The development team at Grinding Gear Games has been working under the moonlight to bring the next expansion, Harvest, to players, which will see players strive to grow farms ... well, not cabbage and tomatoes, that's for sure.
In the Harvest Challenge League, players will run through Oshabi, Overseer of the Sacred Grove, who will instruct you to find seed caches around the world. When you open the cache, you will receive a bunch of seeds, as well as a portal to the Sacred Grove where you can plant your seeds. It will take time for them to grow, but it will only pass when you find the next cache. This way, you won't just wait in the game (or outside of it) for your garden to mature.
When your seeds are ready to harvest, you can activate a collector next to them - you planted a life force collector next to the seeds, right? - and various monsters will pop up for you to fight. Their life force will be collected and you can use this life force to create various items.
This is the main gameplay loop from Harvest, but it's not all that simple. Level 1 seed just needs to be planted next to the combine to work, and it will be “a big part of your gardening,” Chris Wilson of Grinding Gear Games told us. This is because he wanted the farming aspect of the game to be more of a side mission than something that dominates your time - or, as he puts it, he doesn't want players to complain, “Wait, I downloaded the RPG and you makes me build a farm?
Things get a little more complicated when you have Level 2 Seeds. They may require that they be planted next to other specific plants or, in the example he showed me, you need to channel life force from other plants - or more specifically, to the monsters they spawn after you have killed them. , - instead of using this life force for crafting. You will channel this life force around your garden using glowing pipes, giving your garden a SimCity or Cities: Skylines look with how you place blocks with different building types and power / water lines to connect them all.
It should be a city at night, as the garden is dark and the plants glow an eerie blue, purple or yellow light. I commented on their appeal to Wilson, who told me that the gardens "make heavy use of our global lighting technology." Some of the boss's resources were even made by the team working on Path of Exile 2, which Wilson says represents a "quantum leap" over the game's regular graphics. I would just like to stroll through one of the gardens and just admire its beauty, if I were not afraid to kick my leg to death on the plant and stick a wolf out of it.
When we received awards for subjects, Wilson went into what he called "philosophical rant." "When you join the Path of Exile league, it usually gives you items at a rate faster than what you get by playing the regular game." This makes sense as giving players the same level of items for extra league play might seem like a disadvantage. On the other hand, Wilson said that getting “about 80%” of items from league content instead of the base game was also far from ideal.
Harvest's plan, therefore, is to give out significantly fewer rare items for the league's upkeep, but for the garden crafting system to provide better, more efficient items - only at a lower rate. This could lead to The Harvest becoming a "crazy crafting league" where everything is too powerful, but the way Path of Exile works, leagues can be removed after a few months and then reworked for inclusion in the main game. As Wilson said, "Path of Exile is a game about what items you want and how difficult it is to craft them."
In general, gardening should be rewarding, but not overly time-consuming or “micromanaged” unless you want to invest heavily in it. Monster designs also need to be highly customizable, so players can choose the difficulty level in their encounters, similar to the popular Metamorph league, where players build their own boss monsters to fight.
Unique builds
As is often the case, the unique elements in new content don't just have positive effects, they “encourage people to create characters in a different way than usual.” An example that Wilson showed me was Prototype Doryani, a piece of chest armor that only allows you to deal lightning damage, and gives monsters your lightning resistance, and also protects your armor from lightning damage. Therefore, you will want to create a character that only deals lightning, yet has the lowest possible resistance and very high armor value - a tricky proposition for a lightning-focused caster! “It encourages players to think like a puzzle that we throw out and see where the pieces fall,” Wilson explained. "And I potentially regret it a lot."
This update is making a concerted effort to make two-handed weapons more attractive to players. Thus, “clap” skills - skills that hit the ground and damage enemies - will work better with slow two-handed ones than with fast one-handed ones. The one called "Fist of War" summons an ancestor spirit that copies your strike every few seconds, which means it works better with slower, more powerful two-handed weapons than with faster, one-handed ones. The other, Tectonic Slam, deals more damage the more stamina you have. Since you attack less often, you are less likely to "use up" your charges and generally do more damage.
“We added combat skills to the game about five years ago, and they weren't particularly popular,” Wilson said of the next class of love gaining skills. Seismic Shout now causes a certain number of future attacks to deal more damage, again providing synergy with two-handed weapons and their larger individual attacks. Rallying Cry grants a percentage of your weapon to nearby allies, including AI minions, which again is an advantage for a two-handed weapon with a lot of actual damage rather than a DPS rate. Also, it used to give a bonus based on the number of enemies surrounding you, but now it rates its bonus based on the overall quality of those enemies, so it's not useless when fighting a single boss.
Brands are the last class of skills to work on. Unlike other skills, they are actually too powerful, allowing characters to clean up entire levels without doing almost anything. While they soften ("Which player will describe how they build their complexes into the ground"), they also gain some useful benefits. Wilson showed me a video for Arcanist Brand, allows you to attach another skill to it that clings when it hits an enemy. In this case, it was the Magma Sphere that received the attachment, which resulted in a bunch of small fireballs bouncing all over the map.
Aggressive with passive
Changes are also taking place in perhaps the most significant part of Path of Exile - the passive skill tree, which, according to Wilson, hasn't changed "for an embarrassing long time."It has been tweaked and tweaked all over the place - especially in order to improve the aforementioned elements such as two-handed weapons, brands and warcry - and some new key skills are now present on the board as well. Some were learned from the mass of skills you could gain from expanding the Legion, while some were completely new.
Speaking of which, I took this opportunity to ask how the content of the previous expansion was obtained. Wilson said that the players liked it, but the team needed to "do some rebalancing" that will be implemented with this expansion, as the cluster jewels and Delirium ravings will become the main game. This time around, things will be a little different, with Delirium portals being less common than regular league content, but more likely to appear if there is more content from other leagues in the area. This allows players to use a variety of effects to fill an area with leagues, making the gibberish version of that content even more challenging.
Several dozen unique items were also rebalanced, and Wilson named a pair for me: an ax that pulls you towards your enemies with the Illumination Warp skill and boots that shoot lightning behind you as you move. Suffice it to say that the accompanying video was shocking. Yes, well, I will not quit my day job.
New norm
Turning to the elephant in the room - or more accurately, the elephant on the planet - we talked briefly about COVID-19 and its impact on Path of Exile. In our last conversation in mid-February, Wilson told me that GGG's partners in China were severely affected by the disease, resulting in some slowdowns. Now, right? "They went back to work before we got locked up here."
Speaking of “here,” like the Grinding Gear Games home offices in New Zealand, the country has been very good at containing the coronavirus and this has resulted in a short interruption to the development team. Wilson said they are "about a week behind schedule for this league" due to the difficulty of communicating with a team that is more used to face-to-face group meetings, but they've been back to work for a while now and things have been going smoothly, with the exception of Bruce in the arts. who still comes to work in his pajamas. (This is completely unrealistic. I just dreamed up Bruce. But I bet there are at least a few people who would like to go to work in their pajamas.)
We ended our conversation with a quick talk about the new Vulkan render that will be implemented by Path of Exile, which we talked about in the news last week, and it's probably better to describe it on the PoE website than trying to figure out all the technicalities.
Exile Route: Harvesting is scheduled for June 19, although Wilson said the date could slip a little due to all the concerns surrounding the global pandemic. Whenever it arrives, it will be early summer - well if you don't live in New Zealand, that is - so it will be a great time to go out and start planting these seeds!
