This week, Path of Exile will ditch a system that defined it for over a decade, making the action RPG considerably easier to approach for new players. The developers at Grinding Gear Games told PC Gamer that they’re questioning everything that’s sacred going forward, but apparently some things are still off the table—at least for now.
A major roadblock for new and returning players is PoE’s lengthy campaign. Every new league, or season, you have to clear 10 acts before you enter the endgame, like a 20-hour tutorial. Veteran players can race through it in five or six hours, but most people need at least double that.
For years, people have asked GGG to shorten it or provide a way to skip the campaign after leveling your first character to no avail. Those same questions now happen every time a new Path of Exile 2 league—where campaign completion remains a requirement—starts, too. Nobody wants to do what feels like homework to get to the fun part.
But no matter how common the criticism is, GGG isn’t going to budge on this one. Speaking to PCGamesN about the possibility of a campaign skip, game designer Christopher “Octavian” Laferriere and game director Mark Roberts said it isn’t happening anytime soon.
“I’d want to give a lot of consideration to something like that,” Laferriere said. “Maybe it is worth another look—that said, personally, it feels very wrong to me.”
Roberts said skipping the campaign makes you “have a lot less care for your character,” and that he knows first-hand what it’s like because they use tools to do that as developers. He said that it “just genuinely makes the game worse—the work to get there is the satisfaction.”
Instead of giving people a way to skip the campaign, Roberts wants to ensure new leagues freshen it up so it stays relevant. Otherwise, Roberts said, PoE would “lose its quality quite fast if we were to say, ‘Oh, campaign doesn’t matter anymore.’ I think that’s a very, very bad way to go.”
There was a time, however, that the team thought it would be sacrilege to change the multi-colored sockets on gear that limit what skills you can equip in early parts of the game. But enough developers agreed that maybe they didn’t add anything particularly meaningful to the experience and decided to cut them out.
PoE has plenty of inscrutable things when it comes to the new player experience. I’m not convinced the campaign will be next on the chopping block, especially given how stubborn they’ve been about it for all these years. I asked PoE 2 game director Jonathan Rogers about a campaign skip in the sequel, and he basically intimated that it’ll never happen as long as it’s a game he’s in charge of.
I respect that decision and think PoE 2 at least is a better game because the campaign is so good. Skipping it would ruin the pacing and make most of the story events that happen in the endgame kind of weightless. Every new league I get a little faster at completing it and that sort of meta-level skill is fun to improve on, even if I sympathize with all the people who find it to be a slog. That said, if GGG were to ever reach a compromise with players and offer a way to shorten it for secondary characters, I would gladly make use of that.
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