Ranking of Halos, 2026 Non Halo Fanboy Edition

Greetings Friends, I've had a comical interest in FPS's lately for whatever reason. Usually when I'm binging a genre it'll be 16 bit or PS1 JRPGs for a month or two but this time it was shooters. This will be a pretty lengthy pre-amble so fair warning. I played the original Halo quite a bit from 2001-2003 or so including LAN parties and so on; I had already played Doom, Doom 2, Duke 3D, Rise of the Triad, Quake 3, and a lot of Unreal Tournament as well as Goldeneye so I was never Mr. Halo but the game was fun and the campaigns in particular are quite good relative to something like Call of Duty's average campaign (though some CoD campaigns are good too). Side note: while Doom 2 is probably the best FPS still RE4 is a lot better than any FPS and anything that isn't Super Metroid, Vagrant Story, or a Link to the Past. RE4 has the best pistol in any game and also the best shotgun in any game and I guess ultimately that's what you want in a shooter. My first experiences with Halo 2 were in like 2005-2006ish, some random Freshman kept bugging me to play it so I eventually did; I guess I did know him from years prior but it was pretty impromptu on the whole; I also played Republic Commando and Crimson Skies High Road to Revenge thanks to this kid which are both fantastic games. I think we beat most of the game on legendary at that point (Halo 1 I've beaten the campaign like a dozen times across every difficulty) but possibly not the entire thing.....................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter first large gap of time here, at some point my brother (who is now a Lawyer) sent me Halo 2 and possibly Halo 1 as well in the mail because his roommate in the Coastguard left it over at his house; so I just had it spontaneously; I don't think I did anything with it for like 3 years but eventually I had some free time and no one in the house so I set out to beat Vanquish Tactical Challenge 6 for the Platinum Trophy which is still the hardest singleplayer thing to do in any shooter as far as skill required and also Halo 2 on legendary solo which was quite a fun experience, Halo 2 was much easier than Vanquish but it still took some doing and I just generally have a fondness for Halo 2 because of how it coalesced at that exact moment in time (now 14 or 15 years ago) I guess there's some random disdain for Halo 2's campaign because the ending is a cliffhanger and you had to play as Keith David (the horror!) but it seems pretty good to me still; also unlike Halo 1 Halo 2 did sort of birth the console shooter online experience even though COD4 is sort of the one that matters in that regard so Halo 2 would have a mark in the influential category (so Goldeneye, then Halo 2, then COD4 for console shooter influence; COD4 is more influential than Doom or Doom 2 though those games are a lot better; its sort of influential because of the moment in time moreso than the actual innovation). .................................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter second large gap of time, so at this point we've played Halo and Halo 2; surely enough to rank the entire series; well now I played Halo 5 with a friend without ever playing anything in between; we only played the campaign in co-op on legendary so I don't have any opinion on Halo multiplayer beyond 2 (other than a few firefight sessions in the past few days). Halo 5 is a pretty decent game but you do fight the same boss like 4 times in a row for some reason, as far as I can remember it did have the feel of a Halo game and the ability to like skip large portions of firefights if you could just get to the next checkpoint instead which we'll get to that issue later vis-a-vis Halo 4. Running past enemies is the essence of Halo, the key component of the experience regardless of the difficulty you play on, it must be present except for stuff that doesn't progress until you kill all enemies which is typically like one fight in an entire mission.........................................................................................................................................................................................................Enter Largest gap of time in this exercise, the Halo 5 run was in 2016 or 2017 and every other Halo was played in the past two weeks or so, a little bit of infinite like a year ago but the rest of it just now. Full disclosure I got Game Pass for free from Microsoft for about 2 years due to being a Youtubist; that period is shortly to run out though it will probably be back at some point to hazard a guess. Things not going so great for Phil Spencer and co presently but actually last year up until the last few months was quite a good one for game pass; Expedition 33, Oblivion remake, Avowed, Outer Worlds 2, Ninja Gaiden 4, etc. I'm happy with the money I didn't spend to get it. But since it was on the verge of running out I was suddenly motivated to actually use game pass for something aside from new releases, Lo! a Halo spree. I played 3 on Normal and 4, Reach, and ODST on Easy despite playing every prior game on Legendary; this was mostly a time consideration, Infinite I'm not even sure how the difficulty works but I guess its on Normal right now?............................................................................................................................................................................................................Now