Path of Exile 2 is just around the corner we thought it would be fun to look back at what was probably Grinding Gear Games’ very first interview for the original Path of Exile.
Flux, who was with us on the old site at the time, was contacted to go hands-on with a new unknown ARPG back in 2010. We had little to go on but subsequently found out it was Path of Exile. We undertook a huge interview with Chris Wilson, Erik Olsen, and Jonathon Rogers to find out more and it was the first time the ARPG community was exposed to POE and GGG.
We had to dig around in our very old archives to find this interview and thought it would be fun to share it so you can see just how far GGG and PoE have come.
Path of Exile 2 is coming
I think we can agree that POE and GGG have come a long way in the past 14 years and they are now on the cusp of releasing Path of Exile 2 into Early Access. It’s been a long time coming and as we’re fans of both Diablo and PoE, it was fun looking back at this old interview to understand their original vision.
Grinding Gear Games PoE Interview 1 Sept 2010
Can you introduce yourselves and give your job titles?
Erik Olsen: I’m the Art Director.
Jonathon Rogers: I’m the lead Programmer.
Chris Wilson: I’m the producer and lead designer.
What’s the history of Grinding Gear Games? When and where did you guys get started?
Chris: We founded the company in November 2006. Initially it was just the three of us. We wanted to make an Action RPG, we thought we could do a good job of it. There weren’t any online at the time.
You were sick of Diablo 2 after 5 years?
Chris: There was a gap in the market. We knew Diablo 3 was coming, and we had our own ideas. We decided we’d found a company, and we got Erik over from Sweden. The conversation went something like, “Hey, we’re making an Action RPG. Where would we go to get an art director?” We knew Erik had an art background, and he said, “I’ll fly right over.”
You guys were friends from Diablo and other online games?
Chris: Yeah.
Jon: Chris and me were friends from high school, actually.
In New Zealand? Where are you guys located?
Chris: Auckland. That’s the big city.
Who did you play in Lord of the Rings? Since everyone in New Zealand was in the movie.
GGG: *laughter*
Chris: We know people who are working on that, actually. One of our ex-artists. You’ll find art that he did on the game. Weta keeps stealing our artists. It’s easy to find good artists in New Zealand because of Weta, but it’s hard to find good game programmers.
So, to answer your question, we founded the company in late 2006. Just the 3 of us initially, for prototyping. Just to get something up. We could show you screenshots of what it looked like then, but it would be highly-embarassing.
In 2008 was the point when we got a proper office. Rather than working out of our garage. And we scaled up the team quite a lot. We now have 12 full time people, and a bunch of contractors here and there. It’s very easy to hire, for instance, high polygon modelers overseas. You can even give them concept art and they’ll send quality models back. We have some people in the States.
Jon: So we are a relatively small team.
Erik: It’s been a little over four years at this point.
Chris: We have no publisher. The game is entirely self-published. We’re doing it all. We run the servers people can play on. Part of the motivation for this is we look at the online games available. And there are these publisher portals, typically for the Asian MMOs, and they have 9 or 10 different games listed. When you get one you’re encouraged to get the others. They’re all tied together, they have a common microtransaction currency between them all. We feel the drawback of getting a publisher like that is that we’d just get slotted in as game #13 on some site. We’d get localized all over the place.
Jon: They’ll force you to get something like potions that give double experience, or some other crap like that.
Those are like a dollar a shot?
Jon: Yeah, something like that.
Chris: We can’t run a game like that. We’re doing a micro transaction thing, and we’ve got funding and self-financing to get the project done, but we’re running a small studio and it takes longer to make the game.
Very small team. Blizzard has hundreds of developers, but even something like Torchlight, they say they’re doing it with 30 people, and turning out a game a year. Although it’s not a MMO, and they don’t have that much content.
Jon: It’ll take us a little longer, but we’re close now. Maybe six months away from beta. We didn’t want to announce too early. We wanted to wait until we were nearly ready.
Influences
You guys were all Diablo 2 fans. Can you list some of your other gaming influences?
Chris: We enjoyed Titan Quest.
Jon: It had very good combat. It was about the first ARPG after D2 that had the good combat feeling. But they didn’t have an online multiplayer, and no random level generator.
*to Jon* So you only played it once, right?
Jon: *laughs* Exactly.
Chris: I enjoyed Guild Wars a lot. We liked that game’s structure, the architecture, for how many players are in the game or in an area.
Getting Started Quickly
Are you guys excited to finally be showing this off? You’ve been working on it forever.
Jon: Yes. We’re very interested to see what people think.
Chris: It’s been hard operating in stealth mode for so long. We’ve wanted to announce it and get input. We’re hoping to build a community on our website. That’s the main reason for announcing. To get the interested players chatting about the game.
Jon: All the accounts are connected. If you have a forum account you have a game account. We wanted to keep it very simple to join. You just need a user name, email, password, and you’re ready to go.
Erik: One of our goals right from the start of the project was that a new reader could get into the game and kill their first monster within five minutes.
Chris: That’s five minutes from the moment they first viewed the website. It’s very fast and easy to start having fun.
When we picked a game name; which took weeks of debate and discussion; we picked Path of Exile, since that reflects the character’s journey in the game. But mainly it’s something that can be remembered very easily. If you see a friend playing and ask what it’s called, it’s memorable. Anyone can just type pathofexile.com and they’re in. Or Google it and find it very quickly.
