Three months after launching Path of Exile 2 into early access, the development team at Grinding Gear Games is getting ready for its first major expansion, called Dawn of the Hunt, which will add the action-RPG's first new character class, new endgame activities, and more.
IGN sat down with game director Jonathan Rogers to see how the team is feeling about the game's reception so far, and to ask all our burning questions about the upcoming update.
First, I haven't talked to you since the game came to early access. It's been three months. Has the team been happy with the response?
Jonathan Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. I was honestly not expecting that we would beat a PoE 1 launch in terms of concurrency, because obviously this was early access. It was paid instead of being free at this point. So the fact that we exceeded and went even much higher than the largest PoE 1 launch we've ever done was obviously incredible. The scary thing, of course though, isn't you've got that many players. There's lots of considerations you have to make about supporting them and we've obviously done this before, but it's still a lot of work obviously when you've got that many players and having to make sure that you're dealing with all the various problems that they have.
And after sprinting to the finish line for a number of years to get to the early access state you guys are at, how has the team been holding up as you support what's essentially a live-service game where the sprint is not likely to end anytime soon? Have you guys been able to catch your breath at all?
Jonathan Rogers: Yeah, a hundred percent. For a start, we had Christmas break. We gave everyone an extra week for that as well beyond what they would normally have. We made sure that everything was okay there. We also were really trying to make sure that there was no more overtime, making sure that everything goes back to 40 hours a week, that everything's sort of normal again. And so, that's really meant that we're kind of, I think, the studio is sort of back in a sustainable pace again, which is really good.
The thing that I would say that our company is good at doing is coming up with new content very efficiently and creating new things very well. So even though it's not the crazy crunch that we were having before, I still think we're able to create content really fast.
I mean, PoE 2 has a lot of stuff going on in it and that's even including this [expansion] and it's been three months, and that's even including the fact we had Christmas in the middle. So honestly, the main thing is just getting back on that thing that we actually do well as a company, which is the live-support, like having a game being live. I think that's our specialty.
And so it's actually nice to be back in a position where we're doing that again rather than having this kind of endless project that continues on forever, which honestly makes me more uncomfortable, because people can get out of the practice of shipping, which I think sometimes can be a problem.
It seems like Dawn of the Hunt is going to focus a lot on revising the end game experience. Can you share what the top takeaways were that your team received in terms of community feedback based on the initial release and how you guys are addressing them with this update?
Jonathan Rogers: Yeah, so I guess the main things that we had were, for a start: you've got content. The content wasn't lasting. It wasn't lasting to the hundreds of hours the players wanted to be able to last. And the reason for that, really, is that we didn't have enough what we would call “overlapping axis of randomness." And what I mean by that is that you've got mechanics that need to be able to spawn in regular maps, they need to be able to interact together ideally.
So in this expansion we're adding over 40 encounters, if you will, in terms of strong boxes and different types of wisps and bosses running around — stuff like that. But the idea is to get more than 40 interesting combat situations out of that by allowing more of that content to be able to be introduced to each other. So you still see situations that are new even as you play hundreds and hundreds of hours.
So for example, you'll get a type of wisp, that certain type of boss, and then it's like, 'okay, well now this boss has got some ability.' It changes how the fight plays out. What if you had a corrupted essence at the same time, and what if you had this and what if you had that? All of these things overlap together to produce a combinatorial explosion of possible outcomes that make the game much more interesting. And on PoE 1, we definitely had that in its end game with all the stuff we've added, but PoE 2 didn't quite have enough of that stuff. Everything was somewhat compartmentalized for the most part. So it's like, well, once you've played it all one time, it's like, well, then now you've done that thing and it's not as interesting to play it the second time and over and over again. So basically we just need more of that type of stuff. And so that's where the focus has been.
But another thing as well has just been for the existing mechanics, there's been a lot of tweaks. And the thing we have to be careful of when we're doing that stuff is players will say, for example, they'll say, 'oh, you need to drop more maps because I'm not sustaining maps.' And then we're like, 'okay, well I'm not having any trouble sustaining maps. What's going on here?' And then you find out, well, okay, the reason why this is happening is because they're dying too much and much more than we expected. When you actually look at that stuff and then when they die, they obviously don't get the drops for the rest of the map. So we're like, okay, well how can we alleviate that problem? Maybe that's the issue. And then we started thinking about what should the death penalty be. And that's how we get into changing the rez mechanics of maps. And so it's things like that, where you hear one thing, you have to try and come up with a different solution to try and improve things a lot.
