• Interview focused more on high level development
  
• Jonathan thinks what he brings to the table is ID'ing jank
  
• Recognizes that they have a standard to hold to with PoE, but he has to be ruthless (no pun intended) about saying if something doesn't work
  
• Acknowledges the community has quite a bit of skepticism about they changes their making (slowing down gameplay)
  
• Jonathan wasn't even the biggest fan of D2 when GGG started (called out Half-Life, Starcraft, FF7)
  
• Jonathan shows off his Whakawhakawhaka shirt (no, I will never use its proper name). "My wardrobe is basically all PoE shirts at this point"
  
• "Path of Exile 2 is really the most absurd feature creep story in the world". Started off by listing gripes, #1 was melee. Bad because it was really difficult to make new skills, primarily due to the character rigging, which is one of the first things developed for PoE1. Each character has its own rig, so they have to animate skills 7 different times, and this was done for absolutely no good reason. Oh, and armour has to be rigged per character as well.
  
• Beginning of the game looks really old. Why not make new areas instead of refreshing the old ones? How about we make an alternate Act 1...and that snowballed into a whole new campaign, which then became the initially-announced parallel-to-the-first-game PoE2. Then came the realization they'd basically break the poo poo out of PoE by bringing merging all of these changes so now we have the separate games.
  
• Jonathan doesn't think he'd beat Chris in a fight, but will lead the army of PoE2 fans against Chris' PoE1 army if it came down to it
  
• Favorite class: Ranger in PoE1 ("Is it because melee sucks?" "Yes"). Monk in PoE2 ("first time we managed to get melee not to suck").
  
• As long as the game isn't perfect Jonathan will keep developing
  
• Want to have a game with a skill ceiling high enough that not everyone can reach it but supports people coming back league after league to try
  
• Difficulty curve is a bit off right now (fairly even then at the end-end game it spikes greatly) but not sure how to address that
  
• Reason Kitava resistance penalty is in the game is so that they don't have to do something like Armour where it's a number tied to a formula the user never sees or have no penalty and have mods like "2% to fire resistance" to balance. Jonathan doesn't like that for resistances, but people seem OK with it for Armour/Evasion. Could've also done a per-act penalty but it feels worse. Acknowledges this is a bunch of nebulous thoughts.
  
• Mark One is the person who understands all the formulas in the game (I do not like the fact that there's a Bus Factor of 1 here). There might be 100,000 stats in the game (). Basically impossible to fully QA this game, need all of us to find all these issues. Josh likens this to MtG with WotC how new cards interact with cards they had forgotten about until players find it.
  
• "Each time we make a league we are blatantly cribbing from a non-ARPG game" (and yet still no rhythm game league). Delve started as "how can we do Minecraft?" and quite obviously morphed a bit, same with Harvest and Harvest Moon/Stardew Valley.
  
• Jonathan vehemently against damage numbers...then someone showed him how its done in Elden Ring and now PoE2 will have damage numbers.
  
• "We want to be an action game. Action games have dodge rolls.". Same reasoning for directional blocking...and some related un-announced mechanics.
  
• Interesting interaction with a Tencent dev failing an early boss. Jonathan expects people to try again, having increased in skill in the fight. The player instead left to grind for better gear. Josh brought up that because this was a Chinese dev this person was expecting a gear-based solution, perhaps P2W (...is this racist?)
  
• Question Jonathan has wanted people to ask: "Why do we have classes at all?". Initial PoE design was class-less, more akin to Dungeon Siege 1. Classes help clue players into how to build a character. Josh sees parallel with Jungian character archetypes.
  
• Josh points out ID'ing items feels like a holdover from D+D, where you can put on un-ID'd items, but they could be cursed, so ID'ing them would remove that doubt, but that's not a thing in PoE. Jonathan's defense: double-dipping dopamine hit ability to have "near misses", which are things that can't be fully appreciated while in combat and item filters take away a good chunk of this as well (not insulting item filters since he was the one who implemented it). ID scrolls kinda suck, which is why PoE2 has the NPC to do it, and ID scrolls are rarer drops.
  