You’ve got a good acronym too. PoE is nice.
GGG: *laughter*
Chris: When they go to the site they can download the game without signing up. Ideally the game download is small, with patches as needed. And they get right into the gameplay without delay. And as you saw playing, you’re right on a beach and ready to fight.
Jon: Some games they dump you into a giant town and you’ve got to run around and talk to NPCs and try to find your way to an exit to do anything.
Yours is much simpler and more involving. You’re lying on a beach, you get up, and you start killing zombies.
Chris: Our first town is intentionally tiny and limited. There are just a few traders and NPCs to talk to, so the action isn’t interrupted.
Jon: The later towns are much larger and more interesting.
So high level characters will be in a different town?
Jon: Your starting point is wherever you exited from last.
Game and Mission Length
You kind of mentioned Torchlight earlier. One of the big selling points of Torchlight is that you can jump in and play for ten minutes and have fun. It’s not WoW where you need hours and a whole big group to play the end game content. How are you modeling your game for the time spent vs. play fun and rewards?
Chris: We’re making our game just like that. That players can join up for a quick PvP and quit. Or do one level, or find a new waypoint, and get out. We don’t want to tie them in for hours.
Jon: We also want to promote the whole “pick up group” theory. So being able to play with random other people and it’s fun. You don’t need big organized guilds and special roles for each character in the party. You can just jump in and play for fun, with friends or strangers, etc.
Erik: One comment we’ve received from testers is that they’re impressed how well the game runs in a window, with other applications at the same time. You can have the game open while you’re doing your work, for example. When you open our game, it loads within seconds. We don’t have six or seven game logos that you have to watch for five seconds each. It’s relatively light on resources. It can coexist with other stuff you’re doing in Windows.
Are there larger scale missions in the game that would take longer to complete? Multi-stage boss battles or the like?
Chris: No. Everything’s broken up into manageable chunks. We haven’t planned or even discussed any content that’s that long. It’s a typical action RPG in the length of missions.
Can you talk about the plot a bit? Is there a world lore and story?
Erik: The story is more of a personal journey the palyer has. We tell much of the story with visuals and art. Atmospheric.
Jon: One issue with MMORPGs is that you can’t really save the world, since then the next guy comes along and saves it the same way. Inevitably, we have to go with more of a personal journey than one bent on saving the world. Also it fits with the theme of the world.
You start the game exiled from your homeland. You’ve been thrown off a ship and washed up on a beach, and you’re immediately attacked by monsters. The initial challenge is just survival. Over the course of the game you want to find out more about what’s happened.
Erik: You’ll find small clues here and there about what’s happened. And why this is a post-apocalyptic world. The continent.
Chris: We’ve planned out the vibe we want to get from the game, with certain design goals. We want there to be a lot of horror elements. We want the player to feel stalked by the monsters. We want there to be lonely parts and scary parts.
Erik: It’s a very cut-throat world.
Chris: For example, when monsters drop items it’s first to get them gets them. It’s a harsh, difficult world. You have to be prepared for it. We’re not babying the players.
Erik: The equipment reflects the dark, gritty world. For example, we don’t have oversized shoulder pads. Armor is actually functional.
No women in chain mail bikinis?
GGG: *laughter* We’d never heard that, but twice now it’s been asked about.
Chris: I thought Erik was smart for coming up with that term, but I guess it’s in common usage.
Erik: We will not have chain mail bikinis. The females in the game aren’t meant to be sexy models.
Are there sexy men in the game, then?
Erik: Actually, they are more scantily-clad than the women. *laughter*
Chris: Our female characters are not overly sexulized. They are strong, powerful women, rather than scantily clad.
You can believe they can actually pick up a weapon and do something with it?
Jon: Sure. We can show you some art from the character classes. They’re normal people who are fighting for their survival. Not people who look like they should be on Baywatch.
Dates and Release Schedule
Chris: We’re aiming for closed beta starting very early next year.
Jon: There may be delays. If our testers think something’s not working and needs to be reworked, we’ll do it. But otherwise, we’re moving along quickly. Adding more content, etc.
Ethical Item Shop
Item Sales. You want to do it ethically?
Jon: Many of the Asian games are designed around a treadmill of items you must buy. They start off by giving you a few samples of them. And you quickly learn that the only way to have fun playing is to drink this special experience gain potion. And then you get another one for free at level 3, as a reward for being online long enough. And after that you have to buy them from the cash shop.
Chris: We really dislike the concept of players being able to just buy their way to success. So we’re making sure that everything we sell is just not giving the player a gameplay benefit, in the absolute sense.
We’re looking at more visual flair and fun stuff. So you might buy something that would change your spell effects; give your character a dragon’s head or something like that.
Jon: Dyes for armor. Pets for fun. Change your armor in form. There are more functional things; you can pay to change your characters name. We’ll have multiple realms, geographically located. Mostly for local language issues, and for lag/latency. We can have as many players on a realm as necessary, but we might have to add more if they get too busy.
Chris: So if someone wants to change realms, we’ll do that and charge them a small fee. The thing with the item sales, is that players want to look unique, and many are willing to pay for that. Sure, some of them also want to buy higher level characters and powers, but we’re not going to sell those. We think that there’s such a negative taint to that sort of thing that players won’t play if it’s there.
