lack of a death recap frustrating at times. Fighting through maps can get pretty chaotic, which I suppose is part of the game design, but if I suddenly die to an unseen attack in the middle of that chaos, I have no way to learn from that death because there's no recap or damage log and the map content changes on respawn.

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Specific campaign elements

+ Acts 1 and 2 played smoothly as a whole; nothing stood out, but I was decently challenged throughout without getting overwhelmed. I took a few early deaths before learning that you can't dodge-roll through enemies, but after that just one death to Geonor and a few to Jamanra.

+ I like how branching campaign paths adjust their levels as you progress, like the 3-way choice in Act 2 when assembling the Horn, such that the player really does have a free choice but the game will still keep up with expected strength progression - as opposed to other games which say either "here are 3 zones, Easy, Medium, and Hard, and you can do them in any order you want" (but if you deviate from the expected order you'll have a bad experience) or "here are 3 zones, all at the same level" (and whichever one you do last will be trivial).

+ The Molten Vault boss (act 3) forced me to respec for damage to meet the DPS check, which was a good teaching moment because I didn't expect I could get +50% damage just by swapping defensive nodes to offensive ones. It also gave me a good feel for the money cost to respec (well within what I naturally gain, though I'm a compulsive map clearer so my income may be on the high side).

• It's a bit annoying in the moment to realize I have to leave the map and respec/regear, but as an overall experience, I have no issue with forcing specific types of builds for individual bosses as long as the swings aren't too frequent. At least through the current campaign, I didn't feel that that was a problem at all.

+ I had a lot of deaths on Benedictus (act 4) until I recognized the safe spot for the maze wall cast, but it looks like you've already addressed that, and the new visuals are much clearer. Thanks for the quick fix!

− While this is admittedly a first-time-player issue, I feel like the phase 1 wind mechanic for Jamanra (act 2 boss) is too immediately deadly; by the time I realized Asala was creating a safe zone, I had already wiped. It would be easier to recognize the proper reaction if either the damage ramped up over time or the wind inflicted a continuous pushback toward a damage or instant-death zone (e.g. getting blown off the arena) at the far edge.

− The Trial of Chaos feels poorly balanced relative to the Sekhema trial; the trial modifiers are all fairly heavy-handed, which is fine on its own but makes monsters scaled to level 45 rather unwieldy to fight on-level. I tried to stick with the least damage-increasing options, but the bird boss at the end still one-shot me with some unknown mechanic (also see above re: death recap). I ended up skipping this entirely and getting my second set of ascendancy points from a higher-level Sekhema trial.

• As a specific note, I died once in a Soul Core room because I didn't realize I'd accidentally interrupted the action of placing the core in its slot and the DoT from holding it killed me before I could figure out what was happening. I feel like either the action of placing the core should be instant (perhaps with an animation but immediately setting the flag / removing the DoT), or the player should be animation-locked until the core has been placed (which would probably need a faster animation).

− It felt weird to be getting Waystones in the interlude without any in-game mention of what they're used for. I know from watching PoE2 streams that they're for endgame maps, and I understand that the interlude is only transient content anyway, but it would be good for new players to have some introduction to Waystones when they get their first one.

− Azmadi (interlude) looks like a potentially interesting act-end boss, but between the number of "gotcha" mechanics he has in the second phase and the fact that you have to slow-walk through a long RP scene on each restart, I lost the desire to learn my way through the fight and decided to set the game down for now. (Tukohama had this problem too, but at least his scene wasn't as long.) Please add skips for boss RP scenes when restarting after death!

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Artistic presentation

+ As mentioned above, the overall sound/music design is great. I may be coming from the world of console games where every map has its own fully scored music track, but I nonetheless enjoyed the more environmental BGM style of PoE2; the tracks still do a great job of adding to the ambiance of each environment.

+ Also with regard to sound, I appreciate the extensive use of audio cues for game events, from boss attacks to upgrade currency drops (and even unique sounds for different equipment types). This is a fairly subtle but useful thing that a lot of games skimp on.

+ Speaking of audio cues, monster sounds are extremely well integrated, to the extent that I can use them to gauge not just direction but distance of offscreen or hidden enemies. Very immersive experience, no VR required!

• But it would be nice if when returning from a town portal, corpses didn't make their death sounds again and startle me into thinking something's approaching from offscreen. (Bug, perhaps?)

+ World visuals are fantastic, from towns to forests to mountains to caves to everything else. When the Hooded One talks about seeing ruined Utzaal and recalling how it once looked, I feel like I can almost see that along with him.

• I do find that the random nature of the maps means I spend more time looking at the map overlay than the world itself, but that's probably just a "me" problem.

+ The story/lore has considerably exceeded my expectations. Given PoE's nature as a randomized game, I was expecting at most a barebones framework for each of the maps, but the campaign story has really drawn me in and gotten me interested in the history of Wraeclast. Whence Corruption? What have the Azmeri been up to? Why is the Witch such a fountain of sass? And so on.

