Cringe windows interview 13-07-2022

Josh Strife Hayes : Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I'm Josh Strife Hayes and this is devlog, a series where I talk to games designers about their development process and then ask some tricky questions about games design today. As usual, a big thank you to all the supporters on patreon and twitch who keep the channel alive. More information on this at the end. Today I'm talking to Chris Wilson from Grinding Gear Games, the company behind hack and slash action RPG Path of Exile. Chris, thank you very much for taking the time to talk to me.

Chris Wilson : You're welcome. Thanks for hosting.

JSH : For those of you who may not know who you are or the game that you work with, could you give me a brief introduction about yourself, your history with video games, and the history behind Path of Exile?

CW : So my name is Chris Wilson, I founded Grinding Gear Games with some friends back in 2006 and my gaming history is basically a whole lot of action RPGs from Diablo through, Diablo 2 through Titan Quest and so on. We were in a situation in 2006 where we wanted the next big action RPG after getting off a big Diablo 2 binge and, I mean there wasn't anything coming out that we knew about, so we decided to make it ourselves and now 15 years later here we are.

JSH : Diablo 2 very much features as the kind of catalyst and the inspiration, the foundation that Path of Exile seems to have grown from, so could you just explain what Path of Exile is for those who may not have played?

CW : So it's an online action RPG and it pretty much channels what we see as the core kind of traditional classic action RPG feeling. You kill monsters, find awesome items, level up your character, build complex character builds that do ridiculous stuff and basically just try to make as much progress as you can each season that we run.

JSH : Seasons is something when I tap into later on, so I'm fascinated about how those work. So I know that you've done lots of interviews before and you've got lots of time to talk to people and you've probably been asked the same questions many, many times, so I've got a couple of questions that I think are going to really plumb the depths of your design philosophy, the history of Path of Exile, and the lessons that you've learned along the way.

CW : That sounds really good.

JSH : I'd like to start off, and I'm taking a lot of these questions from the talk that you did on game development. You said a while ago that 10,000 players, that was your kind of foundation aim, if you could secure 10,000 hardcore players, you would feel safe as an MMORPG. Now, I think World of Warcraft has warped the mindset of a lot of players because they think anything under 10 million is dead, they think anything under a million active players isn't an active game, and the general consensus among the player base is 10,000 isn't enough. Do you still believe that 10,000 players is enough and how many do you think Path of Exile could grow to sustain realistically?

CW : That's a great question, and when we initially made that prediction, it was kind of a back of the envelope calculation, in fact, I think I did it on an envelope that I have somewhere still, where basically we expected not to grow the studio past about 15 or 20 people. And when you're running something like that it costs you a grand a day to keep the servers up, and then if you're making five grand from your 10,000 average players, you have plenty of money for yourself and all goes well, you buy Lambos after a few years and life is good. That was the calculation we did, based on a small studio in a relatively small game. Path of Exile’s grown since then, I think that we average, including all platforms, maybe 70 or 80k logged in players at any one time, including the spikes of launch and the depths of the late league, where there are fewer people playing. But I do actually believe that for niche games, a small community like 10,000 is totally enough to sustain it, and it really depends a lot on how the game is monetized, and also how expensive their server costs are. I completely get what you mean that large MMO launches start off with a million people playing at any one time, and then it drops down to their sustainable baseline of actual entrenched hardcore users, and people say “Game is dead”, despite the fact there's 30 or 40,000 people playing simultaneously, and that game will be making good money off those 30 or 40,000 people. As long as they're not planning a 50 million dollar expansion at the same time, they're totally happy with that. So it's entirely fine for games to have lower baseline populations, if they design around it. And there's a whole bunch of design topics here like, we wanted Path of Exile to not feel empty if it was unpopular, and that's why towns are limited to 24 players, and you play instances with your friends, because you could honestly have just a few hundred people online and because you're jammed into the same areas, you wouldn't really notice the fact that it was quite an empty game. Thankfully, we don't suffer from that problem, but we designed so that if we did, it wouldn't feel like a ghost town.

JSH : I was talking to a few of my friends about the idea that if a game has a million players online, you may not necessarily interact with all one million. You could probably interact or even see in the world a couple of hundred before it starts to get a little bit laggy and a little bit excessive. So having those hub centers and then the exploration areas that you journey out to, to me reminds me a lot of Guild Wars 1, the idea of the centralized community, and then expand out. Have you never decided to go back on that idea? Have you never thought maybe the explorable areas should be parts of the open world?

CW : We really like the way we're doing it because it lets us use quite aggressive random generation for these areas. It lets us give you a slightly different experience each time you play through, and that's really good for replayability. And it's cool that you mentioned Guild Wars 1, probably my second favorite game of all time. We modeled our networking architecture around that game. We wanted it so that the idea of the hub towns and coming out of them to areas with your party was basically exactly the same as a Guild Wars 1 architecture. We thought that was entirely a brilliant idea of theirs.

JSH : I absolutely love Guild Wars 1, I've been playing with a couple of friends recently. Now you mentioned the idea of a million person MMORPG launch and we've actually seen that recently with New World. We've seen the absolutely incredible success of New World within the first week, and then what some people would call a catastrophic fall down. Not necessarily a failure, because as you said, with a hardcore group of players, you can still keep a game going, but a million people to lose in only a few months is a huge amount. How would you, with the lessons you've learned over time, have approached the New World launch, the New World first week, and then going forward with the design of it, what changes would you have made?