Jon: We’d rather be the good guys and have ethical item sales, and get more players because of that, than sell out and let people buy their way to success.
There are many games online that aren’t really games. There’s no gameplay, but just ways to dress up your avatar. And plenty of them make plenty of money. One of our specific things, we’re not selling cute pets. We’re selling evil pets.
Evil pets!
Jon: One thing I think Erik wanted was a bird that would peck the eyes out of the corpses you left behind.
Chris: One thing we’re thinking about is something you could buy that would increase the amount of gore from kills. You’d be running through an area and some character is getting so much gore it’s amazing. It’s not helping you kill, just making a visual display.
The other players in the game would see that too?
Chris: Yes. Almost everything that we sell we want other people to see. That’s why people buy that stuff.
Another example: you’ve just killed someone in PvP, and all the onlookers are really cheering. You use your taunt animation and stomp them. And only you have that since you’ve spent the money to buy it. There’s a lot of aesthetic stuff you can do. Coloring your equipment and such.
You guys were planning these right from the start?
Chris: Yes. We had this model all along. We’d never even considered selling +experience potions. That’s a fairly recent development in games, isn’t it?
Jon: Yeah. Designers were just getting desperate for money, and they wanted to find a way to sell stuff in the game.
Chris: I think Everquest just started selling items in the game recently. Tons of random games are putting in RMT sales. I feel it’s damaging to the games. I like the integrity of our players knowing they’ve achieved what they have. To me the whole reason for playing a game online is that you can look at a sword and know you’ve earned it.
Jon: Especially since we’re promoting trading in the game and gathering wealth.
All the top items in the game are found in the game?
Chris: Oh yes.
Jon: We don’t sell any items that grant stats or work like weapons you find from playing. In fact, none of the items you buy from the game shop are actually represented as items in the game. You can’t move them around your inventory or put them on your character. They tie to your account.
Chris: An example of something to buy would be a sort of virtual wrapping paper. You’d use that to wrap up an item you were giving to someone else for some special occasion. That sort of thing is completely harmless.
We were asked today in another interview if we would allow additional stash space to be sold. We’re actually debating that one intently. On one hand it’s relatively harmless. Players can always make more free accounts to get more space. So enlarging the stash would just be a convenience. And all characters on the same account share a stash.
Gems and skills
Can you give me a run down on the gems and skills?
Chris: It’s well covered in the video we did on gems, which we’ll be posting in a couple of weeks, along with some blog entries on the exact rules and details. But here’s an abbreviated version for you.
Skills are represented by skill gems, which can be leveled up. Currently they get 10% of the experience a player earns. As the gems level up, they go to higher levels, which improves the spells they provide to the player. Gems can be removed from items at any time, without cost, and given or traded to other characters.
To gain the function of a gem, players need to have that gem socketed in an item they currently have equipped. Item sockets may be found in weapons, shields, and most of the armor items. Not in belts, which are more like rings in our game.
The maximum number of sockets, roughly. Six on body armor. Six between your weapon slots: 6 on a two-handed weapon, or 3 and 3 on a sword/shield. Helms can have up to 4, but that’s not finalized. There are also some one-slot rings. There will be about a dozen for the average equipped character, probably.
It’s hard to find items that are full of sockets. Especially connected sockets.
Jon: The connections are where it really gets interesting. You want to connect things to continue to make skills better. The more sockets that are connected, the rarer. It’s relatively easy to find items with two connected sockets. Getting 3 or 4 it’s much harder.
Chris: So, looking at the overview. Item sockets can be found in three colors. Red = strength. Green = dexterity. Blue = intelligence. Items spawn sockets that are closely related to the type of item. For instance, a staff is a strength/intelligence weapon. Where as a maul is strength, or a bow is dexterity.
So if those 3 sockets are connected, what changes?
Jon: If the sockets are connected that allows you to use augmentations. Those come from “support gems.” You use those together with normal active skills. They modify the effects. You’ve got your say, Cleave, in a weapon with two connected sockets. You put Multi Attack in the other socket, and that grants your Cleave the ability to deal multiple attacks, a bit like the Paladin’s Zeal skill in D2.
Can you put multiple augmentations of the same kind in the same item?
Jon: Yes, but it’s not useful. When you have two of the same skill in your equipment, then you just use the higher level one. You can not stack them.
Chris: Imagine you have several groups of sockets, in different items or on the same item, that aren’t large enough groups to do what you’d like to do. You could have two different items with two sockets. Or four sockets in the same item that are linked in two pairs, but not all four together. In that case you could put the same active skill gem in both pairs, and a different support gem in each. But when you then used the skill, you’d get both augmentations every time.
That’s taken four sockets, rather than three, but you’re getting the multiple bonuses all the same. And two linked socket items are much more common than three.
What is the mechanism for removing gems?
Chris: Nothing what so ever. Just taking them out and putting them back in.
Jon: We want people to experiment with different combinations. So we’re against too much penalty. If anything at all.
Chris: One thing we do want to prevent is exploiting the system. We don’t want players to create macros or external programs that would let them instantly take out and put back in multiple gems. To switch between skills in some exploitive way. So we’ll have to put in a cool down timer or something like that, perhaps.
Do the gems change in appearance as you level them up?
Erik: Not currently. We’re adding art to other areas. But we could add some there, at some point. The issue is if the higher level gem is too good looking, it might make the normal one seem crappy.
