Path of Exile Interview
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GON: Have you identified any issues in the beta that you'll need to address going forward before launch?
Chris: We have found a lot of things based on player feedback and our own analytics that we can improve. There are various systems that we've been working on with the players to find better solutions to. For example loot allocation in the game, a lot of players would like it to be a bit more forgiving and less free-for-all, so we've been looking into a variety of options which will hopefully launch by the end of the month.
GON: When we last spoke you anticipated the third act being the final before launch. How do you feel about that now?
Chris: We added most of the third act in beta release, missing off about the last third of that act. And we are expecting that we will have that as the major content added at launch. It basically finishes off the story, adds a much more climactic boss encounter, and a lot of new areas. And we're also working on the fourth act of the game which isn't going to be ready for launch at the end of this year, but it will come maybe 9-12 months after that.
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GON: When you look to the future you've got the fourth act coming and before that, the public launch, but what's the next step for Path of Exile beyond more acts and more content. Do you have plans for maybe a foundry-style mod toolkit, or any sort of player creation tools? Just spitballing what have you got in the works?
Chris: We've looked into the idea of community content and there are definitely some opportunities there. One of the things to note is that because it's an online game with a secure economy, you can't let the players literally decide (this is the exact layout of the dungeon and we'll put the monsters where we want) because they could make it too easy. So there has to be a degree of challenge that's maintained. We have quite an interesting plan for the future of Path of Exile which involves both continuing forward with the core game, new acts and so on, but also taking advantage of the league system where we can run think of it as new servers of the game that have a fresh economy and new rulesets.
We've been running race events that last between say, one and eight hours, using the system for quite a while now, I mean there's several running a day now, six today for example. It's like a fresh start in the game and you get the chance to race other players. It's unique in action RPGs because it lets you see who's better at the game rather than who has spent the most time accumulating items. We have some interesting twists on that in the future that we believe will be very addictive, and our goal is that alongside having a strong normal action-RPG we'd like there to be a lot of repeatable content in these interesting events.