The players need to get good, that's what I'm hearing.
Jonathan Rogers: Well, no, I mean, we are just making it so that if the players aren't good, they're not nearly as screwed as they were if they were. And this is the thing: it's actually, a lot of the time, it is an exercise in minimizing the differences between the best players and the worst players as far as making sure that they both have good experiences, and it's like you still need to make it so that there are big differences, but you don't want it to be that a player who's not good is just getting completely screwed in their ability to continue to keep playing the end game. And so that's why we have to, we've made special rules, we've changed the drop mechanics for maps very significantly as well. There's just lots of things like that that kind of go on that are not worth mentioning as far as content goes in a livestream, but certainly will matter a lot to the play experience for players who are actually playing.
One thing I run into a lot, because my beat at IGN is a lot of online games and live-service games, is not just the division between highly skilled and low skilled players, but players who have a ton of time and want to live in this game and players who are time-taxed. And often there's a FOMO gap of like, 'well, I could make my game have a ton of content, but then this group is going to be feeling like they're just going to miss out and maybe fall off of the game because now there's too much content for them to ever possibly keep up with.' How does the team think about that?
Jonathan Rogers: Well, I mean, ultimately, I think that more content is better than less when it comes to this kind of stuff. Even though you may run into that situation, the people who are going to be the people who play the most are also going to be the people who are most on your side and talking about your game and generating the buzz. So I think it is very important to make sure we're appealing to those people and other people who have less time. I mean, they're still going to come along for the ride and they're still going to have a great time, and so long as we're still adding enough content, they're going to enjoy it even if they don't get to experience literally everything. I think that's okay. And there's also this sort of funny thing where on some level you need aspirational content to exist in the game content that is hard for most people to get to in order for there to be something to strive for next time.
If you didn't make it to the Pinnacles this time, well, then maybe you'll play next time when we've added more stuff throughout the rest of the game that improves your experience. But then the second time you play, you'll have a better time and Path of Exile is actually a game that kind of almost has a meta experience grind of each time you play the game you get better as a player, which means you get further into it and further towards the goal. So that, I think, is part of the reason why Path of Exile has such appeal. PoE 1 still is growing. I mean, maybe I can't unequivocally say that now, but at least until Path Of Exile 2 came out PoE 1 was still setting concurrency records so many years after it came out. And I think that is really a lot of the reason for that.
Speaking of aspirational content, you mentioned during yesterday's briefing that you were disappointed by how easily players were able to knock down the big end game boss at launch. Can you talk about how Dawn of the Hunt plans to scale back the pace at which players can creep up their power, assuming that's something you guys are shooting for?
Jonathan Rogers: So I wouldn't say that we are shooting for that in the sense that we want, overall, for that to happen. What I will say is that there were certain combinations of mechanics that we didn't expect to be as crazy as they were and those were found faster than people found the content, if you know what I mean. So it sort of meant that all of that — the secrets of build creation had already kind of been unlocked by the time people did that. So yeah, I mean, look, we are doing a huge balance pass. Everything will change. Your expectations of what is good and what is not good will just be readjusted very significantly by this. And the hope is that, as we continue to iterate, that we'll just keep on improving. We will saw off anything that jumps up too far, we'll push up anything that's too far at the bottom, and we'll get to the point of having that be a lot better.
And the reason for that, really, is because if something is easy to get to a broken state, which is... what I mean by that is like, 'oh, you just combine these support gems and then suddenly you've got an amazing build and items don't even matter.' If you have a situation like that, then people will all just do that. Whereas if it's like, 'okay, sure you can kill the Pinnacle Boss in 14 seconds, but first of all, you need a unique from this and you need a unique from that.' And it's like a whole thing, right? If it's economically expensive in-game to be able to do something to become really powerful, then that's fine because you want people to get to the point of killing the Pinnacle Boss in 14 seconds. You just don't want that to be the case the first time you fight the Pinnacle Boss. So that's effectively, ideally, what we're doing.
And so as I said: I don't look at that as slowing the game down exactly. It's just sawing off the things that are causing players to all flock to one particular broken thing and ultimately making the game not have that feeling of progression of power that you want to have. You want to really have that exponential growth all the way from beginning to end and not have any sort of like, 'oh, suddenly I'm just broken now,' that happens at some point.
Ultimately, I think that more content is better than less.Let's talk about the Huntress. What are the main ways that the Huntress differs from the other character classes that are already available in Path of Exile 2, and how does this character justify me going through another play or two of the campaign?
