Live Event on March 21st

• The team is very excited for more people to see all the changes that already have been made in the recent days and weeks, and how the game has changed since they showcased it on ExileCon.
• As example he mentions the Mercenary gameplay with WASD-movement, and how since then many things have changed with the new capabilities.
• Ranger will be showcased on the weekend.
• Melees with keyboard movement will be showcased.
• In terms of WASD-Movement, the team does not forget about the regular click-to-move movement and have made massive improvements there aswell that will be showed.

NDA First User Testing

• They are already doing NDA-testing with people that are currently testing PoE2.
• Their first round of testing is with players not used to Path of Exile, and how they interact with the game, but having already existing knowledge from other ARPG game.

Consoles

• Jonathan is not yet ready to disclose if PoE2 will be launched at the same time on consoles as PC.
• The team does have specific developers for the console version.

Lessons Learned from the past 10 Years

• The devs want an amazing first-time user experience.
• Path of Exile is a complex game. The base level of Path of Exile 1 has become excessively complex.
• All things that dont contribute to the depth of the game should be as easy as possible and not hard to understand.
• “The only conflict would start to arise if we want to achieve a certain gameplay goal, and we dont want to simplify the system that would make the game worse, but also people wouldnt be understanding it.”
• This means that they dont want to sacrifice the type of complexity that makes the game good, while also simplify things that do not require to be complex.
• Jonathan really wants to see massive changes to Combat. But this includes changes several other things, and he is really proud of all the progress and changes that were already made.
• During the beta, there will be a lot of old content coming back.
• Its is pretty “easy” for the devs to copy old systems like “Delve” because the iterations already occured. A team could quickly be adding these systems to PoE 2.

Endgame Vision

• Jonathan likes that players have a different vision how they play their endgame.
• Just because bossing has been showcased a lot during previous events, that does not mean that this is going to be the only endgame content.
• Diverging into two seperate games allows PoE 2 to have more freedom to create systems that might would break PoE 1.
• If a new system in PoE 2 proofs to be good for PoE 1, then it would be no issue to implement that aswell.
• If players are starting to wonder why certain things only exist in one of the two games, then the developers have to consider these systems due to player demand.

Gameplay

• PoE 2 is not intended to be slower then PoE 1.
• The flow of the gameplay is rooted into new design decisions like the attacking while moving.
• Explaining how mechanics work with ingame Help and Tools should be better.
• According to the first-time-user tests, the testers did not really complain about the game being “too hard”.
• They do not want to sacrifice the difficulty of the game for new player friendliness. Its a fine line.
• Checkpoints are in place before Bossfights. Making death less expensive for players, but therefore more expectable.
• Jonathan is interested in the idea of a “Death Recap” window, but he does not have the time to work on that just yet. Visual Clarity should already alleviate some of that.
• Making it more clear if the player is poisoned or has a debuff like Ignite or Shocked.
• During their first-user testing, having more visual cues for low life as example made them subconsciously use more Health Flasks.

Jonathan’s Perception

• He is really proud of how the Bosses are, and players will be very pleased for the showcase this weekend.
• He also really enjoys the different combat system in comparison to PoE 1.

New Player Experience

• Gold is used for respeccing.
• Respeccing Gems to change your spec is easier because Uncut Gems will have a predefined level.
• In Path of Exile 2, Sockets are separate from your Gear.
• The example is that respeccing on Level 60 should be rather easier then in PoE 1, while respeccing on Level 90 is deserved to be hard.
• Sorry again, but skipping the Campaign is nothing they want to do. Similar response as during the Wudijo Interview.
• He understands that the reasoning the devs give for not skipping the campaign is very unsatisfying to players that want that feature.
• Jonathan “does not rule out that idea, but it would be a very cold day in hell”

Lore

• Dialogs how they are have to change. Jonathan claims that PoE 2 has the same conversation system for NPCs like PoE 1, but he thinks that the developers have to put some more effort into it.