With the news that Path of Exile were launching a gateway to bring down the lag for players in Australia and New Zealand, we called Grinding Gear Games’ Chris Wilson to get the low-down on where the F2P-ARPG is at, why now is the right time for a low-ping gateway, and their plans for the future.

If you’d like to play Path of Exile, you can download the beta client free from our file library here (quota-free for iiNet group customers).

GON: Chris, you’ve been in open beta for a little while now, since January in fact — can you tell us a little bit about how everything’s progressing?

Chris: So we’re now at 2.46 million registered users. So we had a large surge of people who became interested in the game, and who have joined our community, which has exceeded our expectations. Most of the game’s performance so far has exceeded our expectations, and this has raised some issues with how do we handle all these users, but thankfully the tests we’ve done prior to open beta were very optimistic in terms of user numbers so we were (barely) able to handle the amount of people that flooded our servers. And it did cause a few weeks of instability while we dealt with issues that only manifest when you have more than 50,000 people playing at once. But we we have those under control now.

GON: So what is your peak concurrent player count?

Chris: We’ve hit 70,000 in the first week of release. We’re very pleased with that. There was an awful lot of stuff combining at the same time with the game being very new and a lot of people talking about it which caused us to really strain the servers, but thankfully it’s dropped a bit to a more maintainable rate at the moment.

GON: Have you identified any issues in the beta that you’ll need to address going forward before launch?

Chris: We have found a lot of things based on player feedback and our own analytics that we can improve. There are various systems that we’ve been working on with the players to find better solutions to. For example loot allocation in the game, a lot of players would like it to be a bit more forgiving and less free-for-all, so we’ve been looking into a variety of options which will hopefully launch by the end of the month.

GON: When we last spoke you anticipated the third act being the final before launch. How do you feel about that now?

Chris: We added most of the third act in beta release, missing off about the last third of that act. And we are expecting that we will have that as the major content added at launch. It basically finishes off the story, adds a much more climactic boss encounter, and a lot of new areas. And we’re also working on the fourth act of the game which isn’t going to be ready for launch at the end of this year, but it will come maybe 9-12 months after that.

GON: So you’re still anticipating a launch in October-December?

Chris: Yeah, at the moment we’re targeting very late September or early October.

GON: And 9-12 months after that, the fourth act?

Chris: Yes, although that will depend a lot on support from the players. If they continue being generous with their support then we’ll be able to do it quickly, and if they’re not then I guess it will take longer. We have to use their money to develop it, and the rate of support dictates how many staff we have working on it.

GON: How many staff do you have now? Have you scaled up since beta?

Chris: We’re up to 39 now, including our customer support department, and that’s the department that’s grown the most.

GON: That’s really good! That must make you… the third biggest developer in New Zealand now?

Chris: Something around there. I’m not sure of the exact studio numbers. After we last spoke, everyone came down on me for misquoting the relative sizes of the NZ game development industry. So I’ll check my figures before I actually comment!

GON: Fair enough! So you’ve activated the in-game cash shop?

Chris: Yeah, when open beta started we stopped selling access to it and so it became public, and we allowed people to use the credit that they’d purchased during closed beta and also to purchase new credit that they can use to buy microtransactions. That’s been very popular. We’re constantly adding new ones, trying to get a few in every week, and people have been letting us know what they’re interested in seeing next.

GON: Have you been seeing a lot of people willing to pay out for new stuff?

Chris: It’s been very good, looking at the rates of support from the users and we’ve been finding it helps to run specials so that people can get some of the more premium things at a discount occasionally if they’re patient.

GON: So you’ve just activated the AU/NZ gateway for a week or so now. Can you tell us about how the ping has gone down since then and what feedback you’ve been seeing from affected players?

Chris: Sure. So we added it to the realm toward the end of last week but in a way that the public couldn’t see, but as of yesterday we’ve made it so the public can log in to it, so we’ve got one day of feedback from the public plus one more of testing from ourselves. For people who are used to playing on a 200-250ms connection to America, they say it’s like a different game because they’re playing in Australia with sometimes less than 30 ping. From NZ we get about 50 ping. There are some issues with the server that we’re working on resolving with the host, some initial configuration issues, and we suspect it’s just a matter of replacing that physical machine with one with different hardware. But from a networking point of view as far as we’re concerned it’s working extremely well, and it validates a lot of what we were hoping we would get. It’s a strange case because we’re running the realm internationally through different server hosts.

The thing about Path of Exile is that players can play together regardless of which server they’re playing on, so if you have a friend in Europe you can play with them and trade items, even though their server is located in another continent. So normally we do this because the data centers we use are linked together, they have really good connections, but in the case of the Australian one it’s with a different company so it’s our first case of actually going through ‘the wild internet’ as it were, to connect between them.

GON: So where is your gateway located physically? And what did you have to do to get it set up?

Chris: I have no idea what city in Australia it’s located in. Which in a way shows that this kind of stuff is handled transparently (laughs). In order to set it up, the first challenge was finding a server host that was able to do it. And the difficulty there is the cost of international bandwidth. It’s prohibitively expensive, but we have a good deal on that with this server, and it was just a matter of soliciting a test server to see how well it performs and then once we were happy with that we can order a lot more and scale it up to support a larger Australian population on there.

GON: Do you have a lot of AU/NZ players? Can you give us a rough estimate of how many there are?

Chris: It’s difficult to know exactly, but my estimate is somewhere in the region of about 4%.

GON: So 4% of your 2.4 million?

