I, uh, have kinda given up on progressing for the foreseeable future. I’m bad at platforming, and after struggling for probably around half an hour to get through one aection that was particularly difficult for me, I was met with a surprise boss fight. Nearest bench before that section. It’s brutal. It takes me about 5ish minutes to do that section now, but fuck I wish I were exaggerating. None of the other fights have anywhere near as nasty a runback and it honestly feels like they forgot a bench.
The game is hard and that’s fine, but that instance I feel ok bitching about and don’t feel like I’m a qhiny pathetic fuck for doing so, which is incredibly telling given how easy it is to make me feel like a whiny pathetic fuck.
There is NO reason for hunts UX to as fucking terrible as it is. They literally took it from bad to straight up awful. Believe me, I know how hard to design and implement a good UI can be, I’m a software engineer. I’m not just handwaving “make it better, duh”. It’s flawed from the user requirements up. It’s like they never used their own ui before. It’s stunning how thoroughly they don’t comprehend how people have a terrible time navigating the game menus.
Which is kind of funny because that corresponds inversely with the quality of the game lol. The game director changed and they have been killing it every since
You specifically called out PoEs passive tree, but honestly the tree isn’t the crazy complicated part of making builds–its finding combinations of mechanics that synergize above average. On the tree sure, but the gear and actual skills are really what makes it crazy. Planning around what items can have what mods and what you can reasonably expect to get on what budget is the real brain disabler for me. I love build crafting, but fuck I hate planning rare tier gear.
Towards the end of the decade Total Annihilation would be released and it’s modern day fan made remake, Beyond All Reason, is really good. Sad there’s no campaign though, I really loved the TA campaign