Yes, well.
The first thing to note is that you don't design a character, you just choose one of the half-dozen or so archetypes available. The second thing to note is that most of your time is spent alone in instances; only at the hubs will you see other players, although the chat window is usually buzzing with people talking about elder-game stuff. POE is meant to be an MMORPG, but it's perilously close to being a non-MM ORPG.
The game uses an isometric viewpoint with point-and-click movement and combat. This means that if you're fighting something, you have to be facing it. That's not very easy to do for one-on-one combat, but most of the time you're facing hordes of please-kill-me mobs running at you in AOE-friendly clumps. Occasionally, though, there are mini-boss mobs in those clumps, and some of these are harder to dispose of than any number of regular mobs. In part, that's because you might not be able to line them up with your attack very well, but mainly it's because of the resistances system.
Ah, resistances. Damage is classified as being of a particular kind (physical, electrical, fire, cold, poison, whatever), and if your target is resistant to your primary damage type then you're in for a long fight. If you're not resistant to your target's primary damage type, you're in for a short, losing fight. You can lower your target's resistance with a spell, but that means you need to target them, which (as I said) is difficult for a single opponent, especially when it's surrounded by a bunch of other mobs so it's hard to spot. You can increase your own resistance with a potion, but that's rather contingent on knowing what kind of damage is coming your way.
Early on, I noticed that there was no penalty for dying. You could come right back and continue a fight from where you left off, except you're now on full health and your opponent is on whatever lowered health you inflicted on it. I therefore built a glass cannon character: I could one-shot scores of mobs and most mini-bosses; the mini-bosses I couldn't one-shot would one-shot me, but I could return multiple times to finish them off.
I didn't notice for some time that this situation did not prevail for the whole game. At some point, being killed in a fight cost XP — something like 10% of the points needed to go up a level. You never go down a level, so for the major boss fights against (in my case, fire-) resistant mobs I found it best to tackle them after I'd just levelled up. Gawd knows how much XP I lost before I noticed the change in death penalty, though.
The problem was compounded in that I was often unsure as to what had killed me. Sometimes, I'd catch a glimpse of a mini-boss and I'd be dead before I knew anything about it beyond the fact it existed. Other times (and this was very annoying) I'd kill a mob but it would have some kind of death throe that would also kill me if I didn't move out of the way quick enough, which wasn't always possible when there were swarms of trash mobs clumping around me like white blood cells on an infection.
The instance maps are usually huge, with some degree of randomness to them. As with all maps in MMOs, the route from start to finish is rarely simple. Here's an example of a map I happened to screenshot (overlaying the instance I was in):
The game has crafting of a kind. You find items of different quality, and use orbs to change their properties and slots. The slots house gems to upgrade (and to some extent define) what the item can do; these can support each other, so creating an item with the maximum number of slots that hold the colours of gems you want in the linked configuration you want is central to crafting. The effects of orbs are random, though, so customising items can use up hundreds of orbs.
Orbs are the currency that players use when trading among themselves. I didn't trade anything myself, though, because there was no explanation as to how to do it. I think you need to pay money for an extra bag tab that you share with other players or something, I'd have to look it up to be sure, but that sounds as if it would involve effort. POE is not in general very good at explaining any of its mechanics. When I started, for example, I was given a choice of which league to use: standard, keepers or hardcore keepers? I didn't even know what a league was, let alone what the difference between the three types were, and there was nothing to tell me, either. It seemed to recommend keepers, in that this is the one it highlighted, so that's what I went with.
The game seems to have a vibrant community, but it's all at the end. I barely saw any other players at all, and there were no guild invites in the chat box that I noticed. I could have hung around for the elder game, but having played through the main story quest considered that this was punishment enough. The elder game is based around running instances of maps that you've found, and you only get six attempts per map. I was usually one-shotted six times from different mobs when I tried it, although I did manage to complete some. If I'd done enough, I might have got a nice, unique-object reward that I could actually use. The story continues as an epilogue if you manage to get up to maps of a certain higher level, but I wasn't so desperate to find it out that Iwas willing to grind my way through to it.
There's another aspect to the elder game that's to do with managing NPCs to reconstruct a city. This is a completely different kind of game to the levelling one, but the players seem to be OK with it. I made a faint start to it, but only as a test to see what it involved; I didn't pursue it in any kind of depth.
There were other forms of content that were more combat-oriented, which felt as if they had once been the elder game for earlier expansions. There was a menagerie of mobs you'd captured and could kill for rewards (they invariably killed me); a mining system in which you collect ore that can be spent on something or other, I never got enough to find out; a heist system, in which you have to fight through a long and winding instance, pick up a McGuffin, then fight your way back out through five times as many mobs as you met on the way in (I only succeeded once); an artefact-collection system that opens up a lot of content if you succeeded in using the first artefact provided (I didn't); a tree that gives a lot of goodies if you collect stuff, which I did actually manage to do quite often (although I never did find out how to extend the tree's branches). The tree also provided some kind of sentient arms that grow out of your back; I had lots to choose from at the end, but can't say I noticed any difference when I used any of them, I either one-shotted or was one-shotted regardless.
I realise I've been somewhat negative in my comments here, but the game did have plenty of good points. I particularly liked my troop of zombies, which acted to keep mobs at bay while I relentlessly lobbed fireballs at them. Overall, it was quite fun, if somewhat repetitive.
The skill tree was quite nice, too, although in classic POE style the usefulness or otherwise of the options available weren't explained. I made good choices for causing crazy levels of AOE fire damage using wands, but given that 95% of my spell usage was fireball spam I probably would have been better using a staff than dual-wielding wands.
Anyway, after 94 hours I'm done with it and have now uninstalled it.
Next up, I think I'll go back to The Elder Scrolls Online to see how much it's changed since I last played in 2019.
Also, I want to keep my left-hand's fingers on WASD for movement, not 123 for potions.