Path of Exile 2 Gameplay With Shuhei Yoshida from SIE

During TGS 2024, Jonathan Rogers from Grinding Gear Games sat down with Sony Interactive Entertainment's Shuhei Yoshida for a hands-on demonstration of Path of Exile 2. During the gameplay, Jonathan showcased several bosses, a variety of skills, and multiple beautiful zones. This article is going to go over some of the events of the gameplay showcase, and then include a few opinions from the author about what this means for Path of Exile 2.

Yoshida-San is the head of the Independent Developer Initiative at SIE and he was the President of SIE from 2008 to 2019. He is one of the most qualified experts in the gaming industry who has seen a lot of different games during his 3 decades of experience. In addition, he's played Path of Exile previously along with many Eastern ARPGs like Dark Souls, allowing him to bring a unique and well-informed perspective to the gameplay walkthrough.

Skills

During the gameplay, Jonathan Rogers showed Shuhei Yoshida several of the skills available in Path of Exile 2. The biggest divergence between Path of Exile 1 and Path of Exile 2 is the focus on gameplay. In Path of Exile 1, most builds optimize into spamming one button repeatedly. In Path of Exile 2, different skills serve different purposes and you frequently combo them together. There's also a major focus on different archetypes and playstyles.

• The Mercenary is inspired by FPS games (or Doom clones), switching between a variety of crossbow and grenade skills. Use a hard-hitting skill to break enemy armor then unleash a barrage of projectiles to melt their health.
• On the Warrior you use Slams. For example, creating a puddle of lava that explodes when struck by subsequent attacks. Next up, use Seismic Cry to amplify your next Slam, and then Stampe over the puddle for a massive burst of damage.
• The monk is combo-based and uses Power Charges to fuel many of his most potent abilities. During the demo, a new Bell skill was showcased that looked rather similar to a Monk's Wave of Light from Diablo 3. We also got a sneak peek at a new empowerment skill.

Author's Thoughts:

In my opinion Path of Exile is the best ARPG on the market. But I've often found the gameplay lacking in comparison to action games and eastern ARPGs like Dark Souls. Don't get me wrong, Path of Exile has an incredible endgame loop, with a robust economy and a wide variety of league mechanics to farm. It also has the best crafting system and buildcrafting I've experienced in any game. But the gameplay more or less comes down to pressing one button to delete everything on the screen before it deletes me.

Exploding monsters, off-screen projectiles, and being unable to see what killed you are all problems in PoE 1 that GGG is hoping to solve for PoE 2. A lot of the changes they're making to the pace of combat reflect this. But so far all we've seen are small slices of the campaign and it's hard to tell what the pace of play will look like in the endgame. After all, PoE 1 campaign gameplay looks very different from endgame so I'd expect the same for PoE 2.

Bosses

During the demo, Jonathan Rogers fought several bosses both solo and when playing couch co-op with Shuhei Yoshida. The Viper Napuatzi fight is particularly interesting. During the fight, you're enclosed by several ranks of Vaal Soldiers. You need to deal with the boss, her poison puddles, and an ever-constricting space. This fight does an excellent job of showing off the environmental interactions.

Later on during the Co-op portion of the showcase; Jonathan, and Yoshida-San took on the Devourer. This is the fight that was notoriously introduced by Chris Wilson as the one that would kill players early and often. There look to be a wealth of optional, yet challenging side bosses present throughout the campaign.

Endgame in the Campaign

One thing I've noticed during several of the gameplay demos is the way each of the bosses feel like an endgame encounter. This isn't a throwaway boss, there's been a lot of care and attention paid to the fight, lore, and telegraphed mechanics. Some of these encounters are mythical figures from Path of Exile's lore like Viper Napuatzi. Others are completely unique to PoE 2, or denizens of the world that are best left undisturbed.

GGG has a lot of great bosses, with the Shaper being a particularly stand-out example. They've been able to apply this expertise to the fights in Path of Exile 2. Most of the encounters change the space within which you fight. There are projectiles to dodge, void zones to avoid, and elements of the arena (like Viper Napuatzi's shield wall) to interact with.