Chris: Yeah I would say it’s somewhere in the region of about 100,000 game accounts signed up through Australia and New Zealand.

GON: You said that the cost of international bandwidth is prohibitively expensive. Is this something you’re finding worse in Australia than any other country?

Chris: In New Zealand and Australia it’s SUPER expensive compared to the rest of the world. In some cases, one hundred times as expensive. So that is prohibitive. Except now that we have a good deal arranged with the server, it should be sustainable.

GON: Now one of the most common reactions to the gateway news was “But these are NZ devs, why did they take so long to make a gateway for themselves”. Can you explain to our readers the realities of game development and why it took this long to make this decision?

Chris: Well I guess there are a few things in play here, and the first one is that although we’re based in New Zealand, our customers generally aren’t. We’d love to be able to support them, the New Zealanders, especially because we’re based there, but the priority has to be the other 98% of players who we have to make sure come first. Because of that, launching an international realm was the first goal in getting that sorted out. And now we’re in that stage of open beta where we’re not encountering stability issues of the core game, you know, everyone else is playing happily overseas, that’s about the time we can look into supporting other territories. In addition of course New Zealand and Australia are very hard to target because of the cost of bandwidth.

We’ve received quotes in the order of multiple dollars per gigabyte of data, you know, like domestic internet rates or worse in some cases because it’s reliable co-located rates. So we’ve received quotes that… there is no way our company could afford the quantity of bandwidth that would be required to run servers there if it was that bad per gigabyte value. Thankfully you can get better rates if you organise larger bulk deals and tie them into server hosting. So we have eventually been able to get one sorted out but it’s not an exaggeration to say that this is literally the sixteenth or seventeenth server hosting company we’ve spoken to.

GON: How do you feel when you see New Zealanders or Australians complaining about this? It’s obviously very difficult for you to be in this position, since you obviously have to deal with the business realities but also you want to support your home team at the same time?

Chris: I would love to give the New Zealanders and Australians a place to play, I mean, if they were playing locally, it’d be easier for us to be greedy and to go and do that at the cost of everyone else, but we decided it’d be best to put most of the players first despite that fact it actually inconveniences us. Another thing is: having the game from New Zealand run at 200-250 milliseconds of ping has encouraged us to make sure the game works acceptably at that latency.

There are a lot of games like Vindictus for example, which is an Asian action-MMO, that game limits it so you can’t connect if your latency is over a certain amount, and they did this because they have quite a fast visceral experience but it requires the latency to be low. Whereas in our case we know that some people are connecting from… like we had connections from the middle of Africa. I don’t know how they’re getting internet, but they’re playing our game and it’s important that the game is playable with a lot of ping. We do an awful lot of action-prediction and stuff like that. When you click to attack it starts the animation going straight away even if it’s going to be a full second before the data gets back to you with the result. And while you certainly suffer playing under conditions like that, it still feels relatively immediate to do so.

GON: I guess this must have made you a stronger developer to have to work under these conditions, but did it provide any difficulties in testing? Were you able to really test the game properly?

Chris: We have our internal servers in our office and we also had the servers in the states so to some extent the experience that we were missing was the experience between these two. The ones in the office have less than a millisecond of latency, and the ones in the states maybe 200 ms away. So we were missing the experience of trying it at any less than 200 ms but thankfully, that’s what our giant army of beta testers was for and they gave us plenty of feedback on that.

GON: When you look to the future you’ve got the fourth act coming and before that, the public launch, but what’s the next step for Path of Exile beyond more acts and more content. Do you have plans for maybe a foundry-style mod toolkit, or any sort of player creation tools? Just spitballing — what have you got in the works?

Chris: We’ve looked into the idea of community content and there are definitely some opportunities there. One of the things to note is that because it’s an online game with a secure economy, you can’t let the players literally decide “this is the exact layout of the dungeon and we’ll put the monsters where we want” because they could make it too easy. So there has to be a degree of challenge that’s maintained. We have quite an interesting plan for the future of Path of Exile which involves both continuing forward with the core game, new acts and so on, but also taking advantage of the league system where we can run — think of it as new servers of the game that have a fresh economy and new rulesets.

We’ve been running race events that last between say, one and eight hours, using the system for quite a while now, I mean there’s several running a day now, six today for example. It’s like a fresh start in the game and you get the chance to race other players. It’s unique in action RPGs because it lets you see who’s better at the game rather than who has spent the most time accumulating items. We have some interesting twists on that in the future that we believe will be very addictive, and our goal is that alongside having a strong normal action-RPG we’d like there to be a lot of repeatable content in these interesting events.

GON: Do you have any plans to introduce a real cash economy into these events? Betting on peoples’ performance for example?

Chris: We are very interested in catering towards the more meta e-sports style stuff. With regards to wagering, I mean we’ve discussed wagering from in-game items all the way up to real money and… of course there a lot of legal implications of real-money wagering, and similar kind of abuse issues that can happen with in-game wagering. I mean people will happily throw matches and stuff to get a better sword, if needed. It does have some interesting points but we really value our streaming community and the people who take the events seriously as a pseudo e-sport, and we have better streaming integration coming in the future for example.

GON: I’ve been playing Neverwinter, and a lot of people are using their Foundry tool to create maps that are basically just easy mob grinds and experience farms. Is this the sort of thing you’d have to worry about with player-authoring tools as well?

Chris: Right. One of the things we are planning on selling is the ability for people to customise the parameters of one of these league events, but in a way that can only make it harder. That way you get bragging rights for completing a very difficult event, rather than the ability to just set it to be too easy and make a lot of progress.

