Intro
I have in the past disdained the whole “rush through the action RPG campaigns to get to the endgame” because endless grind with no goals is not really my thing.
However, there is one case where it is my thing, which is something to do during meetings because having something relatively mindless helps me focus on the meeting itself.
For the past couple of years I’ve been using Rogue: Genesia for this. RG is a bullet heaven game and by far my favorite in that genre; I have 850 hours on record and most of those are probably real and the vast majority are during meetings.
However, I really like Action RPGs, in a way different from my feelings about bullet heaven games, so I was thinking about what an ARPG for meetings would look like, and endgame content seems appropriate there.
Also, I really enjoyed Path Of Exile’s endgame Atlas Of Worlds system. I stopped playing PoE because it has built up, like, 30 game systems over the years and I just always felt lost as a result. Also, you can’t pause. Seriously, y’all? But the actual Atlas mechanic was neat.
So, I thought I’d try out and rate various ARPG endgame systems for my specific, idiosyncratic goals.
The Scales
All ratings are like “good”, “bad”, “amazing”, etc; fully subjective.
Mindless Most Of The Time: There should be large swathes of time when you’re just killing shit and not thinking too hard about what to do. Front-loading decisions is allowed (i.e. “I’m trying to grind for The Wand Of Sparkly Unicorns”), but once the decisions are pre-loaded you should be able to go for at least an hour just killing stuff.
Interesting Decisions Occasionally: Between mindless grind, there should be some decisions to make that actually matter, see pre-loading above.
Interesting Mechanic/System Tying Together The Grind: The overall setup shouldn’t just be “here’s a bunch of monsters”, there should be something tying things together. PoE’s Atlas Of Worlds is kind of the baseline here (although in fairness, I haven’t played PoE 1’s maps very much and I won’t be replaying them for this review, but I gather PoE 2’s maps are very similar).
How Much Trading Is Required: I don’t like trading with other players. I don’t mind trading with vendors, so I try to imagine all the other players are just vendors and I’m saving up to buy that great vendor item, but I like to be The Main Character in games and trading with players can kill that for me. I also don’t have hundreds of hours to play, usually. In many games, if you not spending hundreds or thousands of hours, you need to trade to get the good loot.
How Long It Takes To Get There With A New Character: Yeah PoE2 is gonna lose this one probably.
The Games
Chronicon
Path Of Exile
PoE2 is mostly PoE but you can pause the game. Why would I play the version you can’t pause? And also the one that is so complicated you need a PhD in the game to understand all the systems?
Path Of Exile 2
Mindless Most Of The Time:
Interesting Decisions Occasionally:
Interesting Mechanic/System Tying Together The Grind:
How Much Trading Is Required:
How Long It Takes To Get There With A New Character: