Designing Path of Exile to Be Played Forever. Chris Wilson at GDC 2019

I'm Chris Wilson from grinding Gear games and today I'm gonna talk about how we design path of Excel to be played forever I'd like to thank Jonathan my co-founder for helping me extensively with this talk half of it as him I'm just presenting it I've been asked to make sure that everyone mutes their phones so it's quiet and thank you very much from staying to the last day of GDC to see the Stork hopefully it's worthwhile I'm gonna talk very fast so there's a lot to get through it's like 90 plus slides and 45 ish minutes so we'll see how that goes okay so early on in path of excels history we discovered the truth here player versus player games like League of Legends are endlessly replayable you can play against different opponents every time different stuff happens and they grow over time because of that but a PvE game like path of Exile is difficult because it has a clearly marked like set of content you know a single-player story you can play through and because of the some players when they played the story they then not played they don't play the game anymore and so it's very hard to get these PvE games to grow over time and one could argue there aren't many good examples of PvE games that have grown and World of Warcraft is you know a the type of game I'm talking about they throw a ton of content at it for a long time and they got some really good growth out of that the tricky thing is how do you do that on a shoestring budget when you're a few guys in New Zealand who haven't made a game before so we found out the reality of this when we released path of exile back in 2013 you can see here we had respectable user numbers a hundred and fifty million player hours that year and less than 2014 and less than 2015 and it just wasn't growing right like you know people were treating it as a PvE game and we're doing the best we could and we couldn't keep the player numbers up so we changed our strategy we had some hard learnings to do we change what we were doing and that's what I want to talk about today how we managed to achieve the honestly ridiculous growth that we've seen since then and there's a lot to cover it's also worth noting that the graph here is showing only our PC Western English server this is meant to be an apples to apples comparison we're not cheating by throwing in like China and Xbox to make the graphs bigger the the other realms the other platforms are not included in this graph so I'm going to briefly show you some footage of path of exile this might be very loud so we'll just turn it down if it is so it's an online action RPG I'm sure you're all familiar with this game or at least this type of game it plays a lot like you know the Diablo series and it's all about deep character customization finding awesome items leveling up it's got a lot of replayability and the league content where you come back every 13 weeks to play more puffs of excel and basically it's a game that we're very proud of entirely made in New Zealand it's the game with that skill tree the one that intimidates all the new users but we're keeping in there and so anyway that's path of Exile you can google it if you want more info so back in the mid-2000s my co-founders and I had played a ton of Diablo 2 like like thousands and thousands and thousands of hours and as we over time tired of the game we looked at other action RPGs that we wanted to try out you know we tried out Dungeon Siege series and Titan Quest and so on and we played those games too and enjoyed them but only for dozens of hours rather than thousands of hours and so this caused us to ask why did we sync so much more time into Diablo 2 what was perfect what made that game the best action RPG that had ever existed and so we came up with a bunch of design pillars that we feel a perfect action RPG needs that some of the other games hadn't quite hit in all cases and so those design pillars are as follows the first one is a visceral action combat this goes without saying it's an action RPG you need to have immediacy you hit a monster it dies blood goes everywhere it falls back and you know it's nice and fast an action based and you have to remember back in 2006 the atmosphere of online games like the the climate they were in was World of Warcraft clones the way Compaq worked as you walk up to a monster and you target it and then your character starts hitting it on a timer and you press you call downs occasionally and there's no real action you're not dodging out of the way when it attacks because it's going to hit you anyway and so nowadays of course everyone's doing a much better job at visceral action combat even strict him and most that come out have great combat in them you know games like up like does it online for example if you're really good to play so that's a pillar that everyone understands there's no particular secret the unit action in an action RPG second we have randomly generated levels now this is secret sauce for sure there were games like Titan quests that came out where I played through it and said this is amazing this is the new game I'm going to play and I started my second playthrough and didn't get a quarter of the way through it because I played it before as far as I was concerned and so random levels dramatically help people replay the game and when you want a game to be played for 10 to 20,000 hours over the life cycle of so if your longest users it needs to have the randomness that enables them to play each individual tileset two or three or 400 hours worth of gameplay and so I'll be talking a bunch more about random level generation later on in the talk I understand that procedural generation got a bit of a bashing you know in the last few years because some games have not used it particularly well but used carefully with a lot of like good theming it can work really well so next we have randomly generated items now I kind of wanted to just do an items talk like just focus on this one for an hour and like I think I could do a good job of that but I'm gonna briefly say that if you get your random item system good it makes your game replayable and the reason why is because in these kind of games your items are your progress right the character level not but doesn't matter so much no one really cares if you watch level 97 or 94 what they care about is the cool items you found out that you got on the way and the other nice thing about randomly generated items is it's not just a linear progression but the player knows they've got three items left to go and then they're finished we're dealing with ones where the stats are all over the place who knows what the next best item is how far it can be pushed and because of that you get this cool diminishing returns so that players really appreciate the small upgrades they find because it's a 1% power increase for their character but it makes them so much better than more of their friends the next one is a secure online economy now this is one of the things that sounds obvious clearly games need to secure online economy but if it's obvious why does everyone screw it up so badly like the first thing is so many games these days just remove trade they're like all this gold sellers we can't deal with that we're just going to get rid of trade this is not the right direction you need to have trade in your games that are about items because that way the items have some value if you find an item and you're the only person they can ever consume that it's not really something that you've achieved that you can actually like feel good about having it doesn't have any weight to it if you get a game where you get an item that you could give to your friends if you wanted to but you're not going to because it's your item but you could give it to them that's something you feel good about having and the ability for the item to actually transact with other players is a critical part in that item having worth in the economy and representing your accomplishment the second part of this is the secure part which again sounds obvious but so many games these days often from console developers who aren't used to proper secure client or server authority of code write their games in such a way that it's really easy to exploit them there's dupe methods there's various dumb stuff that goes on with the PC versions you know this there's a lot of horror stories there but the key the key takeaway is that there are very few games that actually respect items to the degree that we try to we want to make sure this is an online economy where the items are sacrosanct they are the program of the players they're going to matter we don't have validate them too quickly with new releases of content and is a big round that you can tell I feel passionately about but needless to say get your items right anyway the final one is deep character customization this is merely the fact that if you have thousands and thousands of ways of playing your game then when someone comes back to play at the second third fifth time they have a different way that they can play it and in some games where they just have a few simple character classes and it is pretty straightforward you'll play it with the first class then you'll play it with the second one in the third and eventually you run out of new classes you haven't tried path of Exile tries very hard to make sure the class doesn't actually matter that much it's more about what you're doing with it anyway so there's the preachy 5 design pillars and we felt that many of those are the games that were released failed in a few areas right they didn't have the secure servers they didn't have the random levels the items were bad and so on and so on very fun games to play through totally worth their money but not something you can actually sync your 20s into all right so the next yep then the next topic is we wanted to run this as a games as a service this is something we knew back in 2006 that we didn't know the buzzwords for it but it was something where we looked at Diablo 2 and they had tens of thousands of people coming back per realm for each one of their ladder resets people were excited to jump back into that game because of the fresh economy and keep playing even though the game was not being substantially updated during that time there was a single expansion a few tiny balance patches no real additions so we felt if we update our game every week with new items new keystone passives new skills and we keep path of excel updated incredibly fast how can we not grow this was the plan I mean this is you know 12 years ago now that we're planning it and this analysis also helped make us realize that we'd be economically viable at 10,000 average concurrent users so that means if you sample the number of players online and if there's 10,000 on average we'd be totally fine we're running a skeleton crew out of New Zealand very few people on the team we paid for the game ourselves we didn't have any investors or publishers and all that kind of stuff back then and we felt 10,000 people is enough to generate from cosmetic microtransactions enough people to generate enough money to pay for the game service to pay for