Managing Expectations for Path of Exile 2 Release

Managing player expectations is crucial for the success of Path of Exile 2, as GGG avoids overselling uncompleted content.

### Managing Expectations in Game Development: A Closer Look at Path of Exile 2
* 🎮  The discussion revolves around the **importance of managing player expectations** in game development, particularly in the context of **Path of Exile 2** and its current **marketing strategy**.
* 💬  The creator expresses gratitude for viewer comments, which inspire **further discussions about the game and its community**, while hinting at their ongoing work on a **"tectonic trickster" build**.
* 🕹️  They emphasize that GGG, the developer, is intentionally **withholding certain gameplay aspects**, like mapping content, to **avoid overwhelming or underwhelming players**, contrasting this approach with the pitfalls seen in games like **Star Citizen and Diablo 4**.
* 📉  The creator cites Star Citizen as a **cautionary example of unmet expectations** due to poor management, highlighting how the game's **prolonged development** has left many players **disillusioned**.
* ⚔️  Similarly, they criticize Diablo 4 for failing to **deliver on its promises**, leading to **disappointment among nostalgic fans**, while noting that both games suffered from a **lack of transparency**.
* 🔍  In discussing Path of Exile 2, they point out that **only a small fraction of the game has been revealed**, suggesting that this deliberate secrecy may **enhance player excitement and trust** in GGG's capabilities.
* 📊  They argue that the absence of mapping footage and endgame content is strategic, allowing players to **explore and discover the game organically**, which could lead to a **more engaging experience**.
* 🤝  Ultimately, the creator believes that GGG's approach will **prevent inflated expectations and foster a sense of community exploration**, encouraging players to **enjoy the journey of discovering Path of Exile 2 together**.

do you have the strength to sweep aside this world and build it anew? I must welcome back you filthy Exiles, so GGG is managing our expectations or player expectations. But uh, let's talk about that topic, okay? So first of all, thank you for all the comments in the last video. I really do enjoy reading through them, and they give me more ideas to pull together for discussions around Path of Exile 2 and such. And you know, in between my usual roster of content for P1, by the way, we're working on a tectonic trickster at the moment, so we'll be on stream later doing that. But uh, yeah, hence why this video exists and hence why I thought it was a pretty good topic to discuss. Now, we won't directly talk about the whole Souls-like drama. However, undertones in this video might address the topic to an element of it and will build a bit of a picture. And to clarify, I don't work for GGG or anything like that, but I do believe in fair I um, and so you know.

everything is fair game essentially, and everyone should be entitled to their position or opinion on things. I do think poe2 will be probably one of the best args ever made, and I will probably lose a good chunk of my life to it. But uh, let's unpack what GGG is doing right now, just around what they have actually shown, and in particular, we call this a negative confirmation, but what they haven't actually shown us so far in the gameplay that's come out. Um, and that's what I find is the most interesting sort of topic to discuss because there's definitely a lot in what's been not shown that we haven't yet seen, and it's exciting because there's so much mystery around what's going to come with Path of Exile 2. But anyway, let's uh, let's delve into this topic and have a good chat about it. Okay, so I feel like the first thing that we have to talk about is let's define what managing expectations, or in this case and context managing player expectations, actually is. Well, it's the

process to ensure that you are presenting to a group of stakeholders neither things that overwhelm or underwhelm them. So let me give you an example in the context of Path of Exile. At this stage for Path of Exile 2, we have not seen any mapping content yet at all. We've seen nothing, right? We don't know what it looks like. We don't know how it's actually going to play. We don't know what the speed of the game is. We'll talk about all these things as we go down. But I guess why would GGG do this? And I'm assuming they're doing this, and it's probably deliberate. Well, let's look at some examples which sort of paint a picture as to why this is actually a pretty good strategy. So Star Citizen is a perfect example of setting the utmost of community expectations, only to end out being a long-winded ordeal that to this day is still dragging out approximately 11 years by my count. So we're now in the multi-decades on the development of

this game, and it's bringing hoping players along for the ride still to this day. Many things were promised at the cost of the players, and currently, the game is still being drip-fed back to the community over what is the second decade of development and production. And, uh, and again on their website, the game is still listed as in development, um, and on the, uh, the wiki, still listed as an in-development product to this day. While there is a very large community still hyped about this game, I would say that they are probably, and this is not to be offensive in any way, shape, or form, but they are probably living on a dream with a sprinkle of copium, hoping that Star Citizen will ever be finished and fully released. And personally, I don't think it ever will, and I never bought into it. I had a lot of friends that bought into it, but this is one example where the developers just did not manage expectations, and now, you know, everything's just blown out of proportion to the point where the game will never really ever be completed, and

if it ever is completed, it will come out, and it will never meet the player expectations to any degree to what has now been promised, and that is literally a worst-case scenario for any game or any game in development to end up in. So, the second example I've got here is Diablo 4, which was pitched as an amazing ARPG set to end all other ARGs, and basically, it did not deliver, right? We got pitched an amazing product, and it was a bit of a stinker. So, from bad looting mechanics to boring and drawn-out endgame design, with the dungeon system just being totally unenjoyable, with, you know, build-based mechanics just not even working. So, things like elemental resistances initially didn't even work. The game promised much, but to this day, it just simply banks on nostalgia from better developers that are no longer in Blizzard, I might add, over just being a good game in the first place and standing on its own two legs. Now, it might eventually get there in

maybe the next few patches or maybe in another 12 months' time, but achieving that outcome 2 years after release plus is just simply inexcusable when many players like myself feel totally misled at the time. And obviously, we paid a lot of money for the game, especially for the various different release types that were out there. I personally bought the legendary edition or whatever, and I will never get my $140 back in any way, shape, or form. But basically, it just left a bad taste in players' mouths at the end of the day that were nostalgic fans of the series, just to realize that the game just was nowhere near as good as what it was pitched to be initially by the devs, 'cause all these things were promised, and basically, nothing was really delivered to any level of quality that we expected. The game looks and sounds amazing, but beyond that point, you know, beauty is only surface deep at the end of the day, and so it just did not deliver. And again, this is another example where

expectations of the player base were not managed, and maybe, uh, Blizzard could have been more transparent about what they were doing. And, or hadn't tried to oversell what wasn't there in the first place. But we have what we have with Diablo 4, and it's getting there. Like, looking at it critically, it's getting there. But will it ever be anywhere near as good as Path of Exile 2? No. And that's just another great example of where things could have been done significantly better. And just a, I guess, uh, put together a bit of a parallel assessment between where of Exile 2 is going in a very different direction, which is good, compared to what happened with Diablo 4. Okay, so how does all of this relate back to what GGG is doing with Path of Exile 2 and managing Community expectations? Well, let's talk about a few key points here. So, so far, we have not seen all the classes. Now, it's a combination of them not all being complete. That's not a bad thing, though.

because they haven't really been teasing classes that aren't ready yet, which is good. So, what we get, what we see, is what we get, right? That's a bad outcome. Secondly, we have only seen leveling footage in the campaign, and this is really important, and we will touch on this further in this video, but we haven't seen any sort of endgame play yet. I'll unpack this further. So, beyond this, we haven't actually seen any builds. So, what we've been shown is pre-made configuration that showed, I guess, a testing of skill combinations and gems and some of the new features with gems and how they work, but we haven't really seen anything put together in a cohesive build at this stage or anything that even resembles anything close to a build. At this point of the game, we haven't seen any curated list of uniques or anything that would give us any illusion or any allude to any further developments of mechanics in the game. So, we've seen things like cloak of flame.

still exists, for example, on the Path of Exile 2 game website page. But beyond that point, we haven't really seen anything else. There were a few things featured in the Exile con 2, or you know, 23 Exilecon unique or itemization presentation, but that's basically about it. And beyond this point, mapping hasn't been shown yet. Now, it's a combination of, you know, they probably haven't finished the mapping system at this stage. It's probably in a fairly hefty amount of development. But that being said, you know, they're looking at an open Beta release, which will most likely encompass map accessibility at that point, which, you know, based on what it assumed and off of some of the previous interviews, is that open Beta less the completion of the final ascendance will be essentially the whole game, to an element of it, with certain things that come online when the full game is released. But they haven't shown any mapping whatsoever, and that's really important to remember because this will

