Preferably in Excel sheets and character building programs, before you just dive in and start investing skill points all willy-nilly, which D3 pretty much allows you to do without repercussion. However, there’s certainly something nostalgic about needing to plan your build. It’s true that rolling a new character because you invested a few points wrongly is a terrible headache, and Path of Exile is actually a massive headache in that regard. You just had to roll a new character to try a new build.īlizzard took a much more mainstream approach in Diablo 3, making it much easier to change talent points and passive skills on the fly, completely changing your character’s playstyle in a few clicks. There was no way to respec your character, until Patch 1.13 released in 2010, 10 years after Diablo 2 ’s release. PoE made tree planning hard againĭiablo 2 was a fairly complex game for its time, requiring players to be careful in skill tree planning, and finding the right loot to min-max their character specs. It’s pretty much like PoE gets an expansion pack every 3 months, whereas Diablo 3 has had exactly two expansion packs in 7 years. While true PoE’s leagues always boils down to RNG and crafting mechanics, and some players have joked that next League Season will just be an actual in-game casino where you roll dice for loot, like an ARPG version of, but it’s always varied and unique enough to keep things interesting. PoE goes through League Seasons every 3-4 months, with unique content added depending on the current season. PoE has a very similar concept with Atlas maps, but Atlas maps are far from the only endgame content. So instead of farming bosses ad infinitum, now you’re just farming randomized map layouts ad infinitum. It was a different era.īut Diablo 3 barely one-upped Diablo 2 ’s endgame, by simply adding endless rifts as endgame content. We were still installing games from CD, and expansion packs were sold in stores. But Path of Exile is a legitimate contender for the throne of best modern ARPG, and in this article, we’re going to highlight why.īack in the 2000s, we accepted that Diablo 2 ’s endgame revolved solely around killing the same bosses again ( and again) to find ultra-rare drops.

Many “ Diablo clones” have come and gone over the years, some more notable than others – Torchlight, Grim Dawn, and Sacred 2 are worth a mention – but none have managed to capture the truly addictive gameplay of Diablo 2.

In fact, Diablo was so popularly successful that subsequent games in the genre were called “ Diablo clones”. For us adult gamers who fondly remember the glory days of isometric view hack-n-slash RPGs, we know that no games influenced the genre more than Diablo and Diablo 2.

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