Path of Exile 2, the highly anticipated sequel to the acclaimed action role-playing game, experienced an impressive Early Access launch in December. Following the arrival of its first major update, Dawn of the Hunt, on April 4, the game’s developers at Grinding Gear Games encountered unexpected challenges. The developers brought in a new huntress class, added Ascendancies and completely overhauled the endgame content. The update was met with overwhelming backlash from the player community, resulting in a rapid nosedive in user ratings on Steam.
Dawn of the Hunt continues with our mission to improve our players experience. It adds new, exciting loot to pursue, enhances new players’ and veterans’ respective learning curves, and tightens the endgame mechanics. Almost immediately upon its release, a tsunami of bad reviews crashed its way through. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a significant portion of the player base was upset with these dramatic changes made to the core gameplay. Additionally, critics claimed that the changes made the Souls-inspired combat system needlessly hard and unsatisfying.
In a direct response to the community’s strong backlash, game director Mark Roberts admitted the mistakes made with the update. As an example, he said, “Oh, that minion change—like that was just bad. This confirmation was a gilded glimpse into the developer’s awareness of their previous misjudgements as they sought to return focus back upon the gameplay. Roberts went into more detail about the continuous process of balancing updates. He continued, “A lot of it’s just Early Access, so it’s permitted. We are shooting from the hip a lot here.”
The game’s Steam rating has now dropped into mostly negative territory as a result of the tide of negative reviews. Unfortunately, many players were frustrated by the changes to character abilities and combat gameplay that they found to be unbalanced and too punishing. To address these issues, Grinding Gear Games outlined a comprehensive plan for balance changes that would be implemented throughout the week. These changes are intended to make more character skills useful in combat, as well as players’ concerns about the feeling of combat.
Jonathan Rogers, a member of the development team, spoke on the challenges of balancing gameplay in Path of Exile 2: “I think a running theme with PoE 2 in general is that the target to hit is smaller because if we want the combat to be more engaging, then that means there’s a smaller target; it puts more pressure on the balance to be right.” While covertly self-congratulatory, this sentiment reveals the complicated procedure involved with designing his game and undermining its balance within serious gameplay systems.
Even with these hurdles, Roberts is still hopeful about the path ahead. Related to that point, he stressed the importance of having a solid player retention strategy in place. “…having sufficiently worked off most of the nerfs, we’re now shifting a lot of our effort towards buffing out the underperforming stuff,” he said. This is about using this opportunity to improve the fun of gameplay overall to the benefit of current players beyond just addressing current complaints.
In response, Grinding Gear Games has delayed the game’s upcoming major expansion. Our goal is to hear the constructive criticism that players have communicated and to make releases in the future that more accurately reflect the desires of our community.