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The month of April has turned out to be a flashpoint for the isometric ARPG community. It’s packed with updates: Path of Exile 2, Last Epoch, Diablo 4, and No Rest for the Wicked all have big new shinies out this month, and while it’s natural to compare them, brawling over which is better obscures the bigger picture: This great genre now has tons of great games, each with its own particular merits.
Let’s start with Last Epoch, whose Tombs of the Erased update just dropped a few days ago. It’s got an overhaul to the Sentinel class, a new and very spidery faction, tons of new monsters, new endgame systems, and crucially for a lot of players, tons of buffs. Almost nothing got nerfed this time around, and it shows.
I’ve been blasting for a couple days here and there, and despite not having much time to grind I’m cruising through empowered monoliths and having a ball.
This puts it in the path of some very direct comparisons to Path of Exile 2, whose last update was only a couple weeks ago (Last Epoch delayed its launch to avoid overlapping).
PoE2 got tremendous nerfs in that update, and that combined with tough monsters and a perceived lack of loot left the community feeling… well, pretty pissed off. Some major content creators even chose to skip the patch entirely, and the reaction online was decidedly negative.
The two games are opposites in a lot of ways. Last Epoch is a breezy, zippy affair where you can reach the endgame in a couple hours, basically every ability you pick can delete whole screens of monsters, and loot fountains down from the heavens so much so that it’ll overwhelm you if you don’t set a good loot filter.
Path of Exile 2, on the other hand, is crunchy, challenging, and sparse. Every exalted orb that drops in the campaign is a cause for celebration because I can pop over to the trade site and buy a huge upgrade. Monsters overwhelm you, boss fights are tough, and items are thin on the ground. Complicated mechanics abound, not least of which is an entire parry system that the Huntress spear skills were built around, meaning that on release (they’ve since patched in another solution) you had to be a parry god to play the class well.
These two games almost couldn’t be more different and still be in the same genre, but they’re both fun. I had a great time with the Dawn of the Hunt update, and while Path of Exile 2 still needs a lot of simmering, I really like getting my hands dirty and having epic fights with the game’s bosses and slowly piecing together a powerful character.
I’ve also enjoyed running around Last Epoch’s empowered monoliths playing a Heartseeker Marksman firing flaming arrows around like a crazed Yondu.
And there’s more…
Don’t wanna play an ARPG that rotates every few months? Get off the live service hamster wheel and go play Grim Dawn. Another crunchy entry in the genre, it eschews the seasonal release schedule for a more old-school expansion approach and lets you play at your own pace.
Jody didn’t care for Last Epoch when he reviewed it last year, finding it a bit too floaty, and prefers Grim Dawn’s more tactile approach to bashing monsters. Nothing wrong with that!
Wanna turn the old brain off and just farm gear in the familiar, bloodsoaked lands of Sanctuary? Check out Diablo 4‘s new season, which has a developer livestream April 24 and a crossover with Berserk coming up.
I have a complicated relationship with Blizzard’s game—Diablo changed my life, Diablo 2 is still in my top 10 of all time, and I felt such an incredible betrayal with Diablo 3 that it soured me on the franchise, maybe for life. Diablo 4 isn’t for me, but a lot of people love it, and that’s outstanding.
The point here is that there really is something for everyone. Torchlight Infinite still exists, even if its season reveal video last week sounds like it was recorded in a grain silo. No Rest for the Wicked has a huge update coming at the end of the month, Titan Quest 2 doesn’t have a release date yet but looks gorgeous.
None of this is to say that we should just enjoy the breadth of ARPG options and stop giving feedback to developers. Particularly for games like Path of Exile 2 that release in early access, it’s important to make our voices known.
But the genre is thriving, and it’s good that its games offer different things and inspire passionate debate, so long as we save the real vitriol for when a recombinator bricks our bow or the Eternity Cache imprints t1 health regen.
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Kurt Indovina
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