But it is crappy!
GGG: *laughter*
Chris: We have the same issue with like, plate armor. We have to make sure that the highest level one looks great, but that the lowest level one still looks useful and interesting to the player, when they find it lying on the beach.
But hopefully by the time they find the lowest plate they’ve gone through various types of cloth and leather and chain and such. So players will just be happy to have a higher level of protection.
Chris: We’ve spread the various types of armor out, in terms of the sockets and properties. So the plate would be mostly for strength, and the chain would be strength/dexterity. Cloth armor is more on intelligence. There are quite a few different types of armor and properties.
Jon: We have a huge number of item types, by the way. The management of the items is just terrifying. The spread sheets are enormous.
Erik: You know you have a lot of items when just getting into the files takes you like a day to do any serious balancing or changing.
Chris: I think our current count is like 500 base item types. And we’re still adding more.
Is that like, ten kind of spears and ten kinds of bows?
Chris: We don’t have spears in the game now, but yes, we have lots of everything else. I think 8 is the number we went for on our initial item pass. Eight claws, 8 daggers, 8 staves, but these are the ones we’ve made so far.
Jon: And armor’s even more numerous.
Erik: And we will keep adding.
Do you have something like the exceptional and elite items, as in Diablo 2?
Chris: Not really. We’ve got enough base types that we have covered the entire spectrum.
Jon: We have a lot of items. I think rather than just taking the short sword and calling it the “awesome sword” we’ll do something better. Maybe do a texture variation.
Chris: I’m not even sure we’ll need that. We’ve got so many items already in the game.
Diablo Runes vs. PoE Gems
Chris: Although the comparison will be made between our system and the runestones in Diablo 3, we thought of ours and had it working in the game long before they revealed theirs. So we want to be sure people understand our gems/skills system since it’s one of the more unique features in the game.
Players are so used to skills being inherent to characters. It’s natural to think about modifying those, as in Diablo 3. Your system of skills coming from gems that are socketed into items seems very different. I don’t think there’s any more than a superficial similarity, which people will understand once they hear the explanation.
Chris: You’ve played D2 online. Having stuff like that in the economy is good for the game. If some player finds an amazingly-awesome skill gem in the game and then they level it up and improve it; even if they spend a year grinding it to some high level, that’s awesome.
So once you get the gem, that enables the skill. And as you have that gem socketed in something your character is wearing, the gem levels up.
Jon: The gem gains 10% of the experience your character gets. Leveling up the gem, the amount of exp it takes to level them up at high levels is even more than what your character gets. So you can trade great gems between your characters and keep leveling up the same gem for a long time.
The gem holds the experience, and you can trade it around as it gets perpetually more valuable and higher level?
Chris: Exactly. For example, there’s a unique item with a property that gems in that item gain double experience. So it becomes an incubator item that you’d use just to level up gems, rather than because it’s useful for your character. You might wind up with a character who just runs around leveling up gems instead of leveling up the character.
And then selling or trading or using those high level gems on his other characters?
Chris: Right. Where possible we want to itemize stuff.
Jon: We’re trying really hard to make sure the economy is very vibrant. We want players to really value their items. We want trading to be a really big part of the game.
WoW-Clone?
PoE isn’t a WoW-clone. You’re not going with grinding, etc.
Chris: The game is very different. We’re both RPGs and are online, but that’s about it. Our combat system is very different. Positioning matters in our combat.
Jon: We’re action-y. In some ways our servers are closer to an FPS game than an RPG like WoW
Chris: We have stun-locking. We have player blocking. You can get trapped by monsters in doorways. These are things you wouldn’t see in an RPG like WoW.
So there are technical skills required of the players. Are you worried about latency for that?
Chris: We have so much client-side protections.
Jon: We’ve put a lot of effort into that. We think ours will be a lot better than other games in that area.
Are the servers in New Zealand?
Chris: No, they’re in America. We’re planning an American realm and a European realm.
Jon: We’re in New Zealand. And we want to be able to play our game fast and for free.
Chris: Our testing is to an American server, and our ping is over 250ms, and we’ve built the game to be nicely playable at that. It plays fine for us from New Zealand now. All of our testers are in New Zealand and they think it’s fine. And it’ll only be better for other people. Technology has advanced a lot in the last ten years.
There’s a new Guild Wars trailer out that’s got lots of exalted narration about how the world changes, and how it’s not just grinding for levels in WoW-like small missions that have no effect on the larger world, etc. You guys, despite your company name, you’re not going the grind path, the Asian RPG mode.
Chris: We feel there are multiple meanings for the word “grind.” There’s good grinding and bad grinding. Good grinding is when you’re having fun playing the game; you’re technically repeating the same areas, since we can’t make a new area for every day of the week, but you’re doing the same randomized areas, and having fun playing it with friends and different random content each time. And then there’s the bad form of grinding, where you’re doing the same areas over and over again with pre-set monsters and predictable drops. We feel that our random drop system goes a long way towards making the game an item lottery that’s fun to grind.
Jon: We also don’t want to make players grind along just to get to the next level or the next area. We want players to go through it and have fun. We don’t want the average player to have to redo areas just for the experience gain.
Chris: We want to even out the interesting content, and make it all fun to do. Though obviously there will be some areas that players prefer or want to do over and over again.
PvP
There will be PvP as well as PvE. The leveling up comes from PvE, right?
Chris: You have to kill monsters to get gear and experience.
Are you planning on any special mechanisms to reward PvP? Items or other bonuses?
Chris: We’d love to give item rewards for PvP. But we want the items to be appropriate for PvP. We’ve talked to a lot of ARPG players who love playing PvP. It’s interesting in PvP, since there’s a lot of design space that other games haven’t explored. For instance, you can fight another player, but there haven’t been good examples of organized PvP tournaments.
Jon: This is in other ARPGs.
Chris: Yeah. We want to get players to use strategy, entering tournaments. We’d like to have tournaments running all the time that players can join into. It would be a bit like an online poker site, in that there would be games running constantly and you could just get in on and join in. That’s kind of our PvP dream. So once a player had their character set up as they wanted…
Another thing we’d like to do is have low level dueling, like you see in some games. That sort of thing is very good for the economy, since it gives a value to items that aren’t super high quality for the end game. Items that are fantastic for level 20 or 30 or whatever, but aren’t useful for high level characters, have a big value in the economy. Hence a PvE player who finds an item that’s great for say, level 30 dueling, could trade that to a PvP player for a great item for PvE that he didn’t need.
Balancing
Your balancing will be crazy, though. Fans will find the DPS is .02% lower with one char and your forums will be just incandescent for a week.
GGG: *laughter* They’ll just have to get used to it. We’ll do tweaks all the time. We have a fast patching system and can make almost live changes to the game. It’s not going be a yearly thing. Changes constantly, and large content additions regularly.
Chris: We’re a free game. We’re not limited to just putting new stuff in the box. We’ll have regular expansions and new content very frequently. Along with fixing bugs and making tweaks. We plan for the company to become larger after release, so with more people working on the game we’ll be able to cover patching as well as new content. We’re looking to grow the game gradually. Expansions have a lot of art as well as programming.
The basic game design is that every character is a good DPS character. They can kill things playing solo.
Jon: Yes.
You don’t have healers or clerics or the like.
Chris: We believe in the same things that Arena Net has so nicely stated. We’re happy for someone to play a support character, but they’ve got to find that on their own. They’ve got to get support skills and figure a way to play in that style. We’re not forcing anyone into that role via their character choice.
Are there classes that are well-paired?
Chris: It’s good to have a tank in front and the ranged attacker behind, certainly.
Jon: The natural tactic is that. We’re expecting people to come up with spell-caster tanks, since that’s possible with the variety of equipment and skill gems we’re putting into the game.
Chris: There’s a lot of stuff in our skill system that’s designed to allow you to help other players. One of the things we have are support gems. There are ways to buff party members. You could put a Buff skill into an item linked to something like a War Cry. And when you cast the War Cry it would affect all of your party members. Not just you. And you can add other effects like Increased Radius, or Increased Duration, so the effect would last really long.
Are you planning on guild features?
Chris: We’d love to support guilds. Whether or not it makes it into the first release, we don’t know yet.
But there are benefits to being in guilds? Other than just companionship?
Chris: Yes. Probably. There are some other unannounced itemization systems that have guild type items that we’re not talking about yet. Those will hopefully make guilds more interesting.
Guilds are something we know we want to support, but we haven’t worked out quite how just yet. We’d rather get the core game ready and spend time on guilds that most players won’t be using. But we’ll quickly add it once players are interested.
Character Differences
Since the characters all have their skills coming from the gems in their items, what makes the characters different? They vary by swing speed or accuracy? Stats?
Chris: The passive skills are the largest character differentiation, ultimately. The passive skills you use determine the attributes your characters gets. Those effectively determine the items and armors you can use. And the items you use determine which type of gems you can socket, which grant your skills.
But you could in theory build 2 different classes with identical equipment and active skills? It would be difficult, since the sockets of the right type wouldn’t appear on some items very often…
Chris: Yes. One class would be much less suited to that role, though. We don’t want to hinder players from doing odd varieties. If you want to build a caster/strength character, you can. And there will be plenty of disadvantages in attack speed and such.
This system also allows players to play a character they find aesthetically pleasing. Or if they like the class personality.
Jon: You do have to stick more or less within the guidelines of a given class, or else you’ll find it a whole lot tougher. If you try to be like… a Ranger, doing Leap Slam, it’ll be a whole lot tougher for you. That said, it’s interesting. It’s more work for us too, since we have to make the animations for every class using every skill.
Chris: We don’t have genders for the classes. For instance, the Marauder is a male character. There’s no female version of the Marauder. We’ve done that for personality reasons.
Erik: Personality, and also the art.
Chris: Yes, it would literally double the amount of art for each character. We’d rather spend that time and money on making more monsters.
Do the monsters come in both sexes?
GGG: *laughter*
Jon: Some of them do, actually. Male and female scavengers. And most of the humanoids, at least.
Chris: With regards to the classes, there will definitely be differences in how they play. But because of the ability of the system you could achieve the same goal with different classes. One would just be better with it.
How many classes will there be in the final game?
Chris: Six. And they’re sorted by their stat type. See this little wheel on the website? It’s divided into three pie wedges, red, green, blue. There are six characters around it; three each in the center of the colors, and 3 on the borders. The Marauder is right in the red, since he’s very strength-based. And you see the green and blue-based characters. There will also be three hybrid characters, who are on the edges. Red/green, red/blue, blue/green. So imagine what the strength/intelligence character might be.