sort of drag us into the next point that I want to flesh out a little bit more. Okay, so circling back to the topic of there being no mapping footage yet for Path of Exile 2. Why is this so significant? Well, part of the first sort of element of that is they probably haven't fully completed it, right? So, they don't want to show something that's incomplete. But the other big thing that comes from this is this is basically the point in Path of Exile 1 where your build starts to take form. And you know, if we break this down into an hour comparison, you would spend, say, 300 hours, you know, for the average, you know, Poe dungeon dweller to be playing a character in a league, right? That may not be the case for more sort of, um, I guess, average players or whatnot, but on a, you know, let's say 300 hours is your average game time for a character, right? So, of that, you would spend 7 to 10 hours in the campaign. Now, if all we've seen so

far is the campaign footage, and Path of Exile 2 is as big, equivalent to, or even close to what Path of Exile one is, or encompasses a number of its elements with a whole heap of new elements. That means that so far, like from a content level and with what we've seen, we've seen less than 5% of the content of what the game actually has to offer, right? So, or the total gaming experience of playing Path of Exile 2 from start to end game. So, the other thing to make a comment here is that for those who know Path of Exile, as myself and many others, the campaign is simply just a tutorial. The game really starts when you hit tier one Maps. Like, that's when you start to actually play into a build, more or less. You don't generally start to build your build, you know, some builds like RF will start in the campaign leveling process, and we do know that's in Path of Exile 2. But, um, yeah, so far we haven't seen T one Maps or

anything like this, so we really don't know anything about the game speed. So, I see a lot of comments that are around, Oh, it looks really slow, looks really clunky, but we haven't seen anything in the end game in many circumstances with Path of Exile one year. The campaign is always way slower. Your characters move significantly slower. There's no such thing as really zoom-zoom in the campaign like there are leveling uniques and things like that that you can use, but generally, the campaign is relatively slow. Your character looks like a bit of a sloth, right? Well, we haven't seen any content in the endgame to be able to disprove that Path of Exile 2 would actually be quite a fast game. And in fact, there are character archetypes like the monk, for example, let's pick on that one, that I suspect will actually be really high-octane, high-peak characters. We also haven't seen anything to do with build balancing or advanced mechanics or interactions or anything to do with unique impacts on

different uh builds or anything like that, or the builds themselves. So, you know, we really don't know anything about Path of Exile 2, and I would say that's relatively deliberate in design, and I actually don't think that that's a bad thing at all. In fact, I think that's actually one of the best things about the approach that GGG's taken in marketing Path of Exile 2 today. And I should clarify the reason why I think this is actually really good. So, basically, what GGG is doing is just giving us a taste of what things look like when you first log into the game, and that's basically all the marketing materials really show us. But behind this is the mystery of where will this go and how far can you really push this, and we don't actually know the answer to that question. And they haven't shown us anything that would prove to us that even they know the answer to that question. As a community, we already know what G can do from Path of Exile 1, so

you know there's that bankability that we have an expect, and we trust them because they have earned our trust over the years. That we know where Path of Exile 2 is likely going to go. So using some common sense here, we know something is there. We know it's probably going to be quite robust. But half of the fun of the adventure of Path of Exile, to the way that I see it, will be finding out what will and won't work and just how crazy the game might actually get. And I sort of like that idea of not being shown everything straight up. And it's also one of the reasons why I generally steered clear of playing demos and early accesses and things like that. Because I actually personally really enjoy the experience of figuring out how the end game works and how builds work and things like that. And there are a large number of players that do enjoy that exact thing. Now, some people may not like that, and they just want to from the get-go have a build that will work and

yada yada yada, but you've also got to appreciate that this is a new game coming out, and nobody's really going to know anything. We're all going to be in the dark, and we're all going to be on the same footing, so it's not really like a competition sort of thing. It's really like we're all together in this, and it's up to us as a community to band together and create something really cool. So overall, where I'm at with this is I actually don't mind that G's taken the approach that they've taken, where they've given us all this mechanical sort of technical breakdown and walkthrough and things like that in the campaign. Now I see a lot of comments around criticisms around game speed, and you know, the game looks like it's going to be a SLO or a Souls-like or all this other crap, right? And the thing is, my question to you is, have you seen mapping? Have you seen the endgame? Do you know what it looks like? Has GGG

released anything about that for you to be able to actually make an informed decision that that should be your stance and so I challenge you to think about that if that's your position or if you go a it's not going to have zoom zoom builds I'm just going to stick to Path of Exile 1 you're perfectly entitled to have that opinion but you also don't have all the information before you to actually draw that opinion and unfortunately you would not be correct in the position you've taken on it and unfortunately that comment I've just made is going to upset a number of people but that's a reality we haven't really been received we haven't received all the information about Path of Exile 2 yet so there's an element to where we have to come up with assumptions and apply some common sense and think about it for a second based on the precedent being set with Path of Exile 1 as to what could happen with Path of Exile 2 it's good that they haven't given us all

the information because if that were to happen, then it would set too many high expectations, and people may not be as happy with the results that are provided. And so, by not giving up all the juice of what's going to happen in the end game and everything, it lets people figure that out over time, and it also lets them build upon what's there. Like, they're not selling a product that is built on golden foundations or anything like that, and then what you're actually going to get is tin foil, right? So basically, what they're giving us is, you know what they're giving us. It's not oversold, it's not over-sensationalized, it just is what it is. And that's a really cogent, reasonable approach to not set too high expectations for Path of Exile 2. Even though you can definitely see they're passionate and they want it to be the game that everybody plays, they're not out there saying that it's going to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, sort of

approach, and I respect that approach. I think it's the right decision to be made from a game marketing standpoint. Okay, so if you like videos like this where we go into a bit of speculative detail in the ethics behind game design and things like that, and a little bit of business speak, definitely like and sub to the channel. I don't set out to offend anyone with any of the comments in this video. I'll just clarify that position, but I'm taking this from a position of an informed decision-making stance, right? So, if you don't have the information, it's hard to draw a conclusion or just assume the worst in the situation. It's like a Schrödinger's cat scenario. Without the information, you know, either can or can't draw a decision, but you don't have any absolutes at the end of the day. Anyway, I'll see you guys later, and most likely on stream, and have a good one.

How GGG is Managing Community Expectations… and this is NOT a BAD thing! | PATH OF EXILE 2

Jorgen

Managing Player Expectations for Path of Exile 2

GGG is focusing on managing player expectations for Path of Exile 2 by not revealing too much gameplay content, creating a sense of mystery.

The lack of shown content, especially mapping, is a deliberate strategy to avoid overwhelming or underwhelming players.

The video's creator believes that GGG's approach is a good strategy, citing the long development ordeal of Star Citizen as a cautionary example.

The Struggles of Game Development: Star Citizen and Diablo 4

Star Citizen has been in development for over a decade, with the game still listed as "in development" on its website and wiki, leaving many players hopeful but disillusioned.

The game's developers have failed to manage player expectations, leading to a worst-case scenario where the game may never be completed or meet the promised standards.

Diablo 4, despite being pitched as a groundbreaking ARPG, has struggled with poor mechanics and unfulfilled promises, leaving players feeling misled and disappointed, especially after investing significant money in the game.

Managing Player Expectations in Game Development

Blizzard's approach to Diablo 4 has been criticized for not managing player expectations and lacking transparency.

In contrast, GGG's strategy for Path of Exile 2 involves not teasing incomplete classes, focusing on leveling footage, and avoiding the presentation of cohesive builds or unique items.

The mapping system has also not been shown yet, with the open beta release anticipated to provide map accessibility and a significant portion of the game's content.

The Significance of No Mapping Footage in Path of Exile 2

The absence of mapping footage for Path of Exile 2 suggests the game is still incomplete.

The campaign, which has been the main focus so far, only represents a small portion of the game's total content.

The real gameplay and build development are expected to start in tier one maps, which have not yet been shown, leaving the game's speed and endgame content uncertain.

The Unique Marketing Approach of Path of Exile 2

Path of Exile 2's marketing strategy focuses on providing a limited glimpse of the game, creating mystery and anticipation for players.

The developer, GGG, has earned the community's trust through their work on the first game, leading players to have confidence in the sequel's potential.

The shared experience of not knowing the game's mechanics and builds at launch fosters a sense of community among players, making the journey of discovery a key aspect of the game's appeal.

The lack of information about Path of Exile 2 makes it difficult to draw definitive conclusions about its direction and features.

The game's marketing approach aims to set realistic expectations, avoiding overselling or sensationalizing its launch.

This strategy allows for a gradual build-up and discovery of the game's elements over time, which the creator respects as a reasonable decision.