Keepers of the Flame (3.27)

Good Morning Folks. This is going to be a bit of an academic topic, that stems out of a brief conversation that I had with a friend of mine about Path of Exile II and why mapping in that game just isn’t as fun. I am having a similar conversation with another friend about why the campaign feels worse for them in particular, but that is something that I am not going to dive into really. Basically there is a minimum bar of functionality that is required to get through the campaign, but once you have achieved it… the campaign is honestly one of the most enjoyable parts of the game. I landed on the term “Progress Engine” to describe what is missing in Path of Exile II. Essentially video games for me, or at least the best ones… are really adept at answering the question “what should I do next?”. They have a natural flow and set up a series of short term, medium term, and long term goals for the player and accomplishing any of them feels really good, like ticking something off a list. Path of Exile II is missing this lattice of things to do that provide a clear answer as to what you should be doing with your time. This exists through the campaign, but largely falls apart once you reach maps, and I believe is also why the attach rate at the end game is seemingly so low. Folks either roll a new character and experience the part of the game that works… the campaign… or they are so profit minded that all they care about is exalts/chaos/divines per hour and provide their own internal motivation.

So lets start off with talking about the Atlas of Worlds, which really feels like a pinnacle of progress engine design. This screen might be incomprehensible for a new player, but once you understand it… you see a bunch of carefully structured tick marks. The base atlas is made up of 115 individual maps, 100 normal maps and 15 unique maps and progressing through this rewards you with an Atlas Passive point for each new map that you run under the requirements for that tier of mapping. Early in Atlas Progression it feels like every single map that you finish is contributing towards some broader goal, and then later you start structuring your maps in such a way as to try and produce the maps that you are missing. Additionally you have 12 Favored Map slots which allow you to skew the drop chance towards dropping specific maps, and there is a sequence of boss encounters that unlock Voidstones, which allow you to increase the level almost all map drops so that eventually you reach a point where you are only getting T16s and almost always getting the maps that you want to run. This is in itself a massive reward of being able to do exactly the thing that you want to do over and over for rewards, and it is achieved through a bunch of micro objectives, that in themselves feel good to accomplish.

The payoff for atlas progression is the Atlas Passive tree, which allows you to shape the content that you are running so that over time you can slowly focus things in on exactly the endgame that you want to be doing, and then do it ALL the time. Effectively you can reach a point where you are sustaining map drops for exactly the maps that you want to be running, and then forcing exactly the content that you want to be running on those maps. This has allowed me to deep dive into specific atlas mechanics and really learn them at a meaningful level. Atlas progression also gives you access to more Atlas Passive trees, with a new one unlocking at 50 and at 100 maps completed so that you can quickly shift up your strategies as your mood shifts. These new atlas tree unlocks are themselves medium scale objectives that feel amazing when you accomplish one. Path of Exile 1 is all about running ONLY the content that you want to run, and giving you a bunch of tools that allow you to force exactly that. If you don’t like Ultimatum, then you can literally block it from ever appearing on any map that you run. As a picky eater… that gets squicked out by specific things in my food… I will always appreciate systems that allow me to granularly exclude the parts of a game that I do not want to participate in.

Then once all of this progression is finished, you have the final lap… of really long term goals which are made up by the Challenge system. Each league there are 40 challenges that vary from things you are always going to accomplish by just completing the campaign, to really edge case things like aggressively running whatever the new league mechanic is, and fully exploring it. Gear Grinding Goals or whatever the final one is called in a given league is almost always going to include things like leveling all the way to 100, and running a bajillion invitations or similar really long ranged goals. They give you an optional set of rewards to gather up, usually with some MTX associated with it and a Totem Pole that grows in size each time you get to specific numerical milestones. These are great reasons to keep engaged after you have effectively arrived at and conquered general mapping. Getting 40 of 40 is a massive commitment and often times requires you to start being focused on knocking these out as soon as possible. Many of them the longer you wait the harder they become to accomplish, because the trade economy means there are fewer copies of any given thing once folks check out and stop playing. However at its core Path of Exile 1 is really good at presenting a series of objectives for you to knock down and giving you a reason for doing all of them.

So now let’s compare the systems in Path of Exile II, and we will start with their version of the Atlas of Worlds. Instead of a fixed series of maps that drop and needing to complete each of them, you have an endlessly generating sprawl of procedurally generated nodes that effectively sprawl out forever in any given direction. Mixed in among these nodes are unique maps that provide rewards for completing them the first time, as well as specific mechanics that you can only find in these nodes. The core progression system involves bumping up your map tiers by fighting boss maps, which guarantee you a waystone drop of one higher tier, and finding corruption nexus nodes and then cleansing them on higher map difficulties. The reward for doing so is 5 Atlas Passives, but the time between Corruption Nexus nodes varies wildly based on luck of the draw. You could spawn into an area with three corrupted areas next to each other, and be able to rip through your early atlas progression really quickly. Or you could be unlock and spend hours roaming around the random grid trying to find the next area. This delayed progression ends up making each individual map feel less important, and more of a chore when you run them. Additionally you can never reach a point where you are ONLY running the maps you want, and there are going to be specific layouts that you hate, and inevitably they seem to always be gating your progress towards the nodes that you need… forcing you to run them.

Then there is the Atlas Passive system where each individual node feels less significant than the nodes in the POE1 passive tree. Additionally you are limited to only the most generic mechanics on the base atlas, and each of the individual league mechanics have their own atlas with their own progression system, that only moves the needle forward by doing increasingly more difficult boss encounters in each of those league mechanics. Traditionally bossing and mapping have been considered to be different objectives on Path of Exile 1, but in Path of Exile II you have to do both with your build in order to sufficiently progress your Atlas of Worlds and making mapping feel more rewarding… requires you to also fight a bunch of escalating boss fights in order to achieve it. In practice it just feels like there are large periods of time where you are setting up for your next burst of progression, but not really seeing much benefit from it. There are no favored map slots, no equivalent to void stones, and no challenges… so it feels like there is less progress to be had that feels tangible and provides a meaningful difference in the way you interact with the game.

