Path of Exile 2 to Overshadow Prequel With Quality and Content - Interview

Diablo 4 may have stolen our attention only just for a moment – a new candidate for the best hack'n'slash on the market is looming on the horizon. Path of Exile 2 doesn’t have a release date yet, but it already ignites our imagination. Grinding Gear Games invited us to a show of the successful sequel to this Diablo's competitor. We have also persuaded them to have quite a long chat about the game.

Everything indicates that PoE2 will continue the established and cherished solutions from the first game. This doesn’t mean that there will be a lack of new features – we talked with Creative Director Jonathan Rogers and CEO and co-founder Chris Wilson about the development of Path of Exile 2, the plans and new features it will have. The interview was held just before the start of Grinding Gear Games' event, Exilecon, dedicated to Path of Exile 2.

Gamepressure: I’ve got to say that I’ve been playing your game fanatically for the last ten years, so forgive me for being a little nervous right now. What we saw told us a lot about Path of Exile 2, but the game still seems a long way off. Over the past few years, we've gotten used to getting a new league every 13 weeks. Crucible, however, has introduced a cycle of 19 weeks. Is this change something we should get used to, or is it caused by the chaos associated with the Exilecon organization? I also have a question, is the 3.22 expansion the last big upgrade before the sequel arrives?

Chris Wilson: We like our 13 week duration. It had a lot of good things for us, and yes, the reason for this quite a long time is the Exilecon.

When we looked at the calendar for the release date of Diablo 4 as well as the start of Exilecon, we had to decide on a 19–week period so that the next league could be released at a convenient time. We wanted to promote it at our event and avoid coincidentally colliding with the Diablo 4 launch.

And so we picked 19 weeks here, but still, our intention is 13 weeks going forward. Now we will assess what else is being released around those times. We'll shift the release if we have to and so on. In terms of the sizes, 3.22 is actually quite a big one. No one's asked this question today so I’m happy to talk about – it has a lot of stuff, a large challenge league. Basically it’s themed around a sport. It’s a bit more like football, and you’ll definitely enjoy that one.

We also made quite a few changes to the gameplay. We have rebalanced two more Ascendancy classes there are 14 new support gems, 16 new Atlas Keystone Passives. These will affect the final phase of the game and many other things. The league itself has 14 new unique items, so it's quite a massive upgrade to Path of Exile. We will share more information on Exilecon.

Do you expect that there will be persistent players who will refuse to switch from the PoE to the sequel? Have you discussed internally what types of players this might be and how to convince them?

Chris Wilson: We will have many players who are very tempted by Path of Exile 2. The amount of content and its quality trump Path of Exile 1. However, even if someone finds something he doesn't like about a sequel and decides to stick with the first one, we will tempt him and he will be able to play both games. The release schedule means Path of Exile 2 leagues will generally be longer compared to PoE 1 because there's so much more to do.

It will be around eight – nine weeks for a Path of Exile 2 to cycle before the PoE 1 league comes out. Some players at that point will switch over to PoE 1 with one of the four or five weeks before the next PoE 2 expansion. And because the microtransactions are shared, you can continue playing whichever you want – your purchases still matter. You buy the new supporter pack, and use it in both games.

Jonathan Rogers: I think there will still be things in PoE that PoE 2 won't have. It's a different experience, a completely different, insane speed of character development. But I hope that people will like PoE 2 more, because that's the game I'm working on. However, it's obvious that some people prefer one and some prefer the other.

In 2019, during the first Exilecon you mentioned that the way you plan to make the game even more replayable is to introduce seeds that are to be given to your character. You've said that the campaign will change to align with your character seed. Is that still a thing, or you working on increasing replayability in a different way?

