Blizzard, the makers of action RPG Diablo 4, thought that having a Skip Campaign button in your game even if you beat it once to skip straight to the endgame was a good idea. However, not many others agree with that sentiment.

Path of Exile 2 game director Jonathan Rogers said that putting in the Skip Campaign option in your action RPGs is a huge mistake because it will make the overall experience of an action RPG worse. Here’s the full quote from a recent media preview event for Path of Exile 2’s Dawn of the Hunt update:

“As for skipping campaign, it just isn’t going to happen. I’ve actually talked about this quite a few times in the past, but it’s one of those things where there’s lots of downsides that we see to that, and we think that it overall will make the game worse. And I would even go so far as to say that action RPGs that do allow that, I believe ultimately will not have as much longevity as ones that don’t.

There’s a lot of reasons for that, but ultimately that is something that I think is a big mistake for action RPGs to do.”

This sounds like a jab at Diablo 4’s Skip Campaign option that lets you jump straight to its endgame. Though to be fair, not many Diablo 3 and Diablo 4 players have complained about this as they do prefer going through the game fast. Besides, the option is only available once you completed the campaign once, so it’s not like you’re skipping the whole content from the get-go.

Check out the rest of Jonathan’s answers in our Path of Exile 2 interview below.

On The Huntress

So I think the thing that was really hard to get right with the Huntress was finding a way to make a hybrid melee and ranged play well in Path of Exile, and I wanted to give players reasons to be able to be both melee and ranged, and I think where it really came together was with the parry mechanics. Parry is something that a lot of action games have, but in a game like Path of Exile where the action is so frenetic, it’s really hard to develop a system for parrying that works with the pace of combat that we have. So what we found when we tried to make parry work, like in most games, parry works like if you block at the exact right time, then you get rewarded with a parry, but in Path of Exile, because you fight large packs of monsters and they’re attacking constantly, that really doesn’t work.

So we kind of had to find a way to make it so that a parry mechanic could be fun to use in this kind of context. So what we did is we made it so you parry everything that comes in, but it’s taking advantage of the parry, often by doing area of effect attacks or jumping back, that can kind of mean you get a follow-up. And that jump back was really great, because it meant that you can use Parry in a context where lots of monsters are hitting you, and because your follow-up attack gets you out of there, it means that you now have time to respond, which means you kind of get both that awesome ranged melee feel, but also a way to make Parry work in a game like ours.

And actually now that we’ve got Parry, it’s made us realize that the shield block that we have on the warrior is not good enough. And while I didn’t announce it here, we actually do have some plans for changing warrior shield block as well to make that better. So as I said, it really forced us to confront some of the interesting differences between other games in our game.

One more thing: the Huntress has the most combo chains of any class we’ve done yet. So the stuff with the elemental whirling slashes, it just means that there are like combos that are sort of like seven or eight levels deep!

On Adding Rogue Exiles To Fight

Honestly, you know, I don’t think there’s specific developer characters that we had, but we were just kind of coming up with, you know, interesting personalities for characters, you know, like what kind of stuff you can do there. Honestly, one of the main things there we wanted to be thinking about was we wanted to make it so that for different… so each Rogue Exile can have different Uniques that it can spawn with and we wanted to make sure that in the pool of Uniques that there was some kind of character who felt like their personality fit what those Uniques can do, and we do have specific AI for each Unique as well, so that means that they really do use the Uniques quite successfully, like there’s a lot going on.

I don’t think we’ve ever made monsters that had AI as complicated as the Rogue Exiles have, you know, they’re like dodge rolling around and they’re like WASD moving and they’re sh**-talking you and stuff like that, like it is pretty fun, so yeah, I think they really should feel like PvP combat, and the fact that you can see the Unique they’ve got is just kind of a fun thing, like you get that moment of like, oh crap, they’re using that Unique, and then I definitely want that thing.

And so now I’m going to… I have to make extra sure that I’m killing it, especially now that the cost of dying… well, I mean, previously in maps the cost of dying was that you couldn’t go back. But we did want the Rogue Exiles to still be the case where if you didn’t successfully kill them that you still, you know, that they portal away, so you know, they’ve still got that cost as well.

On Energy Shield Being Dominant In The Endgame Meta

We’re not going to add more life nodes to the passive tree, but we are adjusting some Energy Shield stuff in this patch. I don’t think it will be quite the same as it is in 0.1.0. I think that the changes we’ve made will probably adjust things, especially because we’ve also modified other mechanics as well. I don’t think it should dominate as much anymore.

On The Most-Played Class Of Path of Exile 2 In The Past Three Months

So actually the main thing that we look at is what the classes at the top of the leaderboards use, and the main thing that we’ve seen is that you’ve got the sorceress, specifically the Stormweaver, being incredibly common as well as the monk with the invoker, and then if you’re playing on hardcore leagues where dying doesn’t matter, then you’ve got the infernalist because it’s got some really good defensive options. So that’s what we kind of mainly be considering about. And so one thing I suppose I didn’t mention in the video is we’re doing a very, very significant rebalance of a huge amount of things in 0.2.0. And so we expect to shake up very significantly the classes that are being done.

So there’s a lot of mechanics that we didn’t expect, and you know, interactions we didn’t expect. There’s going to be some nerfs happening. It’s early access, we’ve kind of got to expect that, so at the moment the top of the leaderboards are kind of dominated by certain classes because of the fact that there are things that we need to shuffle around, so there’ll be quite a lot of changes.

Now I expect the next patch, obviously the huntress being the new class, there’ll be a huge amount of people playing that, but for now it’s really the Stormweaver (Sorceress), Invoker (Monk), and Infernalist (Witch) are the big ones.

Path of Exile 2: Dawn of the Hunt will go live on 5th April 3am GMT+8.