development to pay for the costs and then have some money left over for ourselves if the business goes well and so that was our target we were aiming low and we tried to hit it so we scaled up from a team of three friends of my garage to this motley crew of 18 guys this is a terrible photo I got on Google image search these are the original partial bit path of Exile team that launched the open beta we had like one person per department basically and we spent six years on it and so when we launched it went really well we have two key stats there there was massive internet virality we had 70,000 peaking current users this is like pre apex legends kind of numbers um and 1.5 million signups we're on top of the world right like our random garage game had just suddenly like hit it big and so we were very keen to see what happened with the player numbers so they declined and there's no I'll expect it right like you know you released the game when the everyone knows the numbers go down eventually and so they declined from 70,000 concurrent's to 10,000 which is great because we're happy with 10,000 that's where we want to be so this is still good news you know it was popular and had declined now point out on the graph where the weekly patches were well there were every week all the way through there and they made no difference like we never and to this day have never seen a rise and play a numbers due to changing a small thing about the game it's all about the big changes so we switch to doing three weekly updates cuz one week patches just completely paralyzed your studio you dream about the patch cycle every day and it's bad anyway so at this point we'd decline from 70,000 to 10,000 users the business is still going well we're making some money for once and things are looking great but we need to get a using up his back up we've tasted the sweet fruit of 70,000 concurrent users and being at the top of the Steam charts and all that kind of stuff and we need to get back up there and so we figured well we know that economy resets are important they were critically important in Diablo 2 so let's release some leagues and the way leagues work in path of Exile is that they are basically economy resets in this case is the anarchy and onslaught League the anarchy one had some rogue xl's to the game which is some bad guys you get to find occasionally an onslaught made the players attack it so the monsters attack and move more quickly we also put some challenges in there and this logo is from the challenge t-shirt that we gave out to the top 50 people and those t-shirts over like $1500 on eBay now I think anyway so we gave them t-shirts out to the top players at the start and just motivated people to perform well in these leagues and so the result of this was a hefty 40% increase in player numbers we released this content 40% extra players come back it's validated except when you look at it in the ground context that's 40% of somewhere near the 10k mark and then it declined below 10k so we learned to ourselves we learned that Challenge leagues are important they bring players back people care but we did a really terrible job of marketing these right a lot of people don't even remember the release we put them in we just turned the leagues on basically with a thing on our website and so we learned that you have to bundle these economy resets with significantly marketable content like new characters new acts all that kind of stuff because then the players and journalists will want to talk about it the good news is since we had been since we entered open beta we've been working on a new character and a new half of an action and so that's what path of XR 1.00 was this is the scion character class and that's the act 3x as we called it second half of act 3 in the background there and this was the official 1.00 launch and our goal was to get back up to 70,000 concurrent users and keep them and so we launched on Steam we dropped all this content in and I have to know you can't launch on Steam in 2013 and actually work really well for marketing you can't do that every day and nor can you make this amount of content every day it took a long time use the numbers back up to 70 K just like we wanted holding steady we're feeling really good this time we know what we're doing but a lot of experience the numbers are staying up there it's awesome ok so they went down again that's fine we games do this right like everyone's game goes down and that bump there is Christmas by the way I don't have a pointer but the one on the writers is the effect of Christmas if you're interested see what that looks like in a declining game so we realized here that we needed it's the only thing that causes player numbers to ever go up by the way without releasing your content anyway so we realized we needed more content so we started work on our first path of exile expansion called sacrifice of the vowel sacrifice of the vowel introduce new endgame bosses and introduced site areas and vowel skill gems and a couple of new leagues and all the things a path of Exile expansion needed roughly and how did it do well that's the bump on the right there that's reasonable we got some more users we've got some more money things are good like I have to stress morale at the company is excellent right we control our own destiny everything's awesome people are having a good time it's great running this game as a service for almost every team member it was their first released game we're on top of the world and we're finding that releasing expansions bumps the player numbers up so now we have a button we can push that makes the player numbers go up so let's push it a bunch more times we decided to scope how the second expansion to be bigger because the key question is what is the cadence and size that we need to hit for these paths of Exile expansions right we're all scientists we want to optimize this so forsaken masters comes along this is an expansion that welcome entered the game thoroughly all the way through with these master missions and there's like a customizable player housing and that kind of stuff it was a good expansion and it took about five months to make and during which time the player numbers are pretty flat on the bottom but the spike was bigger so bigger expansion big Spyke this is looking good we have a bigger button we can press if we want to but this is tricky because it took a longer to make so is it even worth while sitting at 10,000 concurrent users for so long so we decided that we would try an even bigger expansion while interleaving some smaller updates in so we started work on hope started work isn't completely correct because the act content guys have been working on this since we finished act 3x but we formalized the path of Exile the awakening expansion which is path of Exile 2.00 it adds act 4 to the game it adds a whole bunch of call you stuff there's socketable jewels that go in the passive tree we completely rewrote on networking code all sorts of cool stuff the players were gonna love and we didn't tell them about it yet because we're waiting until we can show them something impressive and so this is going on in the background and we know it's gonna be a big spike or at least that's the theory according to this but let's try some stuff in the meantime so two more leagues this is torment and bloodlines and we released these alongside some probably pretty misguided PvP stuff that we did in December of 2014 and they were ok like the numbers jumped up again kind of proportional to the size of the content in this case in this case the trauma team bloodlines leagues were worthy of a spike about their big certainly not as important as the biggest spikes from the bigger updates so so far this is validating the thing released bigger content get bigger spikes but we're able to make them pretty easily while working on other stuff so we're pretty happy with us alright next up is the one-month League experiment called being really desperate to get your players back and then calling it an experiment five years later retro actively so we decided to try some more month leagues to see what would happen the idea is we just put some cool game modes on there it doesn't take a lot of development work and we'll see what happens maybe one month is the ideal cadence for path of Exile releases so there's the two one-month leagues at the end there it's hard to tell where the second one is and this is because your players quickly get inoculated to this kind of stuff 1 month is not enough time to play path of excel and enjoy all the stuff especially for the slower players there wasn't new content there was no marketing a lot of people here probably don't know we did them the second one was dark shrine by the way a fan favorite would like ten people I mean you can see at the bump there anyway um so this was kind of a failed experiment as far as we were concerned it was keeping the players somewhat entertained like the core audience was good but you can see the graph there is trending downwards throughout 2014 this is the point where we're getting a little bit concerned we're still over 10k you know we're still making money and it's profitable but it's not looking great like this is the point where we have to question do we just make another game and what's going on but we had the awakening coming out that was path of X or 200 so that was the saving grace we wanted to see how that performed so we finished the awakening got it released and it had a big spike exactly as we had expected because it was a lot of content so this is like everything on this graph says that the more work you do the bed of the results are which is great that's a good moral to live by and the problem was this just wasn't sustainable for us we had this awful situation where we'd work really hard to release some stuff the Planum should spike up briefly then they back down to the borderline unprofitable mark and we have to make more content and we just got to press the button really and frequently we wanted to change the whole paradigm so that's look at what we've learned so far number one economy resets that's the key thing here for action-rpgs if you start a fresh server everyone rushes in they take time off work they want to get to level 100 the fastest they find all the good items economy resets are amazing they're an opportunity - they're an opportunity to have a fresh start and a fair playing field for players if you've disengaged from the game the economy restart is the perfect time to get back into it because it lets you have an equal and equal footing with other people who are much better than you you believe you're better than them and everyone's happy until they're not so economy resets were great the next note was about small content patches they never helped us in any way actually increase player numbers now don't get me wrong releasing content is always good for the game right at the beginning when we're doing one weekly updates and adding new items and skills that's vitally important to have the game actually have some content for people to play but it never moved the numbers up and the reason why is there are two benefits to content the first one is it