Jonathan Rogers: Yes, I remember! We actually modified this slightly. Previously, there was a unique character seed for each character and the layout of the world was different for each character. And what we've changed it now for various reasons, that became rather annoying with regard to party play zone for that. The thing that you're referring to, now is counted per league, not character. So each league, that seed will reroll. Then the layout of the overall world will be different for everyone in the league. But in the next league, the layout of the world will be different for everybody. It means that each time you go to play the game in a new league, you get a slightly different experience with the change of the world.

Speedrunners must have been very thankful for that…

Jonathan Rogers: [laughs]

One of the things that Path of Exile is known for is very distinct economy because there’s no gold. There’s no universal currency, just usable orbs that are directly tied to crafting. Yet sequel introduces gold – that couldn’t have been an easy decision. How difficult was it to convince the team that adding it is the way to go?

Jonathan Rogers: It was definitely a very hard decision of all the things we're doing in PoE 2. We felt that the benefit of it was just so advantageous that we decided we were going to do it. Adding of gold means that instead of receiving a ton of junk, players will be able to collect currency with which they can buy items they are interested in. This is a great positive change.

What about the experimentation with Ruthless, we basically just wanted to create something that's a little bit hard to get. So we decided to throw it in Ruthless mode and give it a test as a league. To see how our models are working out and then make changes based on that. It wasn't so much that we made changes based on player feedback. Then it was more about live player data. And plus it gives us a chance for a bunch of our internal people to just see how it felt in a live round situation.

Chris Wilson: The lack of gold in PoE was supposed to help us achieve several goals. There were many things we didn't like about gold. The new implementation in PoE 2 meets all our requirements.

Jonathan Rogers: We don't want gold to turn into a trading currency so it's very important. You'll definitely trade for chaos and stuff like that and exalts instead of gold.

Exalts? Oh! [Until recently, these were very valuable orbs; divine orbs have replaced them in the trade for some time now – editorial]

Jonathan Rogers: Well, see, you don't value them right now, [Chris and Jonathan both laugh] but you'll probably feel different about them when you understand about how the Chaos Orbs changed.

You’ve mentioned that you plan the current intelligence archetype – Witch – to be dedicated to occult and necromancy, while the new one you’re introducing, the Sorceress will be the go–to for elemental damage. Well then, what’s going to happen to The Elementalist, which used to be a witch ascendancy class until now?

Jonathan Rogers: So, the Elementalist will probably move over to the sorceress and then there'll be an extra ascendancy on the witch instead. In some cases, what we're doing is removing the ascendancies that were on the base of the original classes and moving them into the other variant. For example the templar and the druid, obviously there’s not really overlap there, so all the new Druid ascendancies will be fresh, but for something like Witch and Sorceress Elementalist moves over Sorceress and then witch gets a new ascendancy. So while the themes of the old ascendancies will still be the same, the details will be different.

Path of Exile is a game that already has an incredible amount of content and one of the complaints you can come across often from new players is that there’s just too many mechanics. Actually – even veterans coming back after a few leagues, are saying they overloaded by the amount of new stuff. Could you tell more about the way you plan to combat content bloat in the future?

Jonathan Rogers: I think what we'd like to try and do is have everything back, maybe in some form of minor league. An example – fossil crafting. I think you can bring back the mechanics of it without bringing in the whole set of fossils. It lets you minimize a little bit down or restrict it up to certain areas without losing the essence of coolness that we had back then. Personally, I'm a fan of the idea that with crafting there's always arcane things around and someone finds out that there's an interaction with that. I do like that feeling. So I want to maintain that by having an interesting crafting options, but we have to recontextualize everything.

Is there anything that your team has learned from Diablo 4 launch? Anything they’ve done well or failed miserably that made you rethink any of your design choices?

Jonathan Rogers: To be honest, I wouldn't say that we've fallen into any of the traps that they fell into. I think we're kind of pretty good in that regard. I remain confident in our design decisions. I would say that Diablo 4 is a very different game than ours, and they went to a lot more MMO–like – it's a different game. Like when I play that game, it doesn't feel like an action RPG so much – to me it's MMO. They went in a different direction from us, which is good because we're doing our own thing, they're doing their own thing, but they got some pretty damn sick looking carpets. I will tell you that I’m definitely stealing their ability to render the carpets.