GON: Making it too easy does sound pointless, but… I guess if they’re willing to pay you money?

Chris: It should be interesting. Though it really depends. As long as we can keep it safe for the other users. You’ve probably seen with the design of our microtransactions the goal is that people with money can’t get any kind of advantage over other people in terms of actual progress.

GON: And that seems to be working out quite well for you — there’s a lot of MMOs which are struggling with microtransactions because people know it’s pay-to-win, and so they avoid the whole game like the plague.

Chris: Yeah. It’s difficult as a player to commit yourself to playing something where you know that someone can just trump all of your work by spending twenty bucks.

GON: Chris, thanks a lot for your chat and it’s been really good to talk to you!

Chris: Thank you for your time!

Grinding Gear Games have announced that they are testing an Australia/New Zealand gateway for Path of Exile, to give players much better ping in their free-to-play (and very popular) ARPG.

“We also have an Australian Path of Exile gateway (connected to the rest of the worldwide realm) in testing and will probably turn it on for public testing next week as well,” writes executive producer Chris Wilson on the Path of Exile forums.

“This will hopefully also offer much better performance for New Zealand.”

Source: Thanks, Dave

In real life, I’m a planner. I think through everything, weighing up the pros and cons of any given situation before committing myself. I’m not exactly spontaneous, if you get my drift — I’m more a “measure seventeen times, cut once” kind of person.

When it comes to games, however, I’m far more likely to adopt a “suck it and see” kind of mentality, jumping in with both feet, doing what seems fun and damning the consequences. Sometimes this works well — there is fun to be had with randomised characters that force you to play differently from how you normally would, and there are rarely any game breaking problems by casually misusing a couple of stat or skill points in most RPGs.

After spending a week or so with the beta of Grinding Gear Games action RPG Path of Exile however, my opinion of taking a haphazard approach to character design has changed rather drastically.

I’ve never been one for theorycrafting. In fact, I’ve written more than one column making fun of the people who take more time working out how to play a game than actually playing it. After a first rather disastrous run at Path of Exile during which I went with my gut instead of actually taking the time to work out how I wanted my character to work, my approach to character building in this game, and, I suspect, many more to come, has made an abrupt about face.

Path of Exile doesn’t so much encourage theorycrafting as it does mandate it. The terrifyingly big passive skill tree has been constructed in such a way that each of the six character classes has multiple branches they can expand down, each holding special passives that can be greatly appealing, with added damage, health regeneration, bonus armour, special attack effects and the like. If you don’t check carefully, however, some of these branches can and will force you to spend points that are useless to your chosen character, making for an inefficient and sometimes not particularly useful build.

In the case of my first character I thought it would be awesome to create a stealth, dual-wielding Shadow (the rogue style class) and just put points where I thought I needed them every level. As a result I wound up with a melee fighter almost entirely dependent on gear who didn’t have enough mana to use any of his good attacks and could hardly hit anything even when he did. Not the best thing to be playing when the game heats up in the second act.

I normally dread trawling forums or using spec calculators because there’s usually some type of cookie-cutter spec that is considered the best, and in many games the skill trees are taken up with multiple filler talents placed in between important skills, making coming up with a spec rather straightforward and/or boring. The theorycrafting required in such games to come up with an optimal spec is straightforward but ultimately unnecessary.

Path of Exile makes thinking about how you want to play your character a necessity. I’d even go so far as to say that it gamifies the entire idea of theorycrafting, making it a rewarding experience rather than something that is a necessary evil. Grinding Gear Games does this by making every decision count, not by making every skill spectacular, but by limiting respeccing. Instead of being able to simply buy complete respecs, Path of Exile instead rewards players with limited respecs as quest rewards and random drops. These respecs only give you a point or two to change at a time and in a skill tree that can support up to 120 skill points, that’s not a lot, and as a result every decision made about your character feels weighty.

It’s a clever point of differentiation in a market that is fairly glutted. Whereas games like Diablo III, Torchlight 2 and the upcoming Neverwinter offer tight, coherent games in which most players will have similar experiences by having tightly structured skill trees (or none at all in the case of Diablo III) and easy respeccing if you place a point wrong in your skill trees, Path of Exile appears to be attempting to turn the act of thinking about and creating a character into something as important as the content of the game itself.

Since launching Path of Exile’s open beta in January, Grinding Gears has attracted more than two million player registrations.

In before all the usual “yeah but how many are active and “yeah but it’s free-to-play” to remind you, gently, that Path of Exile was put together by a brave team of Kiwi indies, who seem both gratified and surprised by its success.

“We’re really pleased with Path of Exile’s reception It blew our expectations out of the water and continues to grow every day,” producer Chris Wilson said. “The continued feedback and support from our fans has been great. We expect to add a lot of new content and features during the open beta period as we approach full release later this year.”

Also: it’s actually pretty sweet. Check it out for yourself.

Source: PC Gamer

Path of Exile is, as you know, a very impressive ARPG from New Zealand developers Grinding Gear Games. But did you know Path of Exile also holds race events, where players can compete in leagues either on their own or as a team, to see who can get the furthest in the game or score the most points for specific objectives?

Some of these races last just for an hour, while some can go as long as a week — and at the end, winners can expect to be rewarded with sweet, sweet prizes.

The first of these events to take place during the beta is about to kick off in just ten hours, and it’ll be an hour-long race, and there are heaps of prizes on offer. The player with the most experience overall can win a prize, as can the player with the most experience by class, as well as quest prizes and full-clear prizes for completely clearing specific areas.