Jonathan Rogers: When we are looking at new characters one of the main questions is what weapon type does it use and how is that weapon type going to make the game feel different? So in this case we've got spears. Obviously you don't have to use spears with the Huntress, you can use it on any class, but assuming you're using the stereotype weapon of the Huntress that’s spears, and the thing is, 'well, what makes this weapon type different than others?' And the answer to that is spears are the only weapon that you can use both at melee distance and also throw them at ranged distance. So that's kind of the thing that we're thinking, 'okay, what can we do to make the gameplay be constantly that: you’re at melee range, you're at projectile range — what's the type of gameplay we can do to cause that to happen?' That will be what will make the class feel different.
No other weapon does that. So effectively what it meant was we're like, okay, for every melee combo, we want there to be a ranged skill you have to do before that to unlock it. And for every ranged combo, we want there to be a melee thing you have to do before to unlock that combo. And then we also need to add a lot of tools for getting from one state to the other. And then, what that sort of led to was a class that's incredibly agile, which is very good because it is the primary dex melee character, and it just feels like you're moving around the battlefield a ton, you're jumping in and out. It's just a very kinetic feeling that you get moving forwards and backwards like that, which I think feels very different than the other classes. So to me, that's the reason that you would want to try it.
The other thing as well that I thought was quite interesting is that we managed to really get the parry of countering gameplay. We finally found a formula for that to work well in PoE, which was incredibly challenging. And honestly, I was very skeptical we would even be able to achieve it just due to the pace of the monsters attacking you. But we have actually got something that does work in our game context really well. And so that's a fun one for me as well.
Tell me about beast taming. How does that mechanic work? Or is the idea that we're killing them and then summoning them from the afterlife necromancer style, or...
Jonathan Rogers: When you get the Tame Beast skill, you effectively use it on a monster and you get some number of seconds, I think it might be five seconds or something like that, to kill the monster while it's got that tame thing on it. And then if you do that, then effectively it gets trapped. Its spirit gets trapped and then sucked into your character, and then you can summon it as a companion. And the big thing with beast taming is that you get all the mods on the rare that you found. And that means it's not necessarily just about finding the best type of beast, it's also finding a beast that has the best mods that you can use with as well, since all of those monster mods can do that. So that should be quite a fun hunt to find the best beast for your build. So I'm hoping players will have fun with that one.
That's awesome. How long do they remain by your side?
Jonathan Rogers: Once you've got them, it's like a Poké Ball, right? That's your beast now. If it dies, it'll resummon. That's your beast. You can only have one at a time though for companions. So basically, you'll find a better beast and then presumably you'll want to be using that one instead later on. But yeah, that's just your beast forever.
That's awesome. And are there limitations on what counts as a beast? I assume it has to be an animal.
Jonathan Rogers: Basically yes, someone at some point has decided this is a beast and this is not. I'm sure there'll be some arguments from players about whether something counts as a beast or not, but ultimately it just comes down to that.
You are recommending that players start a new league with this update. Is this something that we can expect from all of the updates where the best experience is starting from scratch?
Jonathan Rogers: Absolutely. And, I mean, that's just our formula really, because our way of looking at things is that we're not a game that you just play forever and ever. We are a game where you come for a season, you play the game for a month or maybe two months, and you get through the content, you get to the point where you feel like your character is finished in some sense, and then you stop and you go play something else. But we'll always be back for another season later on. And as I said, it's a big part of why I believe that our game has so much longevity, is the repeated playthroughs and so on. So it's definitely a different model than what a lot of games in the past have had, but also a model that we've seen a lot of other developers realizing that is actually more sustainable for the industry overall. So something that I like to see.
And is that something you think players would also be expected to do once the game reaches its 1.0 full release?
Jonathan Rogers: Yeah, absolutely. 100%.
You mentioned yesterday one of the changes in the end game is the new primary objective in the Atlas end game map of trying to stop corruption, which unlocks the ability to choose between doing corrupted or cleansed versions of maps while exploring the overworld. Can you explain what the pros and cons are of why you might want to do corrupted versus cleansed? Is it flavor or enemies? Are the rewards different?
Jonathan Rogers: Effectively the main two things are, the enemies are different: there are different bosses and then those different bosses have different rewards. And there's also things like, so for example, the cleansed maps are the only place that you're going to get the fracturing orbs, which is a new crafting mechanic that we've got. Effectively just making sure that each type of content has different rewards, and then we do like it so that when you have different strategies and what you're doing on your Atlas, depending on what type of content that you need, it's like, if you need this, then you're going to do that. If you need this, you're going to do that. So it's giving the players that sort of idea of them choosing what they're doing, but then ideally also being at a different point in a character's lifetime, they may need to do one versus the other, and so they're going to change their strategy at some point as well. But yeah, it's ultimately like, 'well, what rewards am I getting out of it at the end?' is a different element you have to be worrying about though, whenever we're designing new content.
