Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

The Skill Map

V_K

Arcane
Joined
Nov 3, 2013
Messages
7,714
Location
at a Nowhere near you
You could have broadly different approaches and still want to optimize play within those categories. There's nothing preventing the nodes from affecting different aspects of stealth, diplomacy, crafting, ect. PoE just doesn't entertain those approaches and so doesn't have nodes for them.
The question is not whether there could be nodes for that or not (although they probably wouldn't be very exciting, like "-5% noise when walking on wooden surface"), but whether a traditional CRPG with multiple approaches could have enough content to support such granularity of character builds. In ARPGs all you do is kills things, and there are tons of things to kill, which highlights minute differences in how you go about it. On the other hand, I just don't see a traditional CRPG having enough sneaking scenarios to make e.g. "high noise, low visibility" and "low noise, high visibility" stealth builds to be equally viable and at the same time play differently enough to warrant such distinction - at least not when the game has to accomodate for combat and diplomatic scenarios as well. When you have a choice between broadly different approaches, fine granularity becomes both unnecessary and unfeasible.
 

Hyperion

Arcane
Joined
Jul 2, 2016
Messages
2,120
Only thing similar I know of is Final Fantasy X, which had expert mode for its spherogrid. Every character had a specific starting position, but you were free in the choice of direction pretty early in the game.

Funny you mention that. The original closed beta skill tree was actually the EXACT same shape as the Sphere Grid in FFX. The devs claimed it was purely incidental though....

PoE has unfortunately been in a bit of a downward spiral for the past year or so. Their recent success has gone to their heads and they're moving away from the Diablo 2 spiritual successor they always wanted to be, to competing with Diablo 3 and trying to get as many as casual and new players as possible. Their solution for this has been to "speed up" gameplay, translated as make AoE better and better while anything focusing on single target DPS is worthless. Fragile, high speed, massive ranged AoE, screenclearing epilepsy simulators shouldn't be the only or even ideal way to play a game. There should be a sizable risk to that style of play, but right now it isn't there because your average player doesn't like dying and losing XP progression. It does put dinner on the table, though.

After 4 years of PoE, Grim Dawn is the top dog of loot simulator, hack 'n' slash ARPG's right now because of its active modding community imo.
 
Last edited:

*-*/\--/\~

Cipher
Joined
Jul 10, 2014
Messages
909
I just opened the chart, realized I'd need an extra lifetime to level through all that and and closed it again. Probably getting too old for this....
 

Alex

Arcane
Joined
Jun 14, 2007
Messages
8,750
Location
São Paulo - Brasil
Helton, I get you find this system interesting, but... It makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense what these jewels are even supposed to represent. When you have a traditional skill tree, I can understand that some skills are more complicated and require you to apply effort in a simpler one. But this system here just makes no sense whatsoever. It can be fun to play for a while, a bit like a JRPG, but making this the central mechanic of a bonafide RPG would make the resulting game much less interesting and relatable, I think.

I think it is really important for an RPG to be careful with its abstractions. There will be abstractions, of course, but they shouldn't be such that it makes in-game choices completely unrelated to the imaginative element. If you do that, what you are doing in the game stops making sense and becomes a completely abstract action.
 

Mastermind

Cognito Elite Material
Patron
Bethestard
Joined
Apr 15, 2010
Messages
21,144
Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I don't like the skill system in POE. I think it's complicated in a bad way, especially for a diablo clone. I also hate the skill gems shit, it's plain stupid. I appreciate the fact that they tried something new but I don't want to play a mini-game to manage my skills. That said, the actual gameplay of POE is a lot of fun and it doesn't hurt to try something new so if you haven't played the game and liked D2 you should give it a try.
 

Sykar

Arcane
Joined
Dec 2, 2014
Messages
11,297
Location
Turn right after Alpha Centauri
I still do not get why people like PoE skill tree so much. It's an overbloated mess of which about 90% of the nodes add nothing in terms of gameplay just some more damage/survivability. Some of the keystones do change gameplay noticably but that is it. You could easily cut that tree by roughly 80% and nothing of value would be lost.
Another problem PoE suffers is from what I call automatism. If you check out YT videos of the best and most successfull builds you will notice that often you have 1 damage ability in a six socket item and the rest goes into auras or passively activated stuff like Codt for suvivability so the whole game deterioates into a 1 or 2 button masher literally which at least for me is exceedingly boring to watch or play.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
Joined
Feb 17, 2009
Messages
13,999
Location
Platypus Planet
I just opened the chart, realized I'd need an extra lifetime to level through all that and and closed it again. Probably getting too old for this....
You're not supposed to or even able to grind out the whole grid. You usually find a couple of special nodes you want for your build and then you plan the optimal stat path that leads to those special nodes.
 

J1M

Arcane
Joined
May 14, 2008
Messages
14,616
I commend PoE for going all the way with its skill graph approach. I haven't played the game, but it is nice to see a developer exploring an idea to its fullest.

FFXII "international zodiac job system" is a good example of a sprawling skill graph used incorrectly. In an attempt to address criticism of the initial release, they made things worse. Players are forced into an early choice that determines what can be unlocked. (But don't worry, you are protected from creating 6 characters who are mediocre at everything!)
 