If you’d like to take part, make a new character (make sure you assign it to the right league when asked) and get ready to play. Character creation for these event leagues opens up about 30 minutes prior to start time. Click here for more info on how it all works.

If you haven’t got Path of Exile installed, I’ll bet you can grab it from our file library and have it going before the race begins.

What if I told you that right now, you could be playing an action-RPG with the quality of Diablo, completely free of charge? Well, you can: Path of Exile, an online action RPG from New Zealand’s Grinding Gear Games, just entered open beta. I spend the better part of this weekend playing to see how it’s shaping, looking at whether it’s worth spending your time on.

And did I mention it’s free?

More complete

I’ve spent a whole pile of time on Path of Exile in the past, and the biggest new change here is the welcome addition of Act Three. Path of Exile is actually a complete game now, with a clear beginning, midgame, and endgame. The previous closed beta, with only two acts, forced you to just grind into nowhere. Now with a complete story, Path of Exile gives context to your time as an outcast in Wraeclast.

As an action-RPG, Path of Exile still is, admittedly, light on the story. The game is closer to Diablo 2’s six broad quests per act, rather than Diablo 3’s epic quests to unlock the gate down the road, and then find the church 50 meters east, before stopping to recalibrate your GPS.

This light approach works in Path of Exile’s favour, though. There’s enough story to hold the looting game together, without going so far you forget why you were really playing in the first place—killing zombies and robbing them.

More polish

However, it’s the little touches that make the move to open beta truly shine. First among these is the voice acting added to all characters and NPCs. The quality of the acting is surprising, for the credits don’t include any big names, and voices were all sourced from New Zealand. This makes a huge difference in moving the impression of the game from ‘cute indie title’ to ‘serious contender’.

More player skills have also been added—a lot more skills. Path of Exile used to feel lacking in the skill department, with little choice given over what skill you were going to spend spamming your way to riches. The open beta has addressed this problem, with more and more skills added to use. My ranger uses one single target skill, one area skill, one group buff, two curses, and two traps, with multiple support buffs added to the direct fire skills. It’s enough to keep things interesting.

More players

The open beta brought tens of thousands of new players to Path of Exile. The current peak player record is 69,850 players logged on at once. This makes finding multiplayer parties extremely easy. Although this might settle down after the initial launch weeks, right now plenty are around to play with.

This influx of players allowed me to take multiplayer for its first real test. Group size is up to six people, and… it’s really spammy, in a fun, cut-throat sort of way.

Keeping with its homage to Diablo 2, Path of Exile has no permanent personal loot. When a rare item drops, it will be locked to one person to loot—for two seconds. Multiplayer basically consists of firing as many area skills as possible while constantly racing to beat others to loot. At the very least it keeps you awake.

More Lag

Unfortunately, the influx of players has also brought a ton of lag. Over the weekend this server stress resulted in multiple frequent disconnections, and one very frustrated writer. Ordinarily, this would be a severe black mark on the game, with me devoting half an article to complaining about how there wasn’t even a red hair option for my ranger to make up for it. Like all Australians, lag free online play is my expected right.

However, several issues would make such a claim unfair.

First, the developers have been very active in working to scale the capacity of their servers to support more players. The problems surfaced on Saturday, and were mostly gone by Sunday. While 24 hours on a weekend is a frustrating time for random disconnects, it is only 24 hours, after all. As you’re reading this, the game is stable.

Second, half the weekend problems were caused by frequent DDoS attacks on the servers. All I can say is that people on the internet suck.

And third, the game does have a Singapore server gateway, which during closed beta reduced my latency down to a fairly tolerable 120-180ms. However, earlier this month, Australia’s undersea cable to Singapore got cut, making this gateway pointless. The estimated fix for this is sometime in February, and it’s completely the responsibility of the Singapore telcos.

And it’s free

Path of Exile is free to download and play, with a cosmetic microtransactions business model—you can buy vanity pets and new visual effects. An initial selection has been made available on the store, though what’s on offer is a little uninspiring—glowing weapons and frogs with crowns don’t scream “Shut up and take my money”. That said, in the open beta they did manage to sell several million dollars worth of kiwi pets, so it could work for them.

Minor niggles aside, for a free game, Path of Exile is extremely high quality. I remarked in my last look at the closed beta that it was an homage to the more hardcore days of action RPGs, before Diablo 3 and Torchlight cartoonified the genre. That’s still the case. Path of Exile open beta is still a hardcore, high quality action RPG, reminiscent of the genre’s glory days, which you should definitely check out.

Download the Open Beta client from our file library right now and get playing!

Some screenshots via Reddit (here and here)

UPDATE: Cas has just replaced the old file with a new one compressed down to 2GB instead of 5GB. The links below now go to this new file!

Now that our overnight download of Path of Exile‘s open beta client has finally finished, our main man Cas has whacked it up on the File Library for you all to download and save yourself a) 5GB of quota, and b) from having to thrash Grinding Gears’ servers over and over like everybody else.

So! Click here to download the Path of Exile open beta client from our file library. Enjoy!

“What the hell is Path of Exile,” you mutter? Watch this trailer and be enlightened (then, come back here and download it).

Path of Exile is New Zealand’s answer to Diablo — a free-to-play online ARPG built from the ground-up by hardcore Diablo fans who just wanted to make the perfect monster-killing loot machine. And as of right now, the open beta has kicked off and you can get in on the ground floor.

