Path Of Exile 2 had an incredible Early Access launch last December, but the honeymoon period is clearly over. Its first major update, Dawn of the Hunt, arrived last week and quickly led to review-bombing on Steam over difficulty spikes that made the game feel, according to some players at least, “like a massive waste of time.” Developer Grinding Gear Games released some emergency patches to make the action-RPG less of a slog, but the fallout is ongoing.
“There were some blatant fuck-ups, speaking bluntly,” game director Mark Roberts said during a live interview with PoE streamer Zizaran on April 8. “Like the minion change was just bad.” He and fellow director Jonathan Rogers both agreed that nerfs to player ally health and power, as well as buffs to enemy survivability, both went way too far. “A lot of it is just Early Access so it’s allowed but, like, we are just firing from the hip a lot here, stuff like that,” Roberts said. “Like let’s just get it in there, see what people think, and if it’s bad we’ll just undo it.”
Dawn of the Hunt went live on April 4 and added a new Huntress class, a bunch of new Ascendancies, more unique loot to chase, and revamped Path of Exile 2's endgame. But some of that rebalancing ended up leaking out into the full campaign, and overall many players felt the changes made the game’s Souls-inspired combat meat grinder feel way overtuned and unrewarding. Negative user reviews instantly started pouring in on Steam and pushed Path of Exile 2's rating down into mixed territory.
“Every boss fight is incredibly longer than it needs to be. Most of the skills do little to no damage,” wrote one player reviewing the game on Steam. “I understand they said they wanted to slow game play down, but I don’t think I will even make it more than 1 week in this league at this point.” Another asked, “how do you have a relatively good first patch then wait 3 months nerf everything and make the campaign a worse experience?” Some fans on the game’s subreddit were similarly apoplectic. “I was going to take a day or two off work to play this game,” one wrote. “But I removed my vacation I had put in. I’d rather just go into work than play this game right now.”
Grinding Gear rushed into action with a series of quick patches to try and ameliorate the key pain points, including the new Huntress class being so reliant on a parry mechanic to be effective, as well as more basic complaints around crashes and server disconnects. A long list of balance changes was outlined earlier today to go live across the rest of the week, including making a range of character skills more powerful. “Now that we have a lot of the nerfs out of the way, we can concentrate on buffing things that are not performing well,” the developers wrote.
In some ways, that sounds like Early Access working exactly as intended, though there are perhaps deeper philosophical issues underlying some of the ongoing community angst around each big new Path of Exile 2 update. Some of that has to do with a clear, overall effort to make a game that’s (somewhat) more approachable to get into than its predecessor, but also decisively more punishing. Some of it has to do with the fact that people who still love and play the original Path of Exile feel left behind. That game’s next big season was delayed as Grinding Gear tries to get a handle on the sequel.
“I think a running theme with PoE 2 in general is that the target to hit is smaller 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 during yesterday’s livestream. Some fans were critical of him for appearing “defensive” early on during the interview. He apologized toward the end of the chat and said he had just gotten up on the wrong side of the bed. Roberts added that he actually thought it was one of the duo’s more productive discussions about the game because they came out of it ready to launch over a dozen changes to get Path of Exile 2 back on track.
.