CW : So I'm going to focus on just one area here, and I should preface this by saying I haven't actually played New World, all my information comes from video. Video that you have released, the really good one about it, so I'm basing it on that. But I saw the various things that went wrong, and I was sympathetic, right, like I've had bad launches, plenty of bad launches. I know what it's like to have some server fire and there's nothing you can do about it, and you're trying to get someone to sort it out, and it's very frustrating, and it's frustrating for the players, and you feel terrible that you've got them all there looking forward to play, and something's going wrong. But there was one consistent theme with a lot of the problems that really irked me there, and that was the idea that there were economic exploits occurring that were difficult and slow for them to fix, with rollbacks didn't come at the right times and so on. And this really undermines the trust that people have in a game, because we play a game to make progress, especially an online game. We're playing with our friends to get better stuff on them, to level up faster, to have more goals, to have better items. And in a game where progress is literally how you’re measured and what you're working on, the ability for someone to cheat their way to faster progress, you go to sleep looking forward to playing tomorrow, when you come online, everyone's got 10 billion gold and an entire town each, because there was an exploit while he was asleep. That's not fun, and so it's critical in the launch of a game to make sure that the economy is sacrosanct. And personally, if I was launching a game and there were that many problems in it, I would just take it back into beta, do whatever it takes before doing a big wipe and having a launch that was stable where player's progress is actually reliable and tracked properly.

JSH : We had a short chat a few days ago, where I kind of asked about the idea of the economy, and you place the economy and the stability of the economy extremely highly within your game. Why is the economy so important compared to things such as server stability or even a marketing budget? CW : This is an essential thing about Path of Exile, that at the end of the day, we wanted a game where it's fun to kill monsters and it's fun to do various aspects of it. But the thing that you go to sleep thinking about, the thing you're dreaming about, is that item that you want to get, that thing that you're so close to achieving in the game, and has all to do with progress. I have a hundred stories about my experience playing Diablo 2 and Guild Wars where there was something that I was proud of accomplishing, and it was always an item that I received. Something that was really lucky for me to find, my first Stone of Jordan. Back when lances started dropping in Diablo 2, I got one that had really good damage. There were so many things that I remember iconically as feeling just on top of the world, because I had a thing. And so when we were designing Path of Exile, we wanted to make sure that no one could take those feelings away from people and make them feel counterfeited and useless. And that's why the economic stability is the most important thing. If an exploit occurs, we wake everyone up, we take the servers down if we need to, and thankfully due to our design, exploits are incredibly rare, and we haven't had significant economic damage from any. But this is more important, I said, a little facetiously, than server stability, because, well of course we want good server stability, and I'm not saying Path of Exile suffers from problems there, but, I would rather take choppy servers over a choppy economy. Because people can deal with choppy servers, there's ways to fix it, you can undo the damage by buying more servers and so on. But once you lose economic trust, people just leave the game in droves, there's no reason to play if someone else can cheat their way past you.

JSH : I think it's a very honest thing to say that it's possible to undo server issues, but it's not possible, it's not as easy to undo economic issues that impact people for the next month, the next year and make them feel behind.
Let's talk about player retention because, again, a million people into any game is good, and then you want to ideally have a decent amount of retention. I think personally the first hour, maybe even the first 30 minutes of gameplay experience is vital to retention. If the first hour isn't good, they won't play the second. What design issues, what changes, what experiences have you come across while designing anything that you really focus on in the first hour to the first 30 minutes. What are the essential new player experience trackers that you need to know that you have nailed in the first hour?

CW : So there's a number of comments here. I want to start by saying there are two ways to design games. Number one is a data-driven metrics kind of thing, where you sit down, and you run your game, and then say what's the retention like? And you make changes, and A/B test it and try to get the retention up, and you do a lot of stuff. And it's possible to get really good retention in a free-to-play game where you've got a funnel of players come in through your marketing budget, they get retained at certain rates, and eventually they monetize and all that kind of stuff. You can totally put your business suit on and play the data/retention game, and make a lot of money that way. And often you're left with, well, I'm sure you can predict what type of game that would end up. And it's got various dark patterns and stuff like that, and refer a friend programs, and all sorts of bits and pieces. And we try to do the other school, which is where we try to make a fun game, and if a player is not retained because it's not the right game for them, that's okay. We don't force them to stay, they can learn what it's like. Many people play Path of Exile and say, “ This is too ___ ” , there's a hundred adjectives that describe what Path of Exile is “ too ___ ” for many people, but there are reasons why they would say, “Look, I've tried that out, I'm going to go back to playing League of Legends or something”. And that's entirely fine, if the game isn't for them, we don't want to force it to be. To some extent, I feel like games like Fortnite are trying to force themselves to be for everyone, and that means they become a cultural phenomenon. To answer your question though, we took a page from the design of Magic the Gathering, where they have this idea that Mark Rosewater has talked about, where, if you have a theme for a set, you want that theme to be apparent at common. Meaning, when you open a booster pack, the common cards on the pack that everyone is seeing, even if they're unlucky, represent the theme for that. And we want our new player experience to involve all of the bits that a person is going to experience to be at common, as in, every player gets to experience a bit of what they're about to experience for their lifelong play of the game. So when we make a new league, for example, we make sure that it’s mechanics are available right from the start of the game, and the person gets exposure to what it is, and they can quickly make a decision of whether they want to play that content or not. Hopefully they do, because we try to make it fun and engaging, but if a person says, look, this isn't for me, then honestly my advice to them would be Okay, don't play it then, come back with the next one and have a look to see if you like that, because you probably will if you didn't like this one.

