With Dawn of the Hunt, Path of Exile 2 takes its next big step towards release. On the occasion of the new season, director Jonathan Rogers also talked about the competition in an interview.
Why doesn’t he want to defeat Diablo 4? Although two other games in the same genre as Path of Exile 2, Diablo 4 and Last Epoch, are succeeding, Game Director Jonathan Roger is not worried. In an interview with PC Gamer, he reveals that it is not his goal to leave other ARPGs behind with Path of Exile 2.
“There is room for many different players in this genre. It doesn’t have to be that there is only one game that dominates all others.”
Throughout the interview, he also explains why the competition in the genre does not harm his game, attributing this to the secret recipe of its predecessor, Path of Exile.
Here you can see the new trailer for the season “Dawn of the Hunt”:
Satisfied under one condition
When is the director satisfied? The fact that players in the ARPG genre switch back and forth between games has been established for years. For the head of Path of Exile 2, this circumstance is a positive one. He explains his goal as follows: “As long as people are willing to play our game for a month four times a year, that’s fine with me.”
Rogers is not about outshining other games but rather about drawing players in the genre back to the game four times a year with their seasonal content and keeping them engaged for a month. If gamers switch to another game with a new season start after that month, it seems to be no problem for the Game Director.
“ARPGs are one of the genres where the player community has embraced the idea of the season, where you play the game for a while, then stop, play something else, and then come back and play the next season,” Rogers says in the interview with PC Gamer. “That is somewhat of an expectation in this genre, partly because our approach to this issue has inspired a lot of that.”
Path of Exile (1) established seasons over many years and ensured that ARPG players keep coming back to their titles. That is probably also the secret recipe of the game, that it manages to consistently provide entry points for players.
Does the director play other ARPGs? Yes, in the interview he reveals that he also plays other ARPGs, but he is not someone who “reaches the full endgame grind of many other action RPGs.” His inspirations for PoE2 often come from games unrelated to the genre.
When I’m looking for inspirations for game design, I usually look at things outside our genre… For example, I want to play Civilization or something like that and then see what interesting mechanisms I could steal from it, as opposed to what I could steal from other action RPGs.
Jonathan Rogers at PC Gamer
Which mechanics from Civilization will make it into the next update of Path of Exile 2 remains to be seen. However, you can already find the main innovations of Dawn of the Hunt here: Path of Exile 2 changes all classes, saying: You can say goodbye to your OP builds