As of right now, their patching servers are under extreme load as every man and his dog tries to update the game, so please be patient and hit up the official site to log in and download your client.

If you’re a previous Path of Exile player, please note that all your characters have been reset back to level 1. You may also want to familiarise yourself with the full patch notes, which can be found here.

Check out the open beta trailer to see why Path of Exile deserves your attention, or read our massive interview to get a feel for why these guys are throwing down the gauntlet to Blizzard and Runic.

New Zealand-developed ARPG Path of Exile has released a new trailer to remind everybody that its open beta begins on January 23. Handily, it also serves as a very nice showcase of exactly why Path of Exile is looking amazing — watch the trailer below and tell me it doesn’t get your Diablo senses tingling.

Get yourself over to the official website for more on the game and info on exactly when it all kicks off.

If you’ve been itching to play the New Zealand-developed ARPG Path of Exile, you only need wait 12 more days. Path of Exile has just announced that they’ll be heading into open beta on January 23.

The final character wipe, and deployment of patch 0.10.00 (including Act III) will occur then, also. Here at games.on.net we called Path of Exile “one of the most promising Action RPGs around”, so if Diablo and Torchlight aren’t cutting it for you, then head over to the official site come the 23rd.

When we spoke to Path of Exile‘s Chris Wilson in our massive interview, he explained they were expecting to leave beta within 3-6 months and head out to a final launch. The game will launch free-to-play, supported by a microtransaction shop.

The open beta phase of New Zealand-developed Path of Exile has been delayed until next year, reveals a post on the official forums.

“A few months ago, we estimated that we would enter Open Beta in December 2012. Although we believe that we can have the build ready by then, we’ve decided that it’s too dangerous to launch the Open Beta over the Christmas period and Southern Hemisphere summer holidays when many of our staff will be away,” writes Lead Designer Chris Wilson.

“We have therefore decided to enter Open Beta on January 23, 2013, US time. The final character wipe and deployment of patch 0.10.0 (including Act Three) will occur then.”

What should you do while waiting? “Over Christmas we’ll be ramping up the number of events that we run for the community in preparation for the quantity we plan to run during Open Beta,” says Chris. “If you enjoy participating in these events, you should find the schedule rewarding.”

For more on Path of Exile, check out our massive interview with Chris.

Source: Ausgamers

Path of Exile is a hardcore, old-school ARPG from the indie developers at Grinding Gear Games in New Zealand. They’ve been doing very well for themselves recently, and here at games.on.net we’re big fans of what they’re doing. But how are they coping as they scale up to open beta, and how has the recent launch of Diablo III and Torchlight II affected their player base? We spoke to producer and designer Chris Wilson for all the answers.

GON: Now, you’ve just announced Act 3.

Chris: Yes, it’s a major content upgrade that is due in open beta, so we’ve still got five-ish weeks before it’s available to the general public, but we should have alpha testers enjoying it in about a week.

GON: How many acts do you plan on doing before you finally launch?

Chris: It’s tough to say. I expect the third act will be the final one prior to us labelling it as ‘launch’, but we intend to add more at the rate of say, one every nine months, for as long as we can afford to.

GON: So you don’t have an endgame in sight – it’s not going to be a five-act game, for example. It’s just going to be constant expansions?

Chris: Yeah. We’re anticipating adding constant free expansions for as long as we can.

GON: How does that affect your level structure? You’ve already got a skill tree – or should I say a skill forest – that many users find terrifying. In a good way, obviously. How do you balance that and keep adding expansions?

Chris: So the endgame that we have is somewhat separate from the actual act content — we have these randomised map areas, which is a separate topic I guess, but in terms of balancing the levelling it’s actually a very difficult question adding in another because, when people have established characters, where do the levels fit in? We don’t want to invalidate people’s hard work, when they get to the endgame and they’re grinding for specific items with specific properties, we don’t want to come along and say “Here is a new act and everything is twice as good” – you know, the World of Warcraft way of doing things. So it’s important to us that our later acts that we add are extra content, but their function in the end game is somewhat parallel — more places you can play, perhaps with some new stuff you want to get, but it’s not just strictly better. It won’t invalidate your gear or the effort you’ve put in.

GON: So you won’t be constantly raising the level cap for example, it’s a more a case of ‘this is an alternate path to the endgame’.

Chris: That’s right. I don’t think we intend to raise the level cap. The levels have a lot of diminishing returns going on at the moment. It’s exponentially harder to gain each level, all the way up to level 100. This is done for a few reasons, mostly because it’s kind of a badge of honour, how long people have been playing. You see a level 70 guy, you know that he’s been playing for a really long time, and a level 80 is just that much more. So if you find a level 95 person, you know that years of his life have been sunk into this character.

GON: Speaking of sinking lots of time, are you going to wipe these characters when you do launch? Or are you going to keep all the existing ones?

Chris: We’re wiping the characters when we go into open beta in December, and that will be the final wipe. So this is why we’re treating open beta as a release internally. Because once it’s available to the public, and once we’ve pledged to not wipe characters any more — which is the case — it’s essentially a launch, except with a ‘beta’ title because things may go wrong.

GON: When do you expect to leave open beta and do the ‘final’ launch after December?

Chris: We’re intending to remove the beta label as soon as we can. Once we polish up any loose ends that we’ve got to sort out in open beta, which will mostly be driven by player feedback. If they say ‘look, there’s not enough content’ then we’ll add a bit more. If they say ‘there’s not enough skills’, we’ll get that sorted out. The intention will be to remove the beta title and formally launch around 3-6 months after entering beta. But it’s difficult. We’ll happily keep it in beta if we have to.