JSH : I love how you brought in Magic the Gathering, because that's something I want to loop back around to later on a later question to do with the idea of overwhelming design. But talking about the new player experience, we would be remiss unless we mentioned the skill tree. Because that is probably one of the most iconic moments in Path of Exile, opening the skill tree and zooming out, and it's probably one of the most widely discussed moments of people going, This is overwhelming, it's not for me. If that has been identified as such an overwhelming moment, what discussions have you had internally about whether you should change it, and if you do, what it would be changed to?

CW : That's a great question. So Path of Exile has a complicated skill tree and a degree of lock-in, right, you make decisions and it's possible but difficult to undo those decisions. And we see this as a very positive thing that kind of exemplifies the type of game it is. You're going to have to make hard decisions, there's a lot of data to consider, and you might make the wrong ones, and that's okay. You learn, you get better at it. It can be very overwhelming for new players where they open it up and say, what do I have to do, I need to load Google, do I have to watch a YouTube video? And we made a number of changes to make this easier. The first thing we considered internally was hiding most of the tree, to give you just a small area to choose from. And our problem here was that A) It doesn't filter out players who are never going to handle the complexity of the game. Because there is a lot more complicated stuff than the skill tree in there, and we feel that that shock of, here's the skill tree means that if someone really doesn't want a game that involves thinking, they can go back to another one at that stage. It respects their time, if you see what I mean, wastes a bit less of it. So we tried hiding a lot of the skill tree and the problem is for the players who do want to engage with it, that's actually a detriment, because they want to do a bit of planning, they want to say, long term, where am I going? Am I going to this place over here, am I going over there, and giving them full information is a sign of respect. We're not trying to hide something from them. The thing that actually really helped with the new player experience of the skill tree was adding what we call the notable passives. They're the slightly larger ones that have names and a particular theme. Because if you kind of squint slightly and look at just the notables, they lay a much more clear path of what you want to do. “I want to get to this notable, and then to this notable, then to this one, and there's some good ones up there.” You don't have to consider the fine-grained ones along the way, you just have to look at the large 10 that you're going to go for. And that's a better way to approach a build, and maybe a future improvement we could make, is to focus on that a bit more, where we highlight to the players look, a recommendation could be that you get these notables, and then it's up to them to choose what exact path they're doing to get it, but the path is a bit less relevant at that point.

JSH : I very much appreciate there's a search function, as well, because I can search the word minion and then everything that is in any way related to minions kind of flashes, and I appreciate that. So, talking about the complexity of Path of Exile, and especially how long it's been online for, when I'm playing another MMORPG, if I am referred to as the Saviour of the world, if I am referred to as the Slayer of an enemy that I've never even met. I'm being hailed as a hero despite the fact I'm brand new, and this is often because a new player is treated as if they have many years of narrative setup behind them, as if their character has been involved with this world from the start. How do you introduce a new player to the multiple years of narrative setup that Path of Exile has? And how do you not treat them as this world saving hero, despite the fact that, within canon, they might be. How do you approach that?

CW : So we very much try to have a “show rather than tell” approach to the story, if we can. So primarily we want to tell the story through location and atmosphere and that kind of stuff, but there is a fair amount of text in the game. In fact, there's probably like a million words of text by now, because the game’s, it's getting a bit large. So, we have a philosophy basically of trying to keep the story as claustrophobic as possible, and I understand, after thirty-five plus expansions, you're suddenly slaying Celestial Horrors after you've killed all the gods, and so on. So it has had a bit of epicness creep, but the intention is that the player initially has short-term problems they have to deal with, right? In Act 1, it's survival against the undead, finding their way through. In Act 2, you're helping some local Bandits stabilize the region, you're working on a revenge strategy to try to deal with Dominus, the High Templar who exiled you. At this stage, you haven't saved the world. Maybe Act 4 is when you start to do things that involve world saving. And we're careful to make sure all the text in the game is optional, as in the where to go and what to do is in the quest tracker, so you can just read that. And ideally stuff is self-explanatory as you play. And I certainly agree that having a intro quest that says, Congratulations for saving the world, now here's your next challenge, to some extent kind of disrespects the player because it glosses over the fact that they haven't actually experienced all of that stuff. Now it helps that the content that we produce doesn't replace the existing content in the game, as in the person still has to play through the campaign, so a new player gets the full Path of Exile experience before they get to our new expansion content. We don't do a thing where we say, Congratulations, the new expansion is out, you are now level 110, and go save the world again, when the person says, I have no idea how to play this game.

JSH : The amount of stories and the amount of text and the amount of voice over, as well, that's in the game is overwhelming, because it is a phenomenally deep game, and a lot of people do like to just rush in and hack and slash monsters. But if they take their time with it, there is an actual established story there with consistent characters and narrative choices that do matter, especially with the slaying the bandits. Because there's a choice you have to make between three tribes, and depending on what that, you either get permanent passive boost or an extra skill point doing it. So it's not just that the narrative is tacked on in the early game, it is also mechanically impactful, which I do quite like. How do you balance how much the narrative should impact the mechanics that the player experiences?

