Path of Exile 2: The long road to exceeding a decade of expectations

Path of Exile has become a mammoth game since its initial release in October 2013. The free-to-play action role-playing game (or ARPG) now contains about 30 expansions, each introducing a plethora of tweaks and new mechanics, some of which could keep players busy for months or even years. The vast majority of these features are present in Path of Exile to this day, layer upon layer of content to discover and get lost in.

Now, developer Grinding Gear Games is betting on a sequel that will coexist with the original.

Path of Exile 2 sounds familiar enough—after all, it's still a free-to-play ARPG—but it's an ambitious project nevertheless. Path of Exile 2 will feature a brand new campaign across six Acts, with about 100 environments, 100 bosses, and 600 enemies. There are 12 character classes planned, each with three additional Ascendancy subclasses to specialize into. And there will be 700 equipment base types, each with unique items to find, including new weapons like crossbows, flails, and spears.

At the core of Path of Exile 2's development is a striking challenge. The success of the first Path of Exile was powered by the seemingly endless growth in the game’s size and complexity over an entire decade. With Path of Exile 2, Grinding Gear Games isn’t just competing with other games in the genre—it's competing with the ambition and scope of its own now-monumental creation.

In creating Path of Exile 2, the studio has to strike a careful balance, delivering a unique experience that upends some of its predecessor's core principles without upsetting seasoned veterans who might resist or resent those changes.

Ahead of Path of Exile 2’s Epic Games Store launch, we chatted with Grinding Gear Games about the impetus behind a sequel, how the team is adding novelty to familiar mechanics, and the importance of balancing player freedom with a smooth onboarding for newcomers.

New chapter, big changes

Path of Exile will continue to exist as its own game. As it stands, the ARPG easily rivals or exceeds its genre cohorts, big and small, old and modern. But as the years passed and Grinding Gears Games continued expanding the original Path of Exile, the limitations baked into its foundation started to become a roadblock, preventing the team from achieving what they wanted with each new expansion.

With Path of Exile 2, Grinding Gear Games got to start fresh, without the years of cruft. The team could rethink everything—even something as basic as the camera's point of view. It's quite close to your character in the original, but pulled further back in Path of Exile 2 to make the game more suitable for bigger displays and (new to the series) local two-player co-op.

"The reason why we started the project in the first place was because we wanted to be able to significantly improve the combat of Path of Exile," said Game Director Jonathan Rogers.

The original character rigs—the digital skeletons that give characters the ability to be animated—were made over a decade ago. As Rogers explained, the rigs were holding the team back since, once you've rigged something to a character, you can't just go and change the skeleton without also needing to change everything rigged to it. That would involve changing all of the items and redoing all of the animations.

And so that's what the team set out to do for the sequel.

"When you actually go and experiment with different combat and try to make things better, it changes the feel of the game very, very significantly," said Rogers.

Edward Tate, Principal Animator at Grinding Gear Games, detailed how incorporating more movement into characters then rippled outward, expanding possibilities in other parts of the Path of Exile 2. Reworking the movement system meant animations no longer needed to be half a second long, which meant the team could decide how long character skills take to execute, which then allowed for more class creativity and flexibility.

Tate is particularly fond of the resulting close-quarters skills, especially the ones related to the Monk, one of Path of Exile 2's new classes.

"The Monk was kind-of easy for me because I used to do Kung Fu," Tate said. "It's not that I could do any of the stuff that the Monk can do, but I already had an idea in my head of how that stuff should look and what's possible within that martial art."

The Mercenary is another class that encapsulates some of the sequel's biggest changes. Creating the Mercenary's crossbow animations, for instance, required quite a bit of iteration. At one point, Grinding Gear Games Lead Designer Rory Rackham proposed rapid fire, and thought it'd be interesting if the player could still move while doing so. After some tinkering, players could walk freely while shooting.

Path of Exile 2 also includes eight-direction WASD movement—though clicking with the mouse to move is still available—and a dodge roll.

"They were changes that I thought were weird when they were brought up," said Tate. The dodge roll, for example, required some clear restrictions from the beginning, making sure it wasn't faster to roll around than simply walk. "I was like, 'Oh, I don't know about this,'" Tate continued, "but once we got them in and got them working, it really added to the game."

Path of Exile 2 also reworks the Skill Gem system. In the original Path of Exile, Skill Gems are items that you need to slot into your equipment. This includes Support Gems, which modify or boost the capabilities of the Skill Gem you link them to. In Path of Exile 2, all of your skills can be fully adjusted in a different, standalone menu.

"There's much more of a reliance on synergy between skills. We can give players a lot of power for just using multiple skills together, avoiding situations where you just fill your character with buffs or passive skills," said Rackham.

