"Road to Exile" producer China Tour: Three cities in a week, face players' questions

2025-06-29 21:09:20|Myriagame |source：minecraft skins

The "Path of Exile" series was developed by New Zealand game company Grinding Gear Games. The new series PoE2 has a peak online number of 570,000 in the first week of its launch. It then won the Steam best-selling list for 8 consecutive times. It won Steam's new platinum level in 2024, the hottest game of platinum level in 2024, and the best-selling gold level in 2024, and has become one of the most popular treasure-winning games in the world.On June 16, 2025, Jonathan Rogers, producer of the PoE series and co-founder of Grinding Gear Games, started his trip to China and appeared in Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu. He had in-depth exchanges with domestic players, game developers, college students, etc., shared his views and insights on game category innovation, talent cultivation, and cultural communication, and brought the latest news from the national server - "The Road to Exile: Arrival".

Listen to players' opinions and optimize in an orderly and sincere manner

During the sharing and communication, the core players put sharp experience issues in front of Jonathan directly, such as "Now the BD (genre) composition is too single, almost all electric spears!", "Why does the economic system inflation two weeks after the service is launched?" and so on.In response, Jonathan responded sincerely and made a promise on the spot to optimize: "version 0.3.0 will improve the problem of imbalance, and our goal is that all professions will tend to be balanced when the official version is released."Regarding the economic system, he said, "The more free the player's trading, the more fierce the inflation is - this is in line with the essence of economics."Compared with similar products, the PoE series chooses to walk a tightrope between "player asset value" and "inflation" and is working hard to win more player satisfaction.

Regarding the boring experience problems caused by the "repeat main plot of different professions" that players generally feedback, Jonathan promised that "once we remove this setting, the game experience will be greatly improved, and this day may come earlier than you think." He also said that the plot process of many players feedback is progressing too slowly, which is also one of the directions that the team focused on optimizing in version 0.3.0.

Regarding the game's late gameplay issue, Jonathan said: "Continuous updates to the endgame content are always our core goal. We will design more challenging new content to push players to push their limits, but the key is that these challenges must be well balanced with the game's existing system."

It can be seen that the GGG team has never ignored the player's voice, and has been making optimizations and adjustments based on these opinions and suggestions without affecting the core gameplay, bringing players a more fun and motivational treasure brushing experience.

Continue to explore breakthroughs and lead the category track

During the exchange of talents in college game, Jonathan deeply analyzed the five core elements of ARPG games, including ensuring the online game environment, ensuring players feel safe, needing to have a good combat system, needing to generate random levels and random item generation.In the story, he particularly emphasized the key to the existence of the "random" mechanism."This is very important. Only with random rewards can people look forward to what the next unexpected surprise will be." He said so.

When talking about how to achieve breakthroughs and create a category-leading game that players love, Jonathan emphasized that the biggest difference between GGG and other developers lies in the depth of the character development system, which will continue to be adhered to and deepened."This system is very deep and there is a lot to explore. We will always insist on making efforts in this direction and will not change this feature."

Focusing on the evolution and innovation of ARPG, he talked about his experience summarizing in long-term practical exploration."Our ultimate goal is to create the best ARPG. PoE1 was unable to fully achieve its goal due to some technical limitations, which led to the subsequent PoE2." Regarding the current status of PoE2, Jonathan admitted that "the revolution has not been successful yet" and still needs continuous optimization.

Regarding the future development of PoE2, Jonathan said: "In order to ensure the player's gaming experience and let more players join us, what we need to do in the EA stage is to try to meet the various demands of players. To achieve this, we cannot compromise on game quality in order to shorten the development time." As for the development and update rhythm of the two games that players are most concerned about, Jonathan revealed: "We will develop these two games at the same time, and both products will undergo alternating season updates."

Talking about talent training and cultural communication

Interestingly, Jonathan also recalled his growth path in game creation during communication.He said that he started making small-scale games since he was 12 years old. In college, he was preparing for the local ACM programming competition in New Zealand, he trained for more than 3 hours a day, and finally won the competition with his continuous efforts.

Jonathan is very encouraged by students to continuously improve their technical abilities in learning and practice. In this process, he believes that students need to cultivate their own "specialization and strengths"."If you want to join 3A Studio, you must be proficient in a certain segment," Jonathan concluded.

During the discussion, Jonathan also mentioned the domestic 3A game "Black Myth: Wukong" many times, and praised it very much.On the morning of that day, he and his family also visited the "Black Myth: Wukong" art exhibition held in Hangzhou.Speaking of the experience of watching the exhibition, Jonathan emphasized the shock brought by art design: "When I visited the exhibition this morning, what surprised me the most was its art presentation. The facial drawing and visual design with great artistic tension were impressive. Our games have many references." At the same time, he also introduced PoE's practice in cultural integration, such as the integration of local Maori cultural elements in game design."Black Myth: Goku has brought Chinese culture to the whole world. We hope that through the PoE series, we can let more people understand the global multicultural elements including Maori culture," said Jonathan.

The national server is about to be launched, and optimization is worth looking forward to

What is more worth looking forward to is that the Chinese version will be launched soon.

At the sharing session, Jonathan and Bubu, the project leader of "The Road to Exile: Arrival", focused on matters related to "The Road to Exile: Arrival" and gave a large amount of information disclosure.

First of all, the "difficulty in renovating" problem that novices care about the most. Bubu revealed the solution to the national server: "(national server) is run on the WeGame platform. Many games running on the WeGame platform are equipped with game assistant functions. For "Road of Exile: Advent", we will use AI to assist game assistants to help novices solve the problem of renovating the country."

The guests present also asked questions about the traditional optimization inheritance of the national server. Bubu replied: "There are indeed some fashions in PoE1 3.26 that did not synchronize PoE2 as soon as possible, but inheritance must be guaranteed in the future." He said that the changes in the version may bring about conflicts between props. In order to prevent such situations from affecting the game experience, the official will transfer these props to the future version of the national server after they are relatively stable.

When discussing the "localization" optimization issue of the national server, Bubu emphasized that "the national server must be an environment with all simplified Chinese". Not only that, there will also be voice dubbing and special skins in all Chinese to bring a friendly and immersive gaming experience to national server players.

"We will also provide you with a better network environment, including a safer gaming environment, because we know that for a game that can be traded freely, everyone will definitely be worried about the impact of cheating and plug-ins." Speaking of the issue of a fair environment, Bubu added, "Ensure the safe environment of the national server is Tencent's mission. This cannot be said to be a benefit for national server players, but a service that must be provided."

Bubu also added on the spot that the national server is currently working hard to go online during the 0.3.0 season, and will also strive to be consistent with the international server update frequency in the future to ensure the experience of national server players."In terms of price, please believe that we will definitely come and strive for the best conditions," he added.

This trip to Jonathan to China focused on the evolutionary innovation of the game, version feedback and other issues, which brought behind the thoughts from the perspective of cultural and regional differences to Chinese server players and game developers. During the trip, Jonathan emphasized many times that "player feedback is the core driving force of game evolution", from the optimization of mobile speed to the iteration of the final content, from the novice guidance system to the balance of the transaction ecosystem, every detail demonstrates the team's deep response to player needs.In conjunction with the detailed preparations of the national server "The Road to Exile: Arrival" in deep localization, GaaS services, environmental fairness, etc., I believe that it will bring more guarantees to national server players.

With the steady progress of the launch process of PoE2 0.3.0, we have reason to believe that with the cooperation between GGG and Tencent, "The Road to Exile: Arrival" will open up a new world in the domestic game market with an attitude of combining international quality and local temperature.

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