CW : We try to intertwine them where we can, and the Bandit fight there is an example, because you choose which of the tribes to help and that gives you a bonus, and it means you're not fighting a certain boss, you actually get to friend up with them, and so on. There are other subtleties to it as well, like if you arrive in a party at one of those locations, and you have to choose to, say, kill Oak, or not. If you choose to kill Oak, and your friend chooses not to kill Oak, you are now fighting against your friend as well, and technically it becomes a PVP encounter, because you guys had a disagreement about whether you're helping the Bandit or not, and he'll happily side with one of you to kill the other one. And those little stories from that do create situations where players get unexpected stuff. I would like to see more tie-in of the story to permanent player progression. It's tricky though, because we want to make everything repeatable. When we introduce a new league, for example, that's something the player may play hundreds and hundreds of times, and so it's difficult to get a permanent boost from choices they've made with each one. In addition, due to the nature of online games, you have to always provide a way to undo a choice in case the player hastily rushed into it, and then read on the internet that there was a better choice and they are an idiot for thinking themselves.

JSH : There are those people that will read the guides of what they should do before they go and decide to make any choices. Let's take a slight sidetrack here, and talk about the idea of the company's relationship with the players. I've often believed that Goodwill is a currency, if a company do some things that the player base perceive as good and positive, the player base will trust them. And that trust gets built up and built up and built up, and the company can, if they choose to, cash that trust in for very, very large amounts of profit, very quickly, at the expense of that trust from the future. For example, I think RuneScape went through this, where a lot of people trusted the decisions Jagex were making. Then they brought out the Squeal of Fortune and the Treasure Hunter, which was microtransactions in the game. It made a phenomenal amount of money very quickly, because they had a lot of banked player trust, but once people saw how egregious this microtransaction was, the trust fell. And it's taken a long time for them to recover it back up. How do you build up that player trust? What is it that you do as a company that you think the players do trust? And I'm not saying that you're going to do anything that would cash that trust out, but what do you then see companies doing that you think is an unacceptable cash out of that trust?

CW : I see what you mean. Yeah, it's very interesting those terms like brand deposit and brand withdrawal, we heard at a talk at a conference back in late 2008 or 2009 and that was a very poignant thing that stuck with us from there. Where the idea is, treat people well, and later you can treat them badly. Sounds like a really cynical way to run businesses. But we've always had a philosophy of doing best by the players, because we're up against large companies that have far more resources than us, and the defining characteristic of those large companies often is they inexplicably do stuff that isn't in the best interest of players. And some of those are our major competitors, and so we can differentiate ourselves by actually taking a step back and working out what the right choice in a given situation is. It also helps that we are gamers, like, we go home and play games and are the consumers of these products. It just so happens that we get to make them during our day job. And so we know how we would want to be treated. And so we try very hard to be transparent with the community, we do interviews like this, we talk to different content creators from various different places, make sure to explain why we do things, we post, I like there's a News Post on pathofexile.com every single weekday for like the last eight or nine years or something like that, because we want to have some content there every day for players. If we make a mistake, the players tell us, we apologize, we explain what's going on, we change it if necessary. So we try very hard to do what's in the best interest of the players. Not really to ever try to cash it out later, but it does sometimes come in handy, because sometimes the business has to make a decision which looks bad to the players, even though it's not going to hurt them. And that's where trust is important. So, for example, a number of years ago we were acquired by Tencent, and the players were very worried about this because often, being acquired by a large multinational company doesn't end well for the game, and people have seen other examples of games that change substantially when they're acquired. We would only have entered into that deal if we had full confidence that it was going to be okay for the players. And so when we did announce it, we said trust us, it'll be fine, and I believe it has been fine after that point, and because we had some brand deposits already made, we've relied on a bit of a loan against that for the trust of them not freaking out too much about that acquisition. And hopefully everyone who observed that will see in the end that it actually was a pretty harmless thing. But if we had a history of treating the players badly, then they certainly would have had much more reason to be cynical about our motivations for that acquisition.

