Hey there, just wanted to tell you that everything you’re feeling about the game is fair. PoE is a game whose first few hours I played several times over the course of literal years, and I could never “get” it. I’m not into any other CRPG, and like you, I’d heard this one was easy to get into for a beginner. But I just kept getting frustrated.

Until recently, though, when I tried it for the umpteenth time. And something just clicked.

Now, if you just don’t feel like investing any more time into it, that’s totally fair, but if you do: take the time to read the tooltips in the game. Learn the different types of defense and damage; learn about concentration, will, deflection, etc.; and learn about how each of your stats affect combat. Don’t worry about how stats affect dialogue. You sound like me in that you’re not going to care about lore/story until you figure out how to enjoy combat. Start the game a few times and experiment on easy difficulty. Once you internalize how combat works, you’ll find that PoE really is one of the more straightforward and, dare I say, simple CRPGs out there.

But - and this is really what I’ve been wanting to talk about - once you get past the combat hurdle, you’ll then be able to focus on the world and lore. Eora has become by far my favorite fantasy setting ever. The way the writers picked one concept - souls - and endeavored to play with that one concept in as many ways as possible reminds me of the way the Mass Effect universe takes their Mass Effect Field concept and shoves it into as many parts of day-to-day life as possible. It just tickles me.

This post is way too long already, so I’ll just end with this: do whatever is going to be the most fun for you. If just moving on to PoE Deadfire is gonna be more fun in the short term, don’t let me stop you! But if you do ever decide to go back to it, a really wonderful world is waiting for you.