When comparing Path of Exile vs Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition, the Slant community recommends Path of Exile for most people. In the question“What are the best RPG games on Steam?” Path of Exile is ranked 11th while Dark Souls: Prepare To Die Edition is ranked 69th. The most important reason people chose Path of Exile is:
There's a staggering amount of builds and skills you can try out in Path of Exile. There are 7 classes, 19 subclasses, 194 active skill gems, 107 support gems, and over 1000 skill nodes on the expansive skill tree. As a result, there are hundreds of possible combinations, allowing you to spend hours theory-crafting just to create the perfect build. Even if you don't feel like planning out a build from scratch, you can just look up one of the many guides online and get straight into the action.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Hundreds of possible character builds
There's a staggering amount of builds and skills you can try out in Path of Exile. There are 7 classes, 19 subclasses, 194 active skill gems, 107 support gems, and over 1000 skill nodes on the expansive skill tree. As a result, there are hundreds of possible combinations, allowing you to spend hours theory-crafting just to create the perfect build. Even if you don't feel like planning out a build from scratch, you can just look up one of the many guides online and get straight into the action.
Pro Completely free without pay to win mechanics
You can just download and install the game without any purchases. On top of that, there are no pay-to-win mechanics and the only things locked behind paywalls are cosmetic effects, pets, and additional storage space. You can easily play the game for hundreds of hours without spending a dime.
Pro Regularly updated
Every 4 months or so, Path of Exile has major updates, adding new interesting mechanics, skills, items, and various other content. As a result, every time you come back to Path of Exile after taking a break, it feels like a new game.
Pro Great setting
Path of Exile is set in a dark fantasy world where everything is gradually becoming worse. At the foreground, you have the massive continent of Wraeclast that once was the home to a flourishing empire, but now is a place filled with the undead, evil spirits, ruins, and echoes of the past. To make matters worse, malicious entities from another dimension seek to corrupt the world and its inhabitants, giving birth to disfigured monstrosities that seek to end you. The end result is an immersive setting with dark motifs, body horror, loads of gore, and a very tense atmosphere, which is refreshing in an era dominated by family friendly content.
Pro Feels exhilarating to play
While the gameplay might feel a little slow and clunky in the beginning, it gradually picks up speed as you progress, allowing you to swiftly destroy large groups of monsters with any skills you choose. Whether you're shooting ice arrows with your bow, freezing and shattering every enemy on-screen, or if you're cleaving enemies with a massive axe, causing them to bleed and explode on death, it just feels incredibly satisfying.
Pro Greet Developer
Grinding Gear Games provide a lot of communication and community interaction
Pro Brutally challenging real-time combat that rewards patience
Dark Souls is a hard game at its core because of the combat. It's "difficult but fair", as in, the enemies are relentless and hit like a truck, but they're not overpowered or cheap to defeat. If you take your time to trade blows, dodge, and parry as needed, you can get through.
Making your way slowly through new levels and taking on enemies one at a time, whenever possible, is the best approach. Unless you're a seasoned veteran, if you're try to bum rush your foes, you may find yourself getting quickly destroyed. It seems impossible at first, but if you keep at it and learn from your mistakes, you'll surprise yourself with how far you can get in this game.
Pro Gives you a great sense of discovery from exploring
There's an unrivaled sense of exploration you get just from traversing normally through the game's medieval fantasy world. Simply going from one area to the next is astounding, because you get to see exactly how far you've come. After travelling a distance and defeating challenging enemies, you can find a shortcut that takes you down to a previously-visited location, for example, showing you that all of the levels are interconnected in a labyrinthine-like way. Thanks to this well-implemented level design, the world feels like a grand place that's full of mystery and adventure.
Pro Epic and meaningful boss battles
Bosses in Dark Souls are huge, terrifying, and intriguing in ways that don't feel forced at all. They have stories to tell without words, showing their lore and history through awe-inspiring designs and setpieces. Seeing a tower off in the distance, getting there many hours later, and finding a gigantic boss there also builds up the sense of anticipation once you arrive to the fight. Ranging from dragons, hulking armored knights, mythological beasts, and tons more, the variety of boss types are creative, with their own unique movesets for you to learn. Alongside the combat, the bosses make the game what it is.
Pro Incredible soundtrack and atmosphere
The music in this game is astounding because of how well it fits any given situation. Moments where the music stands out most is during boss battles, with sweeping, booming choruses where it works, and quieter pieces where you may not expect them. The warm but sorrowful wind instruments you hear at the main home base area is your cue that you're in a safe location after all of your grueling battles, letting you take a moment to reflect and unwind.
Most playable areas have no music, letting you focus on the atmosphere from all of the little sound effects from enemies' footsteps and your own clanking armor as you go along. So whenever a song does start playing, it stands out more than it would have otherwise. Overall, the music definitely helps to give you long-lasting emotional memories of everything you experience.
