The game’s character class system and the way loot is designed will not allow us to see billions of damage in Grinding Gear Games’ game.

A sequel to Path of Exile, released in 2013, is on the way. Action-RPGs are complex, but gamers don’t care: they want power, even if it makes the game too easy. Diablo IV fell into this trap when its Vessel of Hatred expansion was forced to scale back the huge damage numbers it had previously seen. (Final Fantasy XVI isn’t much better: Clive has 4-5 thousand HP, and bosses can have billions…)

Jonathan Rogers, director of Path of Exile 2, jokingly referred to Diablo IV in the video below: he doesn’t think there will be a similar problem in the second PoE: “Look, Path of Exile obviously got pretty crazy, but at the same time, we had a lot of years – many years – where it wasn’t like that. Our numbers don’t scale as fast as some games and they don’t scale as exponentially, which means we don’t have to worry about trillions of damage or anything like that. I don’t think we’ll ever have to do a number crunching or anything like that. Along with that, I think we get to a kind of middle ground where we don’t let things get too out of control,” Rogers said.

For example, an item in Path of Exile 2 might give you +9 intelligence, which would be +200 in Diablo IV. This keeps the numbers readable in combat so you don’t have to count how many digits of damage you have (which can be ridiculous when you’re looking at 7-8-9 digits of damage in the millions…). This can make the atmosphere better and the gameplay more dynamic.

Path of Exile 2 will be released in Early Access on December 6th, and even in this edition it will be quite substantial (25 hours to play through…).

Source: PCGamer