makes your game better and the second one is marketing and you want marketing when you're doing this kind of thing and trying to get your graphs higher and so it's very important if you batch your content together you get both the marketing and making the game better so it's got to be above a threshold of people wanting to talk about it when we release path of exile expansions now people will message each other excitedly to say look at this cool stuff and path of Excel it goes to the top of overall rate it does all that kind of good stuff back then no one was calling anyone when you release a single new skill Jim and journalists were not covering it but they are now the next thing is balanced changes during a league if you decide you want to fix something you know to make the game better then the people who are doing that thing will be angry and if you make something more powerful because it was too low the people not doing that thing are angry because they missed out on choosing that character built and so basically making any kind of midseason tweaks is just a very negative experience for a lot of players who care about and so we learn to push these balance changes to between the leagues because that's the point when players are choosing what character to play they can see what's been reduced and what's been improved and choose to play based on that the final story is one that I did not realize myself I wish I was smart enough to think of this but this actually came from kripparian the awesome streamer who played a lot of path of excel at the time and so kripparrian and I were chatting on skype as I like to say that we did occasionally and he said to me you know what Chris I've got a good lesson for you that really helped me as my with my streaming he said every day I will wake up and I'll stream in a reliable time I'm there right at that moment and I'm gonna stream until the predictable time and then I'm gonna work on my highlights video and I'm gonna post that at a predictable time and then I'm back tomorrow doing exactly the same thing and I'm gonna try not to take days off I'm just gonna stream at these times and the reason he explained was because that way when someone Combs comes home from work and they're wanting to watch kripparian if that's the time of day that he's streaming and then they'll be able to watch him and if they want to watch a video before they go to bed or whatever the timing is it will be there and the day that is not there is the day they look on the internet so what will entertain me what else is there in the world and they'll find some of the thing maybe another stream and maybe a TV show and now that's the thing they're doing for entertainment and he felt that his numbers dropped significantly if he deviated from his very rigid schedule now you know he's a powerhouse of streaming right he's amazing and he recommended that we do a similar schedule with path of excel because he said look at your graph of what you've actually done in 2014 i I made this graph not him but um this is it was all over the place right we've got medium leagues at 20 weeks big ones at 16 they arbitrarily gets small and close together no path of Excel player is gonna think anything other than is that game dying like what's going on with him getting smaller and what's with the timing no one can predict anything and so he strongly suggested we have a rigid schedule because that way it's more convenient for him because then he knows when to stream it that it's also convenient for everyone else and so we tried this out so this was our new schedule the new era of leagues as it's called and so they're every 13 weeks so this means exactly four of them fit into a year that means that we know that they're going to be on the second weekend of the final month in each quarter or whatever we do and this perfectly fits having one a few weeks before Christmas and a week before GDC and a week before e3 it just just matches everything and it's great so we started doing this and we were initially doing some pipelining we work on a small one while working on a bigger one in the background and then in the second part of the cycle we released the big one and then penis and that enabled us to experiment with scope and so on because to the at this point we still weren't 100% sure how large these had to be to have the correct effect we were pretty sure thirteen weeks which is roughly three months was the right amount of time so that was the new schedule nope the key philosophy here is players will stop playing your game that's unavoidable at some stage something's gonna happen that makes them stop playing they get a new job or whatever they get burnt out another game comes along but the key thing is to give them a lot of opportunity to re-engage and that means they have to really clearly know when the next coming back it is inexcusable for a player to be able to leave your game without knowing the date that they are returning to it as far as we're concerned with this and so that's where we want to make sure that users quit with a plan to come back because before we clearly signaled when the next release was players would get horribly burnt out and then they would just never play again whereas now they can quit before they get burnt out they can say you know what I finished this league I've seen this stuff I'll just come back for the next one and that's amazing for us because then the users are fresh they get chances to play their triple-a games or fortnight or whatever they do and it works really well also we monetize very heavily towards the start of our leagues that's where we introduce new to cosmetic microtransactions and supporter packs and so on so it honestly doesn't matter a lot if we lose users right at the end because they'll come back and monetize again at the beginning of the next league so let's have a look at some results so this tiny little bump at the bottom is the same size as roughly forsaken masters was just for ivory scaled this because it's foreshadowing anyway so this was talisman right tells me was a great league it was a decent size if we could release tell us when every three weeks after every three months I'd be pretty happy and so tell us Minh went well and that was one of the small ones in our cycle all right so the next one was the ascendancy / / andis update this was a bigger one because as you saw we're going small big small big so so far there's no unexpected results right small big or good next one is a small one again because it was prophecy which wasn't as big but you'll notice it was actually a little bit bigger than talisman so this is how we rationalized the numbers went down but in a good way right because they're bigger than the previous small one and then sure enough we release the next big one nothing surprising this is Atlas of worlds and essence League and at this point we decided we hated pipelining because we're getting so much attention split between these two leagues we wanted to see what happens if we just focus on one thing at a time and do it well so he said if we could make one thing what would it be so we made breach and breach is very popular and it was our best release ever so then we said what next what about legacy so we made legacy best release ever and at this point the background process of making a new acts that trundles along always in path of excels background had act 5 almost ready that's the 300 expansion the fall of our EF and that was sitting in my back pocket ready for release so we did and that was huge definitely our best release ever and we were feeling really good at the stage user numbers a big we just launched in China we've just you know launched on Xbox you know this is just PC here and it's already very high dwarfing all our previous results and so the question is what would happen with a 13-week cycle going forward now we knew like and this happened we knew that the next release would not be as tall as 300 because it was just a regular 13-week cycle it wasn't an entire expansion that took 18 months and 80 people to put together and so the at war for the Atlas one was not as big as 300 but it was bigger than the previous expansion before that and industry and then incursion and it just keeps climbing the 13 week cycle is working really well and then we release a delve which was great and actually download a little bit which we're not blaming on delve because it's probably a lack of retention during incursion or something like that and we were a little bit disappointed it was down like this is the point where you're questioning you know is this parabola finally like hit the top but betrayal was really really really big and so when you look at it in the context of all of the paths of Exile history you can see that we were clearly declining there's no argument about that for the first few years and then really clearly climbing and so this is the brunt of what I'm now going to talk about for the rest of the talk is what we do to actually make these and how we scope them out and how we deliver them fast enough okay I'm going to go through the marketing page for path of excel synthesis which is our most recent release and what I'm going to focus on specifically here is the way that we target specific groups our path of exile users because everyone likes something about the game that's why they're playing it and so we've identified a big set of categories of things that people enjoy we've broken all the players into psychographics and we're going to target each one with a specific slide and the goal here is when they're reading for the page they'll look at the features or say oh this is cool and then they'll find the thing that clicks of them they'll find the reason they're playing and they'll say whoa that's good okay time to tell my friends so first of all we start setting the scene the setting and the story and new characters and so on and there were players who really liked discovering about the story in a league this is the thing that turn come on and makes them want to play and so we lead with that and at this point some players are going to say okay cool this looks really nice it's got this awesome blue portal and this dude and you can explore memories I'm gonna go and get excited about it the next thing we do is we talk about a unique gameplay mechanic in combat that we've introduced in this case it's the ability to explore these decaying memories and run away from this wall of decay and this is something that for many players that changes completely how path of Exile plays because now they're running away from the decay wall they've got to use movement skills differently and this is the thing which causes them to become excited because that group of players loves the idea of combat being slightly different the next group of players don't necessarily care about the story they don't necessarily care about combat they care about long-term it her progression within a league the concept of building something up over time and so we often implement kind of meta mechanics and path of Exile which are like games unto themselves and this really appeals to types of players who want a metal layer on top of the regular gameplay