Old man yells at cloud. Bosses edition

My personal and very biased opinion is, most bosses in PoE 1 (and to some extent PoE 2) became little more than "bad guy, big life bar, hits hard" as the game became zoom-zoom min-max maps.

Some of my favorite PoE bosses to this day are (original versions) -

Malachai - great lore. great build up. voice lines. terrifying fight.

Dominus - same reason + being "the guy who exiled you" as the final boss at the time.

Daresso - you know this guy from lore since act 1. It's an epic gladiator showdown.

Piety - taunts you since act 1, and her zone is just a pit of atrocities that sets up your revenge for everything she's done.

Shaper - a very complex character. deep lore. his voice lines towards Zana hit differently when you are a father.

Kitava - generic bad guy in a sense, but there is a heck of a set up for the 2nd time you face him.

The most dopamine moment i had in this game was beating Malachai in hc on merciless difficulty.

Times were different, it took me abozut a week to finish the campaign and dropping a chaos orb was basicly a tink ;P

Good old days. HCSSF was my thing until archnemesis.

without the original crew, meaning Chris and who knows who else leaving, the vibe of the game is going to shift. Just how it is. Mirage league feels like an entire different game than the early Path of Exile days. PoE has fared better than most games that lasted this long and I don't feel like they've made any game-killing change in its lifespan, yet

It's mainly a shift in audience. The OG POE players and dev team are replaced by Gen Z and worse. It's all about fast pace action, instant dopamine, flashy combat nowadays. Stories are considered trash unless you shove a cuts scene in every so often, and explain every plot point 3 times just to make sure the ADHD brain manages to catch it all.

Sadly, it's the natural evolution of things.

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lupasvasile#5385 wrote:

It's mainly a shift in audience. The OG POE players and dev team are replaced by Gen Z and worse. It's all about fast pace action, instant dopamine, flashy combat nowadays. Stories are considered trash unless you shove a cuts scene in every so often, and explain every plot point 3 times just to make sure the ADHD brain manages to catch it all.

Sadly, it's the natural evolution of things.

You can like both story and fast gameplay

You can like both of that in theory but the dopamine alters how your brains works. That is one of the reasons why so few people actually read a book these days.
There are countless videos on youtube that recommend to you to try to rewire your brain with daily routines like meditation or just going out and watching nature without actually doing anything, in case you need to study and you can't focus because of these dopamine issues.
This advice is there for a reason and as mentioned by another post, unless a big cutscene with high quality graphics pops up that shows impressive pictures, people do not care about the story, they just look for the next dopamine rush.

i dunno tbh, i have ADHD, ive read the entire series of malazan, book of the new sun, tolkien, the culture, hyperion, dune etc.

poe has a shit story, it always has and always will, every arpg ever made has a shit story that is not worth bothering with and the only good thing to ever come from an arpg story is probably the D2 cinematics.

i find it hard to believe anyone who has read a half decent fantasy or sci fi book finds anything of worth in any arpgs campaign story? theyre all just kids cartoon level fetch quest justifiers. arpg stories are to literature what a cinema hotdog is to the world of fine dining. probably just better of skipping it entirely and go get something proper to eat after. if you really want a decent story in your arpg playthrough go to audible, download reality dysfunction and listen to it while you power level.