Ken coolly serves the hottest news stories and has played, we think, every game ever made.
Published:
Path of Exile 3.29 feels a little more condensed than the action RPG’s previous expansion, yet transformative changes like the removal of socket colors, rebalancing across more than 100 skills, and our first taste of underwater combat will make it feel very different. Ahead of the full reveal, I sat down (across the internet) with Game Director Mark ‘Neon’ Roberts and Game Designer Christopher ‘Octavian’ Laferriere of Grinding Gear Games to find out if anything is still ‘sacred,’ their current thoughts on campaign skips, and whether there’s such a thing as too much PoE on the calendar as Exilecon approaches.
Stripping out socket colors is a dramatic decision – they’ve been a core part of Path of Exile since its earliest days nearly two decades ago. Roberts explained the thinking behind the decision, noting how once the team overcame the “shock factor” of whether they could change it, everyone that found out quickly came around to the idea. You can read more of what he had to say there in my full PoE 3.29 preview, but it begs the question: is there any change that’s off the table altogether?
“I would say that there’s nothing that’s ‘in stone,'” Laferrier muses, “there’s nothing that’s untouchable for the simple reason of it being untouchable – that is a bad reason. You shouldn’t just have things that are, ‘We can’t change this because it’s not a thing you can change.’ But that doesn’t mean you should go around changing things willy-nilly. The socket color changes were carefully considered and run past lots and lots of people within the office, and we came to the conclusion we did after lots of hemming and hawing.”
One request that often comes up from a segment of the playerbase is the ability to skip the campaign entirely, whether that’s by jumping straight to endgame, or by levelling through maps from the start. It’s something Grinding Gear Games has always been resistant to (a stance I’m personally aligned with), and both Laferriere and Roberts remain steadfast in their beliefs. “I’d want to give a lot of consideration to something like that,” Laferriere responds. “Maybe it is worth another look – that said, personally, it feels very wrong to me.”
Roberts chimes in. “As developers, we have the capability to cheat our way to a character that’s already leveled. The one thing that does come about from that is that you have a lot less care for your character. You could argue that that’s just a development thing, but you don’t grow to love your character, you don’t get to learn and understand the importance of decisions that are made.” Skipping to an endgame character therefore “just genuinely makes the game worse – the work to get there is the satisfaction.”
What about being able to just run maps from level one? “I am personally against it, obviously, so is Jonathan [Rogers, Game Director], so was Chris [Wilson, GGG Co-Founder]. I think it’s important, in a similar regard, that you understand your character’s place in the world.” He says it’s GGG’s job to ensure that new league mechanics, fresh content, and quality-of-life improvements keep the campaign enjoyable. “I actually think the game would lose its quality quite fast if we were to say, ‘Oh, campaign doesn’t matter any more.’ I think that’s a very, very bad way to go.”
In the previous league, Mirage, Grinding Gear Games spiced the campaign up with around 20 new ‘landmarks’ ranging from obvious encounters to hidden secrets. Is that something we can expect more of in the future? “There are so many things I would love to do to the PoE1 campaign,” Laferriere tells me. “It’s so incredibly time consuming, more so than it would seem on the surface – but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be done.
“It’s always easy to come up with excuses for why the good thing that you should do can’t actually be done because it’s too much work, and sometimes you have to just push through those anyway.” He says it’s been a regular point of discussion between Roberts, Rogers, and himself during the development of the last two leagues. “It’s getting to the point where it’s coming to a head, so I’d really like to work on it – but I can make no specific promises, sorry.”
PoE 3.29 introduces a third ascendancy for the Scion class, the Luminary, which is designed to specialize in recruiting and outfitting the returning Mercenaries of Trarthus. Laferriere says it actually came about because, with mercs going core, the team needed a way to give players the option to engage with the system in a more permanent fashion without thrusting it upon everyone. “Any mechanic that we introduce is going to be someone’s favorite thing, but there’s also going to be someone for whom it’s their least favorite thing,” Laferriere notes.
“If a mercenary is a permanent part of the power budget for your character, you can’t not engage with that.” That meant keeping mercenaries around permanently had to be something that required an opportunity cost, “and the right amount of opportunity cost for a mercenary, considering how powerful they are, is an ascendancy.” As for why it went to the Scion rather than any of the others, the answer was simple – it was the one class that didn’t already have three of them.