Joined
Jul 18, 2016
Messages
78
I tried PoE and after 5seconds of gameplay I remembered I fucking hate action rpgs so I stopped playing.

I think the skillmap can be a nice way to visualize how different skills lead to different things. In most games which just offer a list of skills if there are some prequisites they are just mentioned in text. So if you want to learn some skill y you know you need skill x too because it says so in skill y description. But if you look at skill x description you don't really know what is it for until you read skill y description. And more importantly you don't know how useful skill x is until later. Which can mean you do something which is really bad for your character. Like putting too many skillpoints into something where you just need the minimum to unlock something else. Or do something like train ranged combat for mage in shadowrun. I did not make that mistake but it is not mentioned anywhere whether that skill is useful for mage for long rage spells (it isn't).

I also like how you can start from one place in the skill map and from the first moment onwards you can already imagine what kind of plan you want to try to achieve. Similarly it allows game devs to make it really hard to create certain type of overpowered combos that could be really hard to avoid in system where you just list all skills. For example a dodge skill is for physical combat and firebolt is is magical skill and telepathy is uhm... mind skill. So in list based system it is easy to create a mage that is hard to hit, hits hard and can use persuasion to get out of situations. In map based system getting dodge and telepathy for mage is costly.

On the flipside there is of course the danger of reducing the possible options for the players to choose. But personally I think map based system allows devs to add a lot more stuff because they can also control better how different things can be combined. Characters who are really good at many completely different things are expensive skill points wise. Not only are you spending skill points to get some skills higher but you also need to spend more skillpoints just to open those skill for training.

That being said you can of course just add tons of prequisites to a list based system but it would be hard to keep track of and it would take lots of work to figure out what is it that you really need to be able to shoot two handed rifles or fart poison.

I still do not get why people like PoE skill tree so much. It's an overbloated mess of which about 90% of the nodes add nothing in terms of gameplay just some more damage/survivability. Some of the keystones do change gameplay noticably but that is it. You could easily cut that tree by roughly 80% and nothing of value would be lost.
Another problem PoE suffers is from what I call automatism. If you check out YT videos of the best and most successfull builds you will notice that often you have 1 damage ability in a six socket item and the rest goes into auras or passively activated stuff like Codt for suvivability so the whole game deterioates into a 1 or 2 button masher literally which at least for me is exceedingly boring to watch or play.
I think those are very much PoE specific issues that are not really result of the way skill points are consumed in map based system.
 

Hyperion

Arcane
Joined
Jul 2, 2016
Messages
2,120
I don't like the skill system in POE. I think it's complicated in a bad way, especially for a diablo clone. I also hate the skill gems shit, it's plain stupid. I appreciate the fact that they tried something new but I don't want to play a mini-game to manage my skills. That said, the actual gameplay of POE is a lot of fun and it doesn't hurt to try something new so if you haven't played the game and liked D2 you should give it a try.

It started out very good, but unfortunately has devolved into most things being very samey, particularly if you're melee.

If you're melee your main attack is guaranteed to share 4 of the same 6 gems for every skill worth using every time simply because there aren't many support gems for melee. And those that do exist are the generic damage multipliers everyone needs, or pure shit / too situational, like Knockback. You can quite easily theorycraft a generic melee tree in under 5 minutes using Marauder that will work really well for 90% of builds. Just need to pick a weapon style and type.

Everyone throws out the, "Oh, you can build Marauder and go pure caster!" In most cases, no you can't, because it'll generally suck compared to a Witch doing a comparable build. And an Iron Will caster doesn't count since it obviously revolves around Strength. Every now and then you'll come across a genuinely creative build that makes full use of the skill tree, but it's far from the norm, usually gimmicky as Hell, and is rendered useless the next time they update the tree.

FFXII "international zodiac job system" is a good example of a sprawling skill graph used incorrectly. In an attempt to address criticism of the initial release, they made things worse. Players are forced into an early choice that determines what can be unlocked. (But don't worry, you are protected from creating 6 characters who are mediocre at everything!)

First time I've heard a complaint about the permanency of your choices on this website. Interesting.
 

adrix89

Arbiter
Joined
Dec 27, 2014
Messages
700
Location
Why are there so many of my country here?
Helton, I get you find this system interesting, but... It makes no sense. It makes absolutely no sense what these jewels are even supposed to represent. When you have a traditional skill tree, I can understand that some skills are more complicated and require you to apply effort in a simpler one. But this system here just makes no sense whatsoever. It can be fun to play for a while, a bit like a JRPG, but making this the central mechanic of a bonafide RPG would make the resulting game much less interesting and relatable, I think.

I think it is really important for an RPG to be careful with its abstractions. There will be abstractions, of course, but they shouldn't be such that it makes in-game choices completely unrelated to the imaginative element. If you do that, what you are doing in the game stops making sense and becomes a completely abstract action.
RPG skills didn't make much sense from the start. This system is just the logical conclusion from all the Mini-Max faggots. It's only purpose is to create "Builds" and that is what you get.
The fact that you can have a variety of builds that are viable is a miracle in itself.
For everyone that considers investing a bunch of points into skills as "gameplay" this is its highest form.

I for one have no sympathy for skills and attributes in any form. To me they are a crutch that stopped the development of more intricate systems that are tied more to player agency.
 

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom