![]() ![]() “We pooled our life savings, set up in a garage, and three of us started to make Path of Exile. That concept of identifying a hole in the market that evidently had a fan base but wasn’t being satisfactorily served is a core concept that would prove vital in allowing Path of Exile to be a success. ![]() “There was a hole in the market, tens of millions of players were looking for something to play, and we felt like we can do that,” adds Wilson. There was method in the apparent madness since none of these friends had ever put together a game studio before. “We felt that Diablo 2 players were looking for something newer and we thought, somewhat naively, why don’t we make that game?” says Wilson. A place where weird and wonderful game systems emerge, but also maybe one that is unaccommodating of anything else.Above: Path of Exile springs epic visual moments into the action-RPG gameplay. Likewise, Path of Exile is the outcome of growing up on an island of game systems design. Somewhat ironically, Grinding Gear Games is based out of New Zealand – another island home to unique animals not found anywhere else. This guy isn’t going to do so well breaking apart seeds. The environment that supports honeycreepers that feed on nectar would be a wasteland for those who eat seeds. Despite being closely related, the beak of each species of honeycreeper has evolved over centuries to adapt to the local food it eats. It’s like the Hawaiian honeycreepers that have evolved to suck the nectar of particular flowers. in their pursuit of a particular aspect of game design as Path of Exile. Most of the time we don’t notice the choice because few popular games are as, uh, dedicated. Strategy is, after all, as much what we choose not to do as what we choose to do. This doesn’t make The Last of Us Part II better or worse than Path of Exile – it just means our games can’t have it all. To build a team and culture capable of creating The Last of Us Part II almost by definition means excluding people who value systems over narrative. I imagine the opposite is true at studios like Naughty Dog. ![]() But the environment that enables the boundary-pushing systems design of PoE may be deadly to everything else. In theory you could have a team that operates perfectly across all design spectrums one that could incorporate the best of systems design, creative and narrative design, and clear, visceral moment-to-moment gameplay in one beautifully polished product. Perhaps it's only possible to build a game like Path of Exile – a game singularly focused on deep systems – in an environment that is tilted so much towards systems design as to be inhospitable to any other designers. The game not only has some of the deepest and interesting crafting and equipment systems out there, but is also pretty successful, raking in ~ $113M in revenue in 2020. Obviously Grinding Gear Games (the company that makes Path of Exile) employs some talented designers. This is what Path of Exile looks like without a loot filter. But then… why drop this loot at all? And so on. The vast majority of loot is pointless to pick up, and just slows you down by taking up valuable inventory space, so it’s better to hide it. Why is the experience for new players so bad that you basically can’t learn it on your own? Why do you need multiple pieces of third party software to really play the game? This includes a “loot filter” whose sole purpose is to limit the number of items that are shown on the ground from killing enemies. Sometimes when my friends are together on Discord, we idly wonder why certain things work the way they do in PoE. ![]() I wrote about the game Path of Exile (PoE) briefly in my newsletter a few weeks ago, calling it “the collective fever dream of an army of mad systems designers”. ![]()
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