Path of Exile’s overwhelming complexity isn’t the real reason new players pass on it, director believes: ‘I think that PoE 1’s being such an old game is in itself the accessibility problem’

Talk to a Path of Exile player and they’ll tell you they’re still a new player after 3,000 hours. By all accounts, PoE is the most action RPG you can find. It has over a decade of systems layered on top of each other, a web of complexity that you’d probably only understand if you were there from the beginning.

Unsurprisingly, PoE is incredibly abrasive to new players. Most peace out when they open the skill tree and see a screen filled with more little icons than a Ubisoft map. According to its co-director, Jonathan Rogers, though, the complexity of PoE isn’t the primary thing that keeps people from trying it—it’s that it’s old.

PoE co-creator and former Grinding Gear Games director Chris Wilson asked Rogers in a recent interview how he balances meeting the expectations PoE players have for a bigger and more complex sequel in PoE 2 while keeping it manageable for everyone else.

“I think that my opinion is probably a little bit different from a lot of people, which is that I think that PoE 1 being such an old game is in itself the accessibility problem that it has,” Rogers said. He admits that PoE 1 is dense, but doesn’t think “the complexity is necessarily the reason why new players don’t play it.”

The problem is much simpler, Rogers explained. PoE 1 is a 13-year-old game that looks dated compared to anything that’s come out in the last few years, and it’s long past its peak. People skip it because “they feel like they’ve missed the train,” he said.

PoE 2 is a better way for new players to hop aboard because it hasn’t accumulated years and years of cruft that only its most dedicated fans could love. It has more intuitive systems, like the way skill gems slot into a menu and not your gear, but Rogers says his greater goal is to improve the designs of the first game more than just making it easier to understand—although he understands the importance of the latter.

“At the end of the day, the audience I’m appealing to really still is myself,” Rogers added.

Speaking as one of those new PoE 1 players, I know exactly what Rogers means. I played one of its recent leagues and found myself digging up old forum threads to try to understand the basics of how some of its mechanics work, and eventually started ignoring whatever I didn’t understand. The problem is that it’s an action RPG that sort of requires you to learn how everything interacts so that you can find new avenues to strengthen your character.

I came crawling back to PoE 2 pretty quickly because I felt like I would need to put in thousands of hours to reach a 101 level with PoE 1. PoE 2, however, is much better at teaching you how it works, and if the game doesn’t have some bit of required info, you won’t need to bring up the Internet Archive to find it.

It’s not perfect, though, and this is why the next update will be so important to the future of PoE 2. Return of the Ancients will give the game’s most confusing (and rewarding) mechanics tutorial quests, a structure that every future mechanic will slot into. PoE 2 is already a very complicated game, but GGG is putting in crucial work that might prevent it from suffering the same problems as its predecessor.