You're also adding over a hundred unique items. Can you tell me about the one you are most excited about personally, and bonus points if it's something that you fear might need to nerf?
Jonathan Rogers: So one of the ones that might be broken is there's a shield that allows you to parry projectiles. We did show it in the video. It effectively means if you've got that unique that you no longer have to be close to monsters anymore. So it kind of deactivates the melee requirement of the Huntress a little bit. You can now parry and do all the combos from range. So we'll see how it goes because the empowered versions of all the spear throws are pretty good. And so we'll see how that goes. And also just in terms of defensiveness, that might be a little bit too off the hook, but we'll see. I'm hoping it'll be okay.
I guess it kind of has its own nerf because you have to be able to get the timing right to do the parries.
Jonathan Rogers: This is actually not the case, because in most games you do have to get the timing right to do that. But in our game it's actually kind of the opposite of that. While you're holding down the parry button, you're parrying everything and then it's what you do after the parry. Because what it does is when you parry something, it puts a counter on the enemy that you can then take advantage of with another skill. So it's kind of backwards from how most games do it.
We've tried parrying mechanics before, actually. It's been one of those things that we struggled to get right. And the reason why it was so hard is because our game moves so quickly and because there's lots of monsters around you all the time, you didn't really have a chance to follow up attacks very easily.
But with the way we've done parries here, it means that you can much more easily and reasonably do that. Now, the reason why it still incentivizes good timing is because it does interrupt. Parry will immediately interrupt anything instantly. And anytime you're waiting for a monster to hit you is wasted time you could be DPSing, so there’s still incentive to get the timing right. Doing the timing before was just so hard with the combat pace we had that it just wasn't working. So yeah, I'm really proud of how that worked out. But honestly, it wasn't even my idea. I actually was not a believer. I didn't think it could work and Mark [Roberts] was the one who actually managed to solve that problem. So once we did that, it really improved the class.
Whenever someone says something like that, it's usually because they're not enjoying going through the campaign, right? Well, okay, let's make you enjoy the campaign more. That should be the solution.During the Q&A yesterday, you pushed back on certain ideas, like the ability to skip replaying the campaign and a new character. How does the team think about that extremely difficult balancing act of responding to what players want while also having your own point of view and your creative team sort of holding their ground on decisions that they really believe in?
Jonathan Rogers: It's very hard, but the thing that I always try to do is make sure that whenever I'm hearing community feedback that I'm not just thinking, 'okay, oh they're wrong' or something like that. It's very easy to get into a mindset where you've developed this 'us versus them' mentality like that. And then when that happens, you start to get into this sort of negative cycle of, 'oh, I guess we'll just do it."
So the thing that I think is really important is you always have the spirit of discovery about, 'well why are they saying this? I know that they think that it's because of this, but why is it actually?' And if you reinterpret things in that lens, if you, first of all, you believe that if someone's saying they've got a problem, they really do have a problem.
But then the second thing being that, 'well, why is that problem actually happening? Can we solve it? What would it look like to solve it?' Then you will eventually find some solution. Now the thing is that sometimes you can't think of one. Sometimes it is really hard. In those cases you just have to say, 'okay, well we are just not going to change this until we can come with something.' I will never make a change I don't believe in because I think that's ultimately going to make the game worse overall. And that's super important that you never do that. But at the same time, sometimes you just won't be able to come up with something. But I am a believer that there always is something, there will be a way to solve the community's problem eventually.
And so, for example, with the particular campaign thing there: whenever someone says something like that, it's usually because they're not enjoying going through the campaign, right? Well, okay, let's make you enjoy the campaign more. That should be the solution. If you are not enjoying something, I'll make you enjoy it by adding content to it, by improving it. That's the way I would view that. But when you're in a community, it's very easy to say, 'okay, well X is bothering me, therefore remove thing X.' You know what I mean? It's just very easy to look at it that way, because they don't have to be worried about the downsides. It's not their job to be worried about that. Their job is just to complain about the thing they don't like, and my job is to be the one worrying about the downside.
Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt launches April 4, 2025.
Travis Northup is a writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @TieGuyTravis and read his games coverage here.
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