This solves some long-standing issues. Using the original Skill Gem system, for example, you'd sometimes find combinations that did quite a bit of damage to all normal enemies while not being particularly effective against bosses. Now, mixing and matching to achieve different results is much more manageable.

"There are new designs that you couldn't see in Path of Exile because you wouldn't fully invest your character in a skill that's only useful a fraction of the time. You needed something that worked all the time," said Rackham. "But now we can have them fit together and also just have combos that aren't forced. If you manage to apply a debuff, now you have this other skill that's gonna do a lot of damage."

Naturally this led to mechanics that interact with the dodge roll, like skills that leave behind an illusory copy after you dodge roll, which then grants you further powers when the illusion gets hit. Another skill triggers a spell whenever you dodge a few times, adding evasiveness into your offensive strategy.

According to Rackham, working on Path of Exile 2 meant the team could stretch its creative legs a bit more than they could while working on a regular cadence of expansions and seasons for the original. "Let's experiment with some crazy mechanics that will add to development time potentially forever—but this is the thing to raise the bar," said Rackham.

New players and quality of life

Learning the ins and outs of Path of Exile often feels like learning a new language. Grinding Gear Games is aware of this and is looking to close the gap. But the plan is to do so subtly, keeping in mind that many of the players who enjoyed the first game did so because of its complexity and player freedom, not simplicity.

Take respeccing, for example. In Path of Exile, you need to find an Orb of Regret to unspend one point in the passive skill tree. This makes respeccing a laborious task, especially if you need to refund more than one node. Orbs of Regret drop from enemies at random, and if you're running short, you can either farm for them or trade other items of similar value in the player-led market.

In Path of Exile 2, respeccing is done by spending gold, a new in-game currency that you won't be able to trade with others. "In some ways, [respeccing] is more available," said Rackham, "but you could be doing a lot of other things with that gold as well. So you've got to make the choice, 'Do I change my build, or do I just want to gamble a bunch and maybe get a great item?'"

Loot—or at least the way it’s displayed while lying on the ground—is also being tweaked. Ask any Path of Exile player what you need to know before getting into the game, and there's a 99% chance that they'll mention a loot filter. Basically, the filter highlights only rare items, such as the aforementioned Orbs of Regret or Powerful and Uncommon gear pieces. Without a filter, your map will quickly swarm with gray- and blue-tier items, which aren't at all powerful.

"It's such a barrier for someone who's never played Path of Exile before," said Game Designer Hrishikesh Sidhartha. "You load up the game, you play, and then you get to a point where there's just so much stuff on your screen you can't play anymore—until someone tells you, ‘Oh, install a filter, now you can play."

With Path of Exile 2, Grinding Gear Games is working to ensure that whatever is on the ground has some value, heading off this common scenario.
 

Player freedom

Grinding Gear Games always keeps an eye on the community and the ways players approach a game that is often deemed intimidating or even untameable for first-timers.

People love to come up with class builds, devising skill and gear combinations that can be considered the "meta" during each League—seasonal updates that occur every three to four months and are usually centered around a new mechanic or feature. The community has even come up with tools like Path of Building, which lets you input a build and get an exact rundown of everything you'll need to achieve it, from the items down to every passive skill tree node.

But these community efforts extend beyond devising strategies to tackle Path of Exile. Trading, for example, is mostly dictated by players who set up certain prices for in-game currencies or gear, particularly unique items. Items are valuable because players are able to trade them with other people.

This freedom is deliberate. "I think that's just a really important part of just the way that action-RPGs feel," said Rogers.

That doesn't mean that the Path of Exile community is flawless. "It's been hard to maintain a proper trade economy because you can get problems like rampant inflation," Rogers continued. While Grinding Gear Games plans to maintain its community-driven approach in Path of Exile 2, they're still trying to address issues even while remaining as hands-off as possible.

"Most games have freely tradable gold and bound items, and what we've found is that doing the exact opposite actually works even better," said Rogers. "You have bound gold that you can't trade between each other, but items are unbound. What that means is that you can make it so that trade uses gold as the tax for allowing things to move from one place to the other, effectively preventing hyperinflation while still having the ability to have a trade system."

Rogers thinks that many game developers have a fear of letting things get out of control. "We like to give a lot of freedom. My general feeling is to do cool things and then try to clean up afterward."
 

Ambitious aspirations from the ground up

The developers we spoke to are all veterans at Grinding Gear Games, with careers spanning from eight to over 13 years. This institutional knowledge has been beneficial to the growth of Path of Exile, with developers who are familiar with previous ideas and existing mechanics and how they all intertwine together.

