The new Path of Exile 2 league is underway, bringing with it both the new Druid class and the return of one of the most iconic characters in the extended lore. But how do you handle introducing Aztiri, Queen of the Vaal to an audience that combines decade-long veterans of the action RPG with complete newcomers to the series? I sat down with game director Jonathan Rogers from Grinding Gear Games to discuss how Fate of the Vaal integrates into the campaign, what it might look like for the future, and why he’s eager to go back and add more areas and features to the early acts.
The latest Path of Exile 2 season has you delving into the ancient temples of the Vaal, and initially this starts out in the form of fairly unremarkable dungeons where you build the layout yourself as you progress. It’s not until later in the campaign, where you meet up with time-hopping scientist Doryani, that you’re tasked with heading into the past to confront Queen Atziri herself. “We wanted to try and scale back the epicness at the beginning of the game so that you can bring that in over time, as it makes sense to do so in the storyline,” Rogers tells me.
“In PoE 1 we’ve always had this issue where you walk out onto the beach at the start of the game and then you get immediately confronted with some totally ridiculous eldritch thing, or some guy sending you back in time,” he continues. “If you’re a new player, it’s like, ‘Well that’s crazy, why are we suddenly doing this?'” By instead presenting the early stages simply as “a dungeon that you can find, and that’s just kind of a cool thing,” it feels more in-keeping with the early stages of progression. “Then the epicness of the situation matches where you are in the storyline.”
“In PoE 1, we pretty much lost that battle long ago,” Rogers concedes. “You know, people just expect some weird eldritch entity to suddenly appear the moment they walk out of town. But we kind of want to not be there in PoE 2, at least for a while.” By the time you do eventually touch base with Doryani in the sequel, things have escalated so dramatically that the extra wrinkle of chasing after the Queen of the Vaal herself in an attempt to halt her world-sundering ritual feels much less jarring.
As for Aztiri herself, the Queen’s PoE 2 debut caused no shortage of excitement – no real surprise, given her central place in the lore. Rogers says Grinding Gear Games was eager to treat it with the respect it deserved. “There was more iteration on that than what we would normally do. There were a lot of people in the studio weighing in and being like, ‘We need to do this, we need to do that.’ I really hope that we’ve managed to deliver [so that] players feel we’ve done her justice. The boss fight is phenomenal – we teased a few things at the start, but there’s stuff that happens in the fight that I won’t spoil.”
Given the magnitude of what we’re dealing with, I mention to Rogers that I was surprised it was part of a seasonal league and not the core game. However, much like Rise of the Abyssal before it, we can expect it to stick around in some form, although it’ll likely be tweaked somewhat. “The content is certainly designed to stay,” he reassures me. “Obviously we always learn things whenever we reintroduce a league, but yeah, it’ll almost certainly stay in.”
Rogers was eager to start discussing the themes that Fate of the Vaal covers, however. “It gave us an opportunity to explore, like, what does a cataclysm that happens actually look like? What is actually happening when that happens? Which I think is actually pretty useful for storyline stuff later in PoE 2 as well.” He adds that he’s pleased “to show people the cyclical nature of the cataclysms that happened, which we kind of have always had in the lore of PoE, but you don’t really get to see that in the game as it was before.”
The remaining two campaign acts are still being worked on and obviously considered a priority for the game’s 1.0 launch, even if Rogers isn’t as worried about having every class present and correct. However, he also wants to revisit and update some of the earlier sections. For example, one of the big changes in act four (which has been rightly hailed as a rousing success) is that your character holds conversations with NPCs, rather than simply standing there while they talk at you.
“That really brings out some of the character of the people you’re playing as,” Rogers remarks, “so we really want to go back to acts one to three and do that there as well. He also points to act two, revealing that it was originally meant to have a similar level of exploration to the fourth chapter. “Becasue there are some areas that we didn’t finish, the number of options you have doesn’t feel as expansive as we hoped for. Act four delivered on that better, even though honestly there are still like three more islands that we haven’t actually finished yet.”
“When we get to full release, in an ideal world, we’d be able to finish some of those other areas that we had in both acts two and four and sort of expand that open-world feeling,” Rogers says, though he cautions, “I don’t know whether that will happen or not.” He’s eager for each chapter to have some element that makes it feel unique from the others, such as the boating in part four or the parallel present and past regions in act three.
When the new Path of Exile 2 update was revealed, it was met by a wave of backlash due to the fact that it didn’t include major endgame changes. GGG had previously stated that it intended to include these in the patch, but conceded closer to launch that it had been too ambitious for the timeline and wasn’t able to get them to a satisfactory state, choosing instead to push them back to 0.5.
“I need to be more careful sometimes with being like, ‘Oh we’re totally going to have this for the next expansion,’ and then we end up not delivering it. That’s kind of my bad, really,” Rogers responds. “But you know, I’m sure I’ll get better at that. With PoE 2, the quality standard is so high that it can take longer to do certain things than what I would usually expect from my experience on PoE 1.”
“That’s kind of resulted in a situation where I’ll eyeball something and be like, ‘Oh yeah, that’ll take about that long,’ and then it ends up taking longer than I expected. That’s the reality of what’s going on with that.” Overall, however, Rogers tells me he’s happy with the more timely schedule, and the amount of content that Grinding Gear Games has managed to deliver for each expansion. “I don’t have any problem with that at all.”
Path of Exile 2: The Last of the Druids and the Fate of the Vaal League are live now on Steam, and a free weekend is running that lasts until Monday December 15. You’re able to continue your progress if you decide to buy the full game, and there are rewards for playing during the trial period, so it’s a great time to jump on if you’ve been considering it.