There’s room for one more right in the middle. Whose good at all three things.
Jon: *laughs* Excellent. We’ll name that one after you.
Chris: We won’t need to add more characters though, since they’re largely determined by their skills, which all characters can use. So for instance, if we wanted to add a Summoner, we don’t need to add another character. We just need to add more summoning skills, which then any character can use once they find the skill gems. In fact that would be a great addition for an expansion. But there will be some kind of summoning in the base game upon release.
What are you planning for ongoing content? If the game is popular, a year or two after launch, what will have changed?
Chris: We have a schedule, yes. We want to release regular featured expansions. With new content.
Jon: By content we mean new areas. Like new acts. An expansion that adds a new act is very art heavy. An expansion that adds new features is very code heavy. So we’ll probably alternate them for the sake of our design team.
Chris: We’ll be basing this largely on what players want. If there’s a huge rally for say, player housing, then we’d be responsive. In two years from release, the game will be much better. We’re releasing next year since we need to start getting feedback from more people. And there’s no reason once it’s playable to release it, even if it’s not as complete as it will be. We have a long road map planned out. If people are still playing D2 after ten years, we want them to still be playing our game after ten years.
That’s cool. At the same time, you don’t want to launch with too little content, and get a rush of people who play for a week and get bored, thinking they’ve exhausted the game.
Chris: that’s why we’ve waited so long to start the beta. To get enough content built up in advance. It’s important to us that there’s enough content at launch.
We also want to promote long term PvP play. We’d love for it to become an e-sport, but that’s out of our control. We’ll be supporting PvP with ladder rankings of all sorts, at least. We want people to be able to compete in different aspects of the game.
End Game Variety
On that issue, have you planned end game stuff? When people get to very high levels, will the just do something like the Secret Cow Level or Baal runs over and over again?
GGG: *some debate about what they can reveal yet. They agree to just let it fly*
Chris: Okay. Our current plan, and this could change, but right now we want the final difficulty level of the game to be flat. So that you can play anywhere in there and get roughly the same challenge and rewards. It’s very hard difficulty. But at this point when you’re very high level and you’ve got the best equipment, you’re not just restricted to the last level of the last act.
You can play anywhere, and we’re going to put unique and exciting things all over. We could even mix it up so that it changes over time. But we want players to play as many different areas in the end. We’ve spent so much effort on every aspect of the game that we don’t want players to just wind up in the same small place forever.
So there are multiple difficulty levels.
Chris: Yes. It’s very similar to other ARPGs. It’s designed so that any player can get through the weak difficulty level with a modicum of skill and make it through. To get through the higher difficulty levels, players will need to think about their builds, collect quality equipment, and really play carefully, since it will be very challenging.
One thing we think about most ARPGs is that they become relatively easy once you’ve got good items. We want to provide a long term challenge to players. We want it to be twice as hard as most games so players will have to work, rather than just slaughtering through monsters. On the highest difficulty level.
Hardcore Mode
Will you have Hardcore mode? One death and you’re out?
Jon: Yep. We were actually going to make it so that when you die with a hardcore character, they become softcore.
Chris: People are more likely to try Hardcore if they know they won’t lose their stuff when they die. But as far as Hardcore players are concerned, as soon as a character goes to Softcore they’re dead. They’re gone forever. They leave the economy, at least.
We thought about expanding that with Hardcore-only items. So that would be a way for players to play Hardcore and get special items that aren’t in Softcore. But if they wanted to move those items to Softcore, they could do so, but it would require sacrificing one of their characters.
But they could just pass the items down through their shared stash and then have a low level character die with them, right?
Jon: Yes. You could get items from hardcore to softcore, but not the other way around.
Chris: We have announcements in the future about other game modes similar to hardcore as well. Which should be interesting to hear.
Auction House and Economy
Are you going to have an Auction House sort of feature?
Chris: Can we talk about that yet? *quick team consultation* Okay, its’ very unlikely we’ll have an Auction House per se, like the World of Warcraft one. It won’t be like that. We will have another system.
Something better than just walking around town spamming trades?
Chris: Definitely. We’ll have a nice trading system. The reason why we have no auction house is related to the fact that you didn’t see any gold on your little play through earlier. There is actually gold in the game, but it’s very limited. We can’t go into too many details yet, but we want gold to be useful. The gold in Diablo 2 is relatively useless…
“Relatively?” Completely!
GGG: *laughter*
Chris: We’ve played a lot of these games, like Diablo 2, Mythos, Torchlight, Titan’s Quest; you accumulate the gold, and spend it on consumables. All of the consumables can be removed from the system. Who wants to spend gold buying arrows, or repairing items?
Jon: Potions were one thing we thought about. They were one thing everyone had to buy, in other games. That’s why we made ours refillable.
Chris: When possible, we removed all things that gold was used for in other games, in the past. And then it comes down to, what else is gold used for? Things like gambling.
Where it’s purely a gold sink.
