Development Stories: Path of Exile 2 Narrative Design Philosophies

I've played PoE for the first time in 2013, back when Piety was the last boss, and clicking on entrance to the Scepter of God made you start again on the Twilight Strand, just higher difficulty. At least that's how I remember it went. There where 3 difficulty levels, I know I have not finished the last one back then, I kept dying to everything, PoE seemed to me very difficult at the time.

I have absolutely loved the story aspect of the game, for those 3 acts up until Piety. I have found it very mysterious, dark, scary. It made me uneasy, it was foreboding. I liked how little I really knew about it by design, the lost civilasations side of things. I know the world was by no means "realistic" anyway with all the thaumaturgy and stuff, but the story line of my character within the game felt quite believable, nothing too crazy all things considered.

I have returned to PoE years later, when it already had all 10 acts. I have found the game much more fun to play from the gameplay perspective, and a much better game overall, but in my view the narrative goes downhill after the 3rd act. Act 4 story has some elements I liked, but things already start getting "weird". And it got weirder in the 5-10 acts. And by that I mean, to me it just didn't fit, it was different, awkward, unbelievable in the sense as acts 1-3 were believable.

I don't really want to say that it is all bad per se, more like share my personal opinion, since you asked for it, I did not like it. It was not a continuation on par with the orginal story, and I felt like the orginal story deserved something else.

I say all this to illustrate my answer to your question, about what I would like to see again. I would like to see a narrative in line with the first 3 acts. Get back some of that feeling of unknown danger, knowledge lost in time, scraping the surface of ancient ruins of forgotten people, interacting with obscure powerful remnants.

Good luck to you, fingers crossed for something great

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I still hope we will get Zana boss fight before PoE2, maybe in next Atlas expansion in December. There is no reason for the Exile to ally with someone who would easily lock you within the Atlas and leave you there. Other Masters are fine, though.

Yes, I feel the same. She would be perfect for the final boss of PoE 1. She already locked other people inside the altas, in her mind it was to be forever, and done it for greater good. Maybe she made the right decision then, but it's not a long way to doing something similar and this time wrong, for greater good. Easy to give us a motivation to fight her, and it would be a good closure to the overarching story of the expansions.

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hammypants wrote:

No hate here but...

When no one likes leveling through the acts more than a few times...

... why are we spending so much time on a set of new acts?

It's the broccoli you have to eat before you can have your ice cream.

I want to see Nessa bae again :'(

Characters I'd love to see again: Venarius, Tasuni, Dialla. Piety's amazing, but the poor bitch has already been resurrected so much.

And I'm quite attached to many of the endgame masters, but I don't think your post is about them, for the most part.

Areas I'd love to see again: Sarn (Solaris/Lunaris Temples, Bath House, and Harbour Bridge), destroyed Oriath/Chamber of Innocence.

Very stoked for a more interactive experience with the story and lore! After playing PoE 1 enough, it's painfully obvious that acts 5-10 feel like an addendum to the real narrative.

I'm definitely interested to see some of the league mechanics incorporated into the plot more gracefully. Going through the acts and seeing the masters for the first time is quite satisfying, and I'd love to see the same care taken for the first appearance of abysses, or delirium mirrors.

I'm one of the minority of players, apparently, that will exhaust all the NPC dialogue options, and I've found it pretty difficult to get a sense of the history of Wraeclast. It's only now, going through a league character for the second time, that I got that Kaom's fall was at the same time as the Purity Rebellion. I have a lot of trouble working out the history of Sarn, I guess because a lot of the Azmeri names all sound pretty similar despite there being centuries between them. I'm hoping that the core speed-through is enough to give players the gist of why they're doing what they're doing, and that you can embed more intriguing stories in the background for players like me. PoE1 has the Vaal, where all players need to know is they're an ancient dead empire but Queen Atziri's horrific vanity is in the background, but it's otherwise very easy to miss the connections between the Siren boss of Act 1 and one of Act 3's minibosses, for instance.

Good to hear there'll be more emphasis on using the world for storytelling - Act 3's Lunaris Temple is a standout because the way the map generates tells a story of the scale of Piety's operation. I'd love to see what GGG do with a storylet-driven approach; give the plot the ability to get randomly shuffled, but still be coherent and impactful.

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In terms of places and people, what would you most like to see again from Path of Exile 1?

Lady Dialla - though I'm not sure how you manage that given where we left her.

I also quite like Yeena, and I enjoy the outdoors areas of act 2 in general.

Hargan's always good for a laugh & I always wondered what happened to Grigor (in-game) that meant he wasn't around Sarn for Act 8.

I'm also curious which of Tasuni & Irasha is the "good"(ish) one.. Tasuni clearly had an agenda which was not in keeping with the way of the clan, but was it actually just naked self interest or was there at least some degree of seeing that the future required change? Was Irasha really keeping the 'peaceful' status quo, or was she actually a(nother) reactionary waiting to happen?

Just like in Diablo 2 you meet characters from Diablo 1, it would be cool to meet an aged version of the Witch or Marauder!

Dear god no! I hope this doesn't turn into a Diablo 3... full of infuriating gameplay stopping events everytime you go through the campaign.

If so, I really hope there's a system akin to the bounty system so you don't have to make your way through the same scenes over and over, with no choice to skip them because they are built in. I personally loathed even skippable scences in Diablo 3 (even after the added the auto skip, it STILL interrupts gameplay too much).

Well, if it gets too bad I suppose I can stick to PoE 1, they way it's done there isn't bad at all. I just imagined it implemented as in Diablo 3 when I read the post.

Story-wise, we aim to give the player choices to make about how to proceed through an act. Wherever possible, these choices will also have consequences.

As a classical RPG lover, huge props if you can achieve this in an ARPG.

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Schizofrenia wrote:

I have absolutely loved the story aspect of the game, for those 3 acts up until Piety. I have found it very mysterious, dark, scary. It made me uneasy, it was foreboding. I liked how little I really knew about it by design, the lost civilasations side of things. I know the world was by no means "realistic" anyway with all the thaumaturgy and stuff, but the story line of my character within the game felt quite believable, nothing too crazy all things considered.

I have returned to PoE years later, when it already had all 10 acts. I have found the game much more fun to play from the gameplay perspective, and a much better game overall, but in my view the narrative goes downhill after the 3rd act. Act 4 story has some elements I liked, but things already start getting "weird". And it got weirder in the 5-10 acts. And by that I mean, to me it just didn't fit, it was different, awkward, unbelievable in the sense as acts 1-3 were believable.

Fully agree on this part. I share the same experience as you do.