From PC to Console - Talking Path of Exile with Developer Grinding Gear Games
Post by KostaAndreadis @ 03:44pm 25/08/17 | Comments
The excellent Path of Exile has been around for quite a while now, but with a new expansion and a console release we decided to catch up with its developer Grinding Gear Games.
With the arrival of Path of Exile on Xbox One, there’s never been a better time to be a fan of the Action-RPG genre. A style of game that was made popular many years ago with a little gem called Diablo. For New Zealand based developer Grinding Gear Games, which now sits at over 100 people, working to bring the game to console was a project that it took very seriously. And some considerable time too. Alongside the recent, and massive, Fall of Oriath expansion Path of Exile is also back on the minds of people in a big way.
Recently I had the chance to chat with Technical Director Jonathan Rogers and Producer Chris Wilson about bringing the game to Xbox One, the challenges and obstacles they faced, staying free-to-play, and Path of Exile as a beloved Action-RPG experience.
Plus, word on the eventual Xbox One X enhanced update.
At what point did the team start seriously looking at bringing Path of Exile to console?
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. It did take a little longer than we expected!
The action-RPG genre, or the Diablo-style game has never really worked well on console outside of Diablo 3. What were some of the biggest challenges that the team knew it had to solve or overcome going in?
Jonathan: There are really two big issues to solve with Action RPGs. The first one is the feel of the combat. This is something that we knew we had to get feeling great, but it took a surprising amount of experimentation. 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. We studied a lot of other games to see how they were solving some of the control issues we were seeing. In some cases, we copied what they did. In other cases, we came up with our own ideas. 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. We will continue to work on that.
A somewhat harder challenge is the UI (User Interface) for items. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is something we are keen to find a better solution for as time goes on.
Working with the Xbox One hardware, where there any technical challenges getting the game up and running on console?
Jonathan: There were two big challenges for Xbox One. The first was that we had a DirectX 9 based engine. For Xbox, we had to move to DirectX 11. The second challenge was multithreading the engine. 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. In the past, Path of Exile was basically a single-core game. Moving to Xbox meant multithreading the engine and that took some serious engineering effort.
The great thing is that both of those changes have had a massive improvement on performance for the PC game. We improved framerates by insane multiples like eight times or more in heavy combat.
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?
For us, Xbox One X has basically meant that we get to support 4K. 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. The great thing is, we didn't have to add any extra optimisations or anything. The Xbox One X was just powerful enough to handle it right out of the gate.
Based 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. It didn’t at all feel like an inferior version to the PC original. Where other PC ports kind of lose something in translation, what’s the secret. Or, how did the team at Grinding Gear Games manage to pull it off so flawlessly?
Jonathan: It took a lot of work! Though we do have one advantage. 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. This means that rendering PoE [Path of Exile] environments is actually pretty fast. The hard part was getting the game to run well when there was a huge amount of action going on. Having hundreds of monsters and skills on screen at once is quite a hard target to meet at 60fps.
As an indie and relatively small studio compared to others, how did you manage to work both on bringing the game to console and the huge new Fall of Oriath expansion?
Jonathan: Part of it is that we are not such a small studio any more. We are up to around 100 staff members these days! I think there are a few other reasons we were able to create content this fast though. Part of it is that we have been developing this game for long enough now that there are team members who have many years of experience working with our custom tools, so they are able to make things super-fast. Another thing is that we just have a culture of efficiency when it comes to things like clever re-use of existing assets.
With the recent beta, what sort of information was the team looking for from players? And with the beta now wrapped up how did that feedback affect the official release, if at all?
Jonathan: We really wanted to get feedback on the controls, UI, and of course bugs and broken features. While we were able to address most of the bugs, unfortunately we have not really been able to fully respond to all of the UI feedback yet. This is something we will improve as time goes on.
For the team, taking a step back if you can. How does it feel to play Path of Exile on console today versus on a PC?
Jonathan: I think it feels pretty damn good. I find personally that chilling out on a couch and playing PoE is actually a much better experience than I was expecting. I'm looking forward to the game coming out on Xbox One so I can play it seriously at home.
One of the things that most people who haven’t played the game will experience when they fire it up is the lack of a uniform currency or traditional skill trees. This is an interesting variation on a theme, how did this come about and how has it evolved from the original release until now?
Chris Wilson: When we examined other games in the genre, we decided to only use the tropes that were important to gameplay. For example, most other games only had gold coins for tasks like purchasing potions, repairing items and resurrecting mercenaries. Path of Exile's design had none of these, so it didn't need gold coins at all. These decisions were made early in the development process and have not only been validated by half a decade of players enjoying them, but have become a notable part of Path of Exile's identity in the genre. For the most part, those systems haven't changed much since the initial design.
Were there ever any concerns that some players might just not get it, or that the systems would be too hardcore or inaccessible?
Chris: The core game itself is pretty straightforward to play at face value - use skills on monsters until they die, then pick up items that make you more powerful. The hardcore depth takes place under the surface. We try very hard to keep Path of Exile accessible to new players, and have added a comprehensive Help system with videos, images and text in 3.0.0. This has helped a lot with explaining some of the more complex systems to new players.
Path of Exile is free-to-play (including on Xbox One), but it feels more like a full-price game given away for free. How does this affect continued development?
Jonathan: Our general attitude has always been to make a good game first, and worry about monetisation later. We feel that it's important to have a clear separation between that and the gameplay.
As a free-to-play there’s nothing quite like it on Xbox One, where other games with this header are usually filled with micro-transactions and pay-wall stumbling blocks. Was there any concern that going this route might affect its perception amongst the community?