for Ranking stuff; 1. Halo: CE it seems like ranking Halo as the best shooter ever has died down but maybe there's still some people that feel that way, the first Halo has some fantastic levels and then a bunch of okay levels and just by virtue of having a LAN Party scene in the first place a sort of inherent legitimacy in the moment of time segment of gaming; that said I don't think it's actually particularly influential beyond regenerating health/shields which isn't something to be proud of. Its just a good game that's fun and replayable, it did come out before RE4 so if you look at before RE4 shooters it's almost certainly top 10 region but maybe not that much higher than like 8th.................................................................................................................................................................................................................2. Halo 2, the most influential game in the series due to online multiplayer on console; I guess in theory I shouldn't have that much nostalgia for Halo 2 since I played it for maybe 40 hours total but it still seems a bit better than everything except Reach and Halo 1, I remember where I was when I played different moments in the campaign in a tactile sense still. If we're looking at all time shooter rankings Halo 2 might barely scrape into the top 20 though we'll have that discussion again shortly.............................................................................................................................................................................................................3. Halo Reach, almost certainly the best game on a technical proficiency level and just the overall strength of the campaign. If you were someone who didn't give a fuck about Halo 1 when it came out I'd recommend Reach as the main game to play in the series; fantastic game but no nostalgia for it here, I do think Halo Reach should rank a little higher than Halo 2 on an all time shooter list..............................................................................................................................................................................................................4. Halo Infinite, the first controvertial choice I suppose; ultimately 3 and Infinite are very close and would both probably get an 8.5/10 from me but Halo 3's beginning and ending suck and Halo Infinite's middle sucks so ultimately I went with stronger ending. The story of both games sucks as well so that's not really a deciding factor. Halo Infinite does let you run past about 2500 enemies and that is peak Halo.............................................................................................................................................................................................................5. Halo 3, as above; I do think the like 5th through 7th level is some of the best Haloing available its just kind of ass after that part. The gunship is pretty cool for the 5 seconds you get to use it..................................................................................................................................................................................................................6. Halo 3: ODST; ODST is a pretty good game its just that Reach is better in every way. Also Nathan Fillion quips might have worked on me in 2009 but not really at this point in my life................................................................................................................................................................................................................7. Halo 5, I confess I don't know that much about Halo 5 other than I beat it on Legendary in Co-op and you fight the same boss 5 times; I'm pretty sure the entire story was discarded in favor of Halo Wars 2/Infinite's story...................................................................................................................................................................................................................8. Halo 4; unlike Halo 5 Halo 4 doesn't let you run past most enemies and just generally doesn't feel like Halo most of the time, the big tank level is cool and the you drive a Pelican level is cool. It's still a pretty good game ignoring the title.................................................................................................................................................................................................................Final thoughts: A lot of people seem to think modern Doom is like an iteration of Halo and also Destiny is from the Halo devs; I think Destiny felt kind of like Halo originally but not really at all anymore so no need to discuss that. I can buy that modern Doom is pretty Halo-ey and Doom 2016 is maybe the best single player console FPS of all time so that's fine. Doom Eternal is not very good on console and I've only played a little bit on PC which is much better and Doom the Dark Ages is like a top 10 game from last year but lower end of the list; only played that one on PC so couldn't speak to the console controls but I imagine they're fine. I did play all the Halos recently on PC with mouse and Keyboard except for Infinite which does read PS4 pads on PC, rest was on consoles though I played some Halo 1 multiplayer on PC (some time between 2005 and 2010?) which is fun.