GON: It seems like you guys are doing quite well in closed beta already — how are things going for Grinding Gear Games on the back of Path of Exile?

Chris: They’re going really well. We started selling access to closed beta in April this year and I think in American dollars we’ve sold about $1.35 million of access to the game, which we’ve very pleased with.

GON: How does that compare in terms of your initial budget?

Chris: (laughs) We haven’t paid back the cost of the game yet, but it gives us quite a runway to open beta and to add the content we want to add. It’s a good sign that in the future we’ll make enough money to do what we want to do with the game, but uh.. the founders aren’t rich yet. Put it that way.

GON: How many people have you got working there at Grinding Gear?

Chris: We have 22 full-time people working here at the moment.

GON: Is that very large for a New Zealand game developer?

Chris: There aren’t very many large studios here. I think there are just two larger than us, there’s Sidhe down in Wellington — who are rebranding themselves to PikPok — they have something in the order of 100 people, and there’s also Gameloft, the large French company who has a studio in NZ with a lot of teams. They’re both big. But other than us and those companies, it’s pretty much just small teams who work on iOS or Flash games.

GON: Sounds like Australia then! Has the New Zealand government provided you with any sort of support or assistance to get Path of Exile off the ground?

Chris: We haven’t received a cent of support or assistance.

GON: Is this a thing that is available to you as a New Zealand developer?

Chris: It’s something we’ve been looking into recently, but there’s so much paperwork and long complicated discussions about it that haven’t actually led anywhere. I’d like it to, so it may be in six months that we’ll be able to get a grant of some type, but so far it hasn’t yielded anything.

GON: So on the subject of selling beta access, it’s now October in 2012, and this is when your site says you’re planning to ship the pre-order rewards. Are those still on track?

Chris: With the rewards, we’ve actually received all the physical goods in the office at the moment, I can see people in the distance signing posters and so on. They’re going out pretty soon. There was a digital component like soundtracks and kiwi pets that people have already had for some time, but the physical ones should be posted out as quickly as we can sign and package a few thousand of them.

GON: And those pre-order rewards have been really popular as a way to get people in? Do you see a lot of people buying the high-end gold and diamond ones?

Chris: Yeah, I think the last time I checked 37% of our revenue was above the $10 minimum level. So for example if someone gave us $25 we’d count $15 of it above the minimum. So 37% of the revenue is above the minimum, as in discretionary stuff that they’ve chosen to spend above just buying game access. And we’re up to 100 diamond packs, plus or minus a couple.

GON: So when you finally launch you’re planning to be free for everyone to play, but will you offer the same sort of scaling cosmetic packs that you can buy as a general thank you to the developers, sort of thing?

Chris: It’s likely. We’ve got the microtransaction shop coming at launch, where you can spend the credit that people are pre-purchasing. The packs all represent dollar values of credit, you know, if you spend a thousand dollars you get a thousand dollars of credit and all the other stuff. So we will obviously let people actually spend that credit on the microtransaction stuff rather than sell it for real cash, as they’ve already pre-paid for it. But I expect that because of the popularity of these supporter packs that include physical goods, we will come up with a new set of them for open beta. There’s a lot of discussion about what we could put in them and it hasn’t been decided yet, but it’s likely.

GON: I don’t suppose you’re going to go down the Diablo III route of an auction house to support your game financially?

Chris: We don’t intend to have an auction house, no! (laughs)

GON: Speaking of that, how do you guys feel with the launch of Diablo III and Torchlight II this year? How did it affect your player numbers? Do you see a fluctuation in the player base when these games come out?

Chris: In general they are positive. It’s very interesting to look at the difference between, say, Diablo III and Guild Wars 2. When Diablo III and Torchlight II launched we received press coverage because we were similar. If they did like Diablo III they’d discuss us in a negative way, and if they didn’t like Diablo III they’d discuss us in a positive way. But either way we’re getting discussed, we’re getting users and numbers, which is great. There was a big exodus of people that got sick of Diablo III and came over to us, which is awesome. So I’m very glad that Diablo III did come out and that it sold so many units because that really helped.

But when something like Guild Wars 2 came out, people didn’t discuss Path of Exile at the same time as it because, well, it’s not really the same sort of game. But they sure played Guild Wars 2, reducing our player numbers by a little bit. It’s better that competitors come out, because then there’s some discussion around it rather than a somewhat-different game that people will go and play, because they’ve been waiting for years to play it.

GON: So surely you must play what are essentially your competitors games. How do you feel about the different directions that Diablo and Torchlight are taking the ARPG genre compared to what you’re going?

Chris: I completely understand and respect what they’re going for. The decisions to simplify game systems in Diablo III have made them a very large amount of money. They sold a ton of copies of that game and it had a lot of mainstream appeal. From their point of view it was probably the right decision to make, so people giving them flack about it probably don’t understand that they’re a business trying to make as much money for their shareholders as they can.

Which of course is great for us, because if gives us a point of difference. If they’d made Diablo III as a remake of Diablo II with modern graphics, that would have been quite bad for us, because we’re targeting that type of hardcore player. I’m glad they did what they did and I can respect we’ve both made good games.

GON: Well essentially Torchlight II is a remake of Diablo II with modern graphics in many ways. Did that affect you?

