“Path of Exile 2”: The Long Road to Surpassing Ten Years of Expectations – Epic Games Store

Since its initial release in October 2013, Path of Exile has grown into a massive game. This free-to-play action role-playing game (ARPG) now has 30 expansion packs. Each expansion introduces a host of tweaks and new mechanics, some of which are enough to keep players playing for months or even years. To this day, most of these features still remain in Path of Exile, waiting for players to explore and experience them.

Now, development team Grinding Gear Games is working on a sequel that will co-exist with the original.

The name “Path of Exile 2” seems to have nothing new – after all, it is still a free ARPG game – but it is still an ambitious new project. “Path of Exile 2” will bring a new six-act campaign, 100 different environments, 600 enemy types and 100 bosses. The game is expected to have 12 character professions, each with three additional sublimation professions for players to specialize in. The game will also feature 700 base types of equipment, each with unique items, including new weapons such as crossbows, flails, and spears.

There was a compelling challenge at the heart of Path of Exile 2’s development. The success of the first Path of Exile was due to a decade of seemingly endless growth in the game’s size and complexity. Grinding Gear Games’ Path of Exile 2 doesn’t just aim to compete with other games in the genre, it also aspires to surpass its already massive, monumental predecessor.

When making Path of Exile 2, the studio had to carefully maintain a balance: giving players a unique experience and subverting some of the core principles of the previous game, without upsetting veteran players who were opposed to or even disgusted with these changes.

Ahead of Path of Exile’s launch on the Epic Games Store, we spoke with Grinding Gear Games about the impetus for making a sequel, the team’s approach to adding new elements to familiar mechanics, and the importance of balancing player freedom with smooth entry for newbies. .

A new chapter, a big change

Path of Exile will continue to exist as a standalone game. Currently, this ARPG game easily rivals or even surpasses other games in the genre, regardless of their size and release date. But over the years, Grinding Gear Games has continued to expand on the original Path of Exile. Limitations inherent in the infrastructure began to get in the way, preventing the team from achieving its goals with new expansion packs.

“Path of Exile 2” will be a new beginning for Grinding Gear Games, getting rid of the burden accumulated over the years. The team could completely reimagine it—even down to something as basic as the camera perspective. In the original game, the camera was very close to the player character, but in Path of Exile 2, the perspective is pulled back to make the game more suitable for large monitors and local two-player co-op play (a new feature in the sequel).

“The reason we started this project in the first place was to significantly improve the combat experience in Path of Exile,” said game director Jonathan Rogers.

The character’s original frame—the digital skeleton that gives the character his animation abilities—was created more than a decade ago. Rogers explains that character frameworks have been holding back the team’s work because if you want to rig something to a character, you not only need to change the skeleton, but everything else that’s rigged on the skeleton. This requires changing all elements and redoing all animations.

Therefore, the team wants to achieve this goal in the sequel.

“Trying different combat modes and improving combat performance will significantly improve the gaming experience,” Rogers said.

Edward Tate, lead animator at Grinding Gear Games, details how to incorporate more movement into the characters and then spread outwards, expanding the possibilities for the rest of Path of Exile 2. Reworked movement systems mean animations no longer have a half-second delay, so the team can decide when character skills are executed, giving more room for class inspiration and flexibility.

Tate is particularly fond of the resulting melee skills, especially those related to Path of Exile’s new class, the Monk.

“Monk was easier for me to pick up because I had done kung fu before,” Tate said. “I’m not saying I can do Monk’s moves, but I already have images of them in my mind and understand what kind of martial arts are possible.”

Mercenary is another class that embodies the biggest changes in the sequel. For example, Mercenary’s crossbow animation required quite a few iterations. Grinding Gear Games lead designer Rory Rackham had proposed rapid fire and thought it would be interesting if players could move and shoot at the same time. After some adjustments, players can finally walk freely while firing crossbows.

“Path of Exile 2” also has eight directions of WASD key movement and roll avoidance, and still supports movement control through mouse clicks.

“At first I thought the changes were weird,” Tate said. For example, rolling avoidance needs to have clear limits from the beginning to ensure that rolling speed will not be faster than walking. “I felt like I didn’t understand it at the time,” Tate continued, “but once we added the new features and tuned them, it really made the game look better.”

“Path of Exile 2” has also redone the Skill Gem system. In the previous game “Path of Exile”, skill gems were items embedded in equipment. These include Support Gems, which modify or enhance the ability of the associated Skill Gem. In Path of Exile 2, all skills can be fully adjusted in different and independent menus.

