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Path of Exile isn’t slowing down. The original game is continuing at the same pace it always was, despite the fact its sequel has been in early access for two years and is preparing to fully launch into 1.0 this December. Developer Grinding Gear Games isn’t simply supporting its older instalment out of love, though that’s certainly part of the deal – it’s actively worked to keep PoE 1 a viable part of the business model. At Exilecon, I joined a roundtable with Game Directors Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts to discuss the two games coexisting, optimizing their tech, and whether we could see a third pillar added to the mix eventually.
Supporting the first Path of Exile is simple maths. “For one thing, it’s still a very popular game,” Rogers notes. “It still gets into the top three of Steam with every release, so there’s actually no reason that we would ever want to kill it while it’s still so popular. Even if it was one-third the size that it is now, that would still be an incredibly popular, great game to be supporting. So there’s absolutely no reason for us to kill PoE 1.” In fact, he goes one step further, explaining that GGG “engineered a situation where players can feel confident that Path of Exile 1 will still be supported.”
While the two RPGs don’t directly interact, there is one big shared element – their microtransactions. PoE 2’s 1.0 launch will see it become free to play like its predecessor, and while there are still some older designs to port over, all your paid cosmetics (along with any extra stash tabs you buy) are available in both games. “I think a lot of companies put themselves in a situation where they’re not financially incentivized to support their old games – here we’re, on purpose, going to make sure that we are, so that we have a reason to do this. When the players see that, they see, ‘Okay, we should keep playing this.'”
Rogers can “see no reason why Path of Exile 1 needs to die.” He remarks that the player numbers league to league are “basically flat, and that’s fine by us,” but points out that this simple stat doesn’t tell the full story. “One interesting thing about that is that you might think that it’s the same players coming back every league, but it actually isn’t. Only about a third of the players in each league came from the previous league – what they actually come from is the league before that, or the league before that.”
Essentially, a large count of PoE players are only playing “one out of every three leagues on average.” Now that the game has such an established audience and long-running history, GGG is “absolutely fine” with that outcome. “If the particular thing we announced tickles your fancy, you play it, otherwise you won’t. The game has such a long history, there’s a huge player base,” Rogers says, “and we’re happy to support that for as long as they want to play.”
Path of Exile 2’s getting a slight install size increase for 1.0, but that’s been largely mitigated by optimization tools that have reduced the capacity of the existing game to compensate somewhat for all the new stuff being added. “I don’t think it’s going to expand in size too fast now, because we’ve got this batch of content that’s been made over the last eight years, and it’s finally all in,” Rogers theorizes. He doesn’t expect it’ll be going down much more in size either, however.
A lot of the recent optimization (a roughly 30GB saving, albeit one counteracted by 40GB of new additions) comes from a new tool GGG designed to figure out exactly what parts of all the models need to look the best, given that you always play from a fixed-camera perspective. Now that’s done, future reductions would be harder. “In order to optimize more, I think we’d have to start making sacrifices in terms of quality,” Rogers ponders.
There could be some other optimization potential, but “it’s getting a bit thin on the ground now.” He suggests that one possible option would be to allow those players who only want a certain quality setting to download fewer textures. “If you select medium textures, you’ve effectively got like 60 GB of the game that you’re not even using,” he explains. “I was a bit reluctant to implement this, because… it’s kind of a pain in the arse,” he laughs. “Maybe one day we’ll do that to kind of ease that up a bit.”
With PoE 2 almost out, I get the impression that the team is very ready to return to its familiar seasonal cadence for the foreseeable future. A potential Path of Exile 3, then, is not something Rogers would consider “for a very long time.” He notes that the decision to begin work on PoE 2 eight years ago was due to internal uncertainty among the studio “about whether PoE 1 was going to keep growing or not.”
GGG was “really worried that we were going to have a ballistic trajectory of going up and going down again [with PoE 1], which ended up not really being the case.” Rogers says it’d take Path of Exile 2 feeling like it had reached a plateau before the team would even consider beginning to think about starting work on PoE 3. “It’d be forever away,” Roberts adds.
What about the long-dormant PoE Mobile? “The code, the engine, still compiles for mobile,” Rogers reveals, but he says, “It hasn’t been in development for a while because at some point we just realized that we actually cannot sustain three games at the same time.” He says it’d take “a recovery period at least before we start thinking, ‘Hey, do we want to take this seriously again?'”
The other popular angle we’ve seen many games take nowadays is a movie or show adaptation, so would GGG consider something similar for PoE? “It’s not my thing,” Rogers responds, “I’m not going to say never, but it’s not something I would push for.” Roberts expresses even more wariness: “I’ve seen so many good game titles get ruined,” he laughs.
Don’t hold your breath for a sudden surprise addition to the PoE family, then. With Path of Exile 3.30 on the way in less than a week on Friday November 13, and PoE 2’s 1.0 launch arriving a month later on Friday December 11, however, I think we’ll be getting more than enough ARPG goodness to keep us satisfied in the months and years to come.
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