Path of Exile 2 Dawn of the Hunt — its first major update since it launched in early access last year — has been a disaster. When players logged in last Friday to try it out, they immediately realized the game had become almost comically difficult. Killing weak monsters in the opening hours of the campaign took ages, and the new Huntress class felt limp. Reddit exploded with posts titled things like “This game feels like a massive waste of time” and “Game feels miserable”. Popular streamers rage-quit the game.
In response, developer Grinding Gear Games issued several small patches to give players a fighting chance. Monsters lost some of their life, and some underperforming skills, like skeletal minions, were beefed up. But many players still don’t think it’s enough to fix the feeling that the game is unrewarding.
Grinding Gear Games put up a post addressing the broader concerns with patch and what it plans on changing in the coming weeks, most notably the sluggish pacing of its campaign, which you’re required to replay every time a new season drops. While some of the changes have already gone through, players are still struggling to find the patience to play the game long enough to reach its endgame dungeons.
“I can absolutely tell you that our goal here was to nerf the things that were trivializing the endgame before you’ve even managed to get your items and stuff like that,” game director Jonathan Rogers said in an interview with streamer Zizaran on Tuesday.
“There were some blatant fuck-ups, speaking bluntly,” game director Mark Roberts added, specifically calling out the underpowered skills that were quickly hotfixed. “We’re firing from the hip a lot here and stuff like that we’re like, ‘Let’s just get it in there, let’s try it out, and see how people think and if it’s bad we’ll just undo it.‘”
“I think a running theme with PoE 2 in general is that the target to hit is smaller [compared to PoE 1] because if we want the combat to be more engaging then that means there’s a smaller target; it puts more pressure on the balance to be right,” Rogers said.
Rogers explained how he feels PoE 1 rewards players who have spent thousands of hours mastering its systems and that PoE 2 was designed to avoid that problem — it’s just really hard to get right. At the same time, the game is meant to have the kind of deliberate, dodge-roll-heavy combat you’d expect from a Soulslike. It’s supposed to be hard.
Both developers say the team is looking into a number of things to alleviate, but they want to be careful about pushing it too far into the other direction where players start flying through dungeons in just a few hours.
“If we get to the point where a good player never has to face a single challenge ever then I don’t think that’s going to be a game that will be ultimately fun in the long term,” he said.