“Synergies between skills are even more important now. We’re giving players the ability to combine skills for powerful effects rather than just stacking buffs or passive effects on their character,” said Rackham.

This solves part of the age-old problem. For example, using the original skill gem system, sometimes you will find that some combinations can cause huge damage to all ordinary enemies, but are not particularly effective against bosses. Now, players can more easily achieve different effects by matching skill gems.

“There will also be new designs that you won’t see in Path of Exile, because you don’t have a character that is completely focused on a skill that only comes into play occasionally. You need to focus on skills that are useful all the time,” Rackham said. . “But now, we can combine abilities naturally and create fluid combos. If you want to apply a debuff, now you have another ability that can do a lot of damage.”

This naturally leads to the interactive mechanism of dodge and roll. For example, after rolling, an illusion will be left behind, and the illusion will give you additional abilities after being hit. Another skill is that after you dodge a few times, a spell will be triggered that adds dodgeability to your offensive strategy.

According to Rackham, the development of Path of Exile 2 allowed the team to be more creative when creating expansion packs and seasonal updates for the original game. “We tried some crazy mechanics that would have permanently increased development time, but were necessary to raise the bar,” Rackham said.

New players and gaming experiences

Learning the ins and outs of Path of Exile is often like learning a new language. Grinding Gear Games is aware of this and is trying to make the game more accessible to everyone. But they plan to do the process smartly. You know, the reason why many players like the previous game is not because of how simple it is, but precisely because of its complexity and freedom.

Such as washing some. In “Path of Exile”, you need the Orb of Regret to recoup the points spent on the passive skill tree. Therefore, point washing is troublesome, especially when you need to wash multiple nodes. Enemies will randomly drop Orbs of Regret. If it’s not enough, you can farm monsters or go to the player market to exchange for other items of equal value.

In “Path of Exile 2”, you only need to spend gold to wash points. Gold is the new in-game currency and cannot be traded with others. “It makes it a little bit easier to farm,” Rackham said. “You can do a lot of other things with gold. So you have to make a choice and think about whether you want to change your character build or whether you just want to take a chance. See if you can get something good?”

Loot – or the way loot appears on the ground – has also been tweaked. Just ask any veteran player of “Path of Exile”: What do you need to know before playing this game. There is a 99% chance that loot filtering will be mentioned. Basically, the filter will only highlight rare items, like the aforementioned Orbs of Regret, or powerful and rare gear. Without filters, it doesn’t take long for the map to become filled with gray and blue level items. These things have little value.

“For people who have never played Path of Exile, it’s a big barrier,” says game designer Hrishikesh Sidhartha. “You load up the game and you’re ready to play, only to find that the screen is so cluttered with stuff that you can’t even play with it — until someone says, ‘Put a filter on and play.’”

In Path of Exile 2, Grinding Gear Games will ensure that everything on the ground has a certain value, avoiding this common situation in the previous game.

player freedom

Grinding Gear Games always pays attention to the gaming community and what players think about games. After all, most new players find the game intimidating and difficult to pick up.

People like to build careers by matching skills and equipment. Every alliance will have what is called a “mainstream” build. The update frequency of the league is generally three to four months, and they will always focus on new mechanisms or new functions. Gaming community launched“Path of Building”Such tools. You can enter a character build and get everything you need to implement it, right down to items and passive skill tree nodes.

The community’s efforts go beyond the strategy ideas for Path of Exile. For example, trade is mainly built by players. They set the price for in-game currency or gear (especially unique items). Because of the existence of transactions, items have value.

This degree of freedom is actually deliberate by the developers. “I think that’s just an important part of ARPG games,” Roger said.

But that’s not to say that the Path of Exile community is perfect. “It is difficult to maintain a reasonable trade economy because there will inevitably be serious inflation problems.” Rogers continued. While Grinding Gear Games plans to maintain a community-led approach to Path of Exile 2, they are still trying to resolve issues in as hands-off a manner as possible.

“In most games, gold is freely tradable, but items are tied to each other. We found that it works better if it’s the other way around,” Rogers said. “Your gold will be bound and cannot be used for trade, but the items are not bound. Therefore, you can use gold as a tax in trade, allowing items to be moved from one place to another, effectively preventing hyperinflation, while maintaining the ability of the trading system.”

Rogers believes many game developers are worried about things getting out of control. “We like to give players a lot of freedom. My overall feeling is to do something cool first and then tinker with it later.