and so for example in synthesis you could get these kind of puzzle pieces that you connect together a bit like Carcassonne and explore the memory map with that and this is entirely a meta mechanic it doesn't have any impact on the actual like momentum and gameplay of the game the statistic tates how you access the advanced content of the league and that really appeals to groups of players who want to make sure they're doing a different meta thing with each league next we have what I call endgame aspirational content so these are like final boss fights they're really hard to get to you've got to do a lot of you've got a lot of meta progression to get there they're very difficult encounters they've got good rewards you have to learn the strategy of the fights they're big multistage ones and they take a lot of development time to make and they're only accessed by maybe 10% of our players the top players who can get through to the end of the game get a chance to see this content and you may ask yourself why are you guys spending like 20% of our development effort on something that affects 10% of players and the reason why is there are groups of players and there who want to know that there is content that only they can get to stuff that's actually hard and they're an exclusive club for being able to do it and so those players will work incredibly hard to identify the content work out how to get there rush there as quickly as possible build characters custom-made for it do time runs try to do and hardcore try to do it without getting hit all of these things and then repeat it over and over to get all the good items and so we found that it's incredibly useful to have this end game content even if not everyone gets a chance to experience it themselves because there's a good strong overlap between streamers and these top 10% of players cuz streamers are generally the better players in the game and so they can consume this content on straight and everyone else can watch and think oh I wish I was that good I wish I could get characters that strong and be able to play the top path of exile content and so we try to appeal to that group there which has a lot of overlap with the rest of the player base from an aspirational point of view next we talk about league rewards everyone loves finding items that's why they're playing these games and so we introduced new rewards that synthesis that synergize with existing systems in the game and this is for players who want to improve their characters and find out how they're going to be subtly different in terms of what items they're getting in this case it's the fractured and synthesized items we talked about crafting there are paths of Exile players who love crafting there are ones who will like be really bored looking at all the other stuff until we talk about crafting and then the world opens up with possibilities of what kind of stuff they can make using the new systems and this is also important from a gameplay point of view as any path of Exile players know here if you can get a head start on the crafting and the league and make the best stuff before other players you're kind of the source of the best items and the exalts come rolling in and so this is actually one of the power gaming strategies here is to care about the crafting for path of Exile we like to do meta and balance changes so for example we did a spell casting rebalance and synthesis and one of the reasons we do this is because there are players who will play the best character build and only the best character build and if that's the same for two leagues in a row they're playing the same character for two leagues in a row which might be fine but it probably is boring to play the same character for two leaks in a row and so it's really important that we mix things up I mean hopefully not completely arbitrarily we're trying to solve problems here we're trying to take the things that are overpowered to make them a bit worse and take the things that haven't been used for a while and make them really exciting but this is very important because it means that people will get a chance to see different aspects of part of Exile from legal league now an important thing here is it doesn't require developing new content we're literally just rebalancing and so on and that means we get to leverage all of paths of excels hundreds of existing skills and systems when creating cut win win and kind of makes you do content by bumping it up to be top tier having said that is very important that we actually do introduce new skills in order to appeal to players who were keen to play a new powerful character and want to make sure they're doing something snazzy that hasn't been released before and so we shine a spotlight on various new skills and archetypes of players so that they so the players who enjoy playing what's new and hot get a chance to and clearly see what it is on the marketing page finally I know I've talked about item rewards but the items were talking about here is subtly different and you can tell this game's got a lot of item and this is referring to the items that regular monsters in the game can drop just the idea of playing normal path of exile content and many people wanting to know that regular monsters drop more interesting stuff than before there's new divination cards as new unique items as new mods available this is really important because for some people they kind of ignore the league we put a bunch of F in and they just want to play path of Exile and they kind of ignore it and it's fine we just have to make sure that those people understand there is more regular path of Exile view as well now there's plenty more sections in our marketing materials obviously we try to sell them some stuff as well but that's completely irrelevant for this talk here's the checklist of all the things that for path of Exile we find are important to push to the players and so that's basically the scope of what one of these updates is now if you've been involved in game production you may ask that's an awful lot of work to do in 13 weeks how do we do that and so the remainder of the talk which we have about 20 minutes the remainder of the talk is about how we achieve this in the 13 week cycle so I'm going to give you a bunch of advice some of it is going to be a bit weird but bear with me okay so let's start with the easy stuff fast prototyping obviously you should do fast prototyping right why do we even have the slide because it's actually really hard and we fail at it all the time like the fast prototype of synthesis came in really late I was initially gonna say how late but that's really embarrassing so let's just say it was late and that reduce the amount of iteration we could do and potentially that affected the quality of the league we're having - a lot of catch-up work at the moment changing some mechanics based on the fact that our prototype was not ready early enough thankfully the first prototype for 3700 is already being completed and thrown away once and completed again and that's a really good process and so try to do this right it's the easy part now to get onto some harder stuff okay procedural level generation this is a multi hour talk that I'm condensing down to a few minutes okay procedural level generation is critical because you're leagues or whatever is appropriate for your game need new content for players to actually play through and that means making new areas because you've got to go to new places but the traditional way of making levels and games can be slow involves placing a bunch of things around in evolving artists and taking time let's try to make a level in 60 seconds so I load up the tool and I draw a line across horizontally which is a river and then I draw a path going downwards which is eight of the white path they and then they put forests around it and I press the buttons as they go and it makes a path of Excel level out of tiles and there's a river on a path intersecting and the engine knows it can put a bridge there and all this fancy stuff and I click go again and I get it different one and go again and I get a different so by default here it's producing random levels now these are relatively similar because it's just a relatively simple one but I'll make it more complicated so I can then play this in game and sure enough there's a pretty bridge over the river and it works out the direction of the water flow and does all the fancy foam generation all this cool stuff just happens because we've got mature tools for that now and so I say okay so this is a forest I need some stuff to fill it with so I make a set of tiles that can go in there some trees and some full and over trees and bandit camps and tents and some rocks and it puts them throughout the level and then I generate again and get a different set of stuff and again and get a different one and the player story is subtly different each time the crossing is in a different place the bandit camp is in a different place if it's even there at all and you have to bear in mind that this was like literally just a cross in the editor like the simplest possible graph that took seconds to do so here's a real level from path of exile this is the river crossings it's to the left of act to town and the way that this all works is instead of doing levels like this where you just make one and hope it's random enough you make like 20 different variations you have two rivers you have five rivers you have no rivers you have it so that there's multiple roads or a fork in the road you have all of these crazy things and then when the game is generating the level it picks which topology to use first and then it does the random generation within it and so you've got two levels of randomness there and so this is an example topology from the river crossings and here's some examples of what it can make so there are many ways across the rivers there's paths there's broken paths there's little stones there are fallen logs and so on you've got various boss encounters in here you've got different exits going off into different levels waterfalls that kind of stuff here's a completely different variation of it that's generated in this case there's like a different user story as they play through and get different bosses and so on this one here has like an island of the middle with a big like thick cops of trees there and so this area feels different every time you play and did not take the others very long to do for synthesis we said oh we need like 50 or 60 of these areas made that the players can play through and we kind of need them right now like today preferably because we have to actually like use them to put the monsters in and play test and so they took minutes to make each one I think was like 20 minutes but the point is they did it pretty fast and that's something we can do because of a procedural level generation tools suite that we've made and I should note all the paths of excels tools and engine are entirely custom not something I necessarily recommend but it's great when you've got it okay so I'm now going to show you why the level generation is good and another way it understands about your league mechanics so this