Bean Dip, Burrito Filling, Fajita Meat Recipes

Greetings friends, Figured I might as well write this up since I've enjoyed my past few attempts quite a bit. Basically like 15 years ago I had an excess amount of money to buy food and thus wound up working on a particular recipe for 9-12 months intensively and then just added random refinements or subtractions additions over time. The basic concept is refried beans, salsa, sour cream, and shredded cheese (or chopped up block cheese) which is a common enough dip composition but then you combine that with a fajita mix which was Heinz Beef Gravy, Extra Lean Ground beef, and 1 of each color of bell pepper sliced (green, orange, yellow, and red in this case); added to the fajita meat was some kind of taco seasoning (doesn't matter which), garlic salt, and garlic powder typically added directly to the gravy as its cooking on a stove top. The fajita meat is extremely good by itself but you can mix it with the bean mix and voila super good bean dip. In the past 5 years or so I haven't been able to eat a large amount of meat, I can eat meat occasionally just not as a regular component of my diet so I just was working with the bean dip component itself independent of the fajita mix and I've subtracted the sour cream and added rice (and garlic powder recently) but basically you need a bonding agent so that the salsa doesn't become the dominant flavor. Generally avoid using salsa that tastes too much like tomatoes as it will overwrite some of the other component flavors. I've made the full on dip with the fajita mix like 30 or 40 times and the bean component several hundred times with varying results but sometimes you will end up with a completely heterogeneous solidified mix and sometimes it will be more homogenous and closer to liquid; both can be good for different reasons and all of these can be used with tortillas or tostadas as a main dish or just as something to eat with tortilla chips or doritos.

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Expedition 33 Review

Greetings Friends, rare game review post. I guess just to get this out of the way this is the best game since the Witcher 3 which was the best game since RE4 so it's the once in a decade experience more or less; it's only 50 bucks too so you should probably go play it. I actually bought a physical PS5 copy of it as like a symbol; it is the only PS5 physical game that I own (I played the Game Pass version mostly) which is pretty emblematic of the current generations issues. I do get almost every game for free from developers including this one but I thought it would be nice to own one physical PS5 game to go with my Two (2) PS5s and 5 PS5 controllers (2 are broken one is halfway broken); apparently said PS5s are appreciating assets which is highly amusing. Was able to make it through the entire game on a beefy 3090 PC; top of the line from 3-4 years ago but no longer so necessarily; I think it varies a lot on optimization though; the 3090 isn't drastically less powerful than 40 series cards and the 50 series is generally trash so far; Indiana Jones for instance ran very well on high settings with no crashes.................................................................................................................................................................................................................... So what makes this game special and how does it tick. Well for starters Lune is probably the best character design for any female character in any game, visually and the cohesion of the character in the plot; she's not KOS-MOS levels of awesome or anything and not actually the central figure but pretty damn masterful for a supporting character; plus she has feet (and even laughs nervously when she mentions feet in a conversation). This game's inspirations are many and multi faceted but as a baseline it's Final Fantasy X mixed with Legend of Dragoon; then you add a sprinkling of Dark Souls and Sekiro's Mikiri counters (quite randomly in the middle of the game); very reductive dipshits will say "its just Mario" but there's so much more to it than that. It also has very complicated build construction systems though admittedly after a certain point the game is a little too easy to break, but before that point it's fantastic in a balancing sense. I think only Valkyrie Profile 2 has a similar level of customization through gear as far as how busted you can get characters to be; coincidentally before this game VP2 was my 6th best game of all time and now this is my 6th best game of all time..........................................................................................................................................................................................................................As far as the plot is concerned its some mixture of Mother (the Aronofsky movie), Greek Tragedy/Olympic Diaspora of Greek Gods, and otherwise generally pretty unique, the setting is almost entirely unique for any non walking simulator and it's fucking gorgeous the entire time. There's even like some artistry if you're running on lower settings compared to high, the way the game shows that is also sort of artistic. There's an exceptional deconstruction of the JRPG protagonist like "what would actually happen to a JRPG protag in a more realistic setting" and that's wonderful, Andy Serkis is in the game which is pretty wild, plays like a top 10 villain in any game in it probably the most intimidating villain ever in a game but not like a life changing experience to watch like Albedo in Xenosaga or anything (or Delita who still transcends the medium). I do think the Witcher 3 is just better in terms of plot and also has Gaunter O'dim in it who's hard to beat, but if you ignore the Witcher 3 there's not really any other RPG that has voice acting and competes evenly with this game on a presentation level......................................................................................................................................................................................................................So how would this game have been better than The Witcher 3 to broach the Top 5 games ever; well it would have to be mechanically perfect and that's not quite the case. For starters there are awful minigames in it a la Rebirth (they are worse than Rebirth's though not as numerous); my advice is either don't do them (sadly losing out on swimsuits) or mod the game to do them for you basically; no need to stain the masterpiece with the minigames. The gameplay is top 3 in any JRPG for sure but that's still not quite as good as Vagrant Story's gameplay which also has defensive and offensive timing; so from an RPG standpoint it can't quite make it over the hump. So tragically the game is only a 10/10 and better than fucking everything in ages.