JSH : That was a very honest answer, thank you. Now you mentioned in your game design talk that when you first started bringing leagues out, they were various lengths, from a few weeks to a couple of months, and you said the average player needs more than one month to play a league. How do you think the general player base, not just of MMORPGs but gaming in general, how has that changed over the last five to ten years? Do players have short retention spans? Do players want shorter more intense things? And how has “leagues” affected the development of Path of Exile in relation to that? CW : So, I have two observations on players over the last 15 years that I've been involved with this game. And the first observation is that players more and more feel that the correct thing to do is to start playing a new game using a guide. For example, were I to install New World, as an example of a game today which I've never played before, if I were to go and watch all the videos on it, find a guide and then follow that to the letter, that's basically how a lot of people are playing games. Versus the other option, which is just install it, close the internet down, and try to have fun. Which obviously means you make worse decisions and you take a lot longer and it's a lot less efficient, but I would argue a lot more fun to actually do that, because you have a lot more game ahead of you. And so we're facing players who don't fully understand what they're doing, but still doing it as optimally as possible. And this has consequences like, for example, if someone says this is the most powerful build, I'm going to play that, and they don't realize, it's too difficult to get the items for that, the correct plan is to play an easier, simpler one, use it to build up wealth, and then play the end game build, based on the stuff you found using your league starter. That detail is often lost on the new player who just sees the most powerful build and said, I'm going to play that, that sounds amazing. There's other complexity as well, so we generally find there's a push for the average player to want things to be faster and more explosive and rewarding, right? If you if you basically make a change that in any way slows anything down or adjusts it to a place where the long-term die-hard fans are saying okay, this is a much better speed, I like this a lot more. You've got 90 percent of the players saying, what are you doing, you're ruining the game, make it fast again or we're going to boycott it. And this is tricky, because we do want to service all of our players, we do want it so that the 90 percent, which is a large number, who want fast and crazy with lots of reward showering everywhere, they have the game they're enjoying. But we also don't want to go too far away from what actually makes the core of the game fun. And it's amazing how elastic this is, because I believe firmly at the moment, that Path of Exile’s combat and itemization are very far off where would be optimal. Like, I think Path of Exile is a great game and it's running really well, but it's a, it's a sign of the fact that those systems are so robust that it's still fun, despite the fact that it's quite far off the mark that we intended. Due to the accumulation of 37 expansions worth of content. Now, we have the ability to carefully address this in various ways but we are cognizant of the fact that rapidly changing something that players are currently enjoying probably is a bad move overall for the game, and so that's a an interesting point of contention with the community there. To get back to your question about leagues, our league model basically is that every 13 weeks we release essentially a fresh server to use MMO parlance, where there's a new expansion on it and so everyone gets to start out fresh. Basically a new season. And that works really well because it means that players that have zipped through the content before, have the ability to enjoy building up a character from scratch again. And we essentially get … There's this interesting fantasy that players have, where everyone feels they're the best at Path of Exile. Everyone believes if they take a week off work that they can get to the top of the ladder the fastest, they can find the best items, they can play the best build and it's going to go perfectly for them. Because there's no reason it won't, it's just RNG and time investment and skill at that point. And so we have this amazing cycle going where so many people will log in at launch and play for whatever period of time they want to until they're finished with their character, which is as you say, around a month out of the three. Many people take longer, some people are much shorter, and that works really well. Because to get back to a previous point, if we release content that certain players don't like, that's fine. The next league will probably have quite different content and people know to come back every time. And this is a repeatable cycle that's kept ourselves in business, to be completely honest, if we didn't have leagues, we would have dropped down to below 10 000 players over time, and have no way of really getting anyone back.

JSH : I saw the graphs that you used in your game design tour where you showed the success of leagues and the success of consistency. Which has been proven over the last couple of years. Path of Exile seems to be doing remarkably well. Now you mentioned that you've had many, many expansions over the years, and you also mentioned the word complexity, and I want to have a look at the argument of depth versus complexity. Because anyone can make a complex system, if you simply add in far too many variables and you make it impossible to understand. You make it so only you can understand it, or maybe even you can't when you look back at your own design. How do you deal with the balance of something being too complex, but not deep, while trying to keep it deep and involved, but not overly complex? How do you balance these two loggerheads of design complexity versus depth?

CW : Well, we definitely want depth but we will tolerate complexity. Because by that point in the game, Path of Exile players generally understand quite a lot of complex systems already, so if we accidentally overcomplicate something we're trying to get deep, due to mistakes, then the players are generally relatively tolerant of it. We are less so, because we want it to be understandable of course. There are a number of rules of thumb here. It's often down to as looking at what kind of choices a player has to make for a certain thing, and at the point where there is an obvious choice, then there really is no depth to that, even if the obvious choice involves significant complexity. You get some kind of Rube Goldberg machine of crazy that results in good defenses for your character, but everyone just does that, that's not a particularly deep system because there's nothing to do except YouTube how to build that and then do it. And so we want to have systems where there's a lot of debate about the best way to build that aspect of your character.

JSH : I've often found that a lot of players say that they want really challenging content, and then when they do something and die, they tend to leave, saying, This is too challenging. How do you decide how difficult the most difficult content is going to be? And then how do you decide how difficult the average experience is going to be for the player, how hard is too hard?

CW : So we've learned that it's best to gate difficult content behind some kind of economic cost. We found in the past, our initial end game, before we did maps, had a series of areas you can play through and all the streamers were playing in the top top area out of the twenty, the hardest content. So people would watch the stream and say, That looks fun, and they go there and then they die because it was impossible, and be very angry, there's various problems with that. So the map system, the entire goal of us itemizing it was for us to say, What if there was an implicit cost economically in terms of entering an area? Because then, if you want to go and play the hardest map, you can totally save your pennies and go and spend a bunch of exalts and get it and then die immediately, and you'll look foolish. It's like buying a sports car and running it into a wall, right, it's a bit of a waste of money, and you kind of knew it was coming, and it makes sense. And so we've learned that it's very important to take the most difficult content and make it expensive to access, because then people who are very ready for it will do so. As for average players, this is tricky because the average player, if you look at the 50th percentile of people who managed to run the game, as when they get through the download and they run the game, the 50th percentile of new users doesn't get through Act 1. Because that's what happens with free to play games. So an average Path of Exile player is getting to level 10. But if you look at the average person who's using Reddit and giving us opinions, they are well into doing the Uber Pinnacle bosses at the end of the game, right? You know day three, they're in red maps in a league. That's the average player who's the one actually talking online about it. And so it is very difficult to say what averages, because if you accidentally target this average of the top four percent of players, you alienate a whole bunch of people. Now we have really interesting stats. We know that 86 percent of our monetization comes from people that are in maps. Which means that while the early players are certainly humans that we care about and want to have a good experience, we don't need to target monetization at them because they have to get further into the game before they really want to support it more.

