We're now 10 weeks into Early Access, and what a wild ride it has been! This has been our largest launch ever and it certainly broke through our expectations, but we are well into Path of Exile 2's first launch now, so it's time to take a look at what we have done so far, what remains to solve, and what we are going to be doing next.
Since launch we've released 8 patches and 31 hotfixes, each containing various improvements, bug fixes, and of course incremental improvements to the sound, art, effects and environments.
The changes we have been making fall into a few categories:
Quality of Life Features
Since launch there have been many things that players have found annoying or time consuming, so we have been trying to address them one by one.
Two of the big ones are the ability to teleport around the map with checkpoints and overwrite items in sockets but there are a lot of smaller ones as well.
We have also been making QOL improving balance changes like reducing the cost of respeccing, making dodge roll get you stuck less often, and making reviving easier in multiplayer.
Improving the Core Experience of Mapping
The endgame is one of the hardest areas to test in an online game. It takes quite a lot of play to get to the point where you can form an opinion on what is good and what is bad, so having such a large number of players get to the endgame has been incredibly valuable.
To start with, we improved the rewards of endgame substantially by buffing drops from rare monsters and decreased the difficulty at the start of endgame.
We also had a lot of balance adjustments to make within individual maps. We did a full rebalance of all the content that can spawn in maps. Mostly more of everything.
One of the key realisations since launch was how important it is to have more variety in tower maps, so we made it a priority and patched in four more, as well as a better variation on the existing tower map we had.
And we realised that we had way undershot the number of bosses in endgame, so we increased that a lot too, and added a new tablet to allow for adding more of them.
We also added respawning to the endgame pinnacles, checkpoints for travelling in maps, improved strongboxes, and made it a lot easier to find citadels.
There is still a lot more to do to improve the endgame though!
Itemisation Improvements
Existing unique items got a lot of improvements. We buffed a very large number of them to make them much more exciting to find for low level characters. But we do have a need for a lot more build defining uniques going forward.
Fixing Bad Balance Outliers
One of the hardest things about game design is that it only takes a mistake in a single number to make a player have a terrible experience.
We made a ton of changes to monsters and bosses to fix one shots, improved telegraphing, buffed minimum item drops to name a few.
We also addressed a lot of difficulty problems in both the Trial of Chaos and the Trial of the Sekhemas.
On the player side of things, we did a big pass to improve the balance of many skills, but there is still a lot more to come.
We did attempt to address some of the more overpowered player skills, but backed off somewhat in order to prevent breaking peoples characters. We initially thought that there would be more tolerance for this kind of thing during Early Access, but we were incorrect! We will save changes like this for larger balance updates.
We are still nerfing things if they are totally egregious though.
Fixing Crashes and Performance Issues
Crashes have been a major area of focus for the development team since launch. We have fixed hundreds of different crashes, but there are still more to find.
On the server side of things, we have reduced the number of crashes significantly. They should be very rare now.
The client side of things has been a lot harder to deal with. For the most part, crashes in gameplay code have been addressed, but there are some much harder engine crashes that we have yet to find.
The worst of these is a full system freeze that has occurred since Windows 11's 24H2 update. We still don't know exactly what caused this problem, but we have deployed a workaround that seems to be preventing the freeze. We are working with Microsoft to find a better long term solution.
The remaining crashes are happening inside the GPU driver, known as "Device removed" errors. We have added a command line switch "--ex-crash-report" which adds extra logging to help us debug this issue at the cost of a small amount of performance. (Once you have crashed a couple of times with this option enabled, you can disable it again, we will have enough reports).
We are working with nVidia to try and come up with a fix for this issue. Switching to Vulkan seems to reduce the number of crashes significantly for some users, so we would suggest trying that if you are crashing often.
The Biggest Problems
So what are the biggest problems we see with Path of Exile 2 right now? Well, other than the crashes, these are the biggest issues we think we can't solve without a major update.
- Major balance issues with many player skills / builds, both too high and too low
- Not enough character build options including build defining uniques
- Endgame progression balance is off
- Not enough cool things to find in endgame
And so these are the things that we expect to improve in 0.2.0. In addition, we need to make sure that 0.2.0 has a draw card that will bring back as many players as possible to test the changes that we are making!
We don't have an exact timeline for 0.2.0, but our overall plan has been to release major content updates for Path of Exile 2 every few months. We will announce it as soon as we can!