Chris: Right. So we designed the system so the things that are dropping are not gold. We have what we call “currency items.” There are many tiers of them. There are ten of them at this point and we’ve designed for more than thirty. For example, the Scroll of Wisdom (ID scroll) is the lowest tier currency items. For instance there’s a higher level one that adds mods to a magical item. Or turns a white item into a rare item. Or rerolls the properties on a rare item. Or rerolls the socket. So there are tiers that get higher and higher, so for example there might be an item that drops once a week that’s very useful for augmenting your items. This is basically our pseudo-crafting system. You create your items using these random rolls, a lot like how other RPGs work. We don’t like the idea of specifically adding targeted mods to our items, like augmenting a particular property on to one. We feel that when there’s a lottery system for finding items, it adds a lot more fun to the game in terms of perfecting the builds.
Jon: Looking at other games, when they try to have gold-based economies, they almost always fail. Inflation is just a real problem in so many games. So we decided that instead of trying to make gold valuable, we’d remove it entirely. Gold is obsolete. The gold that we have is like Diablo 1 gold. It takes up inventory space, so it’s inconvenient to carry.
Chris: It also appears in very small amounts. By the time you find the first town, you’ve picked up like 3 gold coins. By the time you’ve finished Act One (out of 3 acts, upon release) you’ve found maybe 25 gold.
Gold, NPCs
So what do you get when you sell items to NPCs?
Chris: A token small amount of gold. There’s quite a complicated NPC system that we can’t talk about in detail yet, but needless to say you’ll get some interesting stuff. Some of it sort of related to crafting. Let’s just say that NPCs on our continent value other things than gold. So you might find a guy who’s collecting rare daggers, and would have some interesting things to give you for items he wants, rather than just taking all your trash off of you as in other RPGs.
He only wants daggers?
Chris: In addition to the other things he’s collecting, if you bring him a set of rare daggers, or one of each type of bow found in each area, then he would give you some specific thing. Think of it as a mini-quest. So we have gold as a very low currency item. Useful for getting simple things, like flasks from a shop, or blue (magical) gloves. Or perhaps ID Scrolls.
You mean Scrolls of Wisdom. *laughter*
Chris: Yes, we don’t have Identity scrolls. *laughter*
Jon: The propaganda department had renamed them.
Chris: The thing is that players will quickly discover that there’s no reason to carry a large amount of gold. It’s okay to have say, 20 of it in your stash to use when you need it, because you have other tiers of currency items. This is useful also since there’s a barter system in PoE. You get other online games that don’t have gold as a currency, where making trades is a perfectly valid way to play the game. In Diablo 2 for example, I know people who spend their entire time trading and rarely went on monsters runs. They had more fun doing that than playing. Their skill was in knowing what items were trading for what other items at the moment, rather than which items or builds were best for killing monsters. So we’re trying to build a barter-based economy, as much as possible.
Death Penalties
Another use of gold is in death penalties. You die, you lose gold. So what are you guys doing for a death penalty since you don’t have gold as a loss variable?
Chris: We’ve got a lot of things currently on the table. We’ve considered having people lose some of their current level’s experience, but many players dislike that. There’s also the penalty of the time it takes to run back to where you were playing. We need to find a better system, but we don’t have a good implementation yet. We do have ideas we’re going to test out, though.
How many people do you have testing?
Chris: Just about 30 now have accounts on our little private realm server.
Those are just friends and family?
Chris: Yes.
Our intention is to continually add more friends and family testers for the rest of this year, and then early next year we start our first public closed beta. People who have sign up on our site, as soon as it goes live on Wednesday, will be added gradually, over time. Our site is integrated. People who create forum accounts are also creating a game account. Once you can log into the forum, you’re in the game with the same info. We’ll periodically give people beta access; randomly or to people who have contributed on the forums. We want to keep scaling that up in number until eventually everyone who is interested has it. We’d like to get good access from at least a thousand people. And at that point the game is essentially released.
Huh. I guess yeah, since the game’s free, there’s essentially no transition between the end of the beta and the start of the final.
Chris: The main transition is when we open up the micro-transactions shop. We liken it to Gmail, where it was initially only open to limited invites, and people were selling them for $200 on eBay. Eventually there were more, and everyone had a bunch of invites until finally the program was essentially released, even though it still said “beta testing.”
Jon: We need to get enough testers on there to make sure our servers are bullet proof, and to fix technical issues.
You’d need to wipe characters as well, wouldn’t you?
Chris: Um, well… we’ll see what happens. It kind of depends on how it goes. We have the technical ability to keep it going all throughout the beta and into the final. We haven’t decided yet. If the balance changes a lot, we might have to wipe.
Grinding
I’m not sure if it even really matters. There are people who are going to play the game twenty hours a day when it launches, who will very quickly have very high level characters anyway.
Chris: Our characters are not that hard to level. It’s pretty fast.
No one’s going to be paying Chinese companies to level them up?
Jon: *laughs* No, no. Now obviously we’re from a Western Culture, and so we don’t have the sort of Asian sensibilities when it comes to creating online games. We did play a lot of online games from Asia, and they generally have a much more ridiculous grinding required.
What’s your company’s name?
Jon: Grinding Gear Games.
That’s not an indication of the intended play style, right?
Jon: *laughter* No no. There are different types of grinding.
Chris: There’s having fun playing, and there’s having to do the same thing forever to progress.
Jon: We played a popular Asian MMORPG recently, I honestly can’t remember the name, I’m not just hiding it. But we could easily see the plan they had of how many hours you were going to spend at each level, and how they were trying to get you into their item shop since it makes for faster leveling. That wasn’t interesting to me. It just seemed like a complete waste of time. I played a couple of hours and saw that the game was boring, walking around the same patch of land, killing the same respawning monsters, and I quit. I want to play an action online RPG and have fun playing it. Rather than just to get a higher level number.