is abyss this is where when you're playing through the area there's a crack that you can follow and monsters come out of it and so when we're generating the level the generator can place the abyss cracks throughout the level in an interesting way where of the context of where players can go so that's an outdoors one this is an endorsed one it will follow the paths and go through the doorways and a long little narrow walkways and all that kind of stuff because it understands about the walkability because it just generated this maze for you and so because of this abyss is a fun mechanic it's different every time you play it because of the level that is present in is a completely different story and this kind of leads on to the next topic and this is a topic about multiple overlapping axes of randomness not to give an example imagine you're a path of exile designer your job is to make encounters like fights so you're sitting at your desk and I come over and say we need lots of these we have a encounter that needs a ton of variety because we expect the players to play it like 500 times and you say wait wow I can't make 500 variations of this so you try and you have 10 encounter types to start with you've got the one with the monsters drop down from the ceiling you've got the one where they crawl up the walls you've got the one with a teleport in you've got the one where they're in a big sphere that breaks open you do as many encounters as you can do and you hit about 10 and then I say look 10 isn't enough I said 500 retries of this so you make another 10 and now they're getting diminishing returns and it's really hard to think of them so that's the point where we add another axis in this case it's like okay well all of that was with spiders let's make zombie versions so you make it so it can spawn zombies and then bats and so on and so on so that's another axis and then we're like okay random bosses randomly some of these are going to be bosses so sure enough the fights not different because you get lucky or unlucky with how many bosses there are then we're going to add some random mods to the fight and so on and so on so age access increases it and it gets to the point where you've done five times the work we've got 10,000 times the amount of randomness out versus just making 50 encounters and then it gets boring once they played all 50 which is the prophecy League ok so I'm going to show you a video of breach which is a example of a league with lots of these axes so you tagged this spooky hand and it opens up a breach which is kind of like a parallel dimension where you fight these monsters and if you kill them fast enough the radius keeps on increasing and it gets harder and harder to keep it open until it collapses now there are good and bad things that can occur this is a great reach because it's outdoors and so you've got a big circle you can kill a lot of monsters this is an indoors one where you've got super unlucky and it's up against the side of the level and that's a bad breach because now it's harder to fight all the monsters and that's ok because I look forward next good one but there's way more axes the monster density can vary you can get these like special chests that spawn very rarely within it so you're lucky like there's some chests up here that are like clasped hands that you can tag there are different varieties of flavor of breech you want to get the Kaos ones rather than the fire ones potentially because they've got better meta progression associated you can find reach Lord bosses that maybe you do or don't want to spawn depending on how hard they are and so there's so many things that can happen inside a breach you're always left feeling that the next one is going to be better because you've never seen a perfect one on all axes alright so let's talk about asset reuse this is another obvious thing if you're making a game like this as the games as a service model where you want to make content really quickly then it's important to reuse your assets where you can it would be criminal to make entirely new assets the artist would be really really really put to a lot of work so let's have a look at how we've done that in path of X so these are the same area on the right we have like cows lava cave and on the Left we have a plateau area now what we did is we remove the lava and change the environment lighting so it looks different but the tiles are the same I think many of the textures are the same as well that was really fast to do now this is why you shouldn't add a day/night cycle to your game like this so many people make action RPGs and it's easy to add a day/night cycle so they do because look at how awesome it is on the trailer to have to show off the day/night cycle but that means you're throwing away the ability so like hide versions of areas that use a different environment elsewhere in the game as long as they're far enough away and look sufficiently different and then people will not necessarily feel when they're playing through I mean the players don't care in principle that you've reused content they expect it but they care when they can notice it and so if you have a day/night cycle for each of your areas you've thrown away so many permutations you could use to add actual meaningful extra content elsewhere in the game here's another area where we took the icy glacier area I'd note that everything this is the ascent area and we made it yellow and took the snow away and now we've got a desert and so we do this extensively throughout the game I think like acts six through ten show a lot of examples of both this and actual new assets mixed together in a way that's very hard to tell but was actually you know very very cost effective at making content here's another example with monsters so on the left here you can see a green flying monster you can see a spike and a bone wheel skeleton and at the top you can see a random portal frame made of metal now we had a sudden and urgent need for a pile of synthesis monsters that looked cool so we said that middle stuff looks cool let's take that and put it on the rigs of the monsters on the left and so sure enough we immediately have instantly animated and rigged monsters we can use and all we have to do is give them new names giving new sounds giving you effects and give them new skills so they have a meaningful different combat interaction with the player and then suddenly we had our synthesis monsters sorted out to make monsters on the left involves spoiling upper asset creation pipeline that evolves concept inge and high poly models and low poly models and texturing and all that UV stuff and I don't know any of this animation rigging the whole works you know getting effects it takes months to make monsters but if you do this like cheap approach here you can make stuff that looks different than what you have in the game at the moment or relatively quickly and we often have to make monsters with days of notice when we're putting these leaks together so techniques like this really help and the best thing is these synthesis monsters don't feel like risk ins they've got their own new skills and stuff it isn't just a blue version of the flying thing it's like a cool metal version of the flying thing ok so now we're going to talk about content reuse which is different than asset reuse because I'm talking about taking like a whole cell block of content and reusing it so this is breach which I just showed you and in the regular game you'd find these hands and fight the monsters and players understood it and they liked it and then we turn the breach League off and had them relatively scarce within the game but it was available as a reward for later elsewhere so when we did incursio and sure enough of the viola being researching breaches and the temple of out so artal and so you find breaches in there and when the player sees that purple hand they immediately notice they know exactly what it means in terms of the fact think about to get a big fight and lots of monsters lots of experience lots of items they understand the rewards they understand that if you find splinters inside the breach it lets you create breach stones which this you gotta fight some endgame meta stuff entirely by saying a purple hand there this is a breach inside the delve content so deep underground there's purple hands and we just chuck it in there and it's really like it's entirely positive for players they had a whole system that they really enjoy engaging with here we have some Harbinger fight in the regular game when that was a main league and sure enough you get the same fight deep underground in delft where there's a hub and report all of the monsters come out off and it means you get access to all of the rewards for that league this gentleman here is called kadar oh he gives you bro deals for awesome items he's like a traveling salesman and we used him in the parentis league and in very little since then but when we're designing betrayals rewards of course one of the 200 or 300 outcomes has to be kadhi rows in a cage and he's very happy to do a deal with you and this is cute because of course like wait why is he in a cage in this area but it was something the players really likes because now when they want access to the kuduro content they know they can go and find him in this outcome and all of that stuff is available so we found that wholesale content reuse has been incredibly useful at both bolstering the rewards in the game but also making sure that players immediately say oh I know this I know this is gonna be great okay so now is the time for us to talk about some more controversial lessons this is the point where I get labeled crazy alright so this is the quality curve this is relatively obvious you have your workforces quality thing and this has an asymptote that means that you can never get to 100% quality it's gonna take infinitely long in terms of work because people want more and more and more fixes that you can get pretty close the question is how far along the curve do you go and when you're left with 13 weeks you can't apply there when it's done philosophy and you have to pick somewhere so for example here for 50% of the effort you get 90% of the quality now I'm not saying to release games that are only 90% quality but the way you do it is by putting the quality in the right places polish the things that matter and don't care about the stuff that doesn't matter now this means that you have to make some very difficult decisions about what things to pay attention to and therefore the best skill for a developer to have on your team is the ability to know what actually matters relatively few people on the path of exile team are able to actually gauge that as accurately as we would like and so it's very important that we do focus everyone's efforts on the things that really really pay benefits for the actual content we're releasing and this is also why we hire a player base to be in the QA team and dev team because the path of Exile players will understand what's important because they played through it a whole bunch and know how they interact with it all right pipelining we tried it we really did we wanted to have - two or three