• I did reflexively recoil a bit when I saw the time-travel element of the story, just because it's so often used as a "quick hack". In fairness, though, Doryani himself touches on the awkwardness of that point, so as long as it stays just a background element, I can forgive it.

− Visuals for player-spawned environmental effects (puddles, explosions, volatiles, etc.) are identical to those from enemies, such that running a companion with such a modifier or stealing one with Behead can actually be a liability: "Wait, are those cold explosions safe or not?" I could see this being a design choice along the lines of "don't use those skills/minions in that situation", and I'm certainly not asking for something as bland as FF14's plain blue/orange telegraphs, but if this ambiguity isn't intentional then it would be nice to have some additional visual clarity around friendly vs. hostile effects.

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User interface

+ The HUD is nice and uncluttered so I can focus on the actual gameplay. The "bubble" style health/mana meters feel weird coming from a console background where bars are the more common style, but the in-world bars satisfy that want nicely. (I'm a numbers geek, so I wouldn't mind having in-world damage numbers, but I can also see how they'd get a bit overwhelming while going through maps.)

+ The menu feels easy to use with controller, with good use of buttons for shortcuts to avoid cursor movement. With a couple of exceptions (noted below), I didn't feel any desire to switch to mouse input for menu actions.

+ I really like the controller tooltip implementation - much easier than a lot of games which require you to remember the term and go to a separate glossary menu or even pull up an external website.

− D-pad cursor movement can be awkward when items aren't arranged in a clean horizontal/vertical pattern:

• Keywords in inspect mode (I feel like the natural behavior here would be "up/down always move to the previous/next line regardless of horizontal position, left/right always move to the previous/next word in the current window's text")
• Checkpoints/waypoints on maps (would be nice if right-stick scrolling could be used to directly choose a checkpoint as in the passives grid)
• Passives grid (not as much of a problem because of that right-stick scrolling, but a single D-pad press can sometimes jump a surprisingly long way across the grid)

− While this is perhaps inevitable due to the size of inventory and stash pages, item management is slow and frustrating on controller due to the amount of cursor movement required. In particular, when multiple windows are open (such as stash and inventory), a button to instantly swap between windows would be very helpful.

− The recommended support skills when crafting a support gem don't always align with my build (which I suppose is inevitable just because of the great variety of possible builds), but if I want to stray from the "approved" path I'm presented with a gigantic list of every possible support, which for most skills is a very long list. It would be nice to have some middle ground, maybe even just splitting the supports into separate tabs by level which we could page through with L1/R1.

• Yes, there's the search window, but as a controller user it feels awkward to have to set down the controller and type in a search term. (Now if there was a persistent buff that gave the player two extra arms...)

− It would be nice to have a controller button rebinding menu for the various buttons used in menu screens, without having to resort to system-level button remapping and then also having to deal with button labels not matching the actual buttons I need to press.

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Other minor nits - I imagine a lot of these may already be on the roadmap as "to be improved once main content is complete", but just for the record:

− Pressing X on a jewel to "Socket in Passive Tree" doesn't seem to allow choosing where to socket the jewel, and (at least in some cases) it doesn't default to an empty jewel socket when one exists.

− Pause menu inspect mode only shows enemy status tooltips for bosses, but it's needed just as much for regular enemies - perhaps more, given the variety of modifiers that can attach to rares.

− There are still a number of terms with no definition tooltip whose meaning isn't apparent - Desecration modifier groups (Amanamu/Kurgal/Ulaman) are a big one.

− There should be a way to confirm monster modifiers stolen by Behead either in the Behead tooltip or by having the modifiers as separate buffs (right now the game only shows a "Behead" buff with no details).

− I'd appreciate an option to turn off error dialogue without affecting regular voiced lines - I know full well when I've accidentally hit the wrong button to interact with a character in town, and I don't need my character making snarky comments about it.

A few followups now that I've levelled my way past Azmadi and played around with the endgame a bit:

+ The end of the interlude and transition to endgame is mostly clean, aside from a couple of confusing quest objectives I reported separately as bugs. I can see roughly what the game cycle will look like (and match that up with what I've seen in streams), and the introductory quests offer good stepping stones rather than just dumping the player into a sea of map nodes. It's a good hook, though I don't yet know whether I'll bite.

+ I like the concept of the hideout; since it looks like the endgame can potentially be very long, it's nice to have the opportunity to rearrange NPCs and objects to one's liking, and of course we all know housing is the true endgame. That said...

− I found it a bit annoying to have my companion beast constantly grunting and wandering around in the hideout. I imagine there's some internal program reason why minions are enabled (presumably related to the fact that you have to fight and clear the map once), and I grant there are probably players who enjoy it that way, but can you please at least offer an option to auto-unsummon or otherwise hide minions in hideouts?

− The behavior of Abyssal Depths maps seems to differ in endgame maps from campaign maps: portals send you only back to the parent map (not the refuge/hideout), there's a new "are you sure?" warning before leaving, and in at least some cases, the abyssal map closes off when you leave and prevents you from going back. It would be nice to have some in-game explanation for these so players know the ramifications of their choices.