When I look at my in–game friendlist it looks like a lot of players has decided to create Privete Leauges. They're getting more and more popular with each release. Players enjoy creating their own worlds to trade exclusively with their friends, or medium sized leagues focusing on challenges and streamers. Have you got plans to further expand our possibilities in PoE 2?

Jonathan Rogers: I have always wanted to do more with private leagues. I have a lot of cool ideas I'd really like to do – I just never had time to execute. We'll continue to support it and do things like that, but we really wanna do more with it. I think there are a lot of cool things to do so… we'll get to it.

It seems that over the years Path of Exile has become a game that’s very difficult to engage with just one screen – whether you’re checking out crafting details, what stats can even roll on your weapon in the first place and those stats weight. An average player might have the trade website, PoEdb, and a couple other websites open at all times – is that something we should expect to see change?

Jonathan Rogers: It's definitely something we’ve talked about but I think some of that stuff can be very hard to present in the game client.

With some things, web browser is perfectly reasonable as a way to display information.

So if you're talking about looking at some giant spreadsheet of information, then I think a web browser is probably a better venue for that honestly.

I don't particularly distinguish between the website and the game quite that much. Can the game by virtue of having the item as context, provide better tools that also will give us more information than website? I'm not sure that I can understand like an easy way to use like that. The game could present that well to you. Like it would kind of just end up being a giant megalith some kind of not what you know. So it feels like you might as well in that case just have it on the website right? Yeah.

Currently consoles have the Neversink community filters built directly into the game – playing without them can feel very depressing, whether due to not being able to notice good drops, or being flooded with the bad ones. Do you think the loot changes will make the game fully enjoyable without a loot filter once the PoE 2 drops?

Jonathan Rogers: Yes, I think that that should be enough. We'll still support item filters because why wouldn't we. But we expect item filters in PoE 2 to be used to highlight certain things, rather than hide certain things. Personally I'm not keen on like the sort of rainbow collar thing that people set up. I prefer to use original colors. But I do understand people want to configure all these things, different colors, so we'll still allow that. But my hope is, is that people won't feel the need to just hide stuff in PoE 2 because we will make the loot drops better in such a way that that is no longer necessary.

You’ve mentioned that you expect the game to be more brutal, not just in the way it feels but to overall be more punishing. With more skill based encounters and the expectancy that Hardcore players will die a lot more. So as a hardcore player with bad mechanical skill that used to overcome challenges by overpreparing, do you expect that to still be a thing? [laughs]

Jonathan Rogers: You… can tank a boss. You can. But because the balance will be such that we expect you should die sometimes that means what it means. Yes, you're either going to need on hardcore to be much more skillful such that nothing puts you, or you're probably going have to grind a bit too outgear the boss before you can feel safe enough to do it if you're not good at the mechanical side of things. But it should still be possible.

Certainly you're going to have to make sure that you're concentrating on survivability and the boss will probably take longer to kill for that reason, because you're concentrating more on survivability than damage to the boss.

Chris Wilson: What's also important, when you die during a boss fight in Paths of Exile, you have to repeat the boss fight. And therefore able to balance the boss fights because we expect you to do the whole thing in one go. We've been able to balance the boss fight to not rely so much on one shots.

Correct me if I'm wrong, Jonathan, but I think it’s a better experience for hardcore players due to the fact that we expect the fight to be completed all with one life.

Jonathan Rogers: Right… There's also more subtle stuff to do with flask charge mechanics and other stuff like that that I guess sort of is relevant here. But I mean, it's probably a bit too much to get into.

That’s about it. I would like to greatly thank you for your time and at this point I really cannot wait for the Exilecon. Have a good one!

Jonathan Rogers: Thank you.

Chris Wilson: You're welcome! Have a great day.