The ambition to start from scratch

The developers we interviewed were all veterans of Grinding Gear Games, with careers spanning 8 to 13 years. This institutional knowledge helped develop Path of Exile and allow it to grow because the developers were familiar with previous ideas and existing mechanics and knew how to intertwine the two.

Over time, they naturally want to improve their skills and come up with more ambitious solutions. For an ARPG game known for its complexity, excessive design for the sake of design may be counterproductive.

“I do have a problem with myself, sometimes over-designing things and having too much unnecessary stuff,” Sidhartha said. “It’s easy to fall into this trap. The key is to realize where you’re going too far and how to cut back.”

“Path of Exile 2” introduces many new items and systems, and the campaign strictly adheres to one concept: don’t make the game experience overly complicated. Like the previous game, the story mode is mainly about getting started with “Path of Exile 2”. At the end of the game, players can delve into the details of class builds and see how far they can improve their characters.

Rogers believes that the experience of playing through the campaign for the first time is similar to that of an action game. “People who can beat games like “God of War” should also be able to beat “Path of Exile 2.” He said.

Rogers expects the playthrough time to gradually decrease with each round of the game. For example, if it took 60 hours to beat the campaign the first time, it might only take 40 hours the next time, and 20 hours the next time, and so on. He believes that the key factor is that the shallow value of the game can be accepted by players, which means that players can complete the level at least once without reading any online guides.

“We’re very close to that goal right now. There’s still a lot of testing to do, but I think we’re making progress,” Rogers said.

It may not be easy to surpass your own achievements, but one of the great things about having such a large base is that we can easily learn from it. Rogers said that the team is planning to move his favorite alliances from the original game into Early Access for Path of Exile 2.

“We did a lot of hard iterations to make the mechanics more interesting, so we had to design new rewards, art, special effects, etc.,” Rogers said. He also mentioned popular leagues of the past, such as Breach and his favorite Delve. and Incursion. “Honestly, it’s a lot easier to move that content over than to do it all over again. So it’s a really good library that we can draw inspiration from and quickly add more content to Path of Exile 2. “

Once Path of Exile 2 is fully released, players will find that many alliances from the past are included in the sequel. This is a great way to try out previous ideas and ensure from the start that the sequel is on the path to matching (or even surpassing) the ambitious goals of its predecessor.

Familiar yet novel foundations

The sequel needs iteration, but the player community of the previous game has been very mature for 11 years, and it is difficult to achieve a balance between the new environment and the familiarity. If you want to retain the style of the previous game and ensure that the new content does not deviate too far from the previous one, elements such as artistic style are very important.

“We don’t really like things that are too stylized,” says Tate. “Especially in this kind of content where there’s so much horror and brutality, I think realism helps a lot. If you make the weird things do cartoony things, they become less weird.

Compared to newcomers, veteran players of “Path of Exile” have different expectations for the sequel.

“It was actually a little harder than I originally expected,” Rogers said. “We conducted a lot of closed beta testing. For each test we divided the players into two groups: those who had played “Path of Exile” and those who had not. The first time we tested “Path of Exile 2” this way, we found that those who had not played It worries us that people who have played the previous game will like it more than those who have played it.

The team wants to balance this ratio. Rogers believes there was an initial gap in how much the two player groups enjoyed the game, in part because many of the Path of Exile systems that veteran players were looking forward to were not yet complete. New players might open the passive skill tree and glance at the surface, but veterans familiar with the previous game will start reading the details of the skills and notice anything missing.

Teams must strike a fine balance between being complex and being too complex. “We didn’t want to take away from the depth that we had, because I think that’s what makes Path of Exile so enduring,” Rogers said. “But there are some complex elements that don’t add depth to the game and just happen to be complex. We want to be able to remove those and make sure they no longer impact the gameplay experience.”

Current status of ARPG games

ARPG games are becoming increasingly competitive, and committing to a sequel may sound daunting, but Grinding Gear Games believes that the genre norms established decades ago by pioneers such as Diablo II can continue to iterate and improve. In the process of developing the sequel, the team has been leveraging its experience in “Path of Exile”, but this does not mean that the team does not have other works to draw from.

Inspiration begets inspiration. Modern ARPG games have no shortage of sources of inspiration, including “Diablo IV” and “Last Epoch”.

“There are definitely a lot of games in this genre these days — and the competition is fierce,” Rogers said. But he thinks it’s a good thing. Rogers mentioned that the latest expansion pack for “Path of Exile” (called “Settlers of Kalguur”) has the largest number of players to date.