JSH : Let’s just look at the expansions and the idea of maps that you brought up as well. I've often found it quite ironic that when an MMORPG or an online game brings out an expansion, they actually end up shrinking the size of their game world in relation to what's relevant for a player to do. So if a game has 10 different land masses, and an expansion brings out an 11th, but all the best items, all the best armor, all the best spells, all the best dungeons, all the new quests that give a mass amount of experience, all the new skills of mount riding is on that 11th Island, everyone goes to it. So an expansion has ironically shrunk the game. How do you balance expanding and bringing out new content without making old content irrelevant?

CW : That is a fascinating concept, honestly. Like I know exactly what you mean, I haven't played a lot of World of Warcraft since Burning Crusade, but the feeling of the base game having all of its mature dungeons and stuff, and then you introduce an expansion, on day one it's a very small set of things because they have a plan to roll out more means, as you say, the surface area has shrunk so much and is only new and exciting that's keeping it going. So we implicitly get to avoid a lot of this with Path of Exile, because at any one time there are two things for a player to do. There's the current new fancy league stuff, and there's the rest of the game. And when a league ends, we put it back into the rest of the game in an appropriate way. And we try to make sure that the rest of the game has equal weighting to all the different content, like you could absolutely play Delve if you want to, or you could go into a bunch of blighted maps, or you could potentially play PVP. There are a lot of different things you can do that ideally are equally rewarding, depending on your taste. And the current league that's new, the current expansion is always there, is the main thing you can do, but it's not invalidating the old content because that's still an important part of the game in terms of what it yields in terms of rewards. Like we don't allow old expansions to rot in the game because if necessary we take them out. And an example here, and this is a minor teaser for our next expansion that we're releasing, is we're looking at three old leagues in the game, like three pieces of content that were previously released, including one that was released relatively recently, and giving them a coat of paint, revamping them, making sure that their rewards and stuff are appropriate, making sure that the art is good. Basically just doing maintenance on various leagues because when we look at the roster of what we got, we want to make sure it's all equally good and there's nothing sitting there that's too old and bad.

JSH : Talking about old and bad, I think a lot of new game designers are putting buzzwords into their game to make them new and fresh without really understanding what those buzzwords can bring. Ror example, I use the, what I call the The Four Horsemen of the Gaming Apocalypse whenever I'm browsing games on Steam. If I see a game that says Early Access, open world, crafting, survival, I know that they are likely just throwing those buzzwords in because that is what's popular right now. Another big example would be crypto, blockchain, paid to earn, NFT. That's what a lot of games are looking toward now. How do you as a designer, how do you research these hot new trends, or these marketing gimmicks, and then how do you know what is worth following and what is worth completely avoiding?

CW : We're super anti-gimmick, to be completely honest. Like we imagine targeting the kind of person who, in the year 2000, was playing games on a PC, who bought themselves a 3D accelerator back before you really needed it, mouse and keyboard, traditional gamer. Person who grew up playing Command and Conquer. We're talking proper gamers here. That's our that's our target audience. That gamer was not playing games on their phone. That gamer was not playing games in virtual reality. That gamer was not earning cryptocurrency while they played. And we want to stay to our roots and yes, over time we've added console controller support, we've released on consoles, we have a mobile version of the game coming along quite well. We jokingly experimented with playing in VR for like an hour, and said nope, that's not happening. We've touched on little bits and pieces, but at no point have we swayed the company in the direction of one of these fads. And that's partly because there are better companies for doing that, there are many agile companies out there that are just there to chase money, and they have a bunch of people waiting for a fad to occur and they jump on it and get rich, that's cool. Sometimes when it's like VR, they definitely don't get rich, and then they regret jumping on it. But we like the stability, right, like this is, you only get one life, you may as well spend it making good games rather than chasing something.

JSH : And how much you talked earlier about data-driven analytics and data-driven design. How do you divide the design time between following the data, and following the gut feeling of the designers on the team, because a lot of marketing people, a lot of business people would, they would hate to hear you say that you follow your intuition over the numbers, but the designers would feel the opposite. As the person in charge, how do you approach that responsibility?

CW : I hate data, to be completely honest. I think data's incredibly dangerous. It causes people to justify things after the fact. We had a situation in the past where we were worried about retention in a certain act. So someone went and generated some data, and they found that there was a big drop off, players, like they basically made a histogram of people who completed each quest sequentially. And there was a big drop off between one quest and another in Act 3. They said look, between this quest and that one you're losing like 25 percent of your players, we have to fix it. And I'm like, oh, that's terrible, okay we should look into that, thank you for finding that. Which quest is it? And they're like oh, it's the first quest in Act 3. I'm like wait the one where you have to go and like fight the guards that are harassing Clarissa and then go to town? And they're like yeah, we can totally, we can improve the art for Clarissa, we can move her in a better location, we can make the guards easier, we can do a bunch of stuff. And my gut feeling’s saying, there's nothing wrong with that quest, it's a trivial throwaway one, what are you doing? So, I look into the data, and I find that it was actually looking at completed quests, rather than the quest the player was on, and after that quest, there's a long time before you technically finish completing any particular quest chain, because act 3 is a complete mess. A big ball of yarn where there's so much stuff happening, it's a long time before you actually finish any quest chain, and of course we lose a quarter of our players during that time, because an hour and a half has passed for the average new player.

