Video link: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1TXTczHEuS (this is on a site that’s a Chinese competitor to Youtube)
These are my notes, mistakes very possible.
Interview Opening
- Chinese focus to the interview as it’s for the Chinese playerbase first and foremost, but there’s a lot for everyone else.
- Chinese server this year. Business model as per POE2 international, pricing subject to commercial negotiations taking place at the moment.
- Planning to add full Chinese language voiceovers
- Will initially differ from international for regulatory reasons, may get its own MTX in time.
Texture of the interview:
- Very different segments of Chinese playerbase represented, one esports type, one non-esports powergamer, several more casual players
- Jonathon and Bubu (project leader of the Chinese server) answered questions from the panel.
- There’s a number of jokes thrown in, but it’s mostly professional. Each person speaks their language and both English and Chinese subtitles are provided.
Difficulty:
- Many skills underpowered; if you pick ‘wrong’ the campaign feels too hard. GGG want to address.
- XP gained from 95-99 will increase, details TBC
Campaign
- Removal of cruel ‘might be sooner than you think’
- Adding a tutorial for crafting, very early game
Mapping
- GGG still want more unpredictable events in endgame. GGG’s response to ‘maps are too large’ is more ‘we think they are too sparse & whether large or small, both will feel better when more wild stuff happens each zone’
- During early access, most new mechanics will be POE1 variants. Post 1.0, goal is that new leagues are NEW.
- Azmeri wisps called out explicitly as ‘Torment reworked thoroughly’
- “Explore the Atlas” vs “Hunker near good towers” tension called out explicitly as a problem. Nothing to announce
- GGG internally have significant changes in the works but they aren’t convinced that they work yet, so nothing is being committed to.
Classes
- GGG aware of minion pathing collision issues
- Minion deaths to boss slams acknowledged as an issue.
- GGG hope that when they add medium speed melee weapons (axe/sword) this will address the people who don’t like mace gameplay.
- Swords coming before or at 1.0
- 030 goal – significantly improving build diversity by upgrading unpopular ascendancies and skills. HOWEVER – this might come at the cost of a class falling out of 030
- GGG are looking at each class, which skills are worst on it, then ‘how high can this be pushed right now’ as a metric for ‘does this need to change’
- Where skills combo, they want each component to be non-awful in 030. “For each skill we need to have a story for why someone would choose to use this”
- Mechanically slow skills are called out here, but this is NOT replicated when GGG talked about the warrior and the mace, so not sure what’s going on there.
Itemization (trade and crafting)
- GGG discuss trade philosophy which is slightly different to the past manifesto, talking about inflation as the issue they aim to combat via friction (gold friction or time friction)
- 27:45 or so “I believe that there should be a way to do something similar with things that are not currency items and this is a feature I think is very important to get before we release the game fully so I want to get that feature done as soon as we possibly can and definitely to try it out, it will be very interesting to see if we have any inflation issues if we do that but I think that it will be okay because I think gold has been quite a good experiment. It’s interesting because POE has the exact opposite formula from most games, in most games items are bound to your player and gold is freely tradeable but in POE the gold is bound to your character and the items are freely tradeable so I actually think we can utilize this to make a trade system which doesn’t require all the inconveniences we have now while still preventing inflation from occurring too much”
- Stash tabs come up. GGG will consider adding special stashes to the store as needed. These are a lot of programming work.
- More crafting methods are coming with expansions. Some crafting systems aren’t being used all that much. Essences are likely to change soon.
- (Not from interview) Worth adding that crafting is hugely interconnected. Chaos Orbs went from a niche tool to a very significant one when the fracturing orb was added.
MTX
- GGG consider it not at all ideal that many POE1 supporter pack MTX don’t yet work in POE2. This is a medium priority to fix, but WILL get bumped for more urgent things
Other questions
- 020 removed many jewel sockets because GGG felt there was too much passive tree convergence. They aren’t happy with this new status quo and are looking to up the power level of some non-jewel notables. They want trees to diverge from each other – neither converging on ‘all the jewels on all the builds’ nor on a few 020 setups
- Any plans for massive multiplayer content (analogous to WOW raids)? No. GGG want solo/multiplayer to be down to personal choice for all content even if they sometimes miss (e.g. in 1, Atziri is much more accessible solo, Gilded Allflames much moreso in groups – clarification is my addition)
- How good at the game are the GGG top management? Jonathon considers himself solid but not elite, and considers Mark a truly elite player
- Any chance of death replay/damage log etc? GGG want some sort of damage log but it’s a while off (tough to implement).
- One really oddball thing the Chinese server team are investigating (and this does not sound far along) is using ‘AI’ to assess what someone’s next steps should be. Personally I don’t see this working. Even if it does no guarantee it will port to the worldwide server
- Any plans for an in-game loot filter editor? Seen as a good idea and is already on the list, but far down the list.
- Any plans for performance when lots of players skills are active at once? GGG are working on a system where specific skills get their core parts prioritized. Unimportant parts can then be dynamically culled.
- Any plans for a training dummy? There’s a significant upgrade planned to pausing, when you pause you can mouseover a monster & see damage simulation numbers against that monster as well as the same boss damage info you get. Dummy won’t work with all conditional damage.
- Interestingly while the Western playerbase regards armor as the weakest defense, the Chinese playerbase feels that way about Evasion, and one panellist thought that this was due to the lack of feedback on the difference between “I took no damage because the monster’s skill bounced off my evasion” and “I took no damage because I executed a dodge roll and the monster didn’t hit me at all”. GGG want to add feedback but it may be a while off as it would require programming it into all monster skills.