Pro Extensive lore that's presented in unconventional ways
There's tons of lore everywhere for you to discover, but it isn't necessarily told through a conventional story.
Weapons, armor, spells, and items you acquire have descriptions on them that tell you where in the game world they came from, any prominent characters they're associated with, and a bunch of other relevant and interesting information. So when you find examples of the lore scattered around the game, like bosses wearing a style of armor you read about, or an obscure NPC mentioned in a sword's description, you know the history behind the design and their purpose without that boss or character needing to explain anything to you.
Even though the actual story in Dark Souls is very thin, there's a lot to find under the surface if you're willing to look for it.
Pro You can bring a friend along for online co-op
It's possible to play through most of the game with a friend. If you need help with a boss or if you just want to run things with another person, there's an online setup for the other player to join your world. They will return to their world once you defeat a boss or if you die, but it's possible to invite them back afterward.
Cons
Con Anti-experimentation for new players
The game heavily punishes any experimentation for new players. Unless you have near perfect understanding of late game and the various viable build-options you are more or less unable to experiment your way into viable builds (and the options for correcting mistakes are limited at best). So, unless you are fine with having to scrap a bunch of characters for being sub-optimal, you are more or less forced into following player-made guides to learn the game rather than through engaging with the game itself. This may or may not be a problem for you.
Con Very high learning curve
There's quite a lot to learn when starting to play Path of Exile. There are the mechanics, the crafting system, and the skill gem system. However, the most intimidating factor is the massive skill tree with over 1000 skill nodes, 6 classes and 19 subclasses, allowing you to create hundreds of unique builds. Unfortunately, creating a functional build is really difficult, taking hours of theorycrafting, so it might be better to stick to guides as you're starting out, unless you're fine with possibly messing up.
Con Endgame can get really repetitive
It takes an exceptionally long time to get any wealth, useful items, or access to endgame bosses in this game. You endlessly farm the same maps, hoping you'll get lucky with a few good items, but that usually won't be the case, which can be really discouraging to keep playing. This is made worse by the fact that your character progression comes to a grinding halt near the upper 80s of character levels, requiring you to buy insanely expensive items to feel any progression at all. If you don't like grinding, you'll get quickly bored of Path of Exile.
Con Clunky trading system
The western PC version of Path of Exile currently requires using an external site to find deals or sifting through scam attempts in the trade chat. After you find an item you want to buy, you need to message the seller, and if they respond, enter the same area as them to make a direct trade. There is no auction house, no mail, no automated trading posts, and to sell stuff you have to buy a premium stash tab via a microtransaction.
Con One shot fest
This game has an extreme learning curve, meaning you'll invest 100 hours of just reading on the internet before understanding the basic game, plus the endgame is a one dimensional "spam all flasks and one shot everything or get one shot" style of gameplay.
Con Unrewarding
You fight 40 minutes with "uber uber boss" and he drops white items that can be found anywhere in barrels most of the time
whats worse, you have to "farm" "fragments" to start that boss battle, that will take a while too, if you decide to buy the fragments, you will drop nothing and you will lose a lot of currency.
Con Some aspects of the graphics look dated
While the graphics have received updates over time, a lot of the visuals still lack polish you'd see in most AAA games. Some textures are fairly low res, certain character models look weird when they have armor on, and the animations feel somewhat stiff and clunky. You probably won't notice this during active gameplay, but when you stop for a moment to look around it becomes painfully obvious.
Con Unforgiving and discouraging learning curve
Even though Dark Souls is technically fair, it's still really hard to get into. From the start, there's a minimal tutorial where you read messages scattered around the area for tips on the controls, and then you're forced into an immediate challenge that you have to figure your way out of. The game is clever in the way it pushes you into seemingly impossible situations and makes you think on your feet, but gamers who are new to the genre will more than likely find a serious culture shock here. Because the learning curve is so incredibly steep, you may struggle for a while before things finally click.
Con Certain mechanics leave new players open to unfair PvP invasions
There are a few ways you might find yourself invaded by another player even when you don't want to be. The method for inviting co-op players into your world also leaves you open to PvP invasions, which you can't turn off. The other one involves how you can only carry five healing items with you at the start; there's a way to increase this to ten, but by doing this, it becomes possible for PvP-minded players to enter your world to challenge you to battle whether you like it or not. There's also an area a couple of hours into the game that's notorious for high-level players seeking out oblivious newbies to tear them apart, so beware.
Con Significant performance issues
You may experience some frame dips here and there as you play, but it's pretty bad in one particular level called Blighttown. The frame drops are really awful there to the point where things are practically unplayable. There's a mod on PC that can take care of this issue, but players on consoles sadly have to deal with the mess.