releases on the go at once and it just really failed and we found several problems with this the first one is that when we're focusing on too many releases at once we always had an excuse to go and look at the other one when things got hard if you assign a developer do all the stuff for release a and then maybe do the stuff for release B later they'll work on a like they meant to until they get stuck and instead of then solving the hard problem they would often say oh well there's some easy stuff I can do on B so I'll just work on that for a few hours instead to clear my mind and that's great but then a is completely stalled and when you have precious few weeks in order to get this stuff done you really can't handle those stalls the second thing is if you pipeline releases you do not have time to react to what the game actually needs by the time it's apparent that the game needs a new end you like 3/4 of the way through making a new beginning to it or something like that because reddit will suddenly decide there's a thing that needs fixing and if you have the ability to say yes sir and get that done in 13 weeks that's not even good enough some of the time for them but having to spend like you know oh wait wait we've got the X two expansions almost finished kind of well how we'll do this one next year is just not going to work or the game is on fire until that thing is fixed it's also important not to stall content for later we get into a situation where we're like we finished all the skills we said we're going to make and we've got two extra ones that got out of prototyping and they're kind of finished do we wait do we leave them for the next expansions we have less to do no put them in the game now the game needs to be in this best form now all the time because you don't get second chances as much growth as possible every league otherwise you'll start to decline people express concern about creativity here they say look Chris you've got this plan for like another 10 years of path of Exile with four releases per year that's 40 more leagues I can think of two good ones where are we going to get 40 from and I always refer them back to Magic the Gathering they have released new sets for per year or whatever for so many decades now like 26 years and or something hundreds of these things and there's always new ideas it's amazing the fact they can go back to the well and find really cool compelling stuff and so whenever I hear that we're not going to come up with another 10 or 20 or 30 of these like oh they did a hundred you know and I'm certain we'll be able to do the well will refill now if you're a project manager you're probably asking how we can make all of the stuff in 13 weeks because it's not just we start working in 13 weeks later we release it consider how the schedule actually works in reality so we release the content and now there's problems were there right right now there's a bit of a fire where we're fixing some stuff with synthesis that the community doesn't like that's cool we'll have that fixed early next week but this has taken the first two weeks of the schedule to do so so there's some time spent during live ops work on the existing release you've done then you've got a prototype a new stuff right ideally that's a bit pipelined in there but still it takes time it's gonna be another week before we really know for sure what three seven hours so that's three weeks gone ten weeks left and coming from the other end we like to renounce our content three weeks before the end we put our page up we get the players hypes they have time to tell their friends as a countdown you know it makes sense of people to book time off work so that's three weeks gone there we then have to actually do a press tour where we show all the journalists stuff it's very important to actually do real marketing in PR so we spend two weeks showing all of people's stuff and preparing the marketing page but in order to do this to actually have content ready to show them like a trailer and slides and this kind of stuff and that takes a week so now we've got this like four or five week window in the middle to actually make all of the stuff and that's difficult and that's where the next counterintuitive advice comes in this is how you get your art so quickly create content you have no plan for we have themed assets that we commissioned because we know one day we're keen to use them and a great example of this is with The Betrayal League we decided we're gonna make this very complicated evil organization with 19 members who will have backstories and they all look different and they feel different from any path of excel characters we've had so far but where are we gonna get 19 fully modelled rigs voice-acted fleshed out characters like a vat and three or four weeks and the answer was we go to our giant store of content that we just have because we made it and we pick a bunch of characters we like this is a micro transaction I'm a set we were going to sell it but if I put it on a bandit and like sell it in two years this is a new character and so we found like we we have a just a catalog of path of excel stuff that the team have made because they can slot it into the art pipeline which is going to have a place in the world one day and we just pick some things for the league and I'll give you another example so this is not a real example we are never going to do a path of Excel expansion related to Dragons because we don't want there to be dragons in our world however if we decided one day that dragons were okay we'd say to the team hey guys make some dragons and I tell me in a year when they're finished and then they'll be dragons sitting there in the library of stuff and when we're looking at League ideas were like could we do dragons this time sure how would that work and when we hit the prototyping the dragons are ready to go and so we have so much stuff being made for the future we have bits and pieces for expansions next year where we don't know what that expansion is but we have an idea of a theme that we would like to do and maybe it's finished early maybe we can use that this year maybe we can take a few of those assets for this current league potentially and it's just so good to have that giant library of stuff okay so in conclusion we initially initially released path of Exile kind of failed at getting any growth then we turn things around with ass aggressive 13 week schedule and I've talked a lot about how we actually manage that and various takeaways that are a bit counterintuitive to a regular industry advice there's one last thing I'd like to end on so people quit path of Exile while they're playing the league and come back in the next one but what's fascinating is that the graph of people quitting accessing the community is a lot less steep so the yellow line there is people quitting the game it goes from 100% down to 20% by the end because the real as much point in playing in the last week because the new things coming out a few days later in you about to essentially have your progress reset but people still use the website at no less than 50% of peak and these are players who are still engaged in reading the patch notes telling us we did it wrong looking at all the changes and buying stuff people who are not playing the game will come back and buy my group microtransactions and supporter packs because they're available for when they next one to play and this is amazing because this is actually what we care about is keeping the community engaged and that community is never going below 50% during the quiet periods what's also interesting is the size of the community right at the end there in terms of people accessing the website is a perfect predictor for server numbers for the next league so far for like you know three years in a row we they're able to predict server capacity for each launch because of just looking at the website activity and using some ratios and that's worked really well so anyway the the vindication we have with this whole plan is the fact that the fact that year after year we've managed to both grow our player numbers but also get to the point where people never really leave path of Excel they're still playing it even if they say I'm done with this league I'll see you guys in a few months we know they're coming back and they reliably do they reliably keep spending and having a good time and this is the motivation we need to keep releasing quality content alright so slight plug we're hiring we were in New Zealand so that's hard it's hard to get work visas and we don't pay as much as the Bay Area but if that's no problem and you want to work on path of Exile like everything you saw there's the contact details and also please fill out the speaker survey it's very important to GDC so they can get high quality speakers and of course I would love to answer any questions timeline wise it looks like we have like five or ten minutes so um use the microphone if you would like to ask something [Music] so first let's want to say thanks for making the game I've been playing since open beta and every league since is just incredible and kind of inspired me to enter this industry but a question is that you talk about reusing content and path of Exile now there's so many options in endgame right it used to be just grinding Maps but now we have lots of these meta systems that we can engage in and I'm curious with player retention games like warframe allow players to very specifically choose what they go into right they're like I want to grind out this meta system and make a lot of progress there but in path of Exile feels widespread like you kind of progressed in all things slowly as you work the endgame map system so I'm wondering if you have any opinions on path excel going forward in regards to allowing more player choice in what types of previously content they engage in throughout their experience in the endgame right ok to repeat the question just for the recording so you're basically asking in path of Exile there's a lot of content in the endgame and you get access to it as you find it it's very hard to actually focus on fine on on narrowing down to specific content you want to engage in so this is something we've been experimenting with in the last few leagues we introduced scarabs and their betrayal League which is something that's a tradable way of augmenting the amount of a specific type of content that you find and this is something we are planning to work on more because we do think that someone being out of specialized is an important thing okay is kind like a trade skill or profession in another game if you're just a really good person at playing delve content or synthesis content that's something that's good for you to have a specialization and so this is a direction I would like us to go further but we are very careful because everything here is tradable if we go slightly over the line suddenly everyone is doing exactly that and farming the optimal thing and it's hard to get items out of the economy once you put them there so we're probably too cautious with addressing that hey thank you so much for the talk how do you keep your team engaged with working on the