“I think we said this last time, but I’d be surprised if we add another any time soon,” Laferriere says with a chuckle, referring to 3.28’s addition of the Reliquarian, which (as promised) is transforming into a completely new form for Curse of the Allflame. “There is not a precedent for a class with more than three ascendancies, and Scion is now at three.” With that said, and in line with our earlier conversation, he adds, “that’s not a hard rule necessarily. We could do more, it’d just be a little strange.”
Alongside the main leagues for both Path of Exile and PoE 2, GGG has been running several supplemental mini-events, such as the recent Return of the Ancestors and an upcoming ‘economy reset’ league for Path of Exile 2 0.5. As someone who does play other games, it’s often too much to keep on top of, but both Roberts and Laferriere say that they’re happy with how these bonus rounds are performing.
Laferriere says bringing back TotA took “a week total, but that was one person worked on it for a day, then it went to someone else, then to someone else… in terms of total man hours, probably significantly less than a week, and I would say players got more value out of it than a week’s worth.” Roberts agrees: “Bang for buck, definitely worthwhile. Some do better than others – obviously that was competing with our currently quite heavily played [PoE 2] 0.5 expansion, so not the best in terms of competing with ourselves – but definitely worthwhile nonetheless.”
Roberts points out that “we get to reuse it again in the future now that it’s relatively stable for PoE 1.” He caveats, however, that the Trials mechanic is probably not coming to Path of Exile 2 for a while. “Nah, this needs a lot more work. The quality of the animations, of some of the effects and stuff, it’s just not on the same par as what the PoE 2 campaign has. But also it’s completely fine to just run as a PoE 1 thing for now.”
As for the upcoming Path of Exile 2 economy reset that GGG has been teasing, Roberts says, “I’m not sure if we’ll end Runes of Aldur or keep it going – I think we’ll probably just keep it going, and then add an extra event league on top, which is an economy reset if you’re playing the new thing.” Can we expect any other mechanical twists to the formula? “It won’t be Trial of the Ancestors, but it will be something else,” he teases.
One feature I’m particularly intrigued by in PoE 3.29 is the new pinnacle boss, which is tied to Breach. Roberts teased during the announcement that it has “a particularly unique way of accessing it,” which is tied to an item called Zorath’s Eye of Malevolence. I ask whether the pair expect this particular puzzle to be solved quickly, or prove a headscratcher. “Players are pretty quick to catch onto things,” Laferriere replies, “so if I’m being realistic I think two, three, maybe four days.
“I would hope not literally day one,” he smiles, although admits “there’s a possibility, because the Abyssal changes are changes to core mechanics, so they will be available on Standard where players have a lot more resources and built characters to try and figure this stuff out. Partially because of that, it might be relatively quick. It’s something we’re being a little tongue in cheek about, but it’s also not an incredibly complex mystery. There is a mystery within the mystery, but I will say no more on that.”
Path of Exile 2’s latest league introduced a wide range of mysteries of its own, from deleting max-level characters to boost the strength of everyone playing, to all manner of special crafting tricks and secrets. With the team to hand, I ask whether there’s anything left to discover. “Kind of everything’s been found, but kind of not,” Roberts answers mysteriously. “I know that is vague as hell, but I’ve thought of two things that are still sort of up in the air.” Expect more of that for 1.0, too: “I have a whole bunch prepared for the next time, it’s gonna be fun. It’s one of my favorite types of content to make.”
The full 1.0 launch for Path of Exile 2 is scheduled for the end of the year, following Exilecon in November. Given the extra wait, GGG is squeezing another league in – Roberts confirms to me that PoE 3.30 “will be before 1.0.” He also says the team is feeling very confident about meeting the current schedule. “I was just talking to Octavian, and I was like, ‘Damn we’ve all got really good at making acts.’ If we knew what we know now about making acts, if we could remake Act One, Two, and Three just like how we’re making Act Five – honestly we are blasting through it.”
He remarks that the process “was very difficult when we were making all that stuff while figuring out what the game even is,” and also while attempting to get the endgame in order. “It was just brutal having these different focuses.” Now that those problems are mostly solved and things feel stable, he jokes, “I don’t remember it being this easy, what’s going on here? I feel like this is too easy. But no, it’s actually real confidence on that.”
The big reveal looms: “It’s a massive end of year for us all, and we’re all kind of mentally preparing ourselves for the absolute ruckus that’s about to occur,” Roberts says. “A fun ruckus – I love a good ruckus.” Naturally that does bring about some stress among the team, but Roberts is embracing it. “You know people are going to be at Exilecon telling you how they feel about it in person. It makes it a bit more real, and so people always get a little bit scared – I’m like, ‘Nah, I’ve done this before. It’s all good.'”