If you want to learn more about the boss design for Path of Exile 2, check out this article!

Campaign

Path of Exile 2 has a 6-act campaign with around 50 hours of gameplay. So far, the gameplay showcases have contained content from Acts 1 through 4, but 5 and 6 are complete unknowns. Throughout the gameplay demo, Shuhei Yoshida commented on how impressive the graphics are for each of the areas.

50 Hour Campaign

Alright, I know a lot of people see "50 hour campaign" and groan. Or maybe someone is saying "I want 0 campaign, not 50 hours of it!" But it's important to keep in mind that when several content creators got hands-on experience they were able to blast through the first couple acts in mere hours. I expect that the 50 hour campaign, really means 50 hours of content for a new player who wants an immersive experience. If you're following a leveling guide, and have significant experience from Path of Exile one, then you're going to get through this way faster.

Path of Exile 1 is a lot to learn, and you don't have much time. Especially because mistakes in the campaign can cripple your build's performance in the endgame. PoE 2 provides a lot more guidance during the campaign, and gives new players more time to get comfortable with the game's systems. Each of the boss fights provides a challenge you need to overcome, testing your build and giving you an opportunity to make mistakes and then learn from them. The checkpoints should mean less time spent running back and more time fighting, hopefully, there aren't too many checkpoints that are as far as Rennala's Site of Grace from Elden Ring!

Immersive Experience

Furthermore, live service games aren't for everyone! As I get older, I find myself appreciating singleplayer experiences far more than I did in the past. I'm much more likely to try a new game, if I hear it has a good story and a deep campaign to explore than if someone tells me all about how awesome the endgame grind is. Because the endgame grind comes at the end. Do I really want to invest 5, 10 or 30 hours into a boring and frustrating experience just to find the fun? Not really, there's plenty of other things I can play. But if the campaign immerses me in a world to the point where I'm not worried about rushing to max, I'm much more likely to stick around and experience the endgame.

Gameplay Walkthrough

At the end of the gameplay demo, Shuhei Yoshida gave a few more of his thoughts. He enjoyed the graphics, often describing Path of Exile 2 as a beautiful game. He commented on the more active combat and greater build diversity, enabled by 12 unique classes each of which has multiple ascendancy archetypes. The UI also made for a much better onboarding experience. Yoshida-San has some experience with PoE 1, but he found PoE 2 much easier to get into. Things like the Skill and Support recommendations are great onboarding tools!

In addition, he said the controller support was good, which is particularly important given PoE 2's cross-play (and the massive audience available on consoles). Plus he was very impressed with the boss fights, describing them as something out of a true action game.

Reflecting on PoE 1 vs 2

So far, I've seen Path of Exile 2 get a lot of praise, and many people have extremely high hopes for the title. But time and time again what strikes me is the number of people from outside of the Path of Exile community who are praising the game. Once you reach maps, Chris Wilson has your soul. That kinda says it all, right? The Path of Exile community is extremely passionate, but also extremely small. It might not seem like that, with player counts reaching impressive numbers like 230k on Steam, but it's true.

Path of Exile is a great game, but it's not the sort of game you can get your friends into. Believe me, I've tried! But the game's complexity and the sheer amount of knowledge is intimidating. Then, even if someone wants to learn, they need to keep up with so many complex systems that you get things like the Krangled meme.

In comparison, Path of Exile 2 is a welcoming meadow, with a few spike traps hidden beneath the tall grass. The game eases you into things, and provides you more time to learn at your own pace. In addition, Path of Exile 2 shifts the difficulty from knowing things to both knowing, and doing things. I'm sure once you reach endgame, you can know enough about how to build a character to trivialize many of the things that challenge you in the early game. But I'd also bet a skilled player can outmaneuver many bosses and take them down despite having terrible gear and an unoptimized build. Path of Exile 2 is a game I'm looking forward to and a game I look forward to sharing with as many people as possible.

Written by: Tenkiei

Reviewed by: Crouching_Tuna