Path of Exile Devs Say Djinn-Related Expansion Has Nothing To Do With It Being Ramadhan

Path of Exile's developers said the holy month of Ramadan had no effect on content plans, though it did make for some fun coincidence. 

In our interview with game director Mark Roberts and game designer Octavian talked a bit about the big changes coming to Path of Exile, as well as whether we could see some of those features come to Path of Exile 2. 

However, after watching the presentation, one question rang clear in my own head: with the player running around freeing trapped Djinn in the Mirage league, was that somehow inspired by the Muslim month of Ramadhan, where real-life Djinn and demons are trapped for the month while Muslims fast? 

"No one has mentioned that and I actually find that like quite interesting and kind of cool", Mark says. 

"That is a happy coincidence, but that is definitely not intentional.  I think that's kind of interesting", he says.

"I quite like that there's an interesting thing that happens with a lot of game design somehow ends up reflecting off of real life events and or different cultures and stuff and it happens like quite often quite accidentally", he says. "I always just think it's very interesting and I find it to be like, you know, just these cool Things that happen to align. You've just taught me about another one and I'm like, honestly, you've got a smile on my face thinking about it".

More Mechanics To Play With

With the Mirage league itself, fans might notice it's a lot more mechanics-focused than previous leagues. The Djinss and Varashta are there, of course, but a lot of focus is put on the mapping elements, with each Djinn duplicating the map it's on. Mark explained a bit of the ideation process behind these- basically, because a more mechanically intensive league like Mirage means having less time to work on the more immersive elements like you'd find in Keepers of the Flame. 

"I'd say it's just a matter of like, cool ideas You know come forth and then we ground them to a story and we see what we can do with it", Mark says. "And then we just run with that and I guess this is what we've ended up with".

Octavian also chimed in and said the more mechanics-intensive focus of Mirage also meant features like Wishes could be used even earlier in the campaign. 

"Wishes that appear in the campaign give really useful things at that point", he says. "You might get a binding orb or you might get some some, you know a chest full of boots or something at the early game where you wouldn't necessarily have good gear in that particular slot and you can choose to target that if you want". 

"So there has been consideration given to like making sure the mechanic is not only really good at giving you extra juice in an endgame Map, but also does augment the campaign leveling experience in a way that makes it, you know More makes it worthwhile doing the mirages during the campaign".

That being said, the ability to essentially push Maps further meant a lot of room for farming related shenanigans. With the ability to stack multiple league mechanics, Mark said he was excited to see how the community would try to break it. 

"I want to see how much value and kind of double overlap of content people can get out of the replicated Mirage areas", he says, issuing his challenge.

Mapping Changes And Re-Examining Endgames

Similarly, the two also addressed the changes to mapping. The endgame content sees a pretty big shift this expansion, from quality of life features like maps only being defined by tears instead of terrain, to the removal of things like Chisels and Tier 17 maps. While such a big overhaul might seem insane to players outside of the Grinding Gear Games culture, Mark and Octavian expressed confidence that these changes were what the game needed. After all, at the end of the day the core experience of mapping itself was still untouched. 

"I don't think we've changed too much in terms of the core experience", Mark posits. "It's really focused on more than nitty-gritty things that people have voiced a good amount of displeasure with so to speak".

"[Things like] the Tier 17 maps, people having to apply chisels to every map all the stuff is just annoying ", he continues. "You know when you're actually playing it's like here are the clear and evident problems And then there's also like, you know, a bunch of subjective things to it But like, you know, some of these are easy wins".

"The flip side of that coin of the live service though is that  you have basically a lot of pre-existing game that you're beholden to to some degree you also have the ability to correct things", Octavian adds. "Like, if you just release the game and that's it and you're done. You can't go and change a mistake or something that you now have thought better of, that you made six months ago. Whereas every every new release we get the opportunity to go and fix stuff that maybe we didn't like from previous stuff".

Given the team were willing to objectively reasses the endgame content for Path of Exile like this, I decided to ask what they'd thought of feedback on the endgame loop for Path of Exile 2 as well. The long and short of it was that many fans felt there was a lack of direction on what to do after you'd beaten the game's campaign, and I was curious if they were planning to ride the momentum of tweaking one game's endgame straight into tweaking another. 

While he obviously wouldn't go into details, Mark explained that the team was aware that Path of Exile 2 was lacking in endgame goals- especially compared to the goal-rich environment Path of Exile was currently in. 

"We have an immense amount of in-game changes to make to the endgame in POE 2. I'd say it's a little bit different like there are just kind of obvious objective problems with the POE 2 endgame and that's because we were, like, obviously prioritizing the campaign a lot of stuff like that and then the endgame we kind of were putting it together, but it wasn't getting enough of our development priority", Mark says.

"And so yes, we are we do have a large amount of changes that are planned to upgrade the endgame. We've identified a lot of the problems. We're working towards it I just can't speak as to what it is, obviously because you're gonna have to wait for the POE 2 version of this in order to get that", he continues.

Octavian also shared that he was quite proud of the Eagon Memory maps as an example of the kind of content they were aiming for:

"I find the idea of the sort of mission loop of Eagons shaped regions to be really compelling where it's like I do these you know eight maps in sequence, they get steadily more intense and then I get to go and loot a reward from a vault and then I can do it again", he says.

"I find that to like it's sort of ties back to what Mark was talking about for the POE 2 endgame like the goals being really important like this Eagon system is essentially another layer of that. It's another small short term, you know, like eight map long goal that you can chase over and over and over again".

With that in mind though, fans might be pleasantly surprised to see just how much is new with the Mirage expansion for Path of Exile. From a new Ascendancy class that changes abilities every expansion to new Holy skills, it feels like every playstyle has something new to play with, if nothing else for the visual satisfaction of watching hordes get smashed by hammers made of holy light.