game this long so the question is how we keep our team engaged for working on a game this long it helps to be the only big game development company in New Zealand I'm kidding our team our team have amazing amazing staff retention we love working with them we treat them as well as we can and that it really helps to them we're not necessarily working on path of exile for this long but we're working on these 13-week game jams we were releasing things like last year we said who likes Pokemon we like Pokemon let's do B story and we made a league based on that and the team we're engaging they're drawing the art for the little book that you can take them all off and everyone's having a great time and it's the frequent release cycles which letters actually like kind of everyone when you joined the path of exile team you get an experience of designing and working on and releasing and in maintaining a complete game four times a year basically thank you all right so you have told us about your numbers and how did you manage them on your own 1/3 right what I subjectively think that it's because of yours good decisions while your competition was not doing really well so I feel obligated to ask the question how did how did out of season up with full joke actually that happened in please can actually affect it path of exile have a graph and you've seen it so that was the spike there at the end and I do think that the spike was larger because of what you're referring to for the for the recording he's referring to the UM diablo immortal announcement at Blizzcon last year this did drive traffic to path of exile having said that betrayal was still our best release from a Content point of view and we believe it still would have been our best release and even without the additional traffic we can tell who the new users are it was certainly helpful but um yeah it is useful when fortuitous events happen having said that you know it still means we have to stay vigilant there gonna be a lot more competitors this year there are a lot of action RPGs a little really good that it being developed hey Chris thank you for talking so fast and covering so much my question is about one of the pillars you talked about in the beginning about a good RNG item system could you talk about some common problems or things not to do that maybe you've seen in the industry or that you guys encountered with these item systems so you're wanting to hear about some problems without end systems that other games do this is like getting to know me in person is hearing about the stuff forever um okay so in my opinion the biggest mistake that games make with their item systems as they have item mods that are individually hard to feel like a goal with path of excel is if you strip your carrots down to be pretty simple and you put an item on without looking at the mods you should be able to play and say what the mods do based on how the game feels now this isn't something we always meet obviously there's eleven thousand stats in the game so it's hard to meet it with all of them but the core thing is we want them to individually be an impactful there's none of us like +1 strengths what does that even mean you know we we make sure the amount of strength is actually meaningfully increasing your life meaningfully making at least you know 5% boost to damage so you can feel the difference that's one example there another example of what people do with their item systems is they'll come up with a basically set of sequential items where you can get this one then you get this one then you get this one and this is setting up a content train that players when they get the top item they're then saying well what is there to find now and you as the developer have to go and have more items on the end in path of Exile we go there there's random mods you'll get a top 10% item you get a top 8% maybe a top 5% but we believe that there are not like the best items that were possible in 2013 have not necessarily been found yet in any reasonable numbers just because of the harsh diminishing returns so to some extent the initial levels and mods that we set up six years ago are still working and we haven't had to go and pile on additional higher mods and path of excel at least not to any blood degree hello and thank you for the talk so you guys mentioned that your motivation from making this game was traditional box games like Diablo 2 and so on they're the monetization model is well you like the game you buy it and you enjoy it but for you guys it was not that sort of model I was mostly external visual updates and so on were over point of innovation I believe was your support packs can you tell us a little bit about how you derived that that's a great question so the question was given that the other action RPGs were premium paid games why did we go free-to-play have cosmetic microtransactions and supporter packs it was our plan to go free-to-play before that was a thing we wanted to be the first free game it sounds silly but that was 2006 we'd seen maplestory they were making a lot of money in Korea and we thought we'd revolutionize the Western gaming market now we're trying to say this because it's dumb because then if you spent seven years making the game everyone's free to play by the time you release in fact when we did release free-to-play was a bad phrase that you say free-to-play they assume bad monetization we lost users by saying we were free we tried very hard to make it seen you've got to pay for it anyway so the ethical cosmetic microtransactions thing was because when we initially scoped the game out that was the only thing that made sense we didn't realize that selling power was even a possible strategy right so we scoped this out because it's a competitive game people want to play a feint a fair playing field and that was the way to design games and thankfully this is now you know the tide has turned on this to the point where most new games coming out these days are doing proper ethical microtransactions and a good way if they're competitive the supporter packs thing was we needed to we were about to start selling better access in 2012 because we wanted to trickle a few more people in and they were spamming with threats if we didn't let them in so we figured rumors I'll take $10 and so we made a page where you can spend $10 to get better access and then we realized considering Kickstarter was so big why not model it like what they were doing and so we added the $20 pack and the $50 pack and the hundred dollar pack and we just kept going to a thousand and then that sold a lot of copies and gave us a lot of obligations that we had to dinner fulfill for many years so we've iterated now I think we're on our 12th or 13th set of these support packs and it's something I also care a lot about there's a supporter PAC design so if you're doing anything on Kickstarter or other games where you're doing like a founder PAC or so what about modeling what advice I would love to give advice on that I have opinions there anyway there's the there's a summary of that thank you cool so thanks again for making this game and this talk it's all amazing I played this game a lot and I've been the guy who is like I'm done but I'll play next league a lot and and and the question I have is how do you think about burnout burnout in this like you have these four releases a year you you people are ready to like come back and they're ready to come back but have you thought like what's the what's the take on is like what if people run out of wanting to come back like how do you how do you deal with the like like over time people getting bored of restarting over again even though it's it's something new it's the same new thing yeah so the question was how do we do with meta burnout which is basically the next level above of you know happy to come back every league until eventually you come back so many times this is partly what our big big expansions are for that's the next meta level above there the to over the 300 next year's 400 was gonna be nuts anyway those are the things that really drag people back and like I mean I was talking to a good friend of mine who's a who works at Jenks and he actually said a plane path of Exile way back in the early alpha and he was saying he'd recently returned to it has been having a blast and this is something where he took several years off but now he's back and spending money and playing characters and it's all good thanks hi great talk you mentioned that you generate content and background so that it's just ready for you some expansion because that's the only way to do it what about tools engineering and things like that how do you handle that if the tools you are saying yeah we have a tools team internally so the question was what do we do about tools in terms of um you know content generations on we have a tools team internally probably not as large as we should have is obviously an evolution over many years and they're trying to stay abreast of the tools we made a decision a few years ago that instead of replacing our engine we were just gonna make it as modern as we can so we have a lot of advanced stuff there now which is which is beginning to be used in the game and therefore the tools team really got scaled up a bit now it's kind of the heart of things like procedural generation when we do our I don't know we revamp the atlas of worlds occasionally and that now has a complicated tool the list people move all the stuff around and it really is paying off in terms of in terms of time and F and invested and it's all stuff it's kind of completely separate from the concept of making RSS so for the most part I mean the tool we're using to make this you know endless supply of content is Maya for the most part but all of the stuff we use to actually hook it up into the game as I ever-evolving set of tools which certainly pays off when we improve it one more question hi thanks for the talk love the entertainment from it too so my question was for the economy part of it you said you thought the economy each time you do a release yes how you do that without upsetting users who have spent for like all this effort and put into it this is a great question and something that I did gloss over so we reset the economy worth release but who wants to be reset that sounds really bad the way we do it is we make a new economy and we say you should play the release and that one and you've still got your old characters so we have what's called standard league where you're where all the characters from the past economies get moved you're welcome to play there maybe fifteen ten percent of players do play there and you've still got all the characters you've ever played in path of Exile but the exciting place where the you know economy isn't trashed with all the old items is the new league and so we make sure that the new league contents is generally only available the new economy so that's kind of your reward for starting a new character and this took a little while to train players but it really works well that's the lifeblood I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for the fact that this works well thank you very much everyone [Music] you