Ranking of Final Fantasies 2025 Edition

Greetings Friends, somewhat rare game post. This is mostly just a mental exercise and a self review of past opinions; blog format is so borked I don't think I can actually formulate it as a list so I'll just copy paste the notepad section here momentarily: Tactics, 6, 4, 10, 12, 5, 8, 7 Remake, 1, 7, 2, 9, 13, 3, 15, 7 Rebirth, 16; don't care about the mmos. Tactics has the best non voiced (though it is voiced now) story in any game and the best character in any game in Delita though you could take Gaunter O'dim and I would be fine with that choice as well. It's also the best game mechanically in the tactics genre aside from Front Mission 5 and arguably XCOM 2; great game; sort of killed its own genre by being so good I guess with everything being compared to it and Tactics Ogre afterward...................................................................................................................................................................................................................For a long time 4 was my best final fantasy, I'd say 10 or 15 years straight; I've played 6 and 4 like 25 times each under various conditions and it comes down to how much do I still enjoy it at this point; most recently I've played both on a Super Famicom with actual cartridges and what not; actually both games have really cool and weird bugs/glitches that work on actual hardware so that part is a wash even though the 4 one is more useful I think the Opera House glitch is also fascinating. Sketch glitch doesn't work very well on the JP cartridge so didn't screw with that much (also probably wouldn't since it could be unhealthy to the cart). I think FF6 pre world of ruin is the best game of all time pretty much but World of Ruin botches that even though it's decent enough; it's just not utterly flawless like the rest of the game. That said the WoR grind is strangely appealing the last 4 or 5 times I've played, dunno if its just the habit of doing it or the music when you get the Falcon; who knows. The biggest thing is being able to beat the final boss with any party at any level; I used Umaro and Relm this time who I've never used before and it was a blast. Just coming up with a party to farm Brachosaurs is fun in and of itself and as Celes and Terra become more and more comically broken the game becomes increasingly silly and enjoyable; even in Pixel Remaster (where MBlock is fixed) those characters are basically invincible; just a good time all around. I think conceptually I'd still say 4 is better because Whale, Golbez, Kain, Rubicante etc. but this time out 6 is the victor.....................................................................................................................................................................................................................10 is basically a flawless masterpiece all around, best turn based combat system in any game period; and then the protagonist is unbelievably fucking terrible and thats what shoots the game in the foot. No Tidus and 10 is also maybe the best game ever, but Tidus is there and straight garbage so that's it for that argument, it's still like a 9.5/10 though albeit it tends to elude my top 20 games of all time lists. 12 is awesome and 12 zodiac with 4x speed is even more awesome. 5 is the third most replayable, 8 with speed up options is also quite so plus Triple Triad. 8's story is a mixed bag but aside from Tactics 4 and 6 (and 10 if you exclude Tidus) the series hasn't really had many good stories so it doesn't really bother me much; the strength of Final Fantasy has always been the gameplay, if the story happens to be good that's a bonus on top........................................................................................................................................................................................................................7 Remake has one of the best soundtracks of all time and fantastic gameplay; great usage of the characters and set the stage for Rebirth being good (it wasn't, at least not particularly); great stuff all around. 1 still holds up and is the main NES one I would want to replay though I've more recently played 2 and 3 on Famicom; the Tower of Mystics music in 2 is amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsMQnlL8qw0 Considering how ancient the game is the fact that 1 still works at all and is fun is remarkable; most NES games are terrible. Original 7 (and 8) are big parts of my childhood and hard to parse entirely but aside from particular affection for the characters it's just generally a pretty good game with a cool level up system and good characters; lots of better JRPGs. I like 2's leveling system and did get a second Excalibur to drop from an Iron Giant (1/64 + 3/64 I believe) for my run of Pandemonium on actual hardware (Famicom) so that's cool.......................................................................................................................................................................................................................9 is good for 1.5-2 discs and Chocobo Hot and Cold then it sucks. 13 has issues but a fantastic and super difficult combat system and the hardest boss in the series (Bart Part 2 if you don't grind); I don't have that much desire to replay it or Lightning Returns though; XIII-2 I kind of did everything already. 3 is just worse 5 it's a neat game for a Famicom game though. 