The original mechanics aren't much of a standout in terms of interesting complexity. Warrior was just click and wait like watching paint dry. Mage was pretty fun due to good spell variety. Hybrid just didn't work with the skill and stat cap. Almost all skill benefits were linear so of the 700 skill points you had, you almost always wanted a 7x100 maxed skills. Most of the early UO autism manifested in reverse engineering the skill gain code to AFK grind faster, straddling the line between server chunks to double your per hour gain soft cap and exploiting how the RNG for skill gain seemed to use player location as part of the seed and walking in straight in a cardinal direction until you got a "streak". Some of the very early days were spent figuring out which skills added auxillary benefits too I guess. E.g lumberjacking increasing your melee axe damage.
Later updates changed things completely to add a bunch of limit breakers on skill and stat caps and be much more item based with D2-like item properties, and a bunch of complicated hybrid active skills introduced. But I'd fallen off by then so can't really vouch if they were good or balanced. The item grind and the grind for stat cap breakers was just way too much.
Heh, path of exile is pretty old now, but that's definitely been the butt of the PhD joke many a time. You might be thinking of Last Epoch that released this year that is sometimes called PoE lite.
The thing that makes PoE so difficult to get into is how disjointed it is, it's obvious that it is built up from many seasons of unplanned expansions. You get layers and layers of inter connected systems introduced as you progress through the game. But you have no idea what will be coming layer without looking up outside resources, even though it can drastically affect the build choices you might make in the earlier systems. And the currency is an absolute mess, it's all barter with no gold, only different crafting materials that you get in exchange for selling items in specific sometimes quite complex patterns. Again with no in-game info on what combinations sell for what, you've gotta go look up a wiki or have an obsessive autist's memory.
So yeah, it gets complicated, but it's largely from a lack of user friendly implementation and only about half of it is to the benefit of viable build variety.
The best way to play Path of Exile is to look up character builds that let you ignore as many resource cost and other negative mechanics as possible so you can focus on the 500 APM it takes to not get killed in one hit by basic white monsters.
In response to your Ultima Online musing.
The original mechanics aren't much of a standout in terms of interesting complexity. Warrior was just click and wait like watching paint dry. Mage was pretty fun due to good spell variety. Hybrid just didn't work with the skill and stat cap. Almost all skill benefits were linear so of the 700 skill points you had, you almost always wanted a 7x100 maxed skills. Most of the early UO autism manifested in reverse engineering the skill gain code to AFK grind faster, straddling the line between server chunks to double your per hour gain soft cap and exploiting how the RNG for skill gain seemed to use player location as part of the seed and walking in straight in a cardinal direction until you got a "streak". Some of the very early days were spent figuring out which skills added auxillary benefits too I guess. E.g lumberjacking increasing your melee axe damage.
Later updates changed things completely to add a bunch of limit breakers on skill and stat caps and be much more item based with D2-like item properties, and a bunch of complicated hybrid active skills introduced. But I'd fallen off by then so can't really vouch if they were good or balanced. The item grind and the grind for stat cap breakers was just way too much.
Heh, path of exile is pretty old now, but that's definitely been the butt of the PhD joke many a time. You might be thinking of Last Epoch that released this year that is sometimes called PoE lite.
The thing that makes PoE so difficult to get into is how disjointed it is, it's obvious that it is built up from many seasons of unplanned expansions. You get layers and layers of inter connected systems introduced as you progress through the game. But you have no idea what will be coming layer without looking up outside resources, even though it can drastically affect the build choices you might make in the earlier systems. And the currency is an absolute mess, it's all barter with no gold, only different crafting materials that you get in exchange for selling items in specific sometimes quite complex patterns. Again with no in-game info on what combinations sell for what, you've gotta go look up a wiki or have an obsessive autist's memory.
So yeah, it gets complicated, but it's largely from a lack of user friendly implementation and only about half of it is to the benefit of viable build variety.
The best way to play Path of Exile is to look up character builds that let you ignore as many resource cost and other negative mechanics as possible so you can focus on the 500 APM it takes to not get killed in one hit by basic white monsters.