In the Hack’n’Slay Path of Exile 2, players should be able to create such overpowered builds that everyone feels like they are breaking the game.
In Path of Exile, it’s about looting, leveling up, and of course, hacking and slashing enemies in the best Hack’n’Slay manner. To make this feel satisfying, the right balance is important. In an interview with GamesRadar, Managing Director Chris Wilson and Game Director Jonathan Rogers from Grinding Gear discussed how they handle character progression in the sequel, Path of Exile 2.
Developers want balance, but only to a certain extent
Path of Exile 2 is supposed to provide you with tough challenges and let you bite the dust even more often than the predecessor. Because this ARPG should be demanding from the start. At the same time, players should also be able to live out their power fantasies.
This is made possible by the revised skill system: each ability can be enhanced, changed, or even automated with 6 other skills. This creates powerful – sometimes even overpowered – combinations.
This aspect was particularly important to the creators of Path of Exile 2. For instance, Rogers says in an interview with GamesRadar that they learned a lot from a decade of power creep in the predecessor. They want to provide a minimum level of balance to the gameplay and systems, while at the same time everyone should feel like they are somehow “breaking” the game.
We want this ridiculousness and the feeling of completely destroying this thing, without actually overwhelming everything to the point that it stops working. Balance is tricky, but we have quite a bit of experience with it now. So we will be able to handle it when the time comes.
With this approach of Path of Exile 2, allowing players to live out their fantasies of omnipotence, while simultaneously confronting them with overpowered enemies, this ARPG could fulfill the needs of some gamers come release in 2024, especially those who felt unsatisfied with Diablo 4.
Those who have to wait a while until the release of Path of Exile 2 and have also had enough of Diablo 4 for now, can perhaps hold out with Last Epoch in the meantime. This time-travel ARPG has just received some new updates:
