The hard part was getting the game to run well when there was a huge amount of action going on. This means that rendering PoE environments is actually pretty fast. Working on games that have a fixed-perspective top-down camera you can create stuff without having to worry about what it looks like when the camera gets in too close. Jonathan: It took a lot of work! Though we do have one advantage. Or, how did the team at Grinding Gear Games manage to pull it off so flawlessly?
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#Path of exile 2 console Pc
Where other PC ports kind of lose something in translation, what’s the secret.
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It didn’t at all feel like an inferior version to the PC original. The Xbox One X was just powerful enough to handle it right out of the gate.īased on the performance with the beta version I was surprised to find that on a vanilla Xbox One (for lack of a better term) the game looked great, and ran smooth. The great thing is, we didn't have to add any extra optimisations or anything. We already have higher-than-1080p textures available, because as a PC developer we already have a bunch of gamers who run 4K on their expensive rigs. With the Xbox One X on the horizon could you talk about how that affected the console development, and were you guys able to make any significant visual upgrades to the game to take advantage of the extra power?įor us, Xbox One X has basically meant that we get to support 4K. We improved framerates by insane multiples like eight times or more in heavy combat. The great thing is that both of those changes have had a massive improvement on performance for the PC game. Moving to Xbox meant multithreading the engine and that took some serious engineering effort. In the past, Path of Exile was basically a single-core game. Consoles have much slower individual CPU cores, but they make up for it by having a lot more of them than a typical desktop PC. The second challenge was multithreading the engine. The first was that we had a DirectX 9 based engine. Jonathan: There were two big challenges for Xbox One. Working with the Xbox One hardware, where there any technical challenges getting the game up and running on console? This is something we are keen to find a better solution for as time goes on. It's a lot more of a hassle, but gems are such a core part of the gameplay of Path of Exile so we couldn't dumb it down just to make the UI simpler. On console, you have to select the item, go into gem selection mode, navigate to the gem, then press another button to pull it out. On PC, you can pull a gem right out of an item without any kind of sub-menu because you can point your mouse cursor right at it. There are a lot of issues I could go into here, but a big one that we still haven't really solved to my satisfaction is gems. We will continue to work on that.Ī somewhat harder challenge is the UI (User Interface) for items. I'm fairly happy with how things are feeling at the moment, but there are still a few improvements that could be made around which monsters are targeted for some skills. In other cases, we came up with our own ideas. We studied a lot of other games to see how they were solving some of the control issues we were seeing.
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When we first hooked up a controller to the character, we found people were not able to even do a basic melee hits on a monster, successfully, most of the time. This is something that we knew we had to get feeling great, but it took a surprising amount of experimentation. Jonathan: There are really two big issues to solve with Action RPGs. What were some of the biggest challenges that the team knew it had to solve or overcome going in? The action-RPG genre, or the Diablo-style game has never really worked well on console outside of Diablo 3. It did take a little longer than we expected! Jonathan Rogers: We began to seriously talk about coming to console in late 2015, but we actually began work on the Xbox project around the start of 2016. At what point did the team start seriously looking at bringing Path of Exile to console?