The grind goes on, for both Path of Exile players and Grinding Gears Games as it works on its follow-up Path of Exile 2. After ten years of the original game, the team has been unveiling more and more cool new perks, including directional shield blocking and mounts, both made possible by the game’s native WASD keyboard controls.
At a recent press demo event for PoE2, MMORPG.com had a chance to sit down with Game Director Jonathan Rogers to get a little more granular about the upcoming ARPG’s intentions and philosophy. We chatted about the weighty spell animation speed, improvements to approachability, and what was made possible by this fresh start.
In addition to the discussion here, we also learned the original Path of Exile could theoretically be on the Steam Deck with a little work. But if this interview showed anything, it seems they’ve already got plenty on their minds as work chugs along—and the demo here and at PAX East this week shows some promise.
[Editor Note: This interview has been edited for brevity, flow, and clarity.]
MMORPG: Path of Exile, like a lot of ARPGs, has this reputation of being a little bit intimidating, especially for newcomers, and especially once you hit the endgame. Is that a consideration right now for the audience, especially since you're able to start anew?
Jonathan Rogers: We do have to care about this, and we have made a lot of things easier, but at the same time, we don't just remove things to simplify the game for the sake of simplification. We want to keep as much depth as we can. What that means is we removed all the incidental complexity—things like the Skill Gem system are much easier to use in PoE2. There's a help system, we do video tutorials about skills, all this sort of stuff.
But there is an element of Path of Exile 1—the reason it feels so complex is partly because of the fact that it's just got so much content. Over the years, we've been adding content every three months, and that will usually include some kind of interesting new item stuff because, you know, of course, that's what players want. So then you add 10 years of that, and then you end up with just a huge amount of stuff. Because of the fact that whatever the best players are doing, that's what everyone wants to be able to do, and that means people feel they have to engage with almost all of the systems that the highest end players are engaging with, in order to be good at the game.
That being the case, as the aforementioned ten years of stuff builds up that, just makes it feel complicated. So even just having a reset as a world to get back to like, “here is what the core game is” will have a significant effect on making the game feel easier from just from that perspective. Once again, I think something like Last Epoch or whatever—just the fact that they’re new means that the game feels easier, just because they don't have the 10 years of content. But one day, they will, and then they'll be hugely complicated as well. No doubt.
MMORPG: Yeah, they don't have to think about, like, the “meta.”
JR: They will more over time, but absolutely, that's a concern. I mean, it's really nice actually developing an ARPG again that doesn't have to worry so much about existing stuff, to just be able to kind of do whatever changes we feel like doing and have that be fine. So yeah, that is a really nice thing to do, to be able to start from scratch.
MMORPG: A lot of players are looking forward to PoE2 and just jumping right into that, but I feel like there's a few that might be caught in like the old, sunken cost fallacy issue of, “Oh, I've been here for like tens of thousands of hours.’ What broader incentives, or what specific perks do you want to express as motivation to actually move into PoE2?
JR: There are two things going on that I think are important about that. One of them is that because we have a seasonal model anyway, where you restart your character every season. Players are used to the idea that, ‘I start from scratch, every three months.’ And so I don't think that will be an issue for them.
But the other thing, as well, is that because the microtransactions that you purchase are shared between both games and forwards and backwards compatible, there's no reason to feel like, oh, I have to start this whole new account or anything like that, because you’re using your old account, you have all your old stuff.
As far as microtransactions go, all the cosmetics you're buying, that just means that, you can just feel like, I can just try PoE2 for this week, and then go back to PoE1. And even if I buy something there, I’ve still got them in PoE1, so there's no disincentive to go from the other. Removing all the friction means that I don't think there's any PoE1 player who would not even try PoE2. I'm pretty sure they will all try it—at least, I would hope so.
MMORPG: It sounds like there's a lot of confidence that pretty much everything in PoE2 is going to be an improvement over the original.
JR: I would hope so! I mean, the main thing that I guess people are concerned about is that the combat feel is very different. And it is… but I think it's better. There might be some people that don't agree, in which case, you know, PoE1 still exists, we’re still making content for it. But I'm hoping that almost anyone would feel like the combat is just way more way more interesting.
MMORPG: That was definitely something I was going to ask about too, because in the older one, there is a lot of concern about a playstyle and build where it's like—you build it, and then go in, and you’re able to kind of quickly breeze through everything. What are your thoughts right now on the state of the builds and rotations?
JR: The ‘one click to kill everything’ builds in PoE1—I sort of hope that we can get to the point where you do actually have to do more than one thing. From PoE1, this is kind of true, right from the very beginning. Even just from low levels, it still tends to be that one skill kills everything, and that was a major thing that we wanted to address and improve. My hope is that everyone will engage with more skills and so on.
