Twelve years on from its full launch, Path of Exile 3.27 marks a new frontier for one of the best RPGs on PC; a game beloved by its hardcore community for the level of depth and creativity in every update. The new seasonal league, Keepers of the Flame, is the first time developer Grinding Gear Games has delivered a direct sequel to one of its old mechanics, and it’s picked a big one. Breach, which first appeared in 2016, is a simple but satisfying stalwart that was one of the systems hand-picked to make the jump to side-by-side sequel Path of Exile 2. So, ahead of the new PoE update, I spoke with game director Mark Roberts to ask what inspired the choice, bolstering quality of life, and how dual development is going.
The Path of Exile developer didn’t actually set out to make a sequel league with Keepers of the Flame, Roberts tells me. “The design of the systems came first.” Those were “attachments to the character that do skills,” which would become grafts, and “a tree in your hideout that grows fruit, and those fruit can yield items,” which turned into the Genesis Tree. When developing the grafts, Roberts reveals that he immediately wanted to “get grotesque – let’s keep it dark and horror, not get too airy-fairy with it.”
This quickly developed into the concept of growing additional limbs from your character’s body, “and that turned into, ‘Well, what’s the league that has hands? Breach is all about hands, they will probably work.'” Once that idea was in the team’s heads, Roberts says that it realized, “Breach actually works the best because we have all these modern monsters with modern animations and everything sitting in PoE 2 […] what we can do is use it to tie the narrative between the PoE 1 and PoE 2 timelines for Breach.”
While he thinks there are other cases where GGG could pick a league and then design something new around it, Roberts admits, “I’ve generally been pretty against sequels. If I was to say ‘We’re doing a Harbinger sequel,’ maybe 70% (hypothetical) of the player base likes Harbinger, 30% hates it.” Whatever the exact percentage might be, “as soon as I say it’s a Harbinger sequel, there’s a lot of people who might be turned off by it.” Breach worked well here, he notes, because it’s both old and “probably has one of the highest like-to-dislike ratios because it’s just so simple and elegant.”
Keepers of the Flame is therefore a relatively straightforward wrinkle in the regular Path of Exile formula compared to more experimental leagues such as directing autobattling armies in Trial of the Ancestors or building a city in Settlers of Kalguur. Don’t expect those weirder concepts to be saved for PoE 2 going forward, however; Roberts “100% still wants to” have them in the first game. “I think there’s always a healthy balance to leagues that provide an ‘X factor,’ have something a bit out there, and ones that are just traditional ARPG combat.”
Roberts believes there’s a time for each approach (something I heartily agree with). He’s definitive about wanting to not do anything too weird with a classic system like Breach, however. “People know and love it. If we go and change it to something more complicated, almost a game within a game, some other complete genre within it, you’re immediately going to make people say, ‘You took the thing I love and you ruined it.’ It won’t be that many people, but I want to try and keep it as grounded as possible to what it was, what it is, and why people loved it. Otherwise it’s just going to be like, ‘Don’t do a sequel again, you’re going to break the thing we liked.'”
Now that it’s running two games side-by-side, GGG is faced with the dilemma of which pieces they should share and where they should be allowed to differ. Roberts says there’s no strict philosophy here – the new asynchronous trade system “should be in both, so it goes in both. As simple as that. We didn’t even really have a discussion about it.” He’s wary of bringing league mechanics over in quick succession, however. “I honestly do think that is a bit cheap […] there are a lot of players who are playing both games. Even though the balance is very separate, I don’t want them to think we’re cutting corners.”
One good example is the pinnacle boss from Path of Exile 2’s Rise of the Abyssal league, Vessel of Kulemak, which was adapted from PoE 1’s recently added Incarnation of Dread. “It was full new skill sets, but the actual animation set was the same, and so the monster’s silhouette was kind of the same,” Roberts says. In fact, he adds that GGG “kind of intentionally avoided marketing it because when we did the live stream for it, we saw it in there and said, ‘Oh this just feels cheap.’
“And then it was like, well, this is cheap. We probably shouldn’t have done this. The boss fight was still kind of fun, and I liked it. It had all kinds of new mechanics; it looked different, all-new skills, everything. But it was still like, ‘Alright, let’s not do that again, that boss is now on cooldown for a year.'” He notes, “I wouldn’t say the players were negative about it in any meaningful way. Some people commented on it. But we don’t feel right about it, we would prefer to just have a different boss [in the future].”
Now the two games have settled into a rhythm, I ask Roberts how sustainable the process is feeling. “It’s pretty rough, but I think it’s pretty rough mostly for me because I am technically a game director on both; it’s a struggle for me to balance my time between them,” he responds. “It’s fine, I’m good at that. We’ll work it out, it’s not an issue, but I want to give both [games] everything.” He notes that the team has “hired so many QA [staff], we hired like six recently and all of them are insanely good at the game […] there’s some real good insight there that we’ve been using.”
PoE 3.27 takes away the previous league’s biggest addition, mercenaries that can join you on your adventures, but they will be making a return eventually. “We’re pretty adamant; a bunch of designers that worked on it and myself were like, yes, we want to see this [return]. It’ll probably receive a decent amount of changes, but the fundamentals will still be the same,” Roberts says. “They’ll still be a great tool for people to use, especially weaker players; I don’t want it to be that every character in the entire game is running around with one full-time. I think that is probably an unacceptable amount of mercenaries.”
In its place we get bloodlines, which function like second ascendancies that you earn by defeating certain signature bosses, which creates another reason to revisit the free Steam game’s older leagues. “I am such a fan of people who pick a class based on a fantasy as opposed to just necessarily what’s meta,” Roberts remarks. “Do both; that’s fine, I’ve got no issue, but for people who really want to embrace the world of, ‘I want to be a slayer with occult powers,’ go for it.”
Roberts adds that he loves seeing people talk about playing Heist again thanks to the change that will start all your rogues at max level. “I actually had a big smile on my face reading through all the YouTube comments. It’s one of those things where I’m like, ‘Damn, we should have changed this earlier.’ It’s honestly just an oversight.” He says the response has got him thinking. “Are there any other leagues where if we just changed one thing that we haven’t thought about, then all of a sudden everyone’s going to play it? There probably is something, to be honest.”
Roberts also reiterates his personal quest: “To fix ten quality-of-life features per PoE 1 expansion at a minimum.” This time, we’ve been given mass identify, a quick-swap between augmentation and alteration orbs, a gold-based Atlas respec, and disenchanting in towns and hideouts. Circling back to Blight has been good, he says, because it got the team pondering some simple improvements that could be made while it was on the table. “We’ll eventually get through everything to some degree, I hope.”
Path of Exile 3.27 ‘Keepers of the Flame’ begins on Friday October 31. You can play for free on Steam or via GGG’s standalone launcher. Get started right here.
For even more loot, here’s our picks of the best games like Diablo. If you want to make the new league all the more satisfying, consider upgrading to the best gaming keyboard for your budget.
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