Then there is the general problem that Waystone drops feel like they are super rare. On average I see one waystone drop per map, so I am almost always just barely replenishing the resources that I spent to engage with mapping in the first place. I have invested in every single waystone drop node in the Atlas Passive tree, and it has not made a meaningful difference in the rate at which I find them. Then there is the problem where mapping in POE2 just has more friction in general, since you no longer get a default six portals per map, but instead get a limited amount of portals based on how many mods a given map has. If you run a juicy 8 mod map, you get a single attempt at it… which makes death feel awful when it happens. It rapidly becomes a scenario where the only thing that matters about mapping is currency acquisition, so that you can either afford to buy more waystones and tablets to make up for any of your failures. There is no real progression for the sake of progression system that is guiding you, and once you finish the campaign it largely feels like you are dumped out into a shapeless abyss without many guard rails to guide you. I think in its current state, the only players that really stick around for long are the financially motivated ones that care the most about divines per hour, because the motiviation to keep pushing to knock out objectives is truly lacking.

There are a bunch of different ways that games generate these progression engines. Probably my favorite example to drop upon is Guild Wars 2, which is the game for people who like focusing on various objectives. You have the Wizards Vault which is essentially what that game refers to as daily quests, which has daily, weekly, and seasonal objectives. Then when you are roaming around the maps there are constantly events firing off which provide micro objectives allowing a player to ping pong between them, feeling fullfilled while accomplishing little bursts of activity. Then the achievements section of the hero panel is filled with various objectives, many of which are made up of smaller multi part objectives giving you various sundry things that take hours, tens of hours, and even hundreds of hours to accomplish. For the “number goes up” players there is a global achievement score for your account that unlocks various minor reward chests each time you hit a new milestone.

Then for the folks who want really long term grinds… there are Legendary Weapons and Legendary Armor pieces that are shared account wide and give you more flexibility in the way you build your characters. Even these come in various flavors that will dicate just how much effort they require. The legendary starter kits give you a massive boost in this progress and shave hundreds of hours off the process. Then there are things like the Gen 2 legendary weapons where you have to jump through a long series of hoops to craft the precursor weapon before factoring in all of the resources required to turn that then into a legendary weapon. All these serve as mile markers on your account and ways of visually being able to show and track your progression as a player. Any time I am faced with not knowing what to do next, I dive into the various legendaries that I have started and see what sort of progress I can make towards them. There are also really low effort things like world boss or meta trains that you can hop on to feel like you are making incremental but generally non-specific progression.

I would be remiss if I did not talk at least a bit about the other end of the spectrum… namely mobile games with the sort of progression engines that they have. Namely they are all about deluging you with a bunch of required systems that themselves only require a few minutes of your time… but have so many stacked on top of each other that you feel like you need to spend a few hours a day working on them or your risk falling behind. These are all games with largely micro objectives, with limited medium term… and some really long and financially egregious long term objectives. Completing any one gacha character is unobtainium without a multiple hundred dollar financial outlay. Then there is the challenge where both the amount of time that you can commit to something, and the amount of progress that time will earn you are hard gated… so that they will keep driving you towards the cash shop. Some of these are worse than others, and I rather enjoy Destiny Rising that I am using as an example. However it can be exhausting to log in and see thirty windows lit up waiting on your attention that all require just a few moments of your time. This is esssentially progression engines stretched to the point of breaking and is maybe a bridge too far for most players.

Fate of the Vaal has so far had the fastest drop off of any Path of Exile II league. POE1 Leagues tend to have more of a slowly declining plateau that they reach quickly that slides slowly as the player count drops off as we get closer to the next league. POE2 on the other hand tends to be pretty rapid and pretty constant, not really starting to plateau until you are a few months into the league. My guess behind this is that as folks get into maps, they tend to drop out of the game because there really isn’t much connective tissue there to keep them engaged. The game is missing a progression engine to keep them invested in the long term. The currency aquisition folks stick around because they are self motivated by their own version of “number goes up”, but I think they tend to be a much smaller portion of the larger pie, especially with Path of Exile II. Completing the campaign feels like it represents a larger part of the game. Not only does a full campaign run take much longer, but it also is much more meaningful than anything that comes after it.

I love Delve in Path of Exile, and for the most part the POE2 atlas system seems inspired by this system of endless progression. The problem is however that Delve is a bunch of micro objectives, with any given delve path taking a few minutes, whereas even the fastest maps are at least 5 minutes because the layouts are not as clean as they were in Path of Exile 1. Bad nodes feel more damning when it takes longer to clear them. In Delve you can pretty quickly rush to the next objective node, and as a result none of them feel that bad. You chase the nodes that you care about, which are more clearly marked on the map, and each of them feel super rewarding because the is a tiny bit of effort to clear any of them. It isn’t so much that I want Path of Exile II to just copy the homework of the Atlas Progression system from Path of Exile 1, and more a case that the Delve Atlas just does not feel good. I am open to other solutions, but whatever the case I think they need to rework the entire atlas progression system to give us more bursts of short term progression, rather than the aimless wandering nature of trying to find the next bit of progression that we have right now. Anyways. Like I said this is more of an academic ramble than anything else. Did I completely miss the point? Drop me a line below. The post Progress Engines appeared first on Tales of the Aggronaut.