![]() So, players can take as long as they like, but only walk a certain distance. “Maybe we could do something different where instead of time we could maybe limit distance?” “So, OK, that’s interesting and fairly obvious,” Rogers says. But Rogers definitely liked the idea of mining, and he began thinking about the way Incursion gave players a limited time to kill a number of monsters. So, with three weeks to go until Incursion’s launch, which was when the larger team would start making Delve, Motherload was off the menu. ”Pretty much any time we’ve tried to cut that back it’s led to players being really unhappy, so we have to make sure that if we’re reducing speed, we do it very slowly so no one notices.” Over time, Path of Exile has become faster and faster because players tend to optimise their characters for speed. “There’s this thing in our community called the clear speed meta,” Rogers explains. Slowing players down is a real problem in Path of Exile. But Rogers soon realised that the concept would inherently slow players down. In Delve, he thought, you’d ‘mine’ out different sections and steadily open out the the dungeon, restricted by the need to invest in upgrades. In case you haven’t played Motherload, it’s a game in which you steadily dig down, mining minerals and investing the proceeds in upgrading your miner. ”There’s a Flash game called Motherload,” he says. So, how to provide a limit in an infinite dungeon? Rogers, who is part of a small senior team that comes up with the concepts for each league, thought he saw an answer in mining. ![]() “And then when they get completely crushed they’ll get angry and say the game’s unfair.” He says that they’ll tend to watch streamers, who usually play on the hardest difficulty, watch them win big rewards and then try the hardest mode possible themselves. That’s because, as studio cofounder and technical director Jonathan Rogers tells me, players have a knack for messing themselves up when they’re given freedom to set their own challenges. For some time Grinding Gear had wanted to make an infinite dungeon, but they had to figure out how to limit access to the endless.ĭuring the five years Path of Exile has been out, they’ve learned they always need to restrict and control progression by making it cost resources. Path of Exile is a game about carving incredible character builds out of a fabulously labyrinthine skill system and countless randomly generated equipment, and then running wild and killing gods. The deeper you go, the more valuable the rewards and the stronger the monsters. Then, when it reaches its destination, you face several waves of enemies before setting a new location. ![]() To progress deeper, you send your crawler to a new location on the map and then follow it, battling monsters to attempt to keep up with its island of light. Luckily, you have a crawler which emits light. Here’s how Delve works: you start at the top of an infinitely deep mine that’s so dark that it saps your health. ![]() But as they found rather too late, the real challenge was preventing Delve’s players from avoiding the fun they were meant to be having. Each league adds a new spin on its core monster-slaying action for a few weeks until the next is added, and the latest is Delve, which launched at the end of August.ĭelve presents you with an infinite and pitch-dark mine to dig into, a sprint into the black of the unknown that’s almost a metaphor for its production as its makers raced to find an idea and make it fun in time for release. Įvery three months, Grinding Gear Games adds a new league to its excellent action RPG, Path of Exile. This is The Mechanic, where Alex Wiltshire invites developers to discuss the difficult journeys they’ve taken to make their games.
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