And so there wasn't a problem, it's just that if you space the histogram out based on actual time to complete each thing, it would look like a better curve. But the design conversation was about reworking a quest that was honestly completely serviceable. And that's a case there of the data being dangerous and there are more egregious examples. I very much encourage the team to do gut feeling design. If they need data, they have to get it by asking a question, right? Like it's completely fine for them to say, what percentage of players are using Cyclone right now? as long as they qualify it well. And then they get the answer to that and they can do their design decisions. But most of the time it should be, when I play Cyclone am I having fun, right? I'm having too much fun. Is the game too easy, and that kind of decision. So yeah, I kind of hate data personally.

JSH : Connecting on to the idea of the data and the idea of chasing these trends, gaming goes through cycles as well. I'm glad that you mentioned Command and Conquer, I'm a big fan of real-time strategy games, but I feel the real-time strategy bubble has somewhat popped from the years back where we had Red Alert and Supreme Commander, and even Halo brought out a real-time strategy game for a while. How do you deal with the flavor of the month gaming design? Because a big one recently is Battle Royale. Absolutely every game was bringing out a battle royale version and I think you did an April Fool's style Battle Royale. But you've got a story about that, haven't you, because people were, they said they missed it, but then you tried and they didn't. Just tell me about that.

CW : Right so Battle Royale was a fad and everyone was making a battle royale fish and so we thought it'd be hilarious for April Fool's Day to spend like one day of development time to quickly kit bash that together using our tools. And Path of Exile's got a very versatile engine, good level generation, like this. There's a lot of easy ways you can make games in it. And so we decided for fun, kind of like a bit of a break from our normal work, was to put together Path of Exile Royale. Just, obviously, we didn't even monetize it, in fact we turned off microtransactions in this mode. Like there was no way for us to make money while it's running it, was definitely a Big Money Pit in terms of like trying to run that. But we ran it for April Fool's Day. And the first thing we noticed is most people thought it was fake, like a funny trailer, haha, good joke, but they didn't actually realize they could log in and play it. But they eventually did, and we ran it over a weekend, and we noticed that people said they've had a good time and player numbers plummeted over the weekend. They played a few times and then they would stop joining. And so that's fair enough. We spent a day on it, we weren't expecting this to revolutionize the game. It wasn't, you know, if you can make a good Battle Royale game in a day, everyone will be doing it, which I guess they were trying to. And so that was mostly just trying to find a way to entertain the community and do a cool thing because from time we want to surprise people. So a few years later there was this running undercover to people saying, We Love Royale, bring it back, bring it back, and we looked at the data, are you just saying that? And said we should bring this back, and so we spent a lot longer, like five or six days per team member, polishing it up and bringing Royale back. Which we then ran, and once again, player numbers were good to start with, and gradually fell off a cliff, because our players want to play action RPGs, they did not sign up to play Battle Royale. And so, this is an example of us actually trying to do a fad. Not super seriously and seeing that it's definitely a complete waste of time. And to some extent, this has given us lessons elsewhere. It's meant that we're very cautious before doing leagues like Blight, which is the Tower Defense League where, from time to time you have a tower defense encounter. And that's cool, it went okay, but it wasn't great, because at the end of the day we realized our players signed up, again, to play an action RPG, not to play a tower defense game. And so we want to make sure that leagues that we do are aligned with the concept of, I'm going to kill monsters in whatever way I want to and find some awesome items.

JSH : I like that. So you tried, and then you had both the data and the personal experience to look back on it and say, this didn't go as well as we thought it would. It is just a fad. Now, you mentioned Magic the Gathering earlier. You and me are both big Magic the Gathering fans. If we ever meet, we're sitting down for a game. And you even use Magic the Gathering in your design discussion, the video on YouTube from a while ago where you talk about Magic having sets that came out every three or four months. Now that was very true back then; that has since changed. Magic the Gathering used to have constant sets that came out in consistent distances between them, and players knew the next set, and there were spoiler seasons, and the set came out and it was all great, it was easy to keep up with. It was easy to collect everything. Now, the amount of cards that magic the Gathering has brought out is overwhelming. And there are so many versions of so many cards and there are so many packs out right now, that it's never not spoiler season. It's always spoiling something else. And that has had the effect of driving away the people who wanted to collect everything, because it's now almost impossible to do, or it's prohibitively expensive. How do you, as a designer, approach the idea of not overwhelming the player base with content, even though it's a proven business tactic that is incredibly profitable?