Chris: The interesting thing about Torchlight II is when I was playing it the one thing I noticed is that all of the Diablo II-isms that we changed for Path of Exile came back to annoy me. And I’m not saying Torchlight II is a bad game! I enjoyed playing it but certain things that we’ve changed for Path of Exile that I’m now used to doing our way I found frustrating, because I felt they were bad systems, so I changed them in my game, and therefore it’s frustrating to play them in someone else’s.

GON: Can you give me an example of that?

Chris: A good example of that is the potion system. In a lot of ARPG’s, Titan Quest, Torchlight, you buy a ton of potions and every time you’re hurt you drink one and it’s just a big homogenous stack. In Path of Exile your potions are in set flasks that are actually items that you have to upgrade, and they can be used multiple times, and they become part of your build. If you want a flask that extinguishes fire if you’ve ever been ignited, then that’s part of the way you build your character rather than just a number of potions you bought from the shop last time you were in town.

GON: How many hours of playing ARPG’s did you and your team spend trying to nail down exactly where the cracks in the system were, how you thought you could differentiate yourselves?

Chris: We came to creating Path of Exile off the back of playing ARPG’s as gamers for a long time. In fact I met two of our founders playing Diablo II online and we’d put in tens of thousands of hours by that point, I mean literally years of study and playing the game  – or being unemployed and playing the game, whatever our personal situations were (laughs). We played a lot of Diablo II and then in research for this game a lot of Dungeon Siege, Titan Quest and so on. We made the game that we would want to play as gamers.

GON: So when you see games like Diablo III taking the always-online step, that’s something you’ve followed for Path of Exile? It’s not possible to play offline in the manner of the old Diablo II.

Chris: That’s correct. We basically designed the game to be an online game. The reason why is because when we played Diablo II you could play either online or offline, and there were big differences between the two and we felt the online mode was more fun. We were hardcore players and we always played online. Offline was kind of a ‘second tier’ way of playing because there were cheats and hacks and that kind of stuff so we chose, because we were playing online with our friends and having a great time, this is the experience we wanted to replicate. In addition the thing that most people don’t mention is of course being always online is great for fighting piracy.

GON: Is that something you’ve seen yourselves? Have you been affected by attempted piracy?

Chris: Well they’re only able to log in they have an account, and currently they need to either get a beta key from a giveaway, or be picked by the random timer thing on our front page, or give us ten bucks. And that’s worked well. Nobody’s cheated their way in. If it were a game they could download and just play, they could copy it for their friends — but the primary motivation for being always online is that we’re making an online game and so that’s what the design is going to be. It’s… for example, trade is an important part of the game. Trade is a thing that we can plan around players doing to solve certain problems in the game.

GON: What sort of problems?

Chris: Well for example if your equipment at the higher difficulty levels just isn’t up to scratch, we do allow leeway for trade. Like we don’t give you all the tools you require in terms of item drops. Obviously this is all random item drops so we can’t control it specifically but we don’t have the drops so high that you can find every single thing you need yourself. There’s a certain degree of having to go interact with other players to get the final piece for your build, for example.

GON: Right, so it’s a bit like Pokemon – you can’t get all of them unless you interact with other humans.

Chris: To some extent. We haven’t done it explicitly, it’s more of a statistical thing. It’s unlikely you’re going to find everything, especially if you’re doing something crazy and niche.

GON: Is it the sort of thing that grew organically out of your design during development, or did you always plan for trade to be a huge part of the system?

Chris: Well from the beginning we wanted to encourage players to work together to solve things. Now that can be trade, or just getting help. For example when I was playing Path of Exile recently I wasn’t able to kill one of the boss monsters on a higher difficulty. So I asked one of the guys online, ‘can you give me help?’ and I got help with it and it made it easier. So this is the sort of thing we want players to do, because it encourages players to work together, during parts that are difficult to solve with their current character.

GON: Do other players just teleport into your instance?

Chris: Yes. There are towns which are shared, but everything else is privately instanced. This enables us to do a lot of random generation, so if you walk out of town with a friend or even alone, you get an area which is unique to you. It hasn’t been seen by anyone before. This means that whenever you play through the game it’s different each time. I mean, not completely different — if you’re in a swamp, you’ll probably still be a swamp next time. But the layout of where things are, what monsters there are, will be different.

GON: Anything else you’d like to say to our very handsome audience?

Chris: If you’re keen to check out the game, go to www.pathofexile.com to have a look, and if you have any questions just post them on the forum or write to us, and we’ll answer them!

Thanks Chris!

Remember The Butcher? No, not Diablo III’s Saturday morning villain. The Butcher that scared the crap out of you at sweet sixteen. Diablo I–old school.  Playing Path of Exile, an indie action-RPG, brought those memories back. In other words… I died. On the second boss at level three. Twice.

With the game just finished a public weekend in its closed beta state, I dove in again to see how it’s shaping up.

Challenging combat

The aforementioned deaths were caused by a recent overhaul to enemy AI. Rather than come at you in simple waves, enemies will now try to surround you, so you need to watch your back.

Fortunately, players have also received upgrades, with more skills to counter with. Using the new fire traps with my ranger Kellygrrl was great fun, as I’d lure packs of enemies into the fire while shooting them with poison gas. Combat felt more tactical than it did when I played last year.

Low latency

The next big improvement—added this month—is the lower latency. Path of Exile has a server in Singapore for Australians, and I was pulling a steady 170ms latency with no spikes. While not a true local server, it is the next best thing and makes the game more responsive than Diablo III.