15 is pretty damn good considering how much hate it got, love Adamantoise and the platforming dungeon; I'll play the DLCs at some point. 7 Rebirth would be a good game if it was 60 hours long and the ending didn't suck ass but it's like 150 hours long and the ending is terrible and sets up the next game to also be terrible (gameplay/outfits for Tifa aside); of course I'm going to wind up playing that too. It does have the quality of Remake's soundtrack but again there's too much of it so you need to trim the fat and make it more polished; fat chance with Nomura in charge. 16 I've played both DLCs and around 10 hours of the beginning at this point; I will play through the entire thing when it goes on PS Plus; it has very good core gameplay and a pretty solid story (if slow moving); very bland art design except for a handful of characters and very poor exploration systems; 13 had that problem too but the story was compelling enough for me at the time so it didn't bother me much. It's cool as a character action game because not many of those exist; still like an 8/10.

Economic System Theory Thoughts, Marx, Elon, Lowest Common Denominator Information Dispersion, Marketplace Discoverability etc.

Greetings friends, I haven't really talked about this topic in quite a while so my viewpoint might have changed over time and so forth; a bit of background I was more or less a pseudo Marxist for around 10 years; not because I think Marx is without faults but moreso that I was more concerned with geopoltiical theories and so on and thinking of an economic theory superior to Marx would be difficult and not necessarily productive. But I've had some fairly cogent thoughts recently about both economics and the way information is disseminated on the internet......................................................................................................................................................................................................................I do think there are some overarching merits to capitalism or at least Burgher style market policies in the middle ages that we have inherited; most modern capitalist practices are extremely flawed but the general core concepts from hundreds of years ago do have some merit. The question is how do you harness this; I think nominally we need to reach the 1917 state which we are kind of barreling towards right now; once that happens which every billionaire seems to be anticipating with their bunker building frenzy then we can probably come up with a better system that is neither Marxism nor Capitalism. I think a sort of separation of economic powers and some amount decentralization will help enable this; there will almost certainly need to be a period of some sort of brutal dictatorship though; or at least that will happen and then whoever that person is can then enforce some economic system that isn't so terrible, all other methods of reaching this point are either utopian or apocalyptic; I'm not too opposed to the latter.............................................................................................................................................................................................................................More to the point of discoverability, if a random average person looks at a list of things then they will almost invariably pick from the top of the list due to laziness or general stupidity and being incapable of scrolling down past a point; this is just an inherent flaw with search engines from inception and also an educational flaw in how humans are currently raised; not necessarily a scholastic flaw but a methodology flaw. This isn't fixable under capitalism because every system is informed by it and thus you have a world where one game or one streamer or one politician or one tv show or one sport dominates the conversation and everything else falls to the wayside. I've mentioned Pokrovsk in twitch chats recently when people bring up like "yo Washington DC is the worst place ever" and things similar to that and no one even fucking knows what Pokrovsk is, they are incapable of knowing that; its just too foreign and too old news and doesn't pop up enough in their news feeds. Recently POE2 released and then had like 1.2 million viewers on twitch (now it has like 6k); Kingdom Come Deliverance 2 just came out and same thing but if you look at who's streaming it and doing well for POE2 it was Asmongold (who played the game for like 3 days maybe) with 250k views and for Kingdom Come various other people but if you look down the list at other streamers you would think would benefit from this generally speaking they don't. So I watch Elajjaz and Lobos for example who at some point in time were similarly sized streamers; if Lobos streams a souls game he gets 2k viewers let's say for example and Ela gets 12k now, if Lobos streams Kingdom Come he gets 400 viewers and Ela still gets 10k-12k; this is the discoverability problem in a nutshell as disseminated on twitch. But the same thing happens for anything that functions in a search engine or "algorithm" format, same on youtube, same on reddit, same on google. This entire concept is why both Trump and Elon have power right now because they were able to harness that even though a lot of that traffic is negative for both persons.................................................................................................................................................................................................................I