Channel: Angry Roleplayer

Views: 800,311

Rating: 4.9032168 out of 5

Keywords: path of exile, poe, gdc, chris wilson, synthesis, poe 3.6, path of exile builds, poe builds, ggg, grinding gear games, poe 4.0 expansion

Id: pM_5S55jUzk

Length: 59min 11sec (3551 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 07 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/nukuuu]

That guy is dellusional. Every PoE fan wants PoE:Battle Royale.

/s

[u/soal5367]

It's interesting that you post this here, I can understand why just based on the subject matter but it doesn't all translate that well. I've played over a thousand hours of both Battlerite and Path of Exile and have already watched this talk twice because I love GGG as a company, they are by far my favorite and most consistent across all of my gaming experiences. I think that a few main points to take away, at least in regards to Battlerite, are the following:

​

Small content patches: "They never helped us in any way increase player numbers. Now don't get me wrong, adding content to the game is never a bad thing, at the beginning when we were adding skills and such for people to actually have something to play it was vitally important but it never moved the numbers up. Now the reason why is there are two benefits to new content. For one it makes the game better, for two it's marketing. You really want marketing when you're doing this kind of thing and want to get your graphs higher. And so it's very important if you batch your content together so you can meet this threshold of people wanting to talk about it. When we release content now, people will message each other excitedly discussing the changes. Things pop up on reddit, people start tweeting about it and journalists cover it. Nobody was going to write an article about one skill gem."

Don't stall content for later: "It's also important not to stall content for later, we get into a position where we finished all the skills we said we were gonna make but we've got two extra ones that got out of prototyping and they're kinda finished. Do we wait? Do we save them for next league? No, we put them in the game NOW, we don't wait because you don't get second chances. As much growth as possible every league otherwise you'll start to decline." Chris goes on to talk about marketing and development time, which we can't assume how development works for SLS so there's not a lot to comment on, but the marketing thing is quite interesting.

Community Engagement: "What's fascinating is that the graph of people who stop accessing the community (at the end of a league vs players in game) is a lot less steep. The amount of people leaving the game towards the end of a league is quite high because it's the last week of the league, new content is around the corner and your progress it about to be reset, but people still use the website at no less than 50% of peak. These are people reading the patch notes, accessing the forums, and buying stuff. This is amazing, this is actually what we care about is keeping the community engaged, and that community is never going below 50% during quiet periods."

I've purposefully left out timestamps here because I highly encourage everyone to watch this for yourself even if you don't have any real interest in Path of Exile. If you just want a peek inside the hectic schedule of keeping a community and a game thriving all year long year after year then check it out. A lot of the talk actually discusses asset reuse as well, which I don't think applies to Battlerite all that well. That being said, this would be a good watch for any developer.

[u/steadywing]

I had a whole post typed up 2 weeks ago that linked to this video, just the section that's relevant to Battlerite, which is: a steady, predictable flow of updates.

Embrace the fact that players come in and out of playing your game. Give them a reason to come back at steady intervals.

I want something to look forward to.

Personally, cosmetics do nothing for my retention. Nothing at all.

Emotes? Pets? Super don't care.

New champions? Super yes. Probably the biggest yes.

Seeing the devs explore their creativity via unique champions, unique mechanics and synergies? Super yes.

New modes? Mmm, soft yes.

Balance changes and new champions added during a season? Noooooooo. Super unprofessional move unless it's planned at the halfway mark between seasons and perhaps a week after a new champ or some drastic change is implemented.

Etc.

I didn't post cuz I felt like SLS wouldn't care. But I think this is the single most important change for them to make. It has the capacity to significantly improve dev team synergy as well, bring some much needed structure.

I heard them say they didn't see an improvement in retention when new champions were released, but I just want to challenge that and posit that the lack of retention is due to other factors. New champions are by far the most exciting thing to me as a player.

[u/Axeminister]

This should be a mandatory watch for sls

[u/dicoxbeco]

Chris also made a post on PoE subreddit regarding some issues surrounding the Synthesis league and some aspects towards the future direction of their content development. He was very open about admitting that the current league had some major problems due the course of development being done over Christmas season, and some remedies to them won't be able to me implemented due to priorities in other contents. One of the other key takeaways that the PoE subreddit had when they watched this was Chris' stance against crunches saying "I will not run this company that way."

Their iteration for each season is a month longer than that of BR and BRR's, but even with the discrepancy of the content quantity they, still manage to tease information that's an iteration ahead of the next one. Their community manager is also extremely active on Twitter, forums, and subreddit.

I wish I could hope SLS could adapt from their model of communication, but with the half-year preseason and ostracizing Royale as a separate game thereby doubling their workload, too much damage has already been done to find GGG's actions to be exemplary.

[u/solartech0]

Really good watch, thanks! :)

[u/NickHoyer]

But we do have a great schedule from SLS. Just don't expect updates and you will only be pleasantly surprised (unless they pulled another armory)

[u/WaggleDance]

This part about small patches seems relevant to Battlerite.

[u/Agascar]

Why do you post it here? Path of Exile is a looter game where you can spend enormous amount of time playing the same content over and over just to make your build 5% more efficient, get a random awesome drop for a different build and make a new character to play the same content over again but with a different build. Battlerite doesn't have an infinitely replayable content model. You can't simply make a single gimmick for a new season of BR and expect people to put the same amount of time they put into a new seasonal gimmick of PoE.