This is commendable. The game is privately funded, developed, and published by New Zealand’s Grinding Gear Games. As a self-publisher, Grinding Gear Games has limited funding, and the game is taking some time to release as a result. Yet still they’ve done for us what Blizzivision, with all its excessive means, did not.

Actual multiplayer

Path of Exile also has true multiplayer features to justify its online-only status. Global chat is actually global, and always hopping. Towns are not instanced, so serve well as social hubs, especially with the new looking for group bulletin boards. Both world and arena PvP content is also being tested.

The online leagues are especially integral to the game. The developers run regular competitions, with prizes awarded at the end. A two-week one-life-only hardcore league is running right now, with the winner being the highest, still-alive player at the end. All this together means the game actually feels like an online game, rather than a single player game with online DRM.

Noob friendly

The fourth obvious improvement is the streamlining of the early game. While starting Path of Exile last year was akin to being thrown off a short pier and told to “Have fun!”, these days you’re given tooltips for everything. Levelling up skill gems, for instance, is not the mystical process it once was.

The huge passive skill tree has also been given an overhaul. Now only two paths are given at the start—damage and surviving. This lets you progress quickly towards perks that feel powerful for a set purpose, without worrying about choosing the wrong path and gimping your character. The tree still branches out into a massive number of options, but only once you’ve found your feet and have the basics needed to survive.

Some minor story improvements continue this streamlining. New quests have been added to give the game an actual story now, rather than being a random collection of maps. Even so, however, the story still feels incomplete. Voice acting is still not in, and the entire third act is missing. These will be added when the game goes into open beta later this year.

Endgame

As a genre, action-RPGs are getting long in the tooth. Modernisation was not kind to Diablo III, with Blizzard apologising for the lack of a WoW-esque ‘endgame’.

Arguably, however, Blizzard left out many of the features that made Diablo II’s endgame what it was. Ladders were removed from Diablo III, PvP is non-existent, and boss runs are almost discouraged. At the same time, the addition of mandatory American servers drew criticism. Diablo III, then, was an uneasy—even almost bizarre compromise between the old and the new.

Path of Exile approaches the issue in a completely different fashion—include the old features and don’t fix what ain’t broke. As previously mentioned, the game has ladders in the form of leagues, and world PvP is set to make an entrance soon. Even the inventory is old school, with loot Tetris alive and well.

Path of Exile knows its market, and is a great game if you want to return to the golden age of action-RPGs in a modern online form. It feels just like Diablo I, and makes no apologies here. You can either pay $10 to get access now, or wait until the game goes open beta later this year. It’s well worth a look.

Find out more at the Path of Exile website.

For right or wrong, a number of players criticised Diablo III for its seeming lack of skill trees. They argued that the streamlining of the skill system represented a dumbing down of the game, marking it as aimed towards the casual and console market. I personally thought the skill system worked a treat but I’m not here to argue whether Blizzard’s approach was right or wrong. I’m here wondering where the sweet spot for skills actually lays – or if there is even one at all.

Over the last month or two or so I’ve found myself fairly firmly stuck into The Secret World, the first truly narrative based MMO I can think of. Unlike pretty much any other MMO, TSW also features one of the few truly open skill systems. For those unfamiliar with the TSW skill system, it is broken into a wheel with an inner and outer rim. The inner rim contains the basic abilities for a given weapon, the outer ring contains the advanced and specialised skills for the weapon. Each character can equip two weapons and synergise their abilities together. The skill wheel gives players the ability to make numerous specs for any role in the game.

It’s clever and seemingly open, but now that I’ve reached end game I’ve realised that there really isn’t as much openness to the skill system as there appears to be. It gives players the ability to fill multiples roles but not really the ability to fill roles in multiple top tier ways. There is, like most other MMOs, a right and a wrong way to spec up for each of the roles. There are a number of variations, of course, but those mostly amount to a few secondary skills for support or adding a skill to deal with AoE packs.

To get these optimal specs, however, requires the purchase of numerous unused skills that you may experiment with briefly but probably won’t use. The bloat serves to offer the player all-but-unlimited freedom but all it really seems to do is make the skill trees larger.

This past weekend I took part in a stress test for the upcoming online, semi-MMO ARPG, Path of Exile. Although a very obvious Diablo clone, Path of Exile has gone in an entirely opposite direction to Diablo III in terms of skills.

Just look at that skill tree. It’s enormous, terrifying and packed with redundancies. The game hasn’t left beta yet so there may still be some tweaking to be done, but things are unlikely to change to dramatically. The massive web of skills contains branching paths, with each node on the path representing a variation on the one ability and these abilities are all passive – active combat and utility skills are found as pick-ups to be slotted into weapons and armour. As such the skill web looks impressive but there isn’t much feeling of reward when you level and get a skill point. You don’t work your way down a path for the eventual reward of getting a new ability, but rather continue down a skill path to get another 6% health, then another 6%, then another.

I’m not sure whether these two expansive skill systems are a response to the streamlining that has been happening in MMOs and RPGs over recent years, or whether the systems were originally envisaged to be so expansive, but as far as I’m concerned, using bloat to convey the illusion of choice is just as problematic as any “dumbing down”. I throw the question over to you – where is the sweet spot for skills?

New Zealand-developed action-RPG Path of Exile has been turning a lot of heads lately, and this weekend they’re hoping to turn even more. Their servers will be opened to the public at 5PM (NZ time) this Friday and run until 7PM on Monday 30th (also, NZ time). You can download the client ahead of time to get ready from here, but you’ll still need to sign up for an account on the official site.