I guess it can be a little bit hard to predict what's going to happen towards the endgame, when you've got a lot more power and, for various reasons, how that can go. I would hope we can still entice people to use more than one skill at that point. And that's our goal in any case, we want the combat to be more engaging, or at least it's more engaging whenever you encounter a difficult fight. So, sure, maybe you're just pack-clearing and you don't encounter a rare, you just hold the one button to do it. But as soon as you encounter a rare, or once you get to a boss, it needs to be that you're a bit more engaged with the combat.
MMORPG: And it definitely felt like that in the demo. It feels like what’s included, at least in the early levels, are a lot more… intentional, and you're supposed to think about, like, the synergy.
JR: Yeah, I mean, I want people thinking that way right from the start. So the reason why we've got these video tutorials for the skills and so on is because you need to actually get people to understand the fact, these two skills can be used together. No amount of texts can convince people to do that! It’s good to show them a video for them to understand
MMORPG: The other thing is, the animation or cast times. What’s the balance you’re trying to strike, and the intention behind that weightiness?
JR: The reason why everything had to be ultra fast was because if it wasn't, then you felt like you lost control of your character because you were locked into an attack. So there are three things in PoE2 that really change that.
The first one is that you can cancel at any time. That's really important. So it means that you can actually have a long skill, and if you start casting it, you just push spacebar, or block as well, to get out of it. So that really helps.
The second one is that we have way more retargeting going on up here in PoE2. What I mean by that is, if you stack up a skill one way, you can flick them out somewhere else and have a cast the other way. When you do that, it actually makes you feel like the cast time is shorter, even when they're not, because [of] your intention to do something—your hand can actually start moving before you even realize internally that you even started doing it. So what can happen is, you start clicking the button earlier, then you swing the mouse to get to the target and then your character just does it. So it makes it feel faster that way.
And the third thing is, moving while attacking means that even if you make the skill slower, if they take the same amount of time, if you're casting the same amount per second, because you don't have a movement between each one, then that means that it still feels just as fast-paced, even though you've actually slowed down the skills.
I guess one of the things, in terms of having weighty things—we want there to be more variety, like, differences between skills. We want some skills to be really fast and some skills to be slow, and to actually have a variety there.
That's part of the idea around making it so that you use more than one skill. Because, if every skill has the same cast time, then that's one less axis that you can start making skills feel different on. This is actually true throughout the whole game, for monsters and everything.
We want everything to have way more variants, so the difference between a weak white monster and a strong white monster is way higher in PoE2. You'll get like a tiny little monster that has, like, 10 times the life of a big one—in PoE1, you just never had that kind of variance, just the skills and the monsters. And everywhere, we try to make it so there's way more variance in everything, and that makes the experience more interesting. You have to engage—it makes it a lot more bumpy.
MMORPG: And it's like, visually more interesting so far. It looks like your animators really went all-in with everything with the animation time, and even the pivoting you’re able to do now [with WASD controls].
JR: There's a lot more of that stuff going on. In PoE1, the character played exactly one animation and could blend to another one for two. We worked out recently, you can be playing up to 22 animations at the same time on a PoE2 character because of all the different things, all the different directions you could be moving. The mounts just add craziness, and then there's up-down aiming that you might not even have noticed. It's one of those little things that if you target one of the small monsters, your character will aim down towards it to shoot it, and like, there’s different planes—it's kind of crazy. Yeah, the animation system had to upgrade a lot in order to be able to achieve a lot of what we're doing now.
MMORPG: It sounds like that's one of those things where—I'm sure there's a lot that you're bringing into PoE2 that you weren't able to do in PoE1. Do you have any really exciting examples of that?
JR: I mean, where do I even start? Honestly, all of that animation stuff that I was just talking about is a huge part.
What we're doing with AI is a lot crazier. In terms of the monsters, you can fire projectiles, and they can dodge out of the way. Like we never had that in PoE1, You saw there was a mount, that's a thing that we could never have done in PoE1. Like, a lot of the stuff that we're doing with bosses… it's hard to even enumerate them all.
One of the things that we don't talk about very much is the world randomizations. We have random levels in PoE1. And in PoE2, the world map is also random—so I don't know if you opened the world map screen [during demos] and saw that that's actually a randomly-generated map. That means that every league, that will randomly jump, shuffle around, give it a slightly different layout, and it changes things from league to league.
MMORPG: So now I’m wondering about that. So is it between sessions or is it between seasons?
JR: Between seasons. Now, we actually did have it between characters before, so we can do that. It's just that, for multiplayer, we wanted it so that the overall map layout was the same so that you didn't have issues, and we thought it would be kind of cool that each time you come back for a league, it's got a different world layout, and that's a good pace to do it on. But yes, that is actually a randomly generated map in itself. That changes the overall layout of the game.
MMORPG: The flip of that is. Is there anything you're leaving behind in POE1, that you're like, oh, I kind of wish we could have, but we can't.
JR: Really, there's no reason why we couldn't do something if we liked it. So anything that we’re removing is because we didn't like it. Not a lot of stuff like that.
Full Disclosure: Travel and Accommodations provided by PR for this event.