You guys have seen ProgressWars.com, right? Where you just click a button to make a progress bar fill up. Forever?
GGG: *laughter* Yeah.
Chris: We’ve designed Path of Exile to play like a single player game, where you’re going through interesting areas and you’re killing things. Except it’s online, and you can play it with groups.
Jon: For myself, I hate grinding. I couldn’t keep playing WoW. I got to level 30 or so and lost interest; it was just so slow to level up. I definitely wouldn’t want to make a game where I couldn’t have fun killing monsters.
You still enjoy playing your own game?
Jon: Definitely.
Chris: Jon is the type of Diablo player who plays the game through on Normal, then Nightmare, then Hell, and once he’s killed Diablo there he’s finished.
Jon: I’m not a grinder.
Chris: Where as Erik and I are grinders. Erik you were very high level on the original Diablo 2 ladders, right? Just under GerBarb?
Erik: I was. Well actually, I was second, so there was a display bug so I was third. *laughter from Chris and Jon* I have a screenshot showing me in second on the ladder.
You still remember. How many years ago was this?
Chris: D2 came out in 2000. It’s ten years ago.
Real Money Trading.
Have you guys considered what you’ll do about players selling items for cash money? Will you try to ban it? Facilitate it and take a cut of the sales? Turn a blind eye?
Chris: There’s a big legal mindfield there. We don’t really want to set up the infrastructure to try to take a cut of it. Our policy is probably going to be similar to other online games, where we tolerate but do not facilitate. As long as they’re not doing behavior that’s bad. As long as they’re not running bots in the game, or advertising in the game.
Jon: We’re definitely taking the steps in the game to stop exploiting. No one’s duplicating items in the game. They will get shut down. We have logging and we will find them. However, if someone’s playing the game a lot and he wants to sell some items to a friend when he’s quitting the game, we can’t do anything about that transaction. But it’s a problem when the actions players take to obtain the items are destroying the game for others. If they’re commoditizing things to that point.
You get gem-farmers and bots and such.
Jon: We don’t mind a guy spending some time on the weekend leveling up some gems and making some cash. It’s a big problem when it affects the entire game. We’ll make sure we stamp out botting when it occurs.
But you understand the economic realities, and that might encourage people to play more of the game.
Chris: It’s extremely difficult to fight this fight. We’ve seen other companies try. We don’t have the resources to stop everyone from doing everything. Nor would we want to.
Jon: We’ll stop people from doing advertising or running bots. We have good technology to track that and find out who is doing what. Modern technology is really much better at dealing with this sort of thing. We can track the origin of an item back to where and how it was dropped. So if some guy suddenly has a bunch of items that are being sold, we can work out where they came from and how.
It’s just a question of manpower, though. If the game takes off and there are ten thousand people farming items or duping things, can your small team deal with it?
Chris: As we discussed with “how do you make an indy game on the cheap” part of that is mitigating manpower with technology. If we design it well, as we believe we have done, with adequate security, then systems are in place that do a lot of manpower work for us. So all we’re doing is clicking a button and things are fixed.
Jon: Ban hammer!
You all enjoy it. There are actual high fives in the office. We enjoy that on the Diablo site; we get people spamming comments on the main page news items, and the news script lets us sort every comment ever made by IP#, and it’s very easy to see twenty by the same person, all spamming the same crap. One click, “buh-bye!”
Chris: If we make it difficult enough to cheat our game, the hackers will move on to an easier target.
Unless yours is the one that’s really lucrative. Blizzard’s got a thousand people in customer support, but there are still countless gold farmers since there’s a market for that gold.
Chris: Well another thing is in a game that’s got gold, it’s very easy for farmers to gather it up. Our game though has a more barter-based economy, which means the people trying to cheat it have to know what’s worth something. They have to actually program some logic into a bot to find items, which will wax and wane in value over time. Obviously it can still be done, but it’s more difficult than just picking up gold in WoW. You don’t hear about gold farming, in terms of sweat shop workers playing the game, in Diablo 2.
It’s all bots, these days. I haven’t played much on Battle.net recently, but I’ve heard that most of the games are literally 8 bots playing together. It seems amazing that the programs can be smart enough to do Baal runs; you’d think players could find a way to join the game and get ahead of them and PK them all.
Guys: *laughter*
Chris: We want our game to be a lot cleaner. The technology has come a long way since Diablo 2. It’s ten years.
Jon: I don’t think the developers could have even imagined the sorts of bots and other exploits that are being used against the game these days.
Probably not, but they did repeatedly say it would be cheat proof and that there’d be enforcement against dupers and hackers.
Chris: They were going from peer to peer to client server architecture. We use the same client-server paradigm as all modern games. And even just our database knows to check for dupes. If you make 2 copies of an item and you save your character, one of them will not save. We’re cutting off all duping at the knees just like that.
Just don’t get overconfident, since hackers will find a way.
Jon: I’m sure. One day there will be some duping method, and we will descend upon it and fix it at once. There are always exploits.
And so concluded our interview with the team that created something rather special over 14 years managing to differentiate themselves from Diablo 2 which was the benchmark to aspire to at the time.
Path of Exile 2 goes into Early Access on the 6 December.
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