Path of Exile 2 devs acknowledge the endgame is 'too severe' but are sticking to their guns because 'the whole death actually mattering thing is actually important'

Path of Exile 2's first major patch of the year will arrive later this week, with developer Grinding Gear Games saying it will address several common complaints about the game, with more improvements to come. One of the big sticking points for players has been endgame maps, which director Jonathan Rogers says it aims to make "more rewarding" through tweaks to loot and monster numbers, and the feel of the endgame in general. The thing is, though, that some of the stuff people are complaining about is also the point of the game.

This patch will mean players can now attempt endgame bosses more than once, and will ensure there are less deadly explosions that seemingly kill you out of nowhere. All of those things will be welcomed by players, but the biggest complaint remains the fact that you get one chance at endgame maps.

This element of Path of Exile 2 is unforgiving: Die and you're booted out of the map, losing XP and any loot drops you haven't yet grabbed. And while you can restart the map on the Atlas, you'll need a new waystone to enter it, and you'll lose any modifiers that it originally contained. In some ways that makes sense for a game of this nature, a genuinely high stakes looting challenge where it can all go wrong in an instant. But some just don't like sinking hours of time into something and losing it all like that.

"We did discuss quite a lot about whether we wanted to go back on one portal or not," says Rogers during an interview with streamers Darth Microtransaction and GhazzyTV discussing the patch. "I think it comes down to the fact that it would just not feel the same. The whole 'death actually mattering' thing is actually important.

"We were talking about the pinnacle boss and the discussion came up 'should we allow portals everywhere, should we be allowing checkpoints everywhere' and we ultimately decided we really don't want to go that way if possible. So first of all we try out this pinnacle stuff, make sure it's something where you have true economic value you have to preserve: It takes time to get there and that matters."

Rogers says that for the game to work "you have to have some level of failure being possible" and if players were allowed multiple opportunities you simply don't "fail in the same way… I'm not really a fan, I much prefer the whole 'one death' thing."

As for the XP penalty and whether that's too harsh, "part of the thinking around that is that it's keeping you in the place where you're supposed to be, as in if you're dying all the time then you're probably not ready to keep going up the power curve," says Rogers. "But maybe that's the wrong way of looking at it."

With all that said, GGG's Mark Roberts acknowledges that the endgame right now is not quite hitting that sweet spot of risk and reward the studio wants. “Right now there are too many penalty axes," says Roberts (thanks, Polygon), "so if you're dying all the time, you're not gonna get materials, and thus you're not going to go anywhere… and also an 'add insult to injury' thing [with the XP] where you're just not levelling.

"I think they’re just a bit too severe when all combined together, and I also think that the very start of maps is just too difficult, I think we should ease into that a little bit, bring that down a bit then ramp the difficulty up." Roberts says the rare monsters and the unusual combinations mean players are constantly having to adjust their tactics and the number of different combinations mean "there's nothing to really take from one map to another."

The devs say they're going to be watching how the new patch plays out and focus any bigger changes on the game's next league (season), which will come with more substantial changes. But it sounds like the "one death" principle is here to stay.

"It would be nice if you could just spin another map and still be able to do that content," says Rogers. "But unfortunately we can't do that because it would open up too many economic abuse things, where like you fail the map intentionally because you want to farm the items in the rest of the area. So it's very difficult for us to come up with a solution because I really would prefer that, honestly, if you could re-do a map without having all the problems that being able to re-run a map would actually cause."

"I personally want to keep the one portal and adjust the other axes and see how it plays out," ends Roberts, "before compromising on the one portal. But yeah, it's a bit tricky, it certainly is the case we've discussed it so many times before [PoE2] came out we knew 'people are definitely gonna complain about this' and we know and we haven't found a solution."