Those Problems With Path Of Exile 2? Some May Be Intentionally Part Of A More Free-flowing Dev Style

Grinding Gear Game’s recent Dawn of the Hunt update has Path of Exile 2 feeling less than thrilled with the F2P action RPG at the moment. In fact, between the length of the campaigns and the changes made to monsters and minions, players are left feeling underpowered and not exactly having fun.

The recent state of the game was discussed yesterday in an interview with game directors Mark Roberts and Jonathan Rogers conducted by Zizaran. As you can see below, the interview lasted for a couple of hours, and things kicked off with Zizaran asking specifically about the playtime of the campaigns in Act 3 and if they were intended to last that long. He also asked if they typically took that long for Rogers and Roberts when they test things.

The answer from Rogers effectively came down to, “It doesn’t work that way.”, with explanations about how he doesn’t necessarily play all the way through. He also went on to note that they don’t really look at playtime so much as looking at if it’s fun, noting that if things aren’t fun, they work on fixing that which might result in the playtime being shortened. Making Act 3 shorter is already something the team plans to do and you can get those details from our piece on exactly that from yesterday.

Roberts was a bit more direct later on when discussing development decisions, stating that they’d had “some blatant fuck-ups” and that the devs are “firing from the hip a lot here”. When it comes to ideas, they’re apparently running with a philosophy of “Let’s just get it in there, let’s try it out, and see how people think and if it’s bad we’ll just undo it.”

While this isn’t the worst philosophy ever – other companies have definitely done it – it’s one of those things that tends to work best when people haven’t paid an entry fee for your game, and you’re extremely clear from the outset that things will change quickly and frequently. Despite devs often treating Early Access like it’s still beta testing, players who have doled out money do tend to expect a certain level of done-ness.

As for the problems of having over-nerfed things, Rogers noted that the intention was to “nerf things that were trivializing the endgame”.