As years pass, it's natural to want to improve one's craft and come up with more ambitious solutions. But over-designing for the sake of it can be counterproductive in an ARPG that's already known for its complexity.

"I'm definitely guilty of trying to one-up myself constantly—and by doing so, you sometimes overdesign to a point where something has too many parts that aren't actually necessary," Sidhartha said. "It's a trap that is easy to fall into, and it's important to recognize where you've sometimes gone too far and how to cut back."

With Path of Exile 2 introducing so many new items and systems, the campaign strictly follows this philosophy of not overcomplicating the experience. As with the first game, the story is an introduction of sorts to Path of Exile 2, while the endgame is where players can really get into the nitty gritty of a class build and see how much they can push their characters.

For Rogers, the experience of getting through the campaign for the first time should be similar to playing an action game. "Someone who can complete a game like God of War should be able to complete Path of Exile 2," he said.

Rogers expects the overall completion time to decrease with each new playthrough. If, say, getting through the campaign for the first time took somebody 60 hours, the next time it might take them 40, then 20, and so on. To him, the key element is that players should be able to take it at face value and not be forced to read any online guides to just get through the game at least once.

"It's something we're pretty close to achieving at this point. There's still a lot of testing to do, but I think we're getting there," Rogers said.

While exceeding your own accomplishments can be difficult, the upside of having such an enormous foundation is that it's easy to draw from it. Rogers said that the team is planning on bringing back all of the Leagues he likes from the original game throughout Path of Exile 2's Early Access.

"A lot of the hard iteration is already done in terms of making the mechanic fun, which means that then all you have to do really is like design new rewards, art, effects, and so on," Rogers said, mentioning popular Leagues of the past like Breach, plus his favorites, Delve and Incursion. "All that stuff is honestly easier than having to come up with a thing from scratch, so that's been really nice as a pool to draw from and quickly add more content to Path of Exile 2."

Once Path of Exile 2 has its full release, there'll be a significant percentage of past League content brought back into the sequel. It's a good way to experiment with previous ideas while also making sure that, from the start, the sequel is already on a path to match (or even exceed) the scope of its ambitious predecessor.
 

A familiar-but-fresh foundation

Sequels invite iteration, but when the predecessor has an established community 11 years in the making, it's hard to balance familiarity in a new environment. Elements such as the art style were important to preserve and expand on without straying away too far from what came before.

"We're not massive fans of heavily stylized things," Tate said. "Especially with this kind of content where you've got a lot of horror and brutality, I think realism really helps with that. You know, something that's grotesque kind-of loses its grotesqueness if you then have it doing something cartoony."

But those who've played Path of Exile for a long time have very different expectations of the sequel from those who are newcomers.

"That was actually a bit harder than I initially expected," Rogers said. "We've been doing a lot of closed beta testing, and when we do that, we kind of segment the users into two groups: people who've played Path of Exile before and people who haven't. And when we first tested Path of Exile 2 in that way, we actually found that people who hadn't played the first were liking the game more than the people who had played it, which was a concern."

The team set about getting those percentages to a fairly equal level. Rogers thinks part of the reason behind that initial gap was that Path of Exile players expected a lot of systems that weren't in the game at the time. New players might open the passive skill tree and take it at face value, but somebody familiar with the first game will immediately start reading details about skills and notice anything that's missing.

The team had to strike a fine balance between complex and too complex. "We don't want to reduce the depth that we have because I think that that's the real key to Path of Exile's longevity," said Rogers. "But there were elements that were complicated, not because they added to the depth, but because they happened to be complicated. For those things, we really wanted to make sure that there were no longer barriers."
 

The state of the ARPG genre

As daunting as working on a sequel to an ARPG in an increasingly crowded space might be, Grinding Gear Games believes there are still ways to iterate and improve on genre norms that were first established decades ago with pioneers like Diablo 2. And while the team has been using its own experiences with Path of Exile to inform the upcoming sequel, the developers don't develop in a vacuum.

Inspirations beget inspirations, and there's no shortage of them in the modern ARPG genre, from Diablo IV to Last Epoch.

“There's been a lot of games recently in the genre, for sure—it's definitely heated up a lot,” said Rogers. But he thinks that's a good thing. Rogers mentioned that the latest expansion for Path of Exile, titled Settlers of Kalguur, was the biggest one to-date in terms of player numbers.

“What we've found is that the more other action-RPGs there are, the more we benefit," Rogers continued. "People will often come and try Path of Exile once they’ve tried another ARPG first. The thing with the genre is that you can play for a season and then go try a different one, and that’s absolutely fine. The more people that want to do that, the better.”