am still somewhat optimistic about Trump or rather the people Trump has selected to put in power in that they're generally 30-40 something instead of 70-80 something and thus probably have more mental acuity or adaptability; Trump himself has sort of descended to lunacy of late but it's hard to tell if that's deliberate or he's just saying shit for the sake of generating more discoverability until invariably all conversations and all wealth and power in the western world are either focused on Trump or focused on Elon; I don't think this leads to any particular outcome persay other than comedy but that does seem to be the current trend. Elon has done some extremely abrasive shit just in the past few days but generally speaking him being such an imbecile is really good for everyone since more and more people will grow to hate billionaires which will probably lead to some sort of revolution eventually; hard to say how that will come to fruition precisely but I would assume some kind of coup attempt and the repercussions therein; maybe in 2028, maybe in 2032; maybe caused by external forces due to WW3. After that happens we need to create a new economic system, when Lenin was doing his theoretical construct stuff he was just a writer and a journalist so if someone else can do that right now or start to maybe that will lead to some kind of economic reform in a decade or two; I'm not suggesting that Marx should be the basis of this it's just a loose reference for comparison; any idea is better than the current system you just need to develop and improve upon it enough in that timespan.

Early D3 Inferno and Path of Exile 2 Comparison/Discussion; is Jonathan Rogers Jay Wilson in Disguise?

Note: I'm listen to Mektul the forgemaster's theme while writing this, pretty damn good song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fv8gzm2bLpM x............................................................................................................................................................................................................................. I considered doing like a video essay on this topic but I don't think I'm up to the task of summarizing it well; it's an extremely complicated backstory so something would fall in the gaps. D3 Inferno was this very strange, brief, interesting time in history and POE2 is sort of loosely attempting to do a similar thing (which is to say be impossibly hard for a few months and then get nerfed into oblivion); it's just that POE2 feels extremely sluggish getting to that point so while the concept of e.g. fighting Super Zana over and over and it taking 20 hours of attempts to beat would be cool in reality it would be farm the atlas for 400 hours for one 5 minute attempt (6 logouts) where you randomly get one shot then go again etc. assuming GGG doesn't nerf your build from orbit in the mean time. One attempt per boss just doesn't work for the general interest of beating Early Inferno D3..............................................................................................................................................................................................................................I suppose I should define how D3 Inferno worked and how villainous it was precisely; basically every white mob in the entire game would kill you in one hit if you didn't have the best gear imaginable and none of that would ever drop unless farmed 10,000 treasure goblins basically (what Kripp did); so it was entirely pay to win in a literal sense with the real money auction house. That said if you didn't engage with the P2W system it was really fun just figuring out how to progress in these unbelivably fucked zones. Silver Spire 2 in launch D3 Inferno is far and away probably the hardest thing in any RPG ever made; I don't think the zone was ever fully cleared out pre nerf, the only way through was just to run to the exit then go fight Diablo (Voiced by Jennifer Hale) who was relatively easy by comparison; there's monsters in that zone that don't even show up, they just appear from nothingness and instantly one shot you; there's angels that fly in from off screen, all of this shit hits for like 25,000 damage and you've got 15,000 health maybe (again unless you paid to win to trivialize it). Is POE2 that hard? No not even close, is that the target, eh hard to say; surely it's informed by it but most people don't remember that part of D3; they remember post Reaper of Souls and Greater Rifts etc. which is a fine game but nothing remarkable in the grand scheme of things (apparently now highly beloved in a nostalgia way as though it was as good as D2 which is laughable naturally)....................................................................................................................................................................................................................So what is POE2 targetting here precisely, is it the hardcores, is it the casuals; what's the goal. Well the main thing is to keep you playing the game forever so you spend money, Diablo 2 doesn't have this issue therefore Diablo 2 will always be a better game for all time; and Chris Wilson will keep playing D2/D2R and not POE. They want the combat to be slower paced and have a more methodical feeling to it but also for it to be abrasively impossible at the high end so only like 5-10 people can even kill the top pinnacle bosses and everyone else