Path of Exile 2 is taking the old Temple of Atzoatl idea and basically rebuilding it from scratch, and you feel that shift the moment you see the new encounters and UI working together with systems like PoE 2 Currency. In the first game, you almost needed a second screen just to keep track of which room linked to what, and a single mistake could ruin a whole run. Now the combat and layout both push you to make quick, readable choices instead of memorising a flowchart. You see an altar, you tap it, and suddenly those golems are wrapped in flames, swinging harder and throwing out bigger explosions, but you know you are doing it for extra loot and better scaling rewards, not just out of habit.

Clearer Choices In Combat

You are not just running through corridors on autopilot anymore. Every encounter in the footage looks like it is asking, "How greedy are you feeling right now" rather than hiding the stakes. Powering up enemies is a button press, not a hidden lever. If you want a chill run, you skip the device and move on. If you are chasing drops, you flip everything on and watch the room go wild. It feels a lot more like managing risk in a roguelike dungeon than grinding a bland map. You are not guessing what a mechanic does; you see the danger instantly on screen, so when you get one-shot, you know it is because you pushed it too far, not because the game kept some crucial info off the UI.

Temple Layout That Explains Itself

The biggest shift, though, is how the temple finally tells you what is going on. The old Incursion system basically expected you to remember the whole tech tree of rooms or alt-tab to a wiki. In PoE 2, when you click on a room console, the layout highlights the connections and shows clean arrows to the chambers that will upgrade. You choose to turn a Guardhouse into a Barracks, and the tooltip flat out says it will add "15% increased number of Monster Packs," then you see exactly which spots benefit from that upgrade. No more guessing, no weird hidden rules. You spend time thinking about where you want harder fights and better drops, not about whether you misremembered a diagram from Reddit.

A Growing Temple Instead Of A Disposable One

Another thing you notice pretty fast is how the temple is no longer a one-and-done side activity. In the first game, you finished a temple and it vanished, so every layout felt disposable. Now some rooms destabilise after a run, sure, but you also get to add six new ones each time you come back. The map literally zooms out in the preview footage to show how big this place can get, stretching way past that old fixed grid. It feels more like you are tending a long-term project, slowly shaping a huge labyrinth full of high-tier rewards, rather than just clearing another random instance you will never see again.

Lore, Atmosphere And Player Motivation

All of this lands harder because the story side is pulling its weight too. You are not just farming for gold-coloured numbers; Doryani is right there, pushing you to take on runs in Leraval and making the time experiments feel dangerous instead of abstract. The cracked stone frame of the portal, the unstable blue glow, the sense that the whole thing could blow up in your face at any moment, it all fits with the idea of messing with old Vaal tech that probably should have stayed buried. When you are managing a huge temple, tuning its rooms and chasing better drops, it is nice if the meta layer makes sense as part of the world, the same way players sometimes look outside the game for help or even grab currency and items through sites like U4GM, where the whole loop is about supporting that long-term progression itch.