To Rackham, the variety is cool to see. "It's great that someone else is trying the experimental stuff so that we can then be like, ‘Well, that mechanic actually worked well, we should do a version of it,’ or see how important certain mechanics were for Last Epoch and say 'That's a great thing that we could have done 10 years ago in Path of Exile—what would it have looked like now if it had carried on in the game?"

Sometimes, base mechanics make competing ARPGs totally different from what Grinding Gear Games envisions for Path of Exile 2. Other times, people from the team play a game and are inspired by what they see. Even games outside the genre informed Path of Exile 2. The crossbow, for instance, turns Path of Exile 2 into a top-down shooter of sorts.

Rackham also mentioned that Souslikes and games like No Rest for the Wicked served as inspiration for the sequel's new movement capabilities. Playing Path of Exile 2's Summer Game Fest demo, you could tell that Grinding Gear Games intends player to take a more methodical approach—with bosses being particularly unnerving until you've learned their patterns.

"We've always had challenging in-game bosses that you needed to learn the mechanics for," Rackham said, "But yeah, more complex boss fights are just the standard now, not just for the major Act bosses."

Ultimately, Rogers says that the feel of the combat is what will make Path of Exile 2 stand out in the genre. The different presentation and certain elements could be risky, he acknowledged—especially since long-time Path of Exile players know exactly how the existing game works. But it's important to keep people guessing.

The lead-up to Early Access

When conducting interviews with Grinding Gear Games, it’s clear that the team knows expectations are high. The interviewees all expressed different emotions about getting closer to starting this new chapter that is as familiar for some as it is new to everybody else.

For Sidhartha, it’s comforting to know that after years of development time, people are about to finally get their hands on the game. “There's so many different moving parts that are happening at the same time, and you're trying to make sure that you haven't forgotten any one aspect, right?” he said. “It’s very exciting coming up to it, but it can also be very scary.”

“There was definitely a period where I was, I guess, concerned that people wouldn’t like the changes we were making,” Tate said. “They sounded so big. And there are fans who don't like the look of what we've done, but I think all in all, the perception's been positive, and playing the game—yeah, to me, it feels so much better.”

For Rackham, it doesn’t feel that the team is reaching the end of the road, but rather reaching the part where people are gonna start seeing what the team is doing. As for the Early Access period, he says new content will likely come to Path of Exile 2 at a rapid pace.

While some developers have been jumping between both games depending on the team’s needs, Rackham has been full-on Path of Exile 2 for a while. “There have been times where everyone around me has been on Path of Exile while I’m the one person working on Path of Exile 2—usually just before a big League release,” he said. “In general, I imagine there’s going to be less shifting from one to the other because they’re both going to be happening all at once.”

In terms of what the team is expecting to see from the community, even with a quality assurance department dedicated to trying out different skills together and coming up with builds, there are many permutations that haven’t been tested yet. “It’s gonna be cool to see what people do with it, that's for sure,” Rackham said.

Rogers sees this period immediately before Early Access as a “last-minute rush of concerns,” but one that the studio, at least most of it, is used to by now after releasing an expansion every three to four months for the last decade. “I'm sure it will be hard, but Path of Exile had a surprisingly small dev team for a very long time since the sequel has been in development, and I definitely believe we can still do that.”

The moment Path of Exile 2 gets out of the door, the team will likely want to relax, according to Rogers—but there will still be plenty to do, especially as emergencies arise due to the large influx of players.

“We generally have been a studio that's reacted very quickly to problems, so we have to make sure that we're still maintaining that pace,” Rogers said. “There will probably be more problems here than we've ever seen before, with so many untested interactions between skills and stats and unique items and everything like that.”

The rapid pace necessary to catch any of these so-called emergencies is key, as it can make or break the experience for players and create a domino effect (of sorts) if not handled promptly. If a player finds an issue and the team is able to patch it within a few hours, it’s likely fine—but if days go by and people start basing their builds around an exploit, it gets tricky.

“If you break it, then people will just quit,” Rogers said. “You have to really keep your eye on the ball with exploits like that because the timeline for acceptability of fixing it is literally hours rather than days. We've made it so that we can deploy patches to Path of Exile very quickly and easily, especially for stuff that’s just stats and so on, without restarting the whole realm usually. But there’s always new challenges every time.”

It’s just one of the many unique considerations that a game as ambitious as Path of Exile (and now its sequel) demands from Grinding Gear Games.

“We've had many thousands of players through the closed beta now, and so we found a lot of the problems hopefully already,” Rogers concluded. “But, you know, it only takes one person to find something no one else noticed.”

You can add Path of Exile 2 to your Epic Games Store wishlist today.