CW : That's a great question, and I personally have a lot of very strong feelings about the amount of magic cards being printed. I was actually trying to do a relatively comprehensive collection and you mentioned it's impossible, or at least prohibitively expensive. So for my Magic the Gathering collection, I don't really treat money as a barrier, and so it's not just the expensive that's a problem, it's actually physically impossible to try to get all the different languages and so on, because the rate they print cards exhausts the rate at which I can find people worldwide to source them of all different languages for all the different variations. There's a lot of ranting about the difficulty of collecting cards at the moment, it was certainly a lot easier in the past. And that's had repercussions on Path of Exile. This meant that we're being very careful both in terms of the rate at which we release content but also for things that players are collecting in the game, we want to make sure it's released at a reasonable rate that's actually possible to keep up, because if you run the treadmill too fast, everyone falls off and then no one wants to play on it anymore. With regard to content releases though, we found that our four a year thing is enough that players are kept busy. Now this is going to sound weird, because a lot of people's experience with Path of Exile as they play for a few weeks really hard and then think, that was awesome, I can't wait for the next one. And if there was one sooner, I'd probably play that. But having time to rest is actually important, having time to play - get your fill of Path of Exile and then play another game till the next Path of Exile expansion comes out - works well for us. It gives us the ability to focus on marketing on those four specs a year. Focus our content releases on them. Have some time for the development team to get a bit of downtime between the expansions for us to stop and reflect on stuff. And while it's entirely possible to throw money at the problem and release eight expansions a year, I think that would burn out literally everyone involved, even though it would probably, temporarily, double revenue for a while.

JSH : And this idea of always having the player play the game. You have a game that you can only play, and no other game. You must play this game. You seem very against that. A lot of games now, they want the player to be committed to them forever. They release the daily, weekly, monthly login, they release special - are you playing for three hours, you get this, if you're playing for six hours, you get this, don't miss the next update. You seem to have the attitude of, players should play multiple games, and that likely comes from you being a gamer yourself. Why have you not decided to follow this traditional marketing path of having players only play Path of Exile and nothing else?

CW : Part of it is acknowledging that they're going to go and play other games at the point that they're done, and embracing that. If that's the nature of what's going to happen, we may as well support that. It's also good for health reasons. People get pretty burnt out playing a fast clicking game for the length of time they do. When someone's playing Path of Exile properly, they are obsessed over it, right, like they’re - once you get to maps we own your soul, is pretty much the thing that we say to players, and it -I've experienced that this league myself, right. I've stayed up days I was late to work because I wake up and think, I can play Path of Exile before I go to the office, and then time goes by. It's a very very addictive game, and so I would rather that we let people play that for as long as they want to and then come back to it. And the nice thing is, we've trained people, we will be releasing content on a regular schedule forever. They can have a lifelong relationship with Path of Exile, but it's not going to be a domineering thing that prevents them actually living their life outside of that.

JSH : And that's a very genuine way of making a game. And to finish off with something, a question that's very open-ended and I want you to feel free to go off on whatever tangents you connect this to. What's the single biggest problem faced by new game designers today, from an indie guy sat in his room making his very first game, up to a massive multi-billion company? What is the biggest problem faced by game designers?

CW : NFTs? I think that they're - it's the fads thing basically, right? You look at the gaming landscape, who's making money where the venture capital is, where the investment, is where the excitement is, and it is easy to make the wrong choice. The correct choice, for both the indie, and for the big company, is to make what they're good at. There is a game they have knowledge about. There's a genre that they have a special connection with, that they understand the secret sauce of that, they can judge whether their game is good. They should make that game, or something like it, have an innovation on it, but that's the kind of thing. They shouldn't just say the money is in “play to earn” therefore I'm making a Pokemon-style game that involves - basically comes out with Axie Infinity. Because they may not have even enjoyed that. I mean if they did enjoy it, go for it, they'll probably make a good one. We'll actually have gameplay that people care about. But everything else is a hollow shell, and it's amazing to see all these small projects chasing a fad like that. As well as huge companies chasing a fad like that. Because in both cases, people just think it's the thing to do. And at the end of the day, I feel that the best games come from someone who's actually got passion for making that particular type of game based on their own gaming experiences. And that's why I mentioned RTS's earlier and how there aren't any good ones. And I desperately want there to be a good RTS. But GGG will never make an RTS, because we do not have the core competency, right? I enjoyed it, shallowly, when I was younger. I have nostalgia, but I was never good enough. No one here's played RTS’s competitively, we couldn't make one that actually did the genre justice. Whereas we all intimately understand action RPGs. And so, we'll make good ones of those for sure.

JSH : When people come to me and ask what they should start a YouTube channel about, I give exactly the same answer. A hobby that you're passionate about, something that you have a burning desire to share with the rest of the world. People say, should I make a Channel about X or Y or Z, and I say make a channel about something that you care so much about, that you absolutely have to tell everyone else how much you care about it with your knowledge and your passion. And it seems to me that your knowledge and your passion was, Deliver a better Diablo 2. And I think that's been achieved, and I think your player base, and the vast majority of the internet, would say that it has absolutely definitely been achieved. Thank you very much for taking the time to chat to me. Is there anything that a brand new Path of Exile player needs to know if they watch this video and think, I'm gonna go and download it? What are your words of wisdom for them when they start playing?

CW : So don't be intimidated. It comes across as complex, we joke about how crazy it is, but at the end of the day, if you just install the game, click and kill some monsters, it's very straightforward to play. There's complexity later on, but you will understand it by the time you get to it. And don't be afraid to ask for help from other players. We've got a really good friendly community who want to help you. With a bit of trolling, but they're there to help.

JSH : I can absolutely, absolutely back that up. Thank you very much for your time, and maybe I'll see you online sometime, and maybe we'll get to play Magic the Gathering, who knows. Take care, thank you.