can wish they were that guy. There's a hundred different issues with this conceptually but I think the big one right now is that even those players don't like the game so if you lose e.g. Ben's interest then your whole concept is fucked. That said I would anticipate them dramatically changing how the entire endgame functions; I don't think the campaign is going to change much and seems to be in an okay state aside from a preposterous amount of bugs in Act 3. That's another thing with Diablo 3 is that it's a technical marvel, still feels overall the best and basically never had any technical issues aside from launch day server stuff; the endgame was always pretty whatever and the desire to play it forever absolutely not but just the way the game feels on a moment to moment basis is very good (at least with the classes that aren't boring as shit) If you could get D3's gameplay and then put POE1's mechanics and systems into it you could probably make a really fucking good game but no one is up to that task so instead we have some strange souls-like not particularly difficult combat combined with no loot and constant build nerfing.......................................................................................................................................................................................................... I will say the Necromancer play style from D2 is best revived in POE2 at this point; you still don't have enigma or something like that to tie the thing together for usability but at least you have to straight up going afk and everything dies while you listen to a podcast vibe; that's neat. They will nerf aspects of this build but probably not the overall feel; for some reason almost no game has accomplished D2 necro so minions always feel exceedingly tedious to optimize outside of D2 but that's not really an issue in POE2 so far; pick minion nodes and go afk, you win. Tough game. I'm not even playing my Necromancer I'm actively using a different character in couch co-op and the necro just functions as a series of meatshields, pretty fun if you don't mind using two controllers or a controller and a keyboard...........................................................................................................................................................................................................Tinfoil hat mode engage. Why the Jay Wilson comparison? Well before release Jonathan Rogers kept saying stuff like "we're making the best action RPG of all time" blah blah blah, setting expectations higher than Cyberpunk 2077; what they should have said was yo pay me and you get to be a free labor beta tester, isn't that fucking sweet? Thanks bro. In like 5 years the game'll be good, trust fam. So in a non honesty context that wasn't going to happen, if you don't know who Jay Wilson was he was the original game director for D3 which was at the time the largest PC game release of all time, fastest selling and all that jazz; probably made like 1/500th of Minecraft and Fortnite, incredible levels of success; naturally this made Jay Wilson really happy. Unfortunately the Battle.net forums, that hive of magnificent bastardry became an endless barrage of complaints mostly about D3 Inferno and the RMAH; eventually Jay Wilson released this weird Tseric like statement that ended with "Aren't you thankful?" and was forced to resign like a few weeks later; Aren't you thankful is one of the predecessors of you guys have phones right etc. just meme culture/youtube wasn't as prominent at the time so it's more of an old hat forum lore concept now than an enduring thing...................................................................................................................................................................................................................If you look at the POE2 reddits right now it's very similar to that just constant complaining from people that have played POE for 5000-25000 hours, basically the worst place on the planet including Gaza (meme); that sort of thing combined with very high sales will probably eventually lead to statements and youtube videos and apologies and suck my dicks and so on and most likely some sort of comedic iconic moment like Chris Wilson during Lake of Kalandra; how will it manifest exactly who can say but it could probably happen any time now; grab that popcorn............................................................................................................................................................................................................................What would I do as a profound intellectual mastermind who's good at predicting real life and doesn't really give a fuck about POE unless the league is good (shoutouts to Sanctum/Ultimatum in POE1)? Well I think they have the casual audience and they need to figure out a way to make the onboarding in maps better, they could make endgame like 10-20-50 times harder and who cares those autistic morons would keep playing regardless but you need to get the casuals to play maps so buff white maps/yellow maps and only nerf high end builds or exceedingly high popularity builds. Also maybe just delete deadeye and replace it with Warden or whatever; bring it back later in redesigned form; otherwise we're just back to POE1 31%+ Deadeye play rates and what not; I don't think nerfing it is going to work and would probably be received worse though either move will cause drama.