“We found that the more other ARPG games we had, the more revenue we made,” Rogers said. As long as people have experienced other ARPGs, they will most likely try “Path of Exile”. One of the great advantages of this type of game is that you can play one season first and then play another season, no problem. The more players who have this gaming habit, the better for us. “

Rackham likes to see that diversity. “We’re happy when people are trying new things and we can learn from them. Like, ‘This mechanic is good, we need to make one,’ or looking at the importance of certain mechanics in Last Epoch and thinking, ‘This content is very important. Well, we could have added it to Path of Exile 10 years ago – how did we add it to the game then, and what does it look like now?”

Sometimes, the underlying mechanics make a competitive ARPG completely different from the way Grinding Gear Games envisioned Path of Exile 2. Sometimes, team members get inspiration from games they have played. Even other genres of games inspired Path of Exile 2. For example, the addition of the crossbow makes “Path of Exile 2” a top-down shooting game to a certain extent.

Rackham also cited titles like Souls and No Rest for the Wicked as inspiration for the sequel’s new mobile performance. After experiencing the Summer Game Fest trial of “Path of Exile 2”, it is obvious that Grinding Gear Games wants players to be more careful when playing – especially the Boss battle. If you don’t understand the Boss mechanism, you It will be quite confusing.

“The bosses in the game are very difficult, and you need to understand their mechanics.” Rackham said, “But now complex boss battles have become the standard, not only for the main chapter bosses, but also for the side bosses.”

Ultimately, Rogers said the combat experience is what sets Path of Exile 2 apart from other games in the genre. He acknowledged that different presentations and certain elements could be risky — especially since long-time Path of Exile players already know how the game works. But also keep people curious.

Early access preparation

When speaking with Grinding Gear Games, it was clear that the team knew players had high expectations for the game. Now that a new chapter is about to begin, interviewees have mixed feelings. Some people are familiar with it, while others find it novel.

Sidhartha believes that after years of development, the game is finally reaching players. He was relieved about this. “After all, there are many links going on at the same time, and you have to make sure that you don’t forget any part, right?” he said. “Now that the game is coming to an end, it’s exciting and scary at the same time.”

“I think there was definitely a time when I was worried that people wouldn’t like the changes we were making,” Tate said. “They just sound so huge. There are fans who don’t like what we’ve made, but I think generally, people are optimistic, and getting to experience the game myself – I feel better about it.

For Rackham, he doesn’t feel that the team’s work has come to an end, but has reached a stage where people start to pay attention to the team’s work. As for the early access phase, he said that new content for “Path of Exile 2” may be released soon.

While some developers need to jump between two games based on demand, Rackham has been working on Path of Exile 2 for some time. “Usually before a major league release, everyone around me is working on Path of Exile, and I’m the only one working on Path of Exile 2,” he said. “In general, I think there will be less staff turnover between the two games because both projects will be working simultaneously.”

As for the team’s expectations for the community, although the quality assurance department will specifically try out different skills and come up with character builds, there are still many combinations that have not been tested. “It’ll be interesting to see how players play with it,” Rackham said.

Rogers considers the period leading up to an Early Access release to be “the final moment of worry,” but one that most people at the studio are used to. After all, a new expansion has been released every three to four months for the past decade. “I know it’s going to be hard, but Path of Exile was surprisingly only developed by a small group of people for a long time during the sequel’s development, so I’m confident we can still do this. “

Rogers said the team may want to take a break after Path of Exile 2 launches – but there will still be a lot to do, especially with the influx of players.

“Our studio has always been very responsive to issues, so we have to maintain that responsiveness,” Rogers said. “Given that a lot of the interactions between skills, stats, unique items, etc. are still untested, there may be more issues that arise in the game than we’ve dealt with before.”

The key is to quickly respond to these emergencies, and the success or failure of the player’s gaming experience depends on it. If it is not resolved in time, there will be a certain degree of chain reaction. If players discover an issue and the team patches it within a few hours, that’s fine—but if days pass and players start building their characters around the bug, things get a little trickier.

“If the gaming experience is not good, players will quit playing,” Rogers said. “You have to be aware of this kind of vulnerability because the acceptable time frame for fixing it is hours, not days.” We can already patch Path of Exile quickly and easily, especially for things like changing attribute values. There is no need to restart the entire server for minor problems. But there are new challenges every moment. “

This is just one of many unique considerations for Grinding Gear Games when it comes to games as ambitious as Path of Exile and its sequel.

“Thousands of players have already participated in the closed beta, so we hope we can find as many problems as possible in advance.” “But you know, it only takes one person to find problems that others have not noticed.”

Add Path of Exile 2 to your Epic Games Store wish list now.