• Jonathan finding himself drawn to games without jank these days, called out God of War (2018) and the Ori games ("Scary that the game that they're making now is in our genre"). Kinda concerning how much jank there is in games these days (he works on PoE, so he would know ).
  
• Assets used in Affliction (that he couldn't even remember the name of, which is slightly worrying) were actually assets from PoE2 that became too old to actually use in PoE2.
  
• Jonathan couldn't really point out something they removed to improve the game, since it's mostly been streamlining things, like leech.
  
• Jonathan thought WASD would be bad because of Pagan Online's implementation. Others on dev team were also skeptical because one control scheme might have a material advantage over the other, which Jonathan didn't think would be a big deal.
  
• 5 answers to why melee sucks in PoE1: the aforementioned rig issue (animators absolutely hate working with them, says it takes 10x longer per class than it should; compared to PoE2's single rig. Most of the time they have to resorted to re-using an existing animation, especially with most skills not having weapon restrictions) [Jonathan pointed out that the Templar is left handed for some reason, which I never ever noticed ], too many buffs required that don't feel melee (totems, warcries; designed themselves into a corner on this one, but hinted at a massive overhaul somewhat soon), attack while moving doesn't really exist which means DPS downtime (PoE2 has a setup where there is some distance where the attack time also includes the travel time, for the Monk this is supposedly quite a large distance), attacks requiring very short animation times so that the players don't feel like they lose control of their character, didn't list a fifth (liar).
  
• Weird lesson Jonathan has learned: "Everything is game design". Example: community communication. Big change to the game buried in patch notes = players likely to have less fun with the game. Post on why this change was made = players likely to have more fun with the game (Lake of Kalandra says "hi"). Same with Marketing. If Elden Ring wasn't marketed as a difficult game, players would have had less fun with it. Josh points out this concept exists in theater as "phenomenology".
  
• GGG had a lot of interaction on reddit to start out because Jonathan was a redditor before a game developer and it didn't feel like work (so he's the one to blame!) until it eventually did (no word about reddit being a toxic cesspool ). Josh: negative comments deal chip damage, but positive comments don't restore it, and you can't just not read negative comments because you don't know they're negative until you read them. Jonathan says he's been more receptive to feedback, even negative, and change in the past 2 or 3 years.
  
• Bad game that has a good system Jonathan has learned from. D4 inevitably brought up, Jonathan says he doesn't feel schadenfreude over it. Does call Starfield garbage. Hated the plot ("doesn't make narrative sense"), hated the massive hub area, gunplay was bad ("could tell from the first trailer") and too much junk inventory items (says Skyrim can have "cheese" because players realize it's junk but sci-fi sounding doohickey doesn't have that built-in innate knowledge). Did like the ship building system. Apparently one of the first things that gets brought up when designing a new league is "so we're going to do boat league now, right?", but no ship building plans.
  
• Josh: what are you going to do in PoE2 to keep players actually in the game (i.e. not requiring 12 different tabs on a second monitor)? Jonathan brings up how before PoE shipped Jonathan wanted to have a fog of war on the skill tree but was convinced by Chris to not do this, which he's come around on and is too iconic now to ever get away from. Another idea was to have unlock conditions for revealing sections of the tree (personally against all of this). Having a skill tree as massive as it is fully revealed from the get-go was the least-bad option. Actually answering the question, brings up actually indicating how passive nodes will interact with your skills.
  
• Jonathan disagrees with the thought that the big-rear end skill tree is a good way of filtering players, but do want to set the expectation early that there will be choices you need to make that have ramifications.
  
• PoE2 will have the ability to preview changes to skills/stats on any sort of change (gear, passives, gem leveling).
  

Edmond Dantes fucked around with this message at 14:13 on Apr 16, 2024

Frank Frank fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Apr 16, 2024