Jonathan: Free-to-play has always been a bit of a perception problem for us. In fact, when we talk to the press or make videos for players, we always de-emphasise it. We typically want to impress people with the game first, then mention it's free later. The fact that the game is free shouldn't be the reason you want to play the game. It just removes a potential barrier to entry.
Path of Exile is available now for Xbox One. Thanks to Grinding Gear Games' Chris Wilson and Jonathan Rogers for their time!
Recently I had the chance to chat with Technical Director Jonathan Rogers and Producer Chris Wilson about bringing the game to Xbox One, the challenges and obstacles they faced, staying free-to-play, and Path of Exile as a beloved Action-RPG experience.
Plus, word on the eventual Xbox One X enhanced update.
At what point did the team start seriously looking at bringing Path of Exile to console?
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. It did take a little longer than we expected!
The action-RPG genre, or the Diablo-style game has never really worked well on console outside of Diablo 3. What were some of the biggest challenges that the team knew it had to solve or overcome going in?
Jonathan: There are really two big issues to solve with Action RPGs. The first one is the feel of the combat. This is something that we knew we had to get feeling great, but it took a surprising amount of experimentation. 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. We studied a lot of other games to see how they were solving some of the control issues we were seeing. In some cases, we copied what they did. In other cases, we came up with our own ideas. 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. We will continue to work on that.
A somewhat harder challenge is the UI (User Interface) for items. 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. 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. 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. 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. This is something we are keen to find a better solution for as time goes on.
Working with the Xbox One hardware, where there any technical challenges getting the game up and running on console?
Jonathan: There were two big challenges for Xbox One. The first was that we had a DirectX 9 based engine. For Xbox, we had to move to DirectX 11. The second challenge was multithreading the engine. 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. In the past, Path of Exile was basically a single-core game. Moving to Xbox meant multithreading the engine and that took some serious engineering effort.
The great thing is that both of those changes have had a massive improvement on performance for the PC game. We improved framerates by insane multiples like eight times or more in heavy combat.
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?
For us, Xbox One X has basically meant that we get to support 4K. 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. The great thing is, we didn't have to add any extra optimisations or anything. The Xbox One X was just powerful enough to handle it right out of the gate.
Based 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. It didn’t at all feel like an inferior version to the PC original. Where other PC ports kind of lose something in translation, what’s the secret. Or, how did the team at Grinding Gear Games manage to pull it off so flawlessly?
Jonathan: It took a lot of work! Though we do have one advantage. 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. This means that rendering PoE [Path of Exile] environments is actually pretty fast. The hard part was getting the game to run well when there was a huge amount of action going on. Having hundreds of monsters and skills on screen at once is quite a hard target to meet at 60fps.
As an indie and relatively small studio compared to others, how did you manage to work both on bringing the game to console and the huge new Fall of Oriath expansion?
Jonathan: Part of it is that we are not such a small studio any more. We are up to around 100 staff members these days! I think there are a few other reasons we were able to create content this fast though. Part of it is that we have been developing this game for long enough now that there are team members who have many years of experience working with our custom tools, so they are able to make things super-fast. Another thing is that we just have a culture of efficiency when it comes to things like clever re-use of existing assets.
With the recent beta, what sort of information was the team looking for from players? And with the beta now wrapped up how did that feedback affect the official release, if at all?
Jonathan: We really wanted to get feedback on the controls, UI, and of course bugs and broken features. While we were able to address most of the bugs, unfortunately we have not really been able to fully respond to all of the UI feedback yet. This is something we will improve as time goes on.
For the team, taking a step back if you can. How does it feel to play Path of Exile on console today versus on a PC?
Jonathan: I think it feels pretty damn good. I find personally that chilling out on a couch and playing PoE is actually a much better experience than I was expecting. I'm looking forward to the game coming out on Xbox One so I can play it seriously at home.
One of the things that most people who haven’t played the game will experience when they fire it up is the lack of a uniform currency or traditional skill trees. This is an interesting variation on a theme, how did this come about and how has it evolved from the original release until now?
Chris Wilson: When we examined other games in the genre, we decided to only use the tropes that were important to gameplay. For example, most other games only had gold coins for tasks like purchasing potions, repairing items and resurrecting mercenaries. Path of Exile's design had none of these, so it didn't need gold coins at all. These decisions were made early in the development process and have not only been validated by half a decade of players enjoying them, but have become a notable part of Path of Exile's identity in the genre. For the most part, those systems haven't changed much since the initial design.
Were there ever any concerns that some players might just not get it, or that the systems would be too hardcore or inaccessible?
Chris: The core game itself is pretty straightforward to play at face value - use skills on monsters until they die, then pick up items that make you more powerful. The hardcore depth takes place under the surface. We try very hard to keep Path of Exile accessible to new players, and have added a comprehensive Help system with videos, images and text in 3.0.0. This has helped a lot with explaining some of the more complex systems to new players.
Path of Exile is free-to-play (including on Xbox One), but it feels more like a full-price game given away for free. How does this affect continued development?
Jonathan: Our general attitude has always been to make a good game first, and worry about monetisation later. We feel that it's important to have a clear separation between that and the gameplay.
As a free-to-play there’s nothing quite like it on Xbox One, where other games with this header are usually filled with micro-transactions and pay-wall stumbling blocks. Was there any concern that going this route might affect its perception amongst the community?
Jonathan: Free-to-play has always been a bit of a perception problem for us. In fact, when we talk to the press or make videos for players, we always de-emphasise it. We typically want to impress people with the game first, then mention it's free later. The fact that the game is free shouldn't be the reason you want to play the game. It just removes a potential barrier to entry.
Path of Exile is available now for Xbox One. Thanks to Grinding Gear Games' Chris Wilson and Jonathan Rogers for their time!
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