Grinding Gears Games Path of Exile Interview Part 2 - Page 2 - PvP

03 Sep 2010 at 00:40:02 by Paul Younger

PvP

There will be PvP as well as PvE. The leveling up comes from PvE, right?

Chris: You have to kill monsters to get gear and experience.

Are you planning on any special mechanisms to reward PvP? Items or other bonuses?

Chris: We'd love to give item rewards for PvP. But we want the items to be appropriate for PvP. We've talked to a lot of ARPG players who love playing PvP. It's interesting in PvP, since there's a lot of design space that other games haven't explored. For instance, you can fight another player, but there haven't been good examples of organized PvP tournaments.

Jon: This is in other ARPGs.

Chris: Yeah. We want to get players to use strategy, entering tournaments. We'd like to have tournaments running all the time that players can join into. It would be a bit like an online poker site, in that there would be games running constantly and you could just get in on and join in. That's kind of our PvP dream. So once a player had their character set up as they wanted...

Low level dueling

Another thing we'd like to do is have low level dueling, like you see in some games. That sort of thing is very good for the economy, since it gives a value to items that aren't super high quality for the end game. Items that are fantastic for level 20 or 30 or whatever, but aren't useful for high level characters, have a big value in the economy. Hence a PvE player who finds an item that's great for say, level 30 dueling, could trade that to a PvP player for a great item for PvE that he didn't need.

Balancing

Your balancing will be crazy, though. Fans will find the DPS is .02% lower with one char and your forums will be just incandescent for a week.

GGG: *laughter* They'll just have to get used to it. We'll do tweaks all the time. We have a fast patching system and can make almost live changes to the game. It's not going be a yearly thing. Changes constantly, and large content additions regularly.

Chris: We're a free game. We're not limited to just putting new stuff in the box. We'll have regular expansions and new content very frequently. Along with fixing bugs and making tweaks. We plan for the company to become larger after release, so with more people working on the game we'll be able to cover patching as well as new content.  We're looking to grow the game gradually. Expansions have a lot of art as well as programming.

Character Design

The basic game design is that every character is a good DPS character. They can kill things playing solo.

Jon: Yes.

You don't have healers or clerics or the like.

Chris: We believe in the same things that Arena Net has so nicely stated. We're happy for someone to play a support character, but they've got to find that on their own. They've got to get support skills and figure a way to play in that style. We're not forcing anyone into that role via their character choice.

Are there classes that are well-paired?

Chris: It's good to have a tank in front and the ranged attacker behind, certainly.

Jon: The natural tactic is that. We're expecting people to come up with spell-caster tanks, since that's possible with the variety of equipment and skill gems we're putting into the game.

Chris: There's a lot of stuff in our skill system that's designed to allow you to help other players. One of the things we have are support gems. There are ways to buff party members. You could put a Buff skill into an item linked to something like a War Cry. And when you cast the War Cry it would affect all of your party members. Not just you. And you can add other effects like Increased Radius, or Increased Duration, so the effect would last really long.

Are you planning on guild features?

Chris: We'd love to support guilds. Whether or not it makes it into the first release, we don't know yet.

But there are benefits to being in guilds? Other than just companionship?

Chris: Yes. Probably. There are some other unannounced itemization systems that have guild type items that we're not talking about yet.  Those will hopefully make guilds more interesting.

Guilds are something we know we want to support, but we haven't worked out quite how just yet. We'd rather get the core game ready and spend time on guilds that most players won't be using. But we'll quickly add it once players are interested.

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