LogFAQs > #962838922

kind9 posted...

I think you also have to put much more thought into your equipment. Traders, gamblers, and cube recipes become much more useful. You have to pay more attention to stats like hit rate, block rate, and resistances. In D2 in my experience playing this way requires a much more strategic approach to the game. If your goal is to reach Baal or Diablo in hell mode then it's pretty challenging.

That's mostly what I mean by promoting caution. It's not actually "hard" to grind for an extra hour for fire resistance gear before moving into a volcano zone so you don't get one-shotted. It counts as putting more planning into it, certainly, but that planning isn't particularly demanding, especially if you aren't going in fully blind and you therefore know when you need to upgrade your gear to reach whatever breakpoints are needed to survive the next zone.

wolfy42 posted...

Don't get me wrong, it's great, but it's free to play, and so much more could be done by a big company that builds a great engine, releases the full game and then releases DLC etc every 6 months or so.

Realistically, a bigger budget than PoE's (which isn't exactly low-budget to begin with; F2P games can be quite lucrative) wouldn't help an ARPG much. Improving on PoE would be a matter of making different design decisions, which aren't overly demanding as far as budget goes (and, in fact, are probably actively hampered by a larger budget because then you have executives meddling with the process to ensure that design promotes engagement and greater revenue over entertainment). Bigger budgets generally just translate into more and higher-fidelity art assets.