Would PoE benefit from a real in-game compendium?
What do you think about an updated in-game compendium?
I’ve played a lot of Chinese games, and many of them have strong in-game wiki or compendium systems. That got me thinking: what would people think about Path of Exile getting a much better in-game compendium?
For example, it could show all possible affixes for an item base at a given item level, similar to what sites like PoEDB already provide. It could also include an enemy compendium that tracks monsters you’ve encountered or killed, then gradually reveals data like abilities, damage types, and maybe even confirmed drops you personally got from them.
To avoid killing first-play surprise, everything could stay hidden until you discover it yourself. Item mods, monsters, and drop info would start fogged out, then unlock over time as you play.
My main point is that GGG already seems fine with players accessing a lot of this data through external tools and sites. Build import/export, Path of Building, and shared build links are already a core part of how many players use PoE.
Because of that, it might be better if more of this knowledge existed in-game instead of pushing players to external sites and datamined databases right away. That could preserve some discovery while still giving players the information they need.
Current in-game guides still feel pretty limited. With PoE already closely tied to tools like Path of Building and PoE2 moving further in that direction with build imports, I think there’s room for GGG to improve the in-game information layer a lot.
Would a system like this improve PoE, or would it reveal too much?