and if you play without trading the game is still designed to be somewhat doable. Really the only thing you miss out on is trading

I don’t agree with this at all. Even if you don’t want to trade (which only really requires a single premium stash tab anyway) you’ll struggle in the endgame if you don’t have at least a currency, fragment and map tab. I actually think you need even more tabs in SSF (solo self-found) than in trade league. Because you can’t just buy something if you need it you’ll probably want to keep way more items. And with the four default tabs you pretty quickly run out of space (in the endgame).

But yes, for the campaign it’s not really an issue and I would definitely consider that as perfectly playable for free. And by the time you’re done with it you’ll probably know whether you want to buy some tabs and keep playing or not.

Tip for people who do want to buy stash tabs: there’s a sale every three weeks where all tabs are around 20-25% off.

PoE2 early access is still months away, so I assume you’re talking about PoE1.

In my opinion it’s definitely worth playing if you’re into that type of game. The monetisation is still very fair in my opinion. It’s perfectly playable for free until you reach the endgame, where you’ll probably want to spend around 30-40€ on stash tabs. But you’ve probably played for at least 20 hours before you even get to that point. And it’s a one time purchase which costs about as much as Last Epoch. And less than Diablo 4.

Personally I’m not a huge fan of SSF (solo self-found), it does make the game somewhat harder since parts of the game are not designed around this mode. It’s supposed to be a limitation. If that’s how you want to play and you’re a more casual player then Last Epoch might be the better choice, they have a mode that caters specifically to people who want to play like that (Circle of Fortune). But lots of people play SSF so it’s not like it’s not a viable way to play the game or anything. Playing trade league but only trading for a few things you need (like build defining uniques) is also an option. And in the current league they also introduced an automated currency exchange market which makes trading certain items a lot easier.

I’ve only played the most recent Cycle in Last Epoch so I can’t tell you how the game “now” compares to previous states, but I’ve enjoyed it. The story is a bit convoluted and there’s certainly room for improvement, but I enjoyed the gameplay. Both building your character and the crafting system are way more approachable than in Path of Exile, but still interesting.

Overall I’d probably recommend Last Epoch to a casual player unless you’re drawn to PoE’s more complicated systems or abundance of content, especially in the endgame.

You’re thinking of Dota Underlords, which was popular for a short time but then quickly got abandoned. I definitely wouldn’t count it as a success.

That’s a good point, but I feel like there are reasonable solutions for that like a disclaimer when buying the game digitally. For the physical version they could either put a sticker on it or just delay the physical version only. I also think that people who are informed enough to know about specific features like that are more likely to hear about this discourse.

The S was just a bad idea from the get go.

Yeah for sure. I agree that pushing the One X as the cheaper/entry level version would have been much better. Even for much longer than 1-2 years. People wouldn’t get as mad if they gradually started to phase it out and stopped releasing the high profile games on it after a few years while still supporting it somewhat. Even the feature parity thing wouldn’t have been that much of an issue if they’d just clearly communicated an expiry date beforehand.

They COULD blame it on the S, but, again, Microsoft won’t allow it.

I don’t get how blaming the S for a delayed feature would be different than blaming the S for a delayed game, which is what they’re doing right now.

But I definitely agree that this is bad for Microsoft and they should do something about it. Not sure whether dropping the S would be the right call but they definitely need to reconsider the feature parity requirement policy.

Can’t they blame it on the S either way?

And “just being the ganked version” in this case would mean not having a single feature that the vast majority of players likely wouldn’t even have used in the first place. Yes, it’s not good, but the choice here is between either locking your players out of that one non-essential feature or locking them out of the entire game. And the second option is, to me, very obviously much worse.

And it’s also not like it would be the “bad” version forever. They can just patch it in when they get it to work. And let players decide for themselves whether they want to get the game now without split screen or wait.

True, but I feel like not releasing the game at all is even worse. The consensus seems to be that PS5 already has better exclusives and now you can’t even play one of this year’s best third party games on Xbox.

I also thought they might have such a requirement but I was unable to find a source that confirms (or even mentions) it. Definitely still possible though.

As far as I can tell the article only talks about a feature parity requirement between the Xbox Series S and Series X versions. And that could be met by just dropping the feature from both versions.

What I don’t understand is why they don’t just release both Xbox versions without split screen and then try to patch it in later. That way they’d satisfy the feature parity requirement (as I understand it) and people could at least play the game. I love that they’re still doing split screen despite it seemingly having fallen out of favour these days, but it’s hardly an essential feature.

There isn’t really a “second one”. Overwatch 2 was just a patch with essentially two major changes. They changed the monetisation, making the game free-to-play and introducing the battle pass. An especially unpopular part of that is that new heroes now have to be bought with real money or unlocked through the battle pass. The other big change is the move from 6v6 to 5v5, which was controversial. There are definitely some positives, like getting rid of the “double shield meta”, which did make the game more fun. But there’s also more pressure and focus on the single tank.

The game is free and if you bought OW1 you still have all your stuff (cosmetics and all the non-OW2 heroes), so if you’re curious you can just check it out. Personally I’m still enjoying the game but there’s also a lot of valid criticism.