Path of Exile director Mark Roberts isn't afraid to change "very ancient and often low-quality content"

Path of Exile 3.28, the ARPG’s new ‘Mirage’ update, brings its previous league, Keepers of the Flame, to the core game. While it’s relatively common for developer Grinding Gear Games to adapt old seasonal mechanics into a more permanent, if less dramatic, incarnation that sticks around for good, this one feels a little different. Keepers was the RPG’s first-ever ‘sequel league,’ introducing a new and evolved form of Breach. With its integration into the main game, that means the old-school incarnation of Breach is essentially gone.

Ahead of the new Path of Exile update, I asked game director Mark Roberts and game designer Christopher ‘Octavian’ Laferriere what went into that decision. “Honestly, there’s kind of two mindsets here,” Roberts tells me. “From a purely world-building, narrative setup standpoint, it puts us in a substantially better position to be able to extrapolate on the content going forwards.” He explains that all of the surrounding infrastructure of the modern Keepers version is “a huge win in terms of being able to establish future development.”

Roberts admits that “there were probably people who loved old Breach in exactly the way that it was, and they’ve been playing it the whole time, and it’s really sad taking that away.” He says the team “has to make assessments of, ‘What’s the greater good here? What allows us to do more and better stuff in the future? What allows us to not be held, I don’t know if ‘captive’ is the right word, but [held back] by just the existence of very ancient and often low-quality content?”

“Not to entirely criticize my own work, but it is the kind of thing where the very old bosses don’t really hold up,” Roberts remarks. “I don’t know if a boss made whenever it was, eight or nine years ago, counts as a boss by modern standards – it honestly kind of feels like a rare monster in disguise.” He adds that GGG “tried to make sure we kept a lot of what people loved about Breach intact,” and notes that the team has made changes in 3.28 to address complaints such as the frustratingly maze-like Breach Hive walls.

Could we ever see an option for players to access a pure, old-school Breach encounter again? “We still have the Unstable Breaches,” Roberts responds, “which is our closest medium to that.” He briefly considers the possibility of a node for the endgame Atlas skill tree that removes the Unstable Breaches’ completion condition in favor of one that just expands like the old version, but cautions: “What you almost certainly won’t see back is the old bosses and the old monsters.”

Roberts explains that the new-look Breach foes are “a huge win for us from a development perspective, in a way that I suspect people don’t entirely appreciate. Where we can be doing more of that modern stuff – modern skills, modern effects, modern everything.” He believes that “you can really tell the things where we’ve mashed the old and new together, and it just really feels a bit tacky. It contributes to this overall ‘low-ish quality’ thing going on.”

Overhauling Breach to the modern style of Keepers brings it up to GGG and PoE 2’s modern standards. “I think it is quite important that we do get the capacity to do our artistic upgrades and everything where possible,” Roberts continues, “as well as animation upgrades, visual effects upgrades, performance upgrades, which we can do at the same time. And, of course, loot upgrades, which I suspect is something people care a little bit more about.”

One other big addition in PoE 3.28 is the Reliquarian ascendancy for the Scion class, which was inspired by its experimental Legacy of Phrecia event. It grants you access to the powers of multiple unique items, making it one of the most flexible sub-classes in the game. Most interestingly, what’s on offer will be changed with every new season from now on. “Yes, we’ve signed ourselves up to having to do extra work every single league,” Roberts laughs. “It’s worth it.”

Octavian says that, by pre-informing players that the Reliquarian will be in this frequent state of flux, GGG has more freedom to experiment. “It gives us this one ascendancy that we’re just allowed to do something wild and weird and crazy with, if we want to, every single league. If we were to do that with any other ascendancy, we would be blindsiding people with changes to their favorite thing, potentially. But everybody knows, ‘Reliquarian is going to change every time.'”

The team isn’t committing to every single node in the ascendancy tree changing with each redesign, although the new look will be handcrafted by the design team every time. “I would want to swap more rather than fewer,” Octavian says, “I think it’s cooler that way.” Roberts chimes in: “It’s a matter of sitting down and going, ‘Oh, this pairs with this really well, and this combines with this really well. We can do these builds, this is cool. And maybe one of those is maintained from the previous one, maybe not.”

Roberts smiles. “What’s going to happen, though, is that the Reliquarian will be very good in this league, or very bad, and then people will [either] love or hate that it’s going to change every league.” He’s looking forward to the excitement around players discovering what it looks like with each turn of the wheel, especially as new uniques join the pool and become potential additions. “Sometimes it’ll be meta, sometimes not, at the end of the day.”

The Path of Exile 3.28 start time is Friday March 3 at 11am PST / 2pm EST / 7pm GMT / 8pm CET. You can play for free on Steam, or through the Grinding Gear Games standalone client. While you wait for the Mirage league to begin, read my previous interview with Roberts and Octavian, where we spoke about the recent ‘ground loot’ debate, and what Grinding Gear Games is doing to serve players who don’t always make it to the endgame.