Greatest arpg of all time. Runs better than PoE1 lmao. (No, for real, it's waaaaaay better optimized)
It needs balancing for sure but the core is pretty good, with some balancing tweaks it's gonna be incredible.
Mild criticism that the article doesn't seem to mention, probably because they are not a PoE1 player: the endgame is pretty fucking boring. Not because it lacks content, but because decoupling the entrance key (waystone/map) from the zone/layout doesn't really make it "infinite" as they say. If you think about it, on PoE1 you also have an infinite endgame since each map has a fixed tileset and in both poe1 and poe2 you search for zones with good layouts. All this map of tilesets does is force you to do undesirable layouts and since you only need A tier X map, map sustain becomes trivial.
The endgame quests really need some thinking, it's not okay that the core gameplay loop incentivizes you to clear zones around tower heavy areas to optimize your use of empowering tablets, but the endgame quests incentivise you to ignore all that empowered content and to run in a single direction, to find the special endgame zones. I do like to put some tablets and clear all boss maps that were boosted in an area, but it feels bad to do when you have those quests objectives telling you to find the fortresses.
I totally get that it's EA and they created the endgame in a single month just for the EA, but this needs to be said so that when they start refining it there's a history of feedback around the mechanics.
In any case, I have very good hopes that the endgame will be excellent on release with the amount of feedback they are receiving, and as long as they keep increasing the customization of the map generation, the amount of extra content and the amount of layouts (don't worry, they will), it's gonna easily beat PoE1.