We can’t make music videos with these kinds of Earth shattering graphical wonders any more, we’ve lost the technology.

Been toying with the idea of reviewing Path of Exile 2 for a bit now, but it’s daunting, because there are so many elements at play that feed into one another that can affect how one enjoys a video game.

The good ol’ days of buying that fancy new game, it being an instant classic, and just delighting millions as we relish in the wonders of this incredible medium are long gone. Everyone’s a critic any more, everyone expects more, everyone has this or that reason to dislike something. The journalists are barely gamers, sentiment is dispersed among a throng of thought leaders in the creator space of ADHD riddled man children who will power through your game 24/7 for months at a time and then decry that your game doesn’t have enough content, or that this tiny mechanic here they think isn’t fun enough.

In short, I don’t know if I can reccomend POE 2, and I don’t even think it’s the game’s fault.

POE 2 is a game for neckbeards BY neckbeards, and though that means you’re going to get that raw, unfiltered neckbeard gaming goodness, that also comes at the price of the POE 2 community, and worst of all, the POE 1 community. And gamers any more are self loathing, self destructive douche nozzels who hate everything and everything and want everything their way and they will behave in the most rank, and immature, impatient and disgusting ways imaginable to make sure that if they don’t get their way, everyone else is going to be as absolutely miserable as they are.

This is fast becoming a review on the state of gaming, and our social spheres more than it is a POE 2 review, and i am MORE than ok with that.

This speaks to that loss of the cohesive and ubiquitous society of quality and maturity we used to cultivate in better years.

You need a certain ammount of adults in the room who understand how prosperity and quality works at a base level or else you end up just playing house.

When society runs on monopoly money and is simply the heirs to whatever family dynasty have all the power and influence, what you end up with is big shiny buildings full of yes men and back scratchers, and the foundations of prosperity quickly start to erode, as the people running the system scratch their head...

"WHAT THE HECK!? We hired ALL the most expensive people! We shoved them in the shiniest, most expensive building! We got all the kids with the fanciest titles, and the most assertive with the best resumes and the most impressive backgrounds and former work places! We should be shitting quality things and making a forutne!"

Well, you see, as you fill the world with Kumbaya enjoyers, and everyone takes offense to standards and if you actually value hard work and talent, year on year the competing elements of industry and academia no longer keep one another in check, those global systems of comptetition, the rule of law, the very fabric by which the body of society is held together tears, the creme deosn’t rise to the top.

But POE 2 is actually a very good game, a tremendously good game and it does a lot of things insanely well.

But here’s the problem. A good game doesn’t sell itself any more. We live in a crazed, silly world where public sentiment is more important than your own notion of what is good.

If you’re watching a TV series and everyone hypes up how terrible episode 4 is, and you’re just waiting for that aweful cliffhanger, it’s going to sour how you enjoy the rest of the show. You’re going to not fully enjoy what’s going on in front of you. We’re attuned to that zietgiest, we’re swayed by the general sentiment, we want to be where the action is.

And we’re in this really strange, tribal, hyper gatekept, money driven venture capitalist, social engineered state of gaming, where EVERYTHING is smoke and mirror, not JUST the pixels, the polygons and the post process effects. The ENTIRE SCENE is falsified with monopolized storefronts, with gatekept engines, with stiff armed algorythms, with throttled engagements and hand picked content creators and rage baitors.

Simply put, spoiled rotten goofballs were handed the world with a bow on it, the trust fund children of the goofball billionaires of sillicon valley, entrusted with the whole of Western Civilization, and what they did was proceed to eat fistfulls of candybars, run up a massive bar tab, pop some pills, scream at the top of their lungs how fucking wonderful everyone was from their prestigeous gated communities, crawl into bed after fucking absolutely everything into the dirt, and then shat themselves.

At every single fucking fundamental level, from the social circles and community centers of reddit, to the storefronts, to the colleges where talent is cultivated and acquired, to the dev teams that have now been shuttered as the whole of this industry burns.

Gaming is dying.

The entire ecosystem at every level has been corrupted by namby pamby modern day bullshits to appease the delecate sensibilities of the 2025 Karen as the west is ground to pieces under the weight of post-modern "malformed filth" (my favorite line from POE2).

And that’s what’s so frustrating is people don’t seem to understand just how fucking broke we are. Because everyone’s simultaniously got those nails at their back scratching them and calming them, "you’re doing so well! Gosh isnt this so wonderful! Everyone is getting along and we’re undoing all that evil in this world because we are just so gosh darn peachy! And all those evil doers that we’re suppressing and mocking and shaming and canceling is doing so much good for this world."

Things are NOT well for this world, even for the conniving circles of smarm fuck, and even they are beginning to wake to this notion.

But they dare not acknowledge it fully, because doing so goes against the core post modern tenant, "We are the good ones".

To acknowledge that others were right, that their behavior was destructive and self serving, goes against the absolute fundamental logic of their movement, that every single self serving, aggressive, and violent action they took, was good, it was for others’ benefit. It was making the world a better place.

The bleeding hearts were SO helpful, they were SO kind, they were SO virtuous, that Western society is not on the verge of total collapse. Kids can’t even put a sandwich together at Subway. Game studios don’t know how to make video games. Games journalists don’t know how to play video games.

They became SO obsessed with proving others’ demon, with affirming themselves, with uplifting others, with kumbaya bullshit, that they destroyed civilization.

When someone is severly overweight and you tell them maybe they shouldn’t stuff cake into their face every meal, that doesn’t make you a bad person. When you see someone who failed out of algebra getting into video games, it doesn’t make you a bad person to tell them they should pursue other careers, because games take advanced logics and a pain tolerance for making pain in the ass systems that break in a myriad of ways.

The truth is, that the vast majority of people will never understand the truth. The way things work, the many experiences of trial and error to create things of value. Most people will never experience that, because it is grueling, and if everyone was forced to fail and fail and fail to produce the next generation of wonderous art and tech, the world would be a really miserable place.

But even more miserable, is a world where everyone is told they’re a special snowflake, and that everyone should be making games, and eveyrthing is going to come easy to you, and that everyone who says otehrwise is a big stinking meanie who wants what’s bad for you and wants to horde all the toys.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

I get it now.

I don’t know what the future holds.

I know how we fix this world. We start giving one another swift kicks in the ass, we start telling it like it is, and we get these lovey dovey dipshits out from behind the heavy machinery where they can hurt themselves and others because civilization isn’t lovey dovey commie bullshit. There are real pressing problems that require laser focused, adult solutions by those who can fight in the arena, sweat, and bleed for prosperity and push the fuckin’ envelope.

We gotta get back to pushing one another to have "the right stuff" again.

"PAIN IS WEAKNESS ESCAPING FROM THE BODY!"

"Oh it was hard? GOOD! That means you built a little character!"

"Nothing worth doing is easy"

Remember when we said hard, badass shit like this?

Now the world loses it’s fucking mind if you call someone a retard.

When you live in a candy ass world that can’t even handle people calling one another retards, you’re on the path to exile, you’re on the path to shuttering all the m*ther fuckers that are going to be honest with one another, and hold each other to standards while the world starts holding hands and singing Kumay fucking Ya.

Ok, for reals though, Path of Exile 2 is legit an amazing game, but it’s held back by overly complex and overdesigned mechanics in a myriad of systems from attributes to skill bloat, and skill gem bloat. The game double downed on entirely too many balancing systems overlapping each other, and now they’re locked into this monstrocity of complexity that is NOT better off for it.

The game would be SO MUCH better with less. Less annoying quests to have to do every play thorugh, a tighter talent tree, less of those trash unique items. The game is a constant reminder of how much fun you COULD be having if the game wasn’t an overdesigned hellscape of edgecase logics and overly complex build setups.

The game never just lets you have fun. You never get some rare new item that you can just equip and enjoy a new play style. Everything requires exacting knowledge of how the entire overly complex system works at all times, and there is no room for fun discovery or wacky play styles.

So much of its design fights against iteself. We want dodge rolls to matter! We want moment to moment combat to be well tuned and impactful, but here’s a massive sprawling talent tree that you can easily fuck your build up with and make the game unplayable. Here’s an overly complicated crafting system and sprawling item prefix and affix system with more modifiers than you know what to do with. And you better juggle that perfectly while maxing all resistances and finessing attack speeds, hit chances, and a ton of other jargon, and if you fail to build against enemy stun locks, or not get your health pool up enough, or not get a reliable means of replenishing health and mana, and not figure out how ignite, chill, freeze, and shock all work, you’re going to be uber gimped. And at the end of the day the game devolves into just finding rare items with the perfect combination of resists, attack speed, crit, lifetap and max life like every single damned ARPG that came before it did, and all the overly complex bullshit amounts to much ado about nothing.

That said I’m really enjoying the game in small bursts and it’s been really enjoyable to actually play some games and get my mind of SeaCrit for a little bit.

GAHDAMN my back is still fucking sore. I’m not even kidding you I can barely sit up right now and type up this weird ass game review because I’ve been doing pullups every time I walk by the pullup bar, and I learned about "Negative" pullups where once you max out (i can only do about 4 pullups at a time right now) You jump and pull yourself up and the exercise is to lower back down slowly and REALLY burn out the muscles in your back. So yeah, back is still sore, not from trying to carry this damned industry in our lonesome of late, but more because we’ve been working out too hard for someone who’s felt breathless and like they were going to die for the past 2+ years.

We gotta creep back into this shit and not go so hard

This blog is sort of barometer of our mental outputs. On better days, I coulda blathered harder and with more introspection about how we’re avoiding these pitfalls in SeaCrit, and how less can be more. But more likely SeaCrit will be plagued by its own problems and shit in its own way and we’ll end up with egg on our face.

EVERYONE’S A CRITIC!

That’s what makes this human experience so interesting. Every one of us has our own blinders, our own biases for why we’ll like something or we’ll hate something.

And it really makes you wonder, how much of this world is shit, simply because we want to believe it’s shit. We WANT to think those things other people are making is crap, it doesn’t align with the shape of the thing how we envision something should be.

There are simply so many dimensions to why everything is shit, and will remain shit, but at the very heart of that, is we’ve become so coddled so weak, so up our own asses thinking our shit don’t stink and everything is everyone else’s fault that we are no longer capable of solving the problems. We’re too soft, we can’t see ourselves for what we’ve become, so we will never take steps to fix it.

I find it supremely sad that we now believe the only way we can fix ourselves is to heavily invest in robots and build a fleet of machines to carry western civilization for us.

That’s not victory, that’s ultimate defeat.

I hate that things got this far. I hate that we’ve surrendered to weakness, sloth, and delusion, that the only fix now is to replace ourselves with machines and to have such low standards and aspirations for one another.

That’s the future I guess. We didn’t vote on it, but our ultra elite have deemed us a worthless, lost cause. They shut us out of the colleges, the work forces and now that the world is in a death spiral, their final push, their final investment is into machines to do the jobs for us.

It’s such a bag of balls.

And what’s worse, is if SeaCrit ultimately fails, which it likely will, I will forever wonder if the game was truly that bad, or if it was this stupid fucking world, the stupid fucking storefronts, the stupid judgmental tribalist publishers, game companies, storefronts and social ecosystems that held us back. Am I just a petty, selfish, tribalist asshole for considering this?

Fuck if I know.

Wish I were able to finish with a more coherent and uplifting thought, but we are living in insane and troubling times with a supremely uncertain future as the smarm fucks continue to play their money games and hold hands and sing their idiot choirs of Kumbaya.

Really hope we’re feeling the mojo soon, gotta finish this game before AI ravages the scene, gotta get back to work to distract ourselves from all the bullshit.

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