Path of Exile 2’s developers agree that the difficulty is currently ‘a bit too severe’
Even Way of exile 2 will be a little more forgiving in a patch coming later this week, the developers at Grinding Gear Games aren’t sure how easy it will be to create post-campaign dungeons.
The most common complaints are treated in patch 0.1.1 this week: Monsters leave less deadly explosions and endgame bosses can be attempted more than once. Item quality will also be improved, which should help players survive the campaign and create more powerful character builds as they tackle the game’s toughest dungeons.
But the penalty for dying in an endgame dungeon or map doesn’t change yet. Cards will still kick you out after one death, causing you to lose all the time and materials you invested in them, as well as some of your experience to the next level up. Hours of progress can disappear in a flash, and those who aren’t interested will have to wait much longer for a solution.
Jonathan Rogers and Mark Roberts from Grinding Gear Games were asked in one Follow-up discussion on Sunday by streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV if players can ever retry a card after dying. “For me, I feel like if you want to be a game, you have to have some level of failure (that’s possible),” Rogers said. The experience penalty, he explained, is to communicate to players that they may not be ready to tackle more difficult cards. “But I mean, maybe that’s the wrong way to look at it, I’m not sure.”
“There are a few axes and I think they’re just a little bit too severe when they’re all combined together,” Roberts added. He thinks the transition from the game’s focused campaign to the create-a-dungeon endgame is too difficult for most people and needs to be smoothed out. “But I certainly need to think about it a lot more and do some more analysis to see what the real problems are.”
The developers said that many things are contributing to the problem and that the team regularly discusses how to address the problem. In the meantime, though, they want to see how the new patch turns out and focus on the big class balance changes that come next. The studio plans to launch a new competition (read: season) while the game is still in early access, giving players the chance to create new characters and test new features. The first competition, which is expected to release soon, will involve a substantial update to the game and perhaps some of the unreleased classes as well.