Speaking of games I have over 400 hours on, let's talk about Path of Exile 2. I have an embarrassing number of hours in this game. I have a lot of thoughts, both positive and negative. Before I get to those opinions, I have to give you an overview of the structure of this game.

In case you don't know the 'ARPG' acronym, the Action Role Playing Game genre is a family of spiritual/structural successors to Diablo 2. I say Diablo 2 because that's the when they introduced a trade system. That's the inflection point that drove the structure of these games ever since.

The current structure of these games has the Diablo core. They have a campaign. Then they have an 'endgame'. The endgame is endless, but with steep jumps in difficulty. They necessitate upgrading your gear to move forward in the endgame. And here's the key: It's close to impossible to progress without trading for gear. (Important note: it *is* possible, but it takes an incredible amount of knowledge about their crafting system)

99% of the equipment you find from playing the game is unusable trash. Outside that 1% possibility of getting good equipment from drops, you only have 2 options for acquiring it: Crafting or Trading. This is where the structure gets interesting. Crafting materials drop frequently. And there is a massive variety of crafting material. There are various mechanics represented by these materials, and all have various pros and cons depending on the type of thing you're trying to craft.

The trade system is the flip side of this system. Equipment is priced in crafting materials. Crafting materials have various values, and it's an entire currency system. So much so that the crafting materials are referred to as 'currency' by both the developers and the player base.

Further, the economy of the game is a central design principal. The developers talk about the economy as a core focus of their design. Players complain about the economy. Patches are released to address problems with the economy. It's all massively complex and quite fascinating.

There are some cons. First, the level design is procedural, and levels are *much* too long. This leads to large, sprawling, repetitive, nonsensical levels. There's an unpleasant amount of same-y-ness to the levels. And they're so abusively large it feels like the developers just have no respect at all for your time or enjoyment.

Compounding this time grind are the trick bosses. In a game with such huge time-sinks and brutal experience penalties for deaths, there is no excuse for having one-shot-kill trick bosses that require memorizing large numbers of attack patterns. You spend 90% of the game buffing gear, becoming nigh unkillable, and face-tanking stuff, then have a boss one-shot you because you didn't realize you stumbled into a trick boss fight after 6 hours of grinding. It's bullshit.

On to the positive. The crafting system is unique. It's a combination of deterministic outcomes and a casino. When you're crafting, it's quite possible to 'brick' an item with a bad roll from a crafting material's random rolls. Some of the more valuable crafting materials are designed specifically to make the behavior of other crafting materials to be deterministic rather than random. Some of the most valuable crafting materials allow you to protect an item from getting bricked, or alternately un-brick something a bad roll screwed up.

I have a lot more positive to say, but this is already long. I'll finish with the complexity of the skill tree. It's massive. It's enormous. It's gigantic. There's so much flexibility in what's possible with your character. Every class basically has access to every other class's skill tree, which is unusual. It's not uncommon for classes to cross into each others' skill trees. And there's even items that allow you to jump across the entire tree and